Monsters and Manuals

Yoon-Suin Update

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 19:42:00 +0000

I feel as if it's about time for an update on the progress of my long-promised, long-suffering, long-postponed, long-awaited (by me, anyway) and very possibly long-forgotten campaign setting, Yoon-Suin.

The first draft is nearly finished. All I have left to do is fill in encounter tables. However, when I say "first draft", what I mean is, it's written in pencil on graph paper. I now have to begin the laborious process of typing the damn thing up.

Nonetheless, I feel relatively pleased with what's in there. I've had the intention for a long time of doing something which both pays tribute to the old TSR campaign settings of times past, but which avoids the primary pitfall of making things too detailed, too specific, and too focused on canon. The last thing I want is for people to do what I did with all my Planescape books and boxed sets, which was to spend ages gazing at them in awe and wonder, but to wonder about how to set about actually playing it. I set myself the task of coming up with a tool box to allow the reader to create his own Yoon-Suin, rather than play around with my Yoon-Suin.

(This has a poetic appeal to me too, since some tiny part of the inspiration for Yoon-Suin comes from the Viriconium books; M. John Harrison's philosophy, which was that Viriconium is the same place and yet fundamentally different in each story, gets reflected a little bit in the notion that no two DMs will have the same Yoon-Suin setting.)

And I think that's been achieved. Inside, you will find, amongst other things:

How to create your own nasnas-populated, haunted city
A way to randomly generate a generic ruin, which can be reskinned into an ancient dwarf fort or temple, a tumbledown palace in the Old Town in the Yellow City, a hidden jungle shrine complex, a mysterious stone circle in Lower Druk Yul, and more besides
A random oligarchy generator
Tables for creating your own varieties of tea, opium, and hunting worm
A plethora of Yellow City-specific generators for tea shops, crab-fighting stables, cockroach tribes, crime families, archives, and guilds
20 sample hexes for each of the 4 main regions of Yoon-Suin, which can be arranged to taste or merely serve as inspiration for individual DMs
A unique (I think) random encounter table, which creates geography of encounters and special "complications" as well as the encounter itself, lickety-split
Ways to generate characters from any area of Yoon-Suin, from class to caste right down to name

That's not to mention a big fuck-off bestiary and treasure table, as well as lots of pretentious prose.

I don't anticipate imminent release, but the end is now in sight and I should be totally finished by the end of summer, fingers crossed.

My Unusual Brush with American Copyright Statutes

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 18:52:00 +0000

As many of you may be aware, for a number of years I was writing a thread on rpg.net in which I examined/reviewed each monster in the 2nd edition AD&D Monstrous Manual in order, and people wrote comments. After this was over, I compiled the whole thing into a PDF (which was thousands of pages long) and uploaded it on mediafire for people to download and enjoy (the link is on the right).

The other day I received this unusual email in reference to that file:

Now, I know what you're thinking. Fucking Wizards of the Coast, right? Stomping all over the little guy again!

Er, actually not:

Yes, that's right: for some reason a bot has managed to uncover a breach of copyright in a thread discussing the AD&D 2nd edition Monstrous Manual which is held by NBC Universal. Have you ever heard of something so ridiculous? Or a lawyer who doesn't know how to use the space bar? I spend 90% of my time telling law students the same thing: presentation is important; grammar is important; spelling is important; if you start applying for placements at local firms and there is an error in your application form, it will go straight in the bin. Apparently I'm old fashioned!

In substantive terms the challenge is absurd, as should be obvious: it specifically refers to video files, and my file is a PDF - even assuming that a forum thread containing no media whatsoever could somehow breach copyright. (Shit, I told you guys all about Star Trek Into Darkness in my previous entry....Paramount are going to be all over me!) I expect the sheer idiotic frivolity of it doesn't matter to mediafire, however, who are so terrified of a suit that they'll play along anyway. Oh well: fuck you, NBC Universal. If anybody wants the PDF, I'll change the link to a different host.

EDIT: The link to the PDF on the right hand side of the main blog page has been changed to dropbox.

Star Trek Into Shite

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 11:05:00 +0000

Well, perhaps "shite" is a bit harsh, but I finally caught the latest, grammatically incoherent iteration of J. J. Abrams' Star Trek reboot and it's safe to say, I didn't like it very much. I liked it considerably less even than his first one, which for me was very much a three star film. There were some excellent set pieces, and the look was good (the Klingon segment in particular had a great aesthetic) but it just confirmed my feeling that J. J. Abrams doesn't really seem to get Star Trek. He makes a game stab of it, but I don't think he can quite disguise the fact that he wasn't originally a fan, and wants very much to make it into a slightly more grown-up and respectable version of Star Wars.

There never was a huge amount of science in Star Trek; to say otherwise would be a lie. This is more true of the original series, which especially in later episodes just turned into a long succession of Monster Of The Week scenarios, than it is for Next Gen, which is the most cerebral of the different series. But there was always a sense in which Trek aspired to be something more than just space fantasy - even in its silliest moments it was always dealing with issues of morality and ethics, and at its best, it often dealt with quite profound questions regarding what it meant to be human.

Abrams' version attempts to replicate this, but he seems to do so in an entirely begrudging fashion. There isn't a single interesting moral conundrum that he can't bury (or skate over) with a bunch of explosions and a chase scene, and leave not so much unresolved as cast aside. It's almost as if he's embarrassed at having to burden the audience with all this stupid ethical stuff, when what we really want to see is a load of famous archetype characters running around shooting things. And meanwhile the Trek fans will be satisfied with the occasional bone thrown their way ("I'm a doctor, not a torpedo technician!").

That's not the only issue, of course. The plot...Well, where do you even start? I would describe it as being full of holes, but that doesn't quite capture the sense of narrative abyss which is at the heart of this film. The first Abrams Star Trek was nonsensical enough (and I don't just mean contradictory or containing continuity errors - I mean fundamentally ignorant of the basic requirements of fictional narrative), but here it's almost as if Abrams is abandoning the entire concept of story in favour of linking together a series of modules, themes, and set pieces which are connected only in the sense that they happen one after the other, chronologically. It surely must be a sign of concern to anybody interested in story that the only way to summarise the plot of Into Darkness is as follows: volcano erupting, Kirk, Spock, Uhura, blonde girl we don't care about but who looks okay in bra and panties, nasty British guy, nasty Star Fleet guy, miscellaneous terrorist-style incident designed to invoke 9/11 and similar except not in such a way that it becomes explicit enough to be offensive, dodgy English actor doing a dodgy imitation of a Canadian doing a dodgy Scottish accent, something about torpedoes, Scotty resigning, Klingons are involved for some reason, lots of things blowing up, skulls get crushed, people getting sucked into space, a ship flies into the sea, there's a fight on a flying thing in San Francisco, everything's okay in the end, and there's a rousing speech by Kirk which bears basically no relation to anything which preceded it.

And that's not even to start on all the little things which, taken individually, shouldn't matter, but whose cumulative effect was to irritate me beyond measure. For instance:

There is no reason for Carol Marcus to be in the film except presumably to set her up for something which happens in the next one. She has no role to play in proceedings, could be excised from the script entirely, and her motivations don't make any sense - why does she even get on the Enterprise in the first place? I honestly have no idea.
Where the fuck does the real Spock come from all of a sudden, just at the right moment when inferior Spock needs him? It feels as if that scene is just crowbarred into the film so the director can refresh the audience's memories about Wrath of Khan. Incredibly weak.
Why does 'Harrison' go to Kronos? It's not explained...it's just, well, we want Klingons in there, and, well, Marcus wants to start a war with the Klingons! See - plot!
Star Trek technology has always been impossible when you think about it, but this film didn't even pay lip service to making it believable. How in God's name is Sulu able to simply broadcast an audio message that Harrison can hear on the surface of Kronos, without everybody else on that planet being able to hear it? Or in the future does everybody simply have a radio receiver in their ear? Or have they invented a form of sound that you can beam across hundreds of thousands of kilometres with pin-point accuracy so that an individual person can hear it, but nobody else?
Why were the Klingon patrol involved, except for the purpose of providing a reason to have a fight scene? Or do we just forget about Chekhov's gun nowadays?
Isn't Khan supposed to be intelligent? Wouldn't he spot inferior Spock's ruse a mile off, as the audience does? And on that point, what relation does real Spock's advice have to the actual ruse that inferior Spock comes up with? Surely in order for their interaction to have any narrative meaning, real Spock's words should trigger something in inferior Spock to make him come up with an idea for defeating Khan?
Why doesn't Khan just throw inferior Spock off the flying barge thing at the end? He has about a dozen chances to do it. Why is he obsessed with trying to crush his skull? Is this Mortal Kombat, so everybody has to have a finishing move?
How far is Kronos from Earth, exactly? Because from a remark Scotty makes towards the end of the film, almost the whole thing occurs across the course of a single day. Again, we know that warp speed has always moved at the speed of plot in Star Trek, but at least older iterations paid lip service to the notion that space is, you know, a bit big.
Kirk is obsessed with saving his crew ("Just let my crew live...") but how many people must have died when the big evil Star Fleet ship ploughs into San Francisco? And nobody even bats an eyelid. This is just a manifestation of a bizarre phenomenon that exists in Hollywood scriptwriting, where if somebody's life is meaningful to one of the main characters, we care if they die, but otherwise, we don't think twice about them.
In the future is it okay for officers to argue about their love lives in front of subordinates, as Spock and Uhura do on the shuttle to Kronos? I'm not in the military or anything, but in my job, it's considered the worst possible form for managers to argue in front of subordinates, especially about their personal lives. It just doesn't happen. But this is a film, so fundamentals of human interaction are ignored in the name of inferior Spock getting the chance to emote.
Lens flare. At what stage does that become self parody?

It was bloody dreadful and I regret watching it.

Players Are Like Lucifer

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 18:10:00 +0000

I've plugged it often, and I'll do it again, but The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy is always worth listening to. I've been catching up on recent episodes at the gym, and this one in particular, while video game-specific, has much of interest to say about the nature of games in general.

Austin Grossman, the interviewee in the episode, makes the excellent observation that players of video games are a bit like Lucifer in Paradise Lost; it seems like it is in their very nature to rebel against the pre-ordained state of things. As a video-game designer, you simply have to accept that players will not do what they are "supposed to", and will constantly find ways to pervert what the game is for. And the stricter you make the narrative, of course - i.e., the more you define what the player is "supposed to do" - the more this perverse streak will emerge, and the more it will work against the game.

We've all experienced this. Even within the strict narrative confines of a text adventure, our impulse to type HIT MAN, PULL DOWN PANTS, BITE DOG, FUCK OFF etc. is irresistible.

Grossman puts it down, if I recall correctly (I don't have the transcript), to human players asserting control over their environment and personal narrative in an almost instinctive way. It's not in our nature to restrain ourselves from exercising our autonomy once we have it.

The application of this line of thinking to tabletop RPGs is obvious. While the RPG equivalent of typing "FUCK OFF" into a text adventure interface is not to be recommended, as any DM knows, nothing you plan ever survives contact with the players. Console yourself with this thought next time your brilliant idea is horribly scuppered by the reaction of the players: they are just exercising their autonomy instinctively and are, essentially, acting like Lucifer. It's in their nature.

The Death of an Author and Grown Up Fantasy

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Fri, 31 May 2013 19:58:00 +0000

Jack Vance was one of a handful of fantasy/SF writers who I would consider truly great (the others, off the top of my head, are M. John Harrison, Gene Wolfe and Tolkien). So his passing is a sad event, but I do not feel any sense of shock or tragedy: the man was 96, and the body of work he leaves behind for us to read is vast. Indeed, I've never read The Demon Princes, though I have the complete series on my Kindle; I have that pleasure ahead of me as soon as the book I'm currently reading is over.

It's only really sad that such a great prose stylist was ignored for so long. I'm glad that British newspapers commemorated his death (though perhaps typically, the Telegraph refer to him only as a "seventies writer"; his most popular and famous books were written through the 60s, 70s and 80s), but they only seem to have managed it because a heck of a lot of more famous, but inferior, writers (GRRM, Moorcock, Le Guin, Gaiman) have cited him as influences and expressed their sadness at his passing. I don't think I know more than, say, four or five people who've even heard of the man. Like Harrison and Wolfe, he's somehow missed out on the mainstream success which fantasy/SF is beginning to achieve.

I think there are various obvious reasons for this. Unlike writers such as GRRM, William Gibson, China Mieville, or Paolo Bacigalupi, there is nothing 'cool' about Vance's writing. (I don't mean to use the word 'cool' disparagingly: I like three out of those four writers very much.) His favourite author was PG Wodehouse and there is something old-fashioned about his writing: he seemed to eschew the modern and contemporary in favour of a very recherche, arch, and almost polite style - as if the modernist revolution never affected him. And he was damned by the pulpiness of his titles, covers and publishers, which, unlike the writing, feel very much of their time - people don't write books with titles like The Languages of Pao any more.

But I think there is another reason, which is simply that Vance is a very cold and detached writer, who doesn't make concessions to the reader. That's not to say his writing is difficult to get into; it's just that it's difficult to get emotionally involved in. This is because Vance is first and foremost an amoral author. Not amoral in the pejorative sense, nor in the juvenile everybody-gets-raped sense which sometimes lets down A Song of Ice and Fire. Amoral in the sense that, as a narrator, he never engages in the making of judgements. Even when he is describing horrific behaviour (there is a particularly memorable scene in the first Lyonesse book in which a woman gets her tongue removed) he never allows himself to indulge in telling the reader how to feel about it: his tone and voice always remain detached, neutral and objective. He is always meticulous about allowing the reader to make up his own mind about the morality of what he is reading. (And it is a mark of his skill that he gets you to fall in love with Cugel without ever trying to represent him as sympathetic.)

This is something that it is difficult to love, I feel. If you get Vance, you get him, but if you don't, you probably wonder what the fuss is about. His great strength is something that militates against mass popularity.

I don't mind this, however; if you do get Vance, it's probably a sign you are simply a superior human being, and you are a member of a very lucky set of people. As I wrote a few years back:

There are moments reading Vance where he is simply so brilliant, so much of a virtuoso, that you can hardly stand it. My particular favourite episode in all of the work of his that I've read is the chapter called ["The Inn of Blue Lamps"], which comes near the start of Cugel's Saga. The depiction of gradual descent into drunkenness of the characters involved, the understated humour, the slightly sardonic detached tone in which it is written, and the joyous unfurling of the tightly-wrought and carefully constructed plot (the creation of which you haven't even noticed because it has been done with such aplomb) - it's enough to make you remember all over again just why literature is enjoyable and important.

I'm off to re-read that chapter now with a glass of brandy - here's to you, Jack.

Fin de Siecle Maps of Britain and Outdoor Adventuring; Or, Yet Another Post About Wilderness Maps

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Thu, 02 May 2013 18:16:00 +0000

I can't remember how I came across this (it may have been through somebody on Google+ - has there ever been a more serendipitous age than the one we live in?), but the National Library of Scotland has a website where you can overlay a Google map of the UK (and Belgium for some reason) with a collection of old maps spanning roughly 1750 - 1950. As well as old fashioned Ordinance Survey type generalist maps, there are also maps showing rainfall levels, locations of coal fields, geology, and railway lines. You can even fade the overlay to compare and contrast the old with the current. It's my new favourite toy.

As you may have guessed if you've been reading this blog, maps are a bit of an obsession of mine. More particularly, thinking about the use of maps in RPGs is a bit of an obsession of mine - certainly in recent months. Indeed, I'm sort of coming around to the view that 95% of the reason why I am in this hobby is that it gives me some justification for drawing, thinking about, or just gazing blankly at, various types of cartography.

We humans are signally pathetic at finding ways to emulate the sheer complexity of the geography around us. If you sat me down with a paper and pencil I could come up with an interesting looking map, I'm sure, but it wouldn't come close to matching this:

Or this:

Let alone this:

The world out there is vast and unfathomable; there is a richness out there in its landscape alone which is impossible for us to emulate.

I use real world maps quite a bit in my games, by simply taking the contours of the land and changing names, climate, and so on. But this tool is something else; I may never both creating another hexmap ever again. Why would you when you can print out something as beautiful, useful and interesting as these?

Campaigns I'd Like to Run: III - Ars Magica in 19th Century Northumberland

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:48:00 +0000

There's this group of friends, right? And they're the second or third sons or daughters of aristocratic families and industrialists who never need to work again. They're what might be called, nowadays, the 'idle rich'. But they've become bored of polo, hunting, drinking and bridge. And the devil makes work for idle hands. So they spend their time researching magic, demons, evil spirits, alchemy, and things of that nature. They've learned the rudiments. And they've also learned that there is a whole other reality behind that which they know: a reality in which the rationality of the Enlightenment and the Victorian age is simply wrong. They find the thought of it truly terrifying. But they also suspect it may be the path to something greater than anything else to which they can aspire.

So they sequester themselves to a sprawling manor deep in the Northumberland hills to pursue their aims in private. A place hidden in the dark forest, out of sight from any road or track, which an indulgent parent built long ago and nowadays rarely uses. A place where they can learn the magical arts free from prying eyes. A place like Cragside:

Generic Bastardised Cyberpunk 2020 System: More Thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 21:50:00 +0000

It's been a while since I've posted about this, but it's still in my thoughts. My aim is to create a traditional RPG system which is moderately crunchy and makes combat tactically interesting. With the emphasis on the latter. I like wargames, and I like combat as a mini-game all of its own; at the same time I don't like how, in modern RPGs, that seems to have turned into "PCs can do loads of awesome stunts and have all sorts of cool abilities". That bores me - I want combat to be gritty, mean, dangerous and enjoyable to think about in a rigorous way.

At the same time, I don't know much about Western Martial Arts, and I've never tried to stab somebody to death, so nor am I particularly keen on making something ultra-realistic. Just something that has the patina of realism and which satisfies the person in me who plays Steel Panthers: World at War and Advanced Squad Leader.

Or, as I put it in my original post:

The basic aim is to try to emulate the grittiness and danger of the Cyberpunk 2020 "Saturday Night Fire Fight" system, as well as the importance of armour and shields. The rationale is: if you are prepared for a fight, fully kitted out, you will be very tough to kill. If you are unprepared/unarmoured, you will die extremely quickly.

So I decided tonight that I would run a playtest of my rules and see what happens. This is a battle between John Red and Bill Blue, two warrior types. I'm not going to pretend to be balanced on a first run through: the idea here is to just see how it all works in practice (if at all). Only combat-relevant skills and stats are noted. (Also, I realised at the end I forgot to factor in damage bonuses for BTM. I'm fucked if I'm running the combat all over again, so just chalk the mistake up to experience.)

John Red is a warrior who relies on brawn. He has a BODY of 9 (BTM-3) and REF of 8, and has Combat Sense +5, Slashing Weapons +6, Brawling +4, Dodging +2. He wears steel leg greaves (SP 14), a breast plate (SP 16), steel arm greaves (SP 14), and a full steel helmet (SP 16). He carries a wooden shield (SP 14) and a bastard sword (2d6 one handed, 2d6+2 two handed). His reflexes are restricted by -1 from his armour, taking it to an effective 7. Because he carries a shield, he suffers an additional -3 to his attack rolls.

Bill Blue is speedy. He has a BODY of 7 (BTM-1) and a REF of 10. He has Combat Sense +5, Bludgeoning Weapons +5, Brawling +3, Dodging +4. He wears heavy leather leg greaves (SP 6), a hard leather breast plate (SP 8), and soft leather arm greaves (SP 5), and a steel cap (SP 12). He carries a pole-axe (1d6+3).

First round. Initiative: JR 13, BB 20.

BB knows he doesn't have much chance of getting through JR's formidable defences, so he decides to focus on the left leg. This means he'll be at -4 to hit. He rolls d10+Bludgeoning Weapons[+5]+REF[10] and scores 17, which makes 13 total. JR's defence roll is d10+Dodging[+2]+REF[8] (with -1 from encumbrance), and he scores 17. BB almost, but doesn't land a blow.

JR just pushes forward, flailing with his bastard sword. He rolls d10+SW[+6]+REF[8]-1 = 17. BB's defence roll is d10+BW[+5]+REF[10] = 25. BB easily avoids harm.

Second Round. Initiative: JR 13, BB 22.

BB goes for the legs again, swinging that pole axe. He rolls 15. JR's defence roll is 12. BB connects with a glancing blow that does 3 damage; even with the armour penetration of the pole axe against hard armour, BB's left leg greave saves him from harm, although it is damaged by the blow (SP 13).

JR rolls 13; BB, with 24, easily dodges again, lightly skipping away.

Third Round. Initiative: JR 12, BB 21.

BB keeps up the attack on JR's left leg. He scores 14. JR gets 12. BB connects with another blow, doing 7 damage. JR's leg greave absorbs most of the blow, but its SP is halved versus the pole axe, to 6. He takes a point of damage to his left leg. Argh! His leg greave takes another point of damage to its SP, reducing it to 12.

JR scores 14 for his attack; BB again escapes the clumsy blade, rolling 20.

Fourth Round. Initiative: JR 10, BB 23.

BB gets a 12 for his attack on JR's leg, doing another hit (JR scored 11). The pole axe does 8 damage, beating the leg greave's effective SP of 6; JR would take 2 points of damage, but it reduces to 1 due to his BTM. The greave is further damaged to SP 11.

JR realises he has to change tack. His blows aren't connecting and he's being slowly ground down by the thudding blows to his leg. He takes the radical step of tossing his shield to one side. Now he no longer has the -3 penalty to his attack rolls with his bastard sword and he can wield it two-handed; this means he always loses initiative but does 2d6+2 damage.

Fifth Round.

BB gets 15 for his attack, and JR, for once, avoids the sweeping weapon, getting 19. He immediately retaliates, getting a 16 for his attack; BB gets an 18 and avoids harm again, but JR is already sensing a change in the wind.

Sixth Round.

BB scores 12 for his attack, and JR defends with a 20 and then attacks with a 19. This time he connects - BB only scores 17. Because JR is not calling shots, he hits a random location and rolls an 8 - foining his sword deep into BB's right leg for 6 damage. Bill Blue's leather leg greave is at half SP (3) and thus he takes 3 damage, reduced to 2 from his BTM. A nasty gash, but not enough to take him down, but he has to see if he faints from shock nonetheless - he makes the save.

Seventh Round.

BB keeps on at JR's leg, getting 16, beating JR's 12 and hitting him again, this time for 7 damage. JR takes another point of damage and his armour is reduced to SP 10. But as BB ducks away after making his strike, JR thrusts his sword again into BB's right leg, scoring a 22 against BB's 16 defence roll. He does 9 points of damage this time, for 7 net. This is a serious wound. BB's thigh is slashed open by a blow that could easily have severed it, and he's bleeding profusely. His total damage is now 9; he's critically wounded and his REF is halved.

BB also has to make a save against fainting, modified by -2 for the severity of the wound. He manages to stay conscious, just.

Eighth Round.

BB knows the jig is up and should probably surrender. But he decides to go out in a blaze of glory. He lunges against for JR's leg, and against all odds gets another hit. But he can't penetrate JR's damaged leg greave with a weak, glancing blow, although it does reduce the SP to 9.

JR gets a 16 for his attack roll and BB gets 15; JR presses in for the kill and rams his sword point into BB's ribs for 10 damage, which reduces to 2 thanks to BB's hard leather breast plate. This takes BB's total wounds to 11. A few more and he'll be mortally wounded; he rolls his save against fainting and fails, dropping to the floor, out of action. JR can now capture him, or kill him at leisure.

-

Not sure what that went to prove, but I enjoyed running through it. As you may have noticed, decent armour is a real bitch to break through, but I like that; the idea is that armour is really, really useful in a fight, and something to be worked around. Against a heavily armoured opponent you would want to flank or outnumber him, and never do what BB did and go toe-to-toe. To that end, I'd like to come up with rules for trips and overbearing, to add to the mix.

Hopefully, this would incentivise players to box clever, too. If you could, you would try to catch opponents unawares while they were unarmoured, and encourage sneaky strategising - why allow things to get tactical against somebody with access to plate mail, when you could just stab him in his sleep?

Actual Play: Pendragon of Mars, Sessions 3 & 4

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 18:26:00 +0000

Characters Present: Sir Owain the Red, Sir Wiglaf the Windhover, Sir Elias the Overly Curious, Sir Xyre of the Barrens, and squire Emerec of the Isles

Session 3 began with the knighting of the squires Owain, Wiglaf, Elias and Xyre. [Owain, a new character, had been busy doing something else worthy of knighthood for the time period covered by the first two sessions of the campaign.] The Earl, ever the traditionalist, was keen on performing the full knighting ceremony in full sight of the great and good of Salisbury - and this included him delivering full punches to the face to each of the squires as the last blows they would receive injustly. It also had the newly knighted men performing 'the leap', at which they all succeeded. After the ceremony a huge feast was held, and they all used this to maximum advantage with the womenfolk at the castle. Sir Xyre continued to pursue Gwiona in his attempts to get one over on Sir Guy. Sir Wiglaf bonded with Elaine by capturing butterflies for her in the castle grounds. Sir Owain found a shy, beautiful girl called Iblis, who has an irritating habit of blushing all the time; his flirting tactic was to carve a heart into an apple with a dagger and then toss the apple up in the air and throw the dagger at it - he failed in this miserably, but Iblis didn't seem to mind much. Sir Elias managed to converse for a time with Lady Adwen.

The new knights then returned to their manors for the winter, which passed mostly without incident - except for Sir Xyre hearing rumours that his cousin was a necromancer. A few trials were held, a few births were recorded, and the snows receded.

In spring, everybody reconvened at the fortress at Sarum for the Easter festivities. The knights were each given squires to serve them and train with them; these turned out to be almost universally good looking, flirtatious, lustful and muscular [I set up a random squire personality generator table shortly before the game, but the squires it generated all turned out to be much cooler than any of the actual characters]. Sir Xyre was given another squire to take care of - Emerec of the Isles, an almost suspiciously androgynous young man. [Emerec is, unsurprisingly, actually a woman in disguise. Future post-apocalyptic feudal Mars is a chauvinistic society, so women can't be knights - unless they pretend to be men.]

While at Sarum Sir Xyre bumped into Sir Guy and the two exchanged angry words; Sir Xyre told Sir Guy that the Saxon man Guy had killed last year was the son of King Cnut, and Guy was irritated he had not been informed sooner. He suspected Xyre of trying to keep the glory to himself. Meanwhile, Sir Wiglaf noticed that Elaine, his erstwhile paramour, was flirting quite openly with Sir Phelot the Greyling, the court's resident Jack the Lad. He got his squire to fake an emergency so Sir Phelot would leave her alone.

During the feast, Sir Elad gathered the new knights together and gave them a quest on behalf of the Earl. Sir Michael, a knight living on the border of Modron's Wilderness (an area where the terraformed Martian surface had reverted to its original Martian landscape) had cuckolded Lord Jagent, an independent lord whose lands lay between Salisbury and neighbouring Somerset. Lord Jagent was the type to seek revenge for such a slight and would undoubtedly try to make war on Salisbury if he was not allowed to get "satisfaction" against Sir Michael. Earl Roderick therefore wanted Sir Michael - who had fled into Modron's Wilderness - recovered and brought to Sarum, preferably alive. Since Xyre and his comrades were good hunters, they were chosen for the task.

The knights asked around about Sir Michael, and heard from some of those who had fought alongside him in the past that while he was a skilled knight and his mech, The Marsh Harrier, powerful at distance, he was a coward and weak in melee. They set off for Sir Michael's manor immediately, and arrived at nightfall. There, they met Sir Michael's wife and young son. Although his wife was understandably bitter about the fact her husband had fled after shagging another man's wife, she was also unwilling to tell the knights where he was hidden. But Emerec of the Isles, using a different approach, managed to befriend Sir Michael's son and trick him into revealing the information that Sir Michael was hidden in a plateau in the middle of Modron's Wilderness, with a few allies.

The knights also learned that there were huge sandworms in the Wilderness who would try to eat anything moving across the arid landscape, but that, perversely, making as much noise as possible would not attract the creatures but would in fact intimidate the worms into staying away.

The knights decided they would sleep in their mechs rather than in the manor, fearing what would happen to them if they stayed there, and head into the Wilderness the next day. But during the night, in Sir Wiglaf's watch, a large mech was seen silhoutted in the starlight on a distant ridge. Immediately, a game of cat and mouse developed in the darkness. The ranged weapon on Emerec's rouncy was destroyed, but the attacker managed to slip away in the night. Being the fastest, Emerec pursued, chasing the mysterious enemy knight; by dawn, she had reached the plateau Sir Michael's son had spoken of.

The knights commenced to approach the plateau, and were fired upon from a cave near the summit. They quickly went on the offensive, knowing Sir Michael was weak in melee, and a short, sharp battle ensued. But though Sir Michael was joined by Sir Aquinal, his brother, and another unidentified knight in a smaller mech, they were outnumbered and quickly surrendered. Sir Owain, flushed with victory, emphasised the triumph by driving his mech's energy sword through the torso of The Marsh Harrier once Sir Michael had dismounted, despite the protestations from Michael and Aquinal at the damage to their precious heirloom.

And there session 4 ended. It was a good session and definitely felt as if things were clicking into gear. The arrival of Emerec definitely also added an extra and welcome new dimension - if there was ever any doubt that men and women tend to approach playing RPGs differently I think a recording of our last session would quickly dispel it.

Campaigns I'd Like to Run: II - Noble Cyberpunk House

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 20:01:00 +0000

I re-read James Clavell's masterpiece Noble House over Easter. (James Clavell is like Charles Dickens for the 1980s, except if Charles Dickens has been spliced with the genes of Hemingway and Dashiell Hammett and he's writing about Asia. If you haven't read Noble House, treat yourself. It won't sink in how good it is until page 200. It doesn't matter because there's still nearly 1000 to go at that stage.)

It's a brilliant book, but it's also the kind of thing I aim any Cyberpunk 2020 game to be. Everybody is on the make. Everybody is out for number one. Everybody is motivated. Everybody has a name, a past, a reason for being. Even characters who appear for only a page have depth, desires, passions: the NPCs aren't cardboard cutouts - they're real people to be interacted with, manipulated, bargained with, begged, intimidated, pleasured. They can all do something for you, but they all want something in return. And they all know other people, who know other people, who know other people, who know the first people but for different reasons. To play the game is to create a massive web of favours and enemies and allies and vengeance.

The fact that Noble House is set in 1960s Hong Kong is just the icing on the cake. I love the aesthetic of the original Cyberpunk 2020, but I love the aesthetic of 1960s Hong Kong even more: all the men wear suits, smoke cigarettes and say "I'll have a brandy and soda" when you offer them a drink at 11am, and "I'll have a whiskey and soda" when you offer them one at 11pm. People use the telephone to have important conversations. They leave messages for each other at hotel receptions. They bump into each other in bars and say, "Hello gentlemen, may I join you?"

Why bother with all the cyberware when you can have a noirish game of crime, business and style over substance? Or, a better question: why not an alternative reality in which it's the 1960s, but people have cybereyes, contraceptive implants and Kerenzikov boosterware?

Campaigns I'd Like to Run: I - Jack the Shadow of the Colossus Killer

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 22:11:00 +0000

The 'Completes' were a bit hit-and-miss overall, but the Complete Ranger's Handbook was one of the best splatbooks TSR produced - certainly during the 2nd edition era. This was mainly due to the sheer variety of the Ranger kits on offer.

One of these was the 'Giant Killer' kit - a variety of ranger who made it his business to hunt and slay giants, and got certain advantages when fighting them. I used to want to run a campaign in which the PCs were all Giant Killers roaming the wilderness, protecting the weak and timid from gargantuan monsters.

A few years ago I wrote a post about the giant slaying campaign. I described it as:

[R]evolving around infrequent encounters with large, powerful, and possibly unique enemies right from the beginning. In this paradigm, monsters would start off at the level of trolls and progress from there; they would be mighty and perhaps near-legendary beings who only true heroes could possibly hope to defeat in a fight: Fafnir, Gog and Magog, Grendel, Glaurung, the Green Knight. Giant Slaying adventures would involve much in the way of tracking, exploring and inconclusive battle, and comparatively little in the way of slaughter.

I used the old Playstation game The Shadow of the Colossus as an example of how this would play out. There would be no goblins or kobolds or anything of that nature. Only big, ferocious creatures that you would have no hope of defeating without team-work, strategising, and forward planning.

It didn't occur to me at the time that the Giant Killer kit existed - I'd forgotten all about it. It was only leafing through the Complete Ranger tonight that reminded me of it. It's tailor-made for that sort of campaign. I particularly like how a party composed entirely of Giant Killers would be specialized to the extreme - they would be excellent at working together to hunt down and destroy giants, but correspondingly vulnerable against magic-users and human enemies. This would make an interesting strategic problem for the players: perversely, they might be better against big enemies than those their own size.

The only problem with the Giant Killer campaign is that D&D combat is too abstract to do it justice. You don't particularly need to be creative when, despite a giant's size and unique challenges, ultimately all you are doing is just rolling a d20 against AC like you do for any monster. I wonder if there are any other systems which are designed to handle small human versus big monster combat?

The Rod of Seven Parts and the Sandbox Quest

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 18:13:00 +0000

A long, long time ago, I can still remember how rpg.net used to make me smile. One post I remember in particular raised the idea of a kind of valedictory tour of the TSR universe in pursuit of the Rod of Seven Parts. Each of the seven parts would be found in a different published campaign setting (Al Qadim, Athas, the Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, Aebrynis, Krynn, Greyhawk) and the PCs would be on a grand mission to find all the pieces and put it back together again. It would be a cheesy and cliche TSR novel in gaming form, in other words, but played as straight as possible.

I always liked this idea, and it's always stayed in my mind. Much as I may have moved beyond David Eddings/Weis & Hickman/Terry Brooks fiction, I still have a strong streak of nostalgia for epic fantasy quests. (I many not be alone in this - my friend Nate has been planning for the last 15 years to write "The Boy Who Finds A Sword In A Field Saga".) At the same time, however, it's rather hard to imagine such a campaign working without a heavy dose of rail roading.

Or would it? The campaign, in my mind, would work something like this. First, you would get all the players on the same page: their PCs have been chosen by the gods, for some reason, to gather the seven parts, and if ever one of their PCs dies, the replacement has to be "in on" the quest too.

Then, you would set up an ordinary hexmap and sandbox in, let's say, the Al Qadim campaign setting (because why not have brown people being the heroes of the quest for once?). Somewhere in that hexmap, somebody or something has one of the parts of the rod, but only the DM knows where.

Next, you sprinkle everything with rumours as you normally do when setting up a sandbox-type game, but the difference is, they are geared towards that part of the rod. They don't have to be too explicit ("The sheikh of Blahblahplace has this...special stick..."); they would probably be more like rumours leading the PCs to wise men, sages, archives, libraries, and the like where they can begin their investigations. Those investigations might equally be red herrings. The PCs might be sidetracked by other considerations. But the general idea would be for the PCs to have the finding of the rod-part their primary goal, and for the DM to set things up in such a way that this would be possible without leading them by the nose.

Then, once the rod-part in Al Qadim is found, the Gods say "Now find the next one!!!!1" and the PCs are magically transported to Athas. Rinse, repeat!

False Optimization?

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 10:31:00 +0000

I've seen it argued in the past that players (especially new players) should always be discouraged from making 'sub-optimal' choices in D&D character generation. If you have high STR, you should be a fighter. If you have high INT, you should be a magic-user. And so on. The argument, at least as I understand it, is that if you are going to play a fighter, you should have high STR, because otherwise you will not be as good at fighting as you ought to be, and this will make you less effective (and presumably, by extension, this will make things less enjoyable).

The argument is of course based on a faulty premise to begin with: that mechanical player-character effectiveness is what makes playing an RPG enjoyable. That way lies the utter, and now discredited, madness of 4th edition (which is linked to the equally mad and equally discredited character optimalisation mayhem that can be found on 3rd edition fora online); and even if you believe in that premise, you must recognise that it is simply an axiom and the argument is circular.

But be that as it may, I sometimes wonder if, even in purely mechanical terms, what we used to call "min-maxing" is genuinely advantageous. If your magic-user has an INT of 9 but a STR of 18, he can still cast spells, but he will also be very useful in combat. If your fighter has a STR of 9 but a WIS of 18, he will still be very useful in a fight but can also resist magic. And so on.

This applies more to some stats than others: Charisma is always useful irrespective of your class, whereas Intelligence is not particularly useful unless you are a magic-user. But by and large high stats are useful whatever you are, and provided you have at least a 9 in your prime requisite, you will be largely effective in doing the thing which your class is best at.

Is the notion of 'sub-optimal' choice just received wisdom that too few people question? Or do I simply misunderstand the argument?

Actual Play: Pendragon of Mars, Sessions 1 & 2

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 22:55:00 +0000

After quite a hiatus of running games because of moving cities, I've recently got back in the driving seat via Google+, GMing what I've dubbed "Pendragon of Mars". It's a mashup of Pendragon and Mekton Zeta; if anybody is particularly interested in how this works mechanically I'll go into the details, but it's basically Pendragon except when the characters are in their mechs, we use Mekton Zeta. Duh.

As should be obvious: yes, Pendragon of Mars is Pendragon, but where the knights pilot mechs. We began with this initially cheesy premise in a moment of enthusiasm while puzzling over why Japanese mech-based manga is so boring; the setting sort of spiralled from there. My idea was as follows: it's Mars in the far, far future. In the ancient past - so many aeons ago it is now forgotten - the planet was terraformed by an Earth-based civilisation. The current inhabitants are unaware of this, and indeed do not really know anything beyond Mars itself - to them, Earth is just another shiny object in the sky. They have forgotten much of the ancient technology they once knew, and have regressed to a feudal state without the knowledge of how to operate the crumbling technological remains that still dot the Martian landscape. Just about the only technology of elder days which they still have available to them are their mechs - sad remnants of former times which are handed down from generation to generation of noble families like heirlooms. The knights (the only ones who are allowed to pilot or possess mechs) do not know how to make them, and do not comprehend their technology beyond making simple repairs. Other than the mechs, people live as they did in the Dark Ages on Earth.

(Conceptually, the whole thing is a bastardized mixture of The Once and Future King, Viriconium, Dune and the Dying Earth, but with mechs.)

Sessions 1 and 2 have followed the traditional Pendragon opening. I had the players create Pendragon quires in the normal way (they will be called Sir Xyre, Sir Elias, Sir Wiglaf, and Sir Owain once they are knighted) and four mechs each - a charger, two rouncies, and a sumpter. I then had them begin in an area of Mars called Salisbury, which is more-or-less a Martian version of that in the Pendragon 5th edition book.

In the first session play began with training in the region of Vagon, with each player in one of their rouncies. Sir Elad, the Castellan of Vagon and Marshall of Earl Roderick's forces, suggested they have a race, with the winner taking the position of their leader for the course of the day. Since Xyre had the faster rouncy, he modestly suggested they make the race more interesting by holding it on hilly terrain, which they did - running up and down hills in a chaotic fashion, having several falls and crashes, before Elias emerged victorious.

After the race, they returned to Vagon, and heard news that the people of the nearby village of Imber were reporting the existence of Geteit Chemosit in the area. The Geteit Chemosit are large automata made of a strange green-black stone, who attack people seemingly at random, slicing the top of their skulls off and stealing their brains - for reasons unknown - before disappearing into the wilderness. They are said to be creations of the Elders - the ancient civilisation of Mars.

The squires immediately volunteered to go off and destroy these Geteit Chemosit, which they did in a fierce melee after tracking the things for a day. But Wiglaf's mech lost the use of its left leg, and Xyre's the use of its right (and only) arm, in the fight. They therefore decided to head to the nearby city of Warminster after taking some ceramic swords and ceramic eyes from the Geteit.

In Warminster they sought refuge with the Bishop of Salisbury, at Warminster Cathedral. This is a triangular structure made out of wood, which surrounds a large hall made of pale stone, rumoured to be a creation of the Elders. While there they talked with Brother Roger, a deacon at the cathedral, who told them that there are rumours that the Elders did not die off or disappear, but buried themselves deep underground - where they remain still, in endless slumber. Because the Elders are so artful, where they hid themselves and where they are is a mystery that nobody alive could know.

They also tangled with Sir Belias and Sir Guy, two knights who form the Earl's garrison at Warminster. These two powerful knights bachelor were rather different characters - the former friendly, the other arrogant and dismissive of weakling squires. They told the squires that they had destroyed a group of Saxon raiders a week previously, and the Saxon mechs might be salvageable for parts to perform the necessary repairs on Wigla's mech's leg and Xyre's mech's arm. The next day the squires duly went to the site of the battle, where they found usable scrap but also the corpse of a Saxon mech pilot, decorated with silver and bronze and clearly a man of some repute. They decided to take him back to Sir Elad the next day. Back at Warminster Xyre and Sir Guy had an unpleasant conversation and Xyre seemed to have made himself an enemy. Asking around, he discovered that Sir Guy had an unrequited love for Lady Gwion, the attractive handmaid of Lady Ellen, the Earl's wife.

The squires returned to Sarum the following day and then went with Sir Elad to Sarum, the mighty fortress of Earl Roderick, built into a network of fortified craters. After being announced to the Earl, they told him what they had seen and done in the preceding days and were congratulated on their triumph in combat and their discovery of the Saxon. The Earl recognised the man as being a prince, the son of King Cnut of the East Saxons. He surmised that this prince and his raiders were the remnants of the Saxon horde who had been destroyed in battle two years ago at the Battle of Savernage. He ordered the squires to tell Sir Guy and Sir Belias as soon as they were able that they had achieved a great feat in killing this enemy prince.

The Earl then implied that the squires would be knighted after the evening meal. During this meal they attempted to socialise with the ladyfolk of Sarum. Xyre, mainly as a way of getting back at Sir Guy, decided he would try to seduce Lady Gwion, and invited her to go falconing with him the next day through one of her maids. Wiglaf, meanwhile, invited Lady Elaine - a beautiful adultress shunned by the rest of the court - to dance, and Elias attempted to make the most beautiful woman in the county, Lady Adwen, jealous by dancing with Lady Indeg, a 40-year old three-times widow who is always on the look out for handsome young knights. Thanks to the intervention of Xyre, who composed a ditty for the minstrels, both Wiglaf and Elias were able to dance most impressively. Later that night they are sure to be told by the Earl they will be knighted, whereupon they may be able to press their advantage with the ladyfolk further.

The Underlying Game and AD&D 2nd Edition

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 22:19:00 +0000

It's often said that the "gold standard" of XP for treasure (pun intended) is at the core of older editions of D&D. It's certainly the mechanism by which XP is awarded in most of the retro-clones. And a narrative has developed in which it is said that D&D almost requires this mechanism: it provides a driver for player action - they have to go out looking for treasure in order to advance - and also a fun challenge in its own right (the logistics of handling treasure is in itself interesting).

All the older editions of D&D, but OD&D in particular, did a very poor job of explaining this, but it seems indisputably correct. You might go so far as to say that XP for treasure is the underlying but unstated assumption on which D&D is founded.

AD&D 2nd edition did not have this mechanism. Reading through the DMG, indeed, it is rather striking that the only time XP is supposed to be awarded for treasure is as an individual class award for Rogues. XP, in general, is recommended to be given for the following reasons:

Fun. XP is for rewarding player involvement and making the game enjoyable for others (including, implicitly, the DM). It is correspondingly to be withheld if the players are disruptive or inactive.
Survival. Simply by the PC surviving from session to session, he or she should gain XP.
Improvement. As players learn how to play the game better (the text states "players should also improve by trying to play more intelligently each session") their characters should be awarded XP. I'm reminded once again of Zeb Cook's exhortation to always try to improve as a player and DM.

It will be noted that two of these categories, 1 and 3, are totally external to the game world itself, and 2 is only partially connected to it. They are primarily meta-gaming awards. And they give the lie to the idea that the DM's job is to make the game fun for the players. Indeed, the "tyranny of fun", if anything, cuts in the other direction: it's up to the players to be the heart of things in that regard. It's their job to do interesting things and get involved, and it's their job to get better and better at playing D&D. I wholeheartedly approve.

There are also, of course, group awards (for defeating enemies and for "story goals" like rescuing the princess or whatever) and the aforementioned class awards. These latter are as follows:

In general, XP is awarded when a player has a clever idea, role plays well, or encourages others to participate
Warriors gain XP for individually defeating monsters
Wizards gain XP for using spells intelligently, researching spells, making magic items, and so on
Priests gain XP for using granted powers and "furthering [their] ethos"
Rogues gain XP for using their special abilities (i.e. thief skills and bard abilities) and getting treasure

What is the underlying game for AD&D 2nd edition, then? Surprisingly, given the reputation the edition has for a) focusing on plot/story rather than strategy/tactics; and b) softening the approach of older editions, you might say that, if anything, the XP mechanism for 2e is primarily concerned with player skill.

In that sense, it is not so far removed from the approach of the past, given that gaining treasure was, to a large degree, a clear measure of success and, hence, player skill. But the 2nd edition mechanism is more holistic; it aims to reward not just in-games success but also the more intangible elements of gaming success - doing stuff, getting involved, making the experience worthwhile for all concerned. That seems to be nested in a set of assumptions about players, and would also perhaps be seen as incentivising paternalism in the DM. But nonetheless, it is of interest to me as somebody who grew up playing 2nd edition but piledrivered XP for gold and monster kills. Lying between the two stools of New and Old Schools, 2nd edition remains almost totally ignored and very much under-theorized, which I don't doubt does it something of a disservice.

Noisms' Theorem of Character Generation Length and Player Cautiousness

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 23:17:00 +0000

I am running a Pendragon game (set on Mars...it's a long story), and got to thinking about the lengthy process of character generation in that system. It takes ages to make a character, certainly in comparison to D&D. There are a lot of choices, a lot of numbers to think about, and a lot of rolls to make. It can easily take an hour.

I don't mind this process. There are horses for courses. Short, speedy character generation works for D&D and similar, because characters are commensurately throwaway and individualistic. D&D characters tend to be men with no names, who appear from the aether as a set of dice rolls. They develop personalities through play, but they are not really part of any social milieu. When they die, it's no biggie. You roll up a new one. The system supports, and implicitly expects, this.

Lengthy, involved character generation works for Pendragon, because the expectations of the game are different. Characters are part of extended social networks. They have families, homes, roles to play in the community. They are not aimless Cugel-esque rogues. They have to do things like looking for wives and punishing criminals.

It's not something that I've particularly considered before, although it's obvious when you think about it, but the longer and more detailed the character generation process for a game is, the more you would expect players to try to avoid character death in the early game. Partly this is because a long, detailed progress involves you in the character more. But mostly I think it's just a function of length. If it takes you an hour to sit down and make up a character, you are going to be much more careful about what happens to the character than if it only takes you 5 minutes - again, with the qualification that it is in the early stages of a game. (Of course, the death of a level 15 D&D character who you've been playing for over a year is going to be a horrible prospect for other reasons.)

It's hard to separate tone from length, of course, and there are so many other variables. Does starting off play with a main character and backup make you less cautious - almost like a moral hazard? What about the role of hit points (perhaps the most important variable)? And what about how enjoyable character generation is? Where the process is more enjoyable, do people mind their character dying less, and thus act more incautiously on a subconscious level?

GM as Auteur and The It's My Party And I'll Cry If I Want To Rule

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 21:02:00 +0000

Generally speaking, I favour a loose approach to GMing. I like creating detailed settings, but I usually allow the players quite a lot of leeway in the process (I might have them each say one thing about the setting, or I might let them create a handful of NPCs who they know, for example) and permit them to do what they want with their character within reason.

I think this is more-or-less standard amongst GMs, at least among those who blog regularly or post on Google+. We tend to avoid being too draconian. I wouldn't describe it as a fear of saying no, but there is a sense in which being a stickler about your setting - in which being precious about it - is seen as petty and old-fashioned. It's unusual (I think) for a GM to tell a player directly, "No, you mustn't do what you want to do in developing this character - I don't want that type of character in my game".

It is even rarer to imagine a GM saying to a player, "No, your character mustn't do what you intend him to do" once play has begun. That goes strongly against what has now become established orthodoxy wherever you look, be it on story-games.org (where players are supposed to have narrative control), within the OSR (players have complete freedom within the sandbox) or at rpg.net (where you must never judge anybody for anything or tell anybody how to behave - unless of course they have the wrong opinions, but why would you game with such a person in the first place?). It is the most arbitrary and obvious form of railroading.

Which is all well and good - generally speaking I don't want to run games in which I am constantly telling players, "No, you mustn't do that". (And here I have to stress the distinction between "No, you can't do that", as in "No, you can't understand dragon if it is not on your character sheet", as opposed to "No, you mustn't do that", as in "No, you mustn't torture that orc".) In the vast majority of cases, that way leads adolescent authoritarian bossy madness.

I do wonder whether this avoidance of "mustn't" prevents the GM from acting like an auteur, however. This, you may think, is no bad thing - indeed, there is little more horrendous than a GM who thinks he is a novelist, as we all know. But let's try a thought experiment: imagine that your GM was actually Tolkien, or Mieville, or George R R Martin, or Mervyn Peake, or RE Howard, or H P Lovecraft, or [insert your favourite fantasy author here]. Wouldn't you want to allow them to auteur things to a certain degree? Wouldn't you be interested in having [your favourite fantasy author] have complete control over the tone of the game, within reason? From time to time, wouldn't you want him to tell you "No, your character mustn't do that, because it is not in keeping with the type of game I am running"?

I don't for a second mean to suggest that if Tolkien was my GM I would want him to boss me around to such an extent that I had no control over my character. I am not making an argument for turning RPGs into interactive fiction - God knows Dragonlance was bad enough. But I would certainly want his guidance to a certain extent - I would want him, from time to time, to tell me, "No, what you are proposing just is not appropriate for my game".

Nor am I suggesting that sensible, decent people with an average level of social skills can't just sort out misunderstandings around tone between themselves in the vast, overwhelming majority of cases. But "vast, overwhelming majority" is not the same as all.

Is there anything to be gained from allowing a GM a greater level of auteurship than orthodoxy suggests? Should a GM be permitted opportunities to say, "It's my party and I'll cry if I want to"? "This is my game and I just don't think what you are suggesting is something I am comfortable with"? "Trust me that things will be better for us all if you just don't do that"?

Were-Moray Eel

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 23:42:00 +0000

It's been a while since I've posted any Yoon-Suin stuff. It's ticking away.

Were-Moray Eels are a type of Lycanthrope encountered in the coastal regions of Yoon-Suin, particularly in and around the Topaz Isles. They often live alone or in small groups, and shun other human contact, but their strength and power occasionally leads them to dominion over brigands and sea raiders. They typically have three forms: human, giant moray eel, and a hybrid form in which the facial features and torso take on the appearance of the eel but arms and legs are retained. At the top of the food chain, they accumulate toxins from reef creatures, so their bite is cripplingly poisonous: if the victim does not succumb to Lycanthropy, he may well die from catastrophic diarrhea.

Were-Moray Eel

HD: 5+3*
AC: 5
Move: 120 (60'), Swim 150' (50') in eel form
No. Att: 1 in human form; 2 in hybrid form; 1 in eel form
DMG: As weapon +2; As weapon +2, bite 1d6; Bite 1d8+1
Special: Hit only by silver or magical weapons
Save As: Fighter 5
Morale: 8

Poisonous Bite: Anyone bitten by a were-moray, in addition to his Lycanthropy check, must save versus poison. Failure results in sickness and continuous diarrhea; he can only move at half rate, and loses 1 point of CON per day for 2d6 days. If he runs out of CON, he dies. If the 2d6 days expire and he still has a CON score, he survives and regains his CON at the rate of 1 point per day.

The Authentic Local Experience

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 20:38:00 +0000

I'm not sure about in other areas of the world, but localism is becoming A Thing in Britain. For a long time home grown British things were despised, through a combination of fascination with the world outside and all its exoticism (The Empire was a bad thing, but it certainly made Britain a place that was interested primarily in foreign climes); a fascination with immigrant cultures (particularly from India and Pakistan) which replaced the old suspicion people held for them; and the legacy of industrialisation, which had taken a mostly rural population and transformed it into a mostly urban one over the course of 100 years, replacing local traditions, culture and knowledge with bland uniformity. (Any mainland European visitor to Britain will be amazed at how everybody eats the same things, all city centres have exactly the same shops, and everybody dresses exactly the same way.)

In the past 10 years or so, though, I have noticed a significant trend towards localism, particularly favouring local produce. British people have always been extremely proud of their regional allegiances, but this switch to appreciating locally-made foods and drinks is significantly new. You really notice it when visiting the countryside. Everywhere you go you find micro-breweries making local beers, local dairy farms producing local cheeses, local fisheries producing local seafood, local restaurants selling locally-sourced meats. Part of this is, I think, because of consciousness about the environment (people want to buy local because they think it means less of a carbon footprint from transportation), part of it is wanting to support British producers (I think Britain is generally a more patriotic place than it has been for probably 30 years), and partly it is lead by the BBC, which for whatever reason has been producing series upon series about British history, geography and culture in recent years.

Generally speaking I like this trend. I think the economic and environmental arguments supporting it are probably utterly bogus, but it doesn't matter: Britain is a very interesting country, with interesting local traditions and dialects and music, and with a delicious and varied cuisine which is not well represented by the shit most people actually eat.

I got to thinking about this recently because the local supermarket sells smoked Northumberland cheese, locally sourced, which is probably the most heavenly thing I have ever eaten. As I was stuffing my face with this last night, I started to ponder: is there, or could there be, a local trend in gaming? Might gamers, like foodies, become more interested in setting games in their local areas - whether fantasy-inflected or otherwise?

The advantage of the move towards the local is that knowledge is extremely high. Not to get all Hayekian on a Monday evening, but knowledge in society is dispersed and decentralised: the closer you are to something, the better you know it. I noticed that, when I ran a Cyberpunk 2020 campaign about a year ago set in the area I grew up (Merseyside), I felt a level of comfort with the setting which I don't normally have. Whenever a player asked me something, I was able to respond with the familiarity and detail which only a local person could have (and the players, also being locals, were able to flesh out their characters and the setting very easily too). It's standard for a DM to know his own setting, and nothing less should be expected. But you can't know a fictional place you've made up as well as, and in anything like the same level of detail as, you know a real-world place you know intimately.

Localism in gaming does not have to be modern. Because I grew up in the North West of England, I know the climate and geography of the place very well. I know the landscape, I know the weather, I know the way the sky looks, I know how green the grass is. It would be very easy for me to simply remove what currently exists in terms of human habitation, and replace it with a complete fantasy culture/cultures and society/societies, while retaining the geography and all of those things I know about the physical space as a wilderness. This would give a game I ran in that environment a level of authenticity I could not give a completely created fantasy setting (in, say a desert or a jungle), because of all the extra knowledge I have about how the place feels.

Of course, part of the fun of role playing is using your imagination, so I would hardly advocate only ever running locally-based games. But isn't it a notion worth considering?

Hexology II [Travel]

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 23:33:00 +0000

Some more thoughts on hex crawling and wilderness adventures today; this time, focusing on actual travel itself. It's my submission that a DM running a game involving wilderness travel should know and love wilderness travel; it is important in running such a game to consider not just random encounters tables and pre-positioned adventure locales, but also the more subtle issues - how does it actually feel to be out in the wild? How would wilderness encounters actually play out in practice? How does the geography itself act as both threat and tool? Of particular interest to me is the question of distance (at what distance do wilderness encounters occur?) and surprise (how is it that a party of adventurers becomes surprised?). While hiking around Craster on Monday I started thinking about those questions.

This is a field of cabbages. The plants are a probably two feet high and visibility is low; it would be extremely difficult to spot an enemy in those fields who wanted to be invisible - they could simply drop down amongst the plants and submerge themselves. Moving around on your belly to stay out of sight would pose its own difficulties, however. The plant life is thick and difficult even to walk through. And, as we shall see, this being England...

...the ground is as muddy as fuck. You would be breathing in dirt lying in amongst that. It's also demoralizing merely to walk through, and I'd imagine nigh-impossible to run over, least of all in full armour. An important consideration if a band of orcs suddenly appear from the undergrowth to the left where they've lain in hiding. They're unlikely to be hidden there, though. Look also where the path leads. The choke-point in the path between the copse of trees and the line of shrub is a more-or-less perfect ambush spot. Surprise distance here could be a matter of a couple of yards.

This is the other direction for the path above. It shows the importance of the high ground. Somebody on top of that escarpment (known as a 'heugh' locally, and the site of an iron age hill fort) could see anybody moving along that path from literally miles away. Surprise distance in this scene could be half a mile at the very least.

A close-up of the above escarpment. Difficult to climb, though not impossible (I did). Those green bushes are gorse, though - it's prickly and painful and blocks movement. And if an enemy appears while you're half way up, you may as well just drop your pants and bend over.

And the view from the top. It shows how exposed anybody would be moving in the open ground below - but also shows how difficult it would be to see somebody on the hilltop from down below. There would be almost no need for a surprise roll out here. Somebody on top of this hill would easily see anybody approaching, and could just as easily hide amongst the rocks up at the top.

A typical muddy English field - the same comments about running through that mud apply: you couldn't. If I was a band of orcs, I know where I'd be - in the copse to the left. But it's important to consider the role of animal life...

...because, although you can't see them in this photo, the woods here on the right are packed with jackdaws and wood pigeons. As soon as you approach they scatter, crying out with loud abrasive voices. Again, think about an encounter here: what would a failed surprise roll mean? It might not be that you've been spotted. It might just be that somebody has spotted the birds which you have disturbed. A nice way to build tension - the players notice a few wood pigeons suddenly scattering up ahead. They know something has flushed those pigeons. But what?

Dunstanburgh castle. People who built castles knew what they were doing: imagine trying to assault that. The House of York apparently did it during the Wars of the Roses - the solution was to blast it with cannons. Notwithstanding that, you might want to give it a wide berth - but it would have to be very wide, because it is surrounded by open ground.

A view up the beach to the castle. Beaches aren't always sandy. Those rocks are slippery and take ages to clamber over. Again, forget running. And if you're in armour heavier than leather, roll a d6 per turn: get a 1 and you fall over.

A sheep trail. Game trails are an important way to move around, because they are usually more clear than the surroundings, but they have a bad habit of leading nowhere, or going round in circles. A bigger concern is the sheep themselves: sheep are easily disturbed, and they tend to baa the alarm when a stranger appears. Again, the surprise roll might just mean the local troll has heard the sheep warning of your arrival.

Another heugh. Plenty of places to wait in ambush for anybody walking along that boggy path.

An old limestone kiln set in the trees. There could easily be something hiding in there: and it would most definitely see you before you saw it, hidden away in the dark like that. Sneaking up on that structure would be a challenge in itself. You might be able to skirt around from behind, but the chances of being heard are still high.

The long hard slog of a journey. Imagine walking through that. Now imagine doing that for a week. No wonder people didn't get about much in the medieval era.

Hexology I [Contents]: Lindisfarne Case Study

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 21:50:00 +0000

A while ago I put up a few posts regarding the contents of 1 mile and 6-mile hexes, mostly using Google maps to show aerial views. In light of my most recent post and the comments it generated (to do with wilderness mapping and hex crawling in general) I thought it might be illuminative to do some work on the contents of hexes from the ground up: how much might a hex contain? But also - when you stop to examine the geography of a 6-mile hex, what sort of things might be encountered? What challenges would the landscape provide?

The first of these posts is a case study of Lindisfarne, or Holy Island, a tidal island off the Northumberland coast, near the Scottish border - for no better reason other than that I happened to be there on Saturday (I've spent the last four days driving and hiking around the far North East of England). My aim here is to answer the most simple of the questions posed: what might a 6-mile hex contain?

Lindisfarne is about 2.5 miles East-West and 1.5 miles North-South - easily enough to fit into a 6 mile hex, together with the surrounding coast and smaller islands:

This makes it ideal for our purposes of investigating how many interesting locales there might be for an 'adventurer' (or law lecturer on holiday) to interact with.

Let's take a look at what's on Lindisfarne (while entering the necessary caveat: I was taking photos on my BlackBerry, which is shit, and I'm also a shit photographer, so don't expect anything decent).

This is a view across lush pastures to Lindisfarne castle, a small fortification on the only real promontory on the island. Note the flooded areas in the middle ground. These are extremely difficult to cross and would have to be worked around. Note also how big this area is. It's only a small part of the island, but it's still a large area of ground. To the right is a narrow road and a collection of houses which, today, house the local branch of Her Majesty's Coastguard.

A typical farming cottage with a wide expanse of pastures for sheep grazing around it. One of several on the island. It may just be a farmhouse, but who lives in it? What's his or her story?

The village of Lindisfarne itself. The population is around 150. As well as houses, there is a distillery for brewing mead, a few churches, a graveyard, a quayside, and a ruined priory which we shall re-examine later.

A flooded pasture, which harbours about three dozen geese. Or, if you prefer, a monster of some kind. Or, both.

An old lime kiln to the rear of the castle. This is a warren of tunnels, about 100 yards square, where people used to fire lime stone to make bricks.

The view to the rear of Lindisfarne castle. Again, a wide area of open ground, and plenty of sheep. What you can't see is that this area is boggy underfoot and difficult to walk over, and criss-crossed with rivulets which have to be jumped over.

More flooding - the pool is well over a foot deep. At the brow of the hill is a walled garden area which is strangely pristine and fertile given the bleakness of the surroundings; it could easily be imagined to be magical, or owned by a witch, or similar.

Pebbly beach stretches around much of the Northern and Eastern coasts of the island. It is covered with flotsam and jetsam - broken crockery, sheep bones, crab shells, etc.

Looking up at the castle.

Looking over the sea towards the mainland. All of that area is included within the 6-mile hex: the islet in the middle of the channel, and the coast beyond, dotted with farmsteads and small hamlets.

A cemetery overlooking the sea, complete with creepy mausoleum.

Coming up a steep hillside to a church and cemetery. A spooky and evocative location, even on a sunny winter's day.

A view over the channel to the smaller island to Lindisfarne's south. I have no idea what those two towers are, but studying them was my obsession the day I was on the island. They look pretty much exactly where I would expect a pair of squabbling arch-mages to live. Again, they are within the bounds of a 6 mile hex centred on Lindisfarne.

A better view of the small islet. There is a low building of some description on it, as well as a shrine (you might just be able to make out the crucifix there).

I don't know if this is actually a well, or just a flooded dungeon or basement. There is clearly something down there worth exploring, though, don't you think?

The old priory. An extensive ruin, full of dark arch ways and unexpected corners.

A ruined watch tower overlooking the entrance to the harbour.

Another view of the ruined watch tower. Is it haunted? Is something buried underneath it? Does it harbour a hermit, a group of brigands, an evil spirit?

Boats turned upside-down and converted into huts - apparently a tradition from the Viking days. Probably housing suspicious fishermen, but I bet you can think of a dozen interesting things you could put here as a DM.

Detail of the doorway to an abandoned farm building down by the beach. Peeking through a gap I found a lot of hay and some abandoned farm machinery, but again, I bet you can think of a dozen more interesting things you could put inside as a DM.

These potentially important locales are only a taste of what is on Lindisfarne - let alone the surrounding area of coast which would potentially be covered in a 6-mile hex hex here. Put simply, there is a huge amount of game-able material just in this very tiny piece of land.

As a DM, of course, coming up with a list of 15 interesting locations for each 6-mile hex before the start of a campaign would be overkill, but there is certainly an argument to be made that at the very least each 6-mile hex in a campaign setting, particularly in a settled area, should have a handful of adventure locales within it, with more arising through improvisation during play and through random encounters. One locale per hex, or even blank hexes, simply aren't good enough.

Tomorrow: thinking about actual wilderness travel.

Fetishizing the Dungeon

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 23:07:00 +0000

The kids over at the rpg site are discussing whether or not the collective output of the "OSR" has been better, or could be better, than that of TSR.

My own feeling is that, whatever the answer, the OSR certainly creates better dungeoneering materials than TSR did, but the opposite side of that coin is that The Dungeon, and particularly The Megadungeon, are fetishized within the OSR to a far greater degree than they ever were during the TSR era. This is especially true of the 2nd edition period, when many of the major campaign setting materials created - Al Qadim, Dark Sun, Planescape, Spelljammer, and so on - specifically and deliberately eschewed The Dungeon as the locus of play.

The obsession with The Dungeon is a source of some mystery to me, as somebody too young to have played 1st edition. Although, equally, it's clear that it comes from a preference for that play style among the early OSR heavyweights, and that this has, in turn, influenced the development of the movement (such as it is). I like dungeons, but it's far from my favourite method of play, which would revolve around city-based and/or wilderness exploration. What excites me most is not the insular dungeon layout, but an open hex map full of interesting areas to explore and range over, and interesting locales to interact with.

In that area it's very hard to say that the OSR has produced much good at all. I could be wrong, but the only products that spring to mind in that regard are Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown, both of which I find pretty uninspired, and the Sin Nomine and Land of Nod stuff - which is good, but nowhere near extensive enough to say that it is in any way challenging of the grand TSR setting creation machine that was at work in the 1990s.

Thoughts on Buying White Dwarf

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 20:42:00 +0000

I was in my local Anonymous Supermarket the other day and saw the latest issue of White Dwarf winking seductively at me from behind a copy of Woman's Weekly in the magazine section; I couldn't resist the urge to buy it. I think it may be the first time I have bought it since around issue 195 or so - although I do vaguely remember the celebrations for issue 200. In any event, not since around 1996, when I was 15 years old. And because I haven't played Warhammer or 40k since I was about 16 or 17, I've been out of the loop for quite some time. (I was astonished to discover, for instance, a few years ago, that Chaos Dwarfs are no longer an army list.)

White Dwarf has changed a lot since the old days. I noticed that:

Although they still have battle reports, they are breathless, chaotic affairs where you don't have a clue what the fuck is going on - except that everybody is dying. In my day the battle reports were quite drawn out and considered. The players would describe their tactics in some detail, and although the reports were written with verve, they were relatively easy to follow and contained detailed maps showing the locations of the units each turn with their movements. Apparently they don't do that any more. The battle in the February issue is Chaos versus Night Goblins and a "slaughterbeast" was involved, but I couldn't tell you a great deal more than that.
There is actually more than I expected on how to paint and customise the models and rules. Far more than in the old editions, at least as I remember them. I was surprised by this, because in my conception of things Games Workshop had gone down the route of Wizards of the Coast and increasingly frowned upon people doing anything remotely resembling DIY. Not so: it seems actively encouraged. (There is even an editorial from the still-active [and still alive!] Jervis Johnson explicitly telling you to do whatever the hell you want with the rules, the models, and everything else.) The how-to-paint articles are detailed, useful and extensive.
In the same vein, they've freed up Space Marines. In the old days everybody made up their own Space Marine Chapters, but that seemed not to be encouraged by GW: I remember all the codices and articles in WD being about the Space Wolves, Ultramarines, Blood Angels, Dark Angels or nothing. Now it appears having and designing Your Own Chapter is positively encouraged.
Far more ads - but I could just be misremembering the extent of ads in 'the old days' because I never paid attention to them.
I was surprised to discover a lengthy section detailing the model conversions carried out by the great John Blanche and his friends. One of their creations is called "Deposed Planetary Governor Daven Kel-Rosber, penitent and executioner". I love 40k sometimes.
There is oodles more model porn. Particularly Space Marine porn. There are metric shit-tons of photos of people's Space Marine designs, conversions, kit-bashes and paint jobs. A lot of it is incredibly impressive.
It's amazing that I was surprised to discover there is no longer a catalogue to order models from at the back of the magazine. Of course there isn't. In the years since I was reading White Dwarf, this thing called 'the internet' has come along.
Warhammer, and 40k, remain brilliant, compelling, dark fantasy creations - among the greatest in the history of the genre, without question, despite their ruthless pilfering of ideas from elsewhere. This issue details a 40k chaos warrior called "Vilitch the Curseling" who is a weak, stunted child who forged a pact with the chaos gods: he now controls his big, strong older brother while attached to his shoulder, from which he sprouts like a hideous growth, and he has become a mighty chaos wizard. The dark creativity of Games Workshop is as strong as ever.
They have a girl working for them now, and she's actually kind of cute.

I enjoyed reading the magazine and found myself getting genuinely excited about the thought of buying some of the new models and maybe even collecting an army. Then I looked at the prices. £30 for 10 plastic chaos warriors? Fuck me.

Generic Cyberpunk 2020 Bastard System: Fantasy Edition

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 20:17:00 +0000

For some reason today I got onto thinking about using the Cyberpunk 2020 system as a generic GURPS-esque system - I think I started off by wondering what system I would use for a fantasy cowboys sandbox thanks to watching Django Unchained yesterday, and it sort of snowballed from there.

Here is what I have so far. This is a fantasy/medieval history iteration, not a western one. I am posting it up here for comments and, if anybody really wants to, play testing. You'll need to have some knowledge of Cyberpunk 2020 to know what the fuck I'm talking about, but still.

The basic aim is to try to emulate the grittiness and danger of the Cyberpunk 2020 "Saturday Night Fire Fight" system, as well as the importance of armour and shields. The rationale is: if you are prepared for a fight, fully kitted out, you will be very tough to kill. If you are unprepared/unarmoured, you will die extremely quickly.

Character Generation

Default is to assign 60 points between the stats, but you could roll 9d10 and use the total instead. The 'Iron Man' system of character gen would be to roll a d10 for each stat in order, re-rolling 1s.

'Cool' is renamed 'Fortitude'.

Skills

As standard. Combat skills would include Brawling, Archery, Polearms, Slashing weapons, Bludgeoning weapons, Exotic weapons (for things like whips, nets, bolas, etc.).

Combat

Combat rules are as standard - d10+skill+REF. BTM modifiers apply for both attacker and defender. Hits are randomly assigned, also as standard. Following exceptions to main rules applies:

Damage reduction - all penetrating hits damage armour by SP1, but axes, pole-axes and maces always damage hard armour (i.e. plates) by SP1 irrespective of whether they penetrate.

Edged weapons are armour-piercing against soft armour (e.g. leather, hide, padded) - SP is halved.

Pole-axes, warhammers and military picks are armour piercing against hard armour - SP is halved.

Damage to head is doubled without a helm.

Shields work against all hits to arms, torso or head (though not to rear attacks), and are SP 14 (wooden) or SP 16 (metal). All hits to wooden shields reduce the shield's SP by 1. Shield users suffer a -3 modifier to hit when attacking. [Designer Note: The idea is that if you are fighting a shield-user, you're probably going to have to either wear down his resolve with repeated blows, outflank him, or go for the legs with a called shot at -4 to hit]

Sample armour SPs:

Hide/padded 4
Soft leather 5
Ring mail 10
Chain mail 12
Banded mail 12
Scale mail 14
Field plate 18
Full plate 20

Sample damage ratings:

Longsword 2d6
Two-handed sword 3d6
Battle axe 2d6
Mace 1d6+2
Pole-axe 1d6+3
Spear 1d6
Short sword 1d6
Dagger 1d3+1

Magic

Not thought about that yet.

On Dwimmermount and Lateness

noreply@blogger.com (noisms) — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 18:26:00 +0000

Things seem to have kicked off big time over Dwimmermount. (If that word means nothing to you and you are reading this blog, I would be extremely surprised, so forgive me for not going into the back story on this.) It's not my place to comment on the particulars, which I am not privy to, and it's certainly not my desire to stir shit in any sense, so I'll steer clear of making any sort of statement on the particulars.

But I will talk in generalities: I think Kickstarter is a nice idea, and I have backed some campaigns in the past, but I am highly suspicious of the legal nature of such projects and their likelihood of success. It's my view that a contribution to a Kickstarter should effectively be seen as a gamble, and contributors should only hand over as much money as they would be willing and able to part with for literally no return. A wise gambler only puts down as much money as he has to waste. The same should be true with a Kickstarter and the attitude to success should, as with gambling, be pleasant surprise, not expectation. It's my hope that the behaviour of contributors will come to reflect this.

Personally, as somebody with ambitions to create and distribute material for use in RPGs, I would never use such a campaign, for the simple fact that I know that I am rather feckless (my main character flaw - yes, I do have them, amazingly) and also often extremely busy. My ability to actually complete a project within an acceptable time frame is not high. It would therefore be irresponsible and negligent of me, to say the very least, to promise any completed product by a given deadline in return for punters' hard-earned cash.

Moreover, I am in general suspicious of quick fixes when it comes to creative endeavours. Good art (and yes, I consider game design an art) is produced because, fundamentally, the producer needs and wants to express something. It's not something that they do primarily to make a living, and it is something that they would be doing even if they were not being paid to do it, because they would enjoy it. If you were really going to be producing great stuff to use in games, you would be producing great stuff to use in games anyway, Kickstarter or not. So, then, why would you need a Kickstarter in the first place? (The only possible answer is "To finance art and layout", to which my only response would be, "Did Gygax and Arneson give a shit about art and layout?")