Rock the Gothmagog, Old School Hack style.

On Monday, I got the Secret Santicore 2011 book and flipped through it (as best I could on the computer.) Piles of great stuff! Not something to chuck in the pantry, but instead something to set in the spice rack.

I saw “Down and Out in Gothmagog” by Jeff Rients, and after carefully reading through it I decided that would be the game I’d run for my Friday night game. So, I adapted it for my use, and for Old School Hack, and here it is!

OSH Down and Out in Gothmagog

I stayed true to Jeff Rients’ foundation. I added some physical description and ages, dropped out some of the random encounters, added in travel from the estate to the city, put in a backup plan if the characters suck as investigators (what?! I know! ALMOST impossible!), used my preferred scenario information organization of nested points, and statted up the whole thing for OSH.

For the journey, I added in elements from Dandy in the Underworld’s rural tavern randomizer (which was not in the Secret Santicore book, but the author had another entry in the book) and Danny Peck’s “Random Encounters in a Spooky Dark Forest” to keep a certain thematic unity to the embellished scenario. And to encourage people to check out the “Secret Santicore 2011″ project. Check it out, there’s LOTS of great stuff in there!

This post is scheduled to go up at 1:00 a.m. on Saturday, and I’m scheduled to play until about midnight on Friday–so hopefully I can get you a play report soon.

Thanks to the Secret Santicore project, and specifically to Jeff, for a great bundle of unseasonal treats.

My GM Badges

I enjoy the GM badges over at Strange Magic, but I had not picked some out for myself. I don’t think I could perfectly nail the flavor of what I do easily, as there is a lot of movement and most of them apply to some degree. Enough waffling! Here are my badges.

I focused on four main categories, adding a fifth for flavor for each.

• The GM is In Charge in my games and “rule-zero” is in effect
• I will Mirror back player ideas I think are interesting in the game
• I frequently Tinker with the rules of the game
• My games include Disturbing content

Then each of my three listed campaigns adds a focus.

• Old School Hack
• My games are Gonzo and include a lot of strangeness
• Edge City
• My games focus on interesting Characters and Drama
• Fantasy Masks: Search for the Sleeping Goddess
• My games will tell an interesting Story

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while. Here it is!

Dungeonmorph Blocks!

Dungeonmorph Dice are an inch across. The mind may not immediately translate that into a kinesthetic that connects with the physical objects. When I got them I could not help but notice they are about the size of blocks.

I am not the only one who noticed.

This is my son. He can fit up to 4 blocks in each tiny pudgy hand. He knows what games you can play with these dice; pull them out of the bag, put them back in the bag, stack them, knock them down–so many different games you can play with the same d6s!

Around my house, that’s how we roll.

For additional game master training cred, please note he already has his own world to play with, lower right corner. And yes, he will get to try out a sandbox campaign in the future, when it gets warmer.

Note: This is a closely supervised activity. I am sitting directly off camera in easy arm’s reach. Please no freaking out about sitting on a table, playing with dice at the age of 15 months, etc. Thank you.

OSH: The State of the Bard

The blogosphere has lots of discussion about the bard. I think “Old School Hack: The Fictive Way” can satisfy a broad range of opinions on the subject.

Other Character Class That Can Play Music. If you think that the bard is someone who can play music and sing songs, you can use the ability to learn musical instruments and performance instead of picking up a new Attribute point upon leveling (or just take it at generation) to create that character concept. This works with about any other template, so you can make a fighter, thief, elf, etc. You can even take a talent to compose music (that has an in-game effect), from the Bard template, as a cross-template talent.

Jack of All Trades Including Some Magic. If you think that the bard should have a little bit of a broad variety of talents (including magic), you can make a wizard, give the wizard musical talent at generation, and pick up some spells and lots of cross-template talents starting by taking Bard talents.

Loremaster. If you think the bard should be a mystical lore-master, make a Scholar (know all languages even dead ones!?!) and take a restricted bardic talent at generation, explaining the crossover background and getting DM permission to take other bardic talents as cross template talents as you level.

Music as a Superpower. The Bard inherent ability grants profound knowledge of music, so you get a bonus and others get penalties resisting it, and you can play any musical instrument. Then you can get half your talents from the Bard list and half from elsewhere to choose a more nuanced direction. If you want to add magic, if the DM lets you start with or get the “Mystic Prodigy” talent you can add spells one at a time.

An Amusing Anecdote. So the gladiator had a goblin who followed him, and felt safer riding on his back. In exchange, the goblin started oiling his exposed manly muscles, and cheering him on (because the gladiator’s ego required a fan base to function properly.) The goblin leveled, and between sessions, enrolled in a school and learned to play music as well as picking up the talent to compose.

When next we saw the pair in action, the goblin now could play the goblin lute (an impythri–pronounce it out loud and it’s funny) and craft ballads about the exploits of his hero.

My Stance on These Matters. I understand that you can role play with tremendous latitude, eschewing system and replacing it with mutual trust, creativity, and delight. (I’ve done that.)  I understand that you can make up rules for any situation (or try to) and end with something so cumbersome it is not ever used rules-as-written by anyone, including its creator. (I’ve done that too.)

I believe that the role playing is enhanced when there is in-game crunch to reward you for playing your character along certain lines, just as mechanics are rewarded for using a hammer instead of a wrench in some situations.

I believe that rules should be like the form built of wood into which concrete is poured; a well built form combined with responsible use of concrete, floating, and a level will do much better than pouring the concrete and shaping it into place with a ditch, or your hands. Rules matter; whether you have to work around them, within them, or through them. I think through is great. Player choices should matter, when they make their characters and grow them and play them. If you hand-wave everything, keeping fairness in view (even the perception of fairness) becomes extraordinarily difficult, and the DM shoulders more of the burden than should be needed, by taking over for a rulebook too.

I really am not asking for people to agree or disagree, just expressing my design principle. Confucian view of law is that a good law is enforceable, and a bad law is difficult to enforce; that is a good view of game rules too. Inspiration is another key factor; seeing the rules for the Book of Power inspired me with visions of plots for adventures to get one. The rule for Very Heavy Weapons inspired me to dream up a character with a life size statue of his ex wife chained to him. Rules should enable fun and creativity and storytelling and adventure.

So, rather than building the One True Bard, or leaving it out altogether, I think I’ve used this elegant and flexible system to allow various parties to get just what they want without peeing in anyone else’s cornflakes. That delights me.

OSH Template: Nomad

I had one slot left to fill, and I chose Nomad to do it. A home for my horse templates, at last. Granted, not a fun template to have if there are no horses around, but here is a great thing about this game: if there is a template that has talents, then its individual talents can be stolen by other characters. Even if you don’t want to play a character that’s all about the horses, you can take a talent or two so when you are mounted, you rock.

OSH Nomad template

On the Old School Hack front page forum, one person says he likes the layout of the original Old School Hack so well that he won’t use anything not in that format. I guess for me that feels really odd, as I repurpose stuff from many sources and merge it together into my own house version as I work on things. I will not ignore a source of cool stuff because I don’t like the format. But, obviously, I am not typical. And I don’t use iPads and tech when I’m running the game; I use paper. And for me, working on double sided paper, landscape is extremely difficult to manage.

One of the great things about being me is that I have absolutely no obligation to make everyone happy. I do want to make some people happy. I hope that as some DMs and players alike look at the resource I made, they clap their hands and do a little dance as they plan to pull the stuff in and use it to make their games more awesome. That’s gravy. A major reward is that I will use this stuff at my game table. So yeah, the wide interwebs have people I’d like to please. But my game table has people I also want to please. And I want to be proud of what I’ve done.

So, I have no interest in blowing this out of proportion. I can look at someone who disagrees, note that, think about how that affects my process or doesn’t, and then go on about my business. (I pretend that a number of faceless people out there are happy with what they see, and just don’t tell me so. One of the many great things about Matt Jackson is that he comments on my work and isn’t threatened by it.) The man who designed Old School Hack likes my work enough to put me on the permanent sidebar, so I’m not turning sacred cows into baseball gloves.

Bottom line, this is a major creative exercise, over a hundred pages of work, and I am proud of what I have done and satisfied that it has a lot of creativity and skill in it. I know that there are people who will benefit from it, even if I never meet them or hear from them, even if it will be five years from now before they even know this game exists. My work is good, and it will see use. That’s enough.

Maptacular Monday: Miranda Class Cruiser General Plans

For Christmas, I got the Miranda Class Cruiser General Plans I’ve been wanting for a couple years now. You can find them here.

I’m not a Trekkie, but I do like Star Trek. I would like to run a Star Trek game. My brother had a Trek game going a couple years back, and I stepped in for a session, and that combined with my existing love for the Miranda class ship and Trek generally to give me an itch to run a Trek game.

Geography inspires adventure. Maps inspire stories. And now that I have the fantastic plans for the Miranda in hand, they do not disappoint.

Knowing that the Intelligence office and briefing room is right next to the forward observation lounge inspires visions of meetings before and after official meetings to work out malleable alliances in full view of the silent stars. The senior officer lounge has steps up to a balcony with two corner seating areas; an interesting place for the tactical officer to choose as his hangout, where other senior officers might look for him.

On Deck 3, on the starboard side, the archeology and linguistics labs are across from the library and the specialized passenger staterooms. What might happen in THAT hallway? On the port side, the sociology lab and anthropology lab are across from the arts center. So in leaving the anthropology lab puzzling over researching an artifact, you might drop in to the Arts center to see a crewman has made a weirdly exact copy of the highly classified artifact you’re working with!

People are familiar with the transporter pads, but what about the 22 pad emergency transporters next to them? How intriguing to note that the recreation deck has a game room with programmable tables, a gym, and a pool, and a level above that is all lounge, overlooking each of those areas?

You can show people the layout of their quarters. Junior officers and crewmen share bathrooms with others–so they might learn things from others quartered near them that they would not otherwise know. The auxiliary control room backed up to the computer core would be a cool place to convene the group to drive home the desperation of the situation if the bridge is trashed.

I doubt I’ll get to run a game of Star Trek in 2012. I’ve got my wife (one of my main players) vaguely interested by intriguing her with the idea of the fun of playing a passive-aggressive Vulcan. And I can get a captain, I think. Still settling on the best system, and what story I’d want to send the crew of a Miranda class ship into. Still. I can work on this in the background, so when the time comes, I’ll be ready.

Maps like this allow a game master to prepare in a way that watching all the shows never would. I’m not going to memorize the ship, but gaining a good familiarity with it allows me to prompt players through skill rolls to have the kind of talent and skill that their characters would have as senior officers of a Starfleet vessel, and provides information that can turn to inspiration for games.

“Fictive’s Talents and Templates, 2012 Edition” is posted!

Fictive’s Talents and Templates 2012

I wanted to post by the end of the year, and here it is. The second edition, the one I am going to leave alone for a year. (It is on the “Old School Hack Resources” page, or you can click on the nameplate above.)

At 117 pages, it’s 30 pages longer than the last version. It includes all the player rules for Old School Hack, everything but monster rules and the tracker. I don’t think it is helpful to exhaustively list everything in the book, but I can say it has 40 templates, and backgrounds you can add to characters instead of continuously pumping their Attributes up.

The magic system is deeper, with generic wizard and cleric talents supplemented by 6 schools of magic and 5 deities with their own spell lists, as well as a list of general cleric spells to make generalists or add to the functionality of existing clerics. Plus I’ve added scrolls, potions, and a huge pile of magic items (including weapons and armor).

Now there are fast and simple rules for climbing, swimming, intimidation, inspiration, and more. I offer rulings I’ve made in-game that can serve to guide other DMs in similar situations. I developed some quick and easy rules for beasts of burden, including carts and wagons and coaches and so on.

And the talents! I divided them into 3 categories: open, restricted, and exclusive. And you can upgrade them. I have lists of open and restricted talents to browse. The 40 templates are divided into 28 human templates and 12 other race templates, including attribute caps and ways to be half-breed. There are literally hundreds of new talents.

I have made minor adjustments to the combat, increasing the functionality of shields and allowing for opposed tests of strength for the Push move, as well as adding a strong element of mounted combat.

Even if you have looked at a previous edition, take some time and browse through this one. If you like Old School Hack, you may find this inspirational. I found Old School Hack inspirational the first time I read through it, and I want you to feel a deep reverberation of my delight at the system’s functionality as you see how I extended that functionality further.

So… what do you think?

OSH Template: Shokoro!

You know what is cool? Lizard people! And now you can play one in Old School Hack. Because you know you want to. And you want to pit them against Primordial Apes in an ancient and bitter war. Well, pulp it up. It’s Christmas Eve. Don’t say I never gave you anything.

OSH Shokoro template

A Tale of Three Games

I have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to gaming; I have a group of 4-6 that gets together regularly about every 2 weeks, and an open game table drawing from double that number that gets together about once a month.

In the interests of focusing, I have three games in the new year.

Edge City. A system that started as White Wolf’s Aberrant system and has been adapted and adjusted and expanded so that it no longer resembles that system but in the broadest sense–I call it “Masks.” The plot: a city out of step with time, as “super villains” have used technology over and over to menace the city, which is protected by vigilante heroes; it has a “Batman, the animated series” feel to it but is brighter. Usually.

Search for the Sleeping Goddess. “Masks” fantasy. Started with the open table game, but when the characters got to a certain level of power and direction I broke off the very best “team” of characters and they will be going on a quest to find a way to wake a goddess that went quiescent centuries ago, but could help do battle with the undead.

Old School Hack: The Fictive Way. This game is now my open table. The loosely connected episodic play has tracked Timothy the Tulip, a gladiator, as he has taken on a quest to find a dragon’s lair and kill the dragon to take all the loot. He is getting dangerously close; probably two more sessions, he will accomplish that goal, then retire the character and by then I’ll have my geomorph stocker up, so we’ll try that out.

Three very different games. Edge City is what I consider the gourmet game, in that the characters deal with a complex tapestry of all kinds of genres seamlessly blended into a single setting, adding a depth and variety of good guys and bad guys that is hard to find elsewhere. Hundreds of pages of game record, half a dozen bad guy factions to keep track of as they scheme to do the characters in, scores of allies to pull in while fighting the good fight. Most of the violence is emotional and mental, but every now and then there’s a good dust-up.

Sadly, the main problem with this game is that the players each took on a sprawl of personal side quests so they drifted apart, all solo-playing at the table for half the session or more, then complained that there was too much to do. Implying that it was my job to tell them “no” if their side projects would detract from the game. Unused to the freedom, they ran all over, then took each possible objective as a mandated quest, fried their prioritizing circuitry, and froze up. Plus, some unwise decisions by a couple party members put everyone in jeopardy, and it reached a point where the players were not having fun. I offered to switch to another game, but a couple of the characters have a fierce and passionate love for this game and setting, and fought for it, and so we are still playing there; one player left the table on this one, and we’re rebalancing. I have some really cool ideas for the upcoming plots.

Still, all the kerfluffle encouraged me to build in a second game to alternate arcs with Edge City. Sleeping Goddess campaign will be sweet because in some ways it follows the D&D arc; they did dungeon crawls for a while, then got wealth and strength and looked to broader adventures requiring traveling.

One of the reasons I went fantasy was to try out dungeon crawling in Masks. They chose a party leader, they have a thief who is terribly helpful in finding secrets and looting corpses, a murderous wizard that tickles his player, a halfling (boggie) who we jokingly call the Ukranian Tractor Midget who can huck a javelin right through you, a follower of the god of border justice and protection who is also a tracker and archer… and one player was bored with her murder machine and got permission to play a were-bat, which she’s been dying to do and which would work well here.

So we’ll mix questing with going into dark and dangerous places. The goal is not loot–the goal is lore and objects that will aid them in waking the Sleeping Goddess.

Finally, Old School Hack. Everyone who has played it at my game table has been delighted–except my wife, who had a lot of fun, but ultimately finds it too silly for her tastes. My frustration with the open game table had been growing, so being able to switch to a game with minimal rules confusion, lots of hearty laughter and success, and generally high esprit de corps as a game mechanic was a good thing. Plus, I need to test the material I’m pumping out on the blog.

So. Three games standing. A dozen more I’d like to run, shadowy in the wings. But I have committed to these three games for 2012. And that’s basically all I ran in 2011 (the fantasy Masks open table morphed into the quest and OSH.)

As a closing note, one of the great things about running games I design myself is that I don’t have to buy game books, or ask my players to buy game books so they can play. I still DO buy game books, because I like ‘em, but I strip mine them or use them to satisfy my curiosity, not running anything out of them rules as written.

So what are you running in the new year?

OSH Templates

Archer is too cool to leave out. So, I’ll finagle things around.

If I pull out the 11 other races, and put Archer in, I’ll have 26 human templates. I can use the other 2 slots to indicate a roll on the non-human template list.

Then I’ll have the non-human list:

1. Cosmic Channeler
2. Dwarf
3. Elf
4. Fey Warrior
5. Ghim
6. Goblin
7. Hobbin
8. Kiskov
9. Orc
10. Primordial Ape
11. Sylari
12. ???

I will add one more non-human playable template. So many possibilities! So far I’ve avoided gnomes of all kinds, kender, draconian types, revenants, furries of all stripes, fish people (arguably a subset of furries), constructs, demons and angels, and mushroom people.

Turning option 12 into “DM choice” or “player choice” defeats the purpose of the randomizing, really; they can always choose unless they choose to limit themselves, right?

Any preferences, suggestions, or general thoughts on the matter?