Fantasy Floorplans: Medieval Monastary

I love it!

This .pdf costs $3 and is well worth the expense. Inside you get the layout of the monastery, crisp and clear, with words instead of a numeric key. Also, the text description of the areas of a monastery and their function gives the imagination a great head start on what it looks like there, and what could go wrong.

Of the 13 pages, 7 are text, and 2 are an oversized map repeating what we saw earlier in the document.

The information is concise, giving a sense of how the space would typically be used. This background is further bolstered by a one-page description of monastic orders, giving a variety of real-world examples to inspire your fictional inhabitants.

This location is very flexible. It could be a ruin that the characters claim as a base after clearing it. Or, maybe it is at the center of their base town. Perhaps the bad guy lairs there, and they have to do something about it. If you need to hide a relic, you can take this map and twenty minutes of thinking and scribbling and be ready to play the hunt.

I really appreciate the work Cornelius Clifford put into this .pdf. It is not too heavy, and great fun to page through.

Review of “Stonesky Delve”

Review of Advanced Adventures #15: Stonesky Delve

This module impressed me with its clarity, creativity, and boldness. The highlight of the adventure is the caving section, which has a top-down and a profile map on the same scale next to each other. This is very helpful! The only improvement I could suggest is a ¾ map as well, but that is additional luxury.

The scenario’s main boldness is in giving player characters a chance to really touch on the roots of dwarven identity and culture. If you have a generic fantasy setting, playing this scenario and accepting it into your game’s canon changes the background of an iconic fantasy race. Bold, but well done. These features can be adapted for a world that already has the background, but I think it is great that the elements were included in case your situation is more generic and you’d like some flavor and depth and epic-ness inserted into your game.

The ecology of the situation is thought out and the threats are situation-appropriate. The environment itself has a great mix of claustrophobia and wonder, as caves should have. Movement is not easy. Using mapping as an objective gives the characters a reason to explore. Gaining understanding of the environment is the greatest treasure in the adventure, and that speaks to me personally and meshes with my game style very well. Looting is much less important than exploring.

The time-keeping device for the scenario is genius. Characters are given a pupa of a cave moth; it will hatch in 3 days, and its wings will develop over another day. So you know what day of the adventure you are on, even underground. Thoughtful touches like that abound through the scenario, aiding the DM in providing an immersive experience.

Having explored the cave, the characters may find a connected, more finished compound. This is a more traditional dungeon crawl. Thematically, it connects to the holy divine space they are in, and it has some really unique encounters with monsters that will feel familiar in some ways but still be new to most players.

The module was also designed to function as a tournament, complete with time-keeping tools and scoring. I think that’s an interesting idea, and a valuable addition to the material, even though I would not run it as a tournament.

The adventure is very flexible. It has caves, and a dungeon. It can be used as a tournament. It can flesh out the cosmology of the dwarves in your setting. All in all, I think this resource provides a lot of different utility in a clean presentation with a great mix of new and old tropes, encounters, and locations. There are puzzles, mysteries, role playing encounters, treasure, exploration, and death in the dark.

So, my congratulations to Joseph Browning for writing a fine adventure. Also, my thanks to Expeditious Retreat Press for making this great product available.

Axes and Anvils

Repeat after me: “Dwarves are not just for comic relief!”* In fact, dwarves can be right terrifying.

My very sensible wife has always preferred dwarves to elves. One of my gamers has an unhealthy attraction to playing Warhammer’s dwarf slayers. I get to trot out a couple of my favorite accents for dwarves.

I would LOVE to put more money into this Kickstarter, but all I can manage is the .pdf. Would I play the system? Unlikely, as I’ve got my plate full with 2 other systems. However, I’d love to get a look at the clan builder, the concepts in there… and this project will have a cookbook, dwarf songbook, and all kinds of other madness.

I want the book! No, the boxed set! Look at the cool rune stones! A DM screen!

Also, I really grok the concept of the clan almost as a character, and players able to come and go and make new characters all under the umbrella of furthering a clan that the players help shape.

…is it wrong that I looked at the miniatures and thought about how cool it would be to work them up for Arkham Horror, play Zombies!!! with them, and maybe send these dwarven killers after Dr. Lucky?** I don’t need them!

You’re almost out of time. Check this one out.

*This is not to say they can’t be funny, but dude; quit picking on Gimli.

**It’s that kind of thinking that led me to back the Weird West miniature project to get a single guy. Yeah, Abe will feature in all those settings.

Some great scenarios!

You should take a look at …and the sky full of dust as well as his other blog, Godsend: the City of Bones.

Recently, Simon posted a great temple crawl with a Dyson map, following close on the heels of a lovely tomb raid (again with a Dyson map.) As I was admiring his easy-to-use handiwork, I got nostalgic for another wonderful project he posted.

The Mirrored Hall is a fairly unique beast, in my experience. It has elements of a megadungeon; connected areas discrete to themselves, themes, no expectation you’ll clear it all out, etc. It also has elements of a sandbox setting; multiple locations that the players can choose to explore as their cunning and luck permits, different authority figures and their spheres of influence, travel and resource management.

I like the way this massive scenario balances giving the player characters tools, and denying them a railroad. I like how Simon’s voice balances evocative description and brevity, with stats included where needed but only the barest suggestion of how the DM uses the tools at hand.

Very little is handed to the players (or the DM) pre-figured-out. This is frustrating as the DM preparing to run the scenario, to a point. Then you tip over to the different style of the thing, to the sense of wonder that is built into going through the looking glass, through the mist, through the waters, and coming out somewhere new without trusting there’s a door at your back when  you arrive.

While you could break any of the settings out to run on its own, taking them together is a courageous act of trusting players to engage in the mystery and do their best, and trusting the setting to provide them with wonder and challenge.

I think the best use of this setting would be on a lazy summer, with gaming once a week with the same group, where you just sit back as DM and let them explore. Let them generate consequences. Let the thing take on a life, let the world do something unexpected, let the players decide what mysteries, injustices, threats, and rewards they want to engage.

Good work, Simon! Thank you for sharing all your creativity with us.

Weird West Review

This is the cover of Stuart Robertson’s rules-lite Weird West game. Let’s talk about it!

It is a neat game, and I have seen a lot of people post positive things about it. Still, as I looked at the game, I don’t think I’d be able to run it with my range of play styles.

The first big hurdle I hit was the disassociation built in to “Skill” and “Magic” as attributes. “Skill” is a broad category including dodging/defending, handling animals, hiding in the wilderness, gambling, and physical movement. “Magic” includes objects you may have (medicine bag), supernatural powers (electromancy, magnetic shield), training (scientific mind, Shaolin monk), and inborn characteristics (innocence). That’s… really  broad. And strangely titled.

The second big hurdle I hit was the complexity, compounded with dice. There are four kinds of adventurers, with different advancement rates for various abilities by level. Hit points are rerolled each adventure (trying to top current high, don’t go down.) There are 5 kinds of dice possible for weapon damage (and some weapon damage is affected by what kind of adventurer you are), then there are fight and defense actions to modify the combat. The back page is a matrix showing the defense and fighting scores, to show what you need to roll on a d20 to hit.

Compare that complexity to the skill system, which compares the difference of your skill and the difficulty of the task, and that modifies a d6 roll. Tidy!

This system would be MUCH stronger if the combat system were replaced with the skill system; do you hit or not? (As it is, you look at defense and fighting scores, to set the difficulty on d20; not hard to repurpose that to the d6 system.) And if you do, how much damage? I think something simpler (like the Grit attribute x2) for wounds would allow a more streamlined, less dice-heavy modifier-heavy combat system in a 1 page rule document.

I am unsure of the different types of adventurers; I am not sure the combination of imposed schedule of attribute gain as you level and the freeform of the advantages picked up in the system is a good match. Looking at weird abilities that can be gained upon leveling, it’s difficult to see how my stage illusionist could escape bandits, then BAM! He’s a Shaolin monk too!

Maybe you pick up a new power each level, maybe not; you can choose to start with one or more powers, and then “your character can learn different spells and find special items during their Weird West adventures.” Hm. If you don’t pick up new abilities, why would you ever raise Magic again?

The difficult part of the balance for me was feeling caught between a “just for fun” game and a “this is our campaign” game. It has a lot of different dice types and modifiers to keep track of to be rules-lite (or so it seemed to the newcomer who looked at it with an eye to “do I want to run this?”). On the other hand, it has a lot of disassociation, and hand-wavium, to be a campaign game.

I bet I would feel differently if someone ran it for me and I played, getting into their groove. That’s not likely in my circumstance, so I viewed it as something I might run. I felt the complexity would not reward my effort with depth. Also, the system has hard questions reasonable players might ask to try to make sense of some parts of it that I could not answer (based on rules; I can always make stuff up.)

Take Magic again, the most unclear part of it as I looked the system over. Learning a spell is a difficult task, referring to the spell level; is that the Magic prerequisite to take the spell? What about the “spell” that includes a skill prerequisite? Do they stack to make the spell level? Can you learn more spells than your Magic level if you have access to them? How difficult is it to teach a spell? How long must the student study?

That’s all up to me as the Judge. If I want Billy to be able to look a gunslinger in the eye and spontaneously learn Fastest Gun in the West if he makes his Magic roll, then I can do that. I can say it takes a year of training to  become a monk. So I’m not saying this lack of rules and clarity  is crippling to the system, it is just distasteful to how I like to run things.

Part of the requirement for players to have meaningful choices is an understanding that the Judge is not wildly inconsistent and driven by whim. Otherwise, choices are far less important than the Judge’s mood, and that’s not how I like to play, on either side of the screen.

If you don’t mind coming up with your own setting (from scratch or taken from elsewhere) and ruling on the fly on all kinds of issues, this game can help you run a Western style from a single sheet of paper. That’s a huge plus, and reason enough to check the game out.

(Also check out Citadel of Evil, a great pocket mod 1 page dungeon by Stuart.)

October Blog Carnival is Kind to This Site!

I was privileged to participate in the blog carnival in October, and the wrap up summarized my articles and said nice things about them! I am mostly putting them here so I do not lose track of them in the future, because this is just great.

Click on the picture to go to the wrap-up and see all the other really great articles posted on the topic of loot as part of the plot. Meanwhile, here is their review of my stuff:

Five Fictive Fantasies

FiveFictiveFantasies seems to have been genuinely inspired by the subject and has offered many posts to the blog carnival.

The first is Mark Of Station which posits the consequences of making “the loot” badges of office, and how that immediately makes it part of the plot – no matter what the relationship is between the wielders and the PCs. An elegant proposal that I will have to make greater use of in my own campaigns!

Second up, we have No Printing Press in which literacy combines with the concept of ‘books as treasure’ in a number of extremely useful ways. If you can’t draw new inspiration from this article, you have no imagination.

The third in this series of posts is The World Is Loot, and it describes the insight of a paradigm shift in the perspective of the players. Whether we realize it or not, this is the goal that we all strive for as GMs of our campaigns – but it’s a lot harder to reach a destination if you don’t know where you’re going.

Next up, we have Magic Shouldn’t Work So Hard. I have to agree completely with these proposals – consider them snaffled for my campaigns!

And this blog isn’t done with the subject yet: Overpaid Killers (an ironic title, given that I’ve just co-authored an e-book on assassins) talks about the art of painlessly separating PCs from their accumulated coinage. This post works brilliantly in conjunction with the submission from The Githyanki Diaspora cited earlier.

Review: WFRP, Renegade Crowns

I am a Warhammer fan.

I started the Warhammer Fantasy Role Playing experience with Hogshead products, supplemented with material for the tabletop miniatures strategy game because the backgrounds were often too thin to do what I needed to do. When Green Ronin took over, I was pleasantly shocked to see the effort and tone and successful interpretation they lavished on the setting.

This book is a slender 128 page tome, but it is absolutely useful–not just for Warhammer, but for any fantasy game. (You can take their structure and tables and substitute your own content if you need to see how it can be more universally useful.) The loose system and guidance for handling the process of becoming a ruler, and maintaining that rule against internal and external threats, is worth the price of admission.

On top of that, there is a method for generating an area–geography, rulers,  ruins and lairs, and economy. The whole project is story-based, so it doesn’t get bogged down in simulationist madness. At the same time, it IS story based, so it wants the players to have places for their characters to go, quick sketch flavors, rapidly generated hints for important NPCs, and a path to claim a territory and rule it. The process offers anchor points that will add a sense of realism, bolstered by quirky and memorable deviations.

All that is fine and good. But then we get to the next level of usefulness. Warhammer has always, in my mind, succeeded best as it took the sensibilities of Tolkien and used them to inform a familiar European history sideways. This book is spot-on in its tone, with the wry acknowledgement of mortality and immorality, its cynical take on politics and the value of life in a harsh and kaledoscopic political landscape, in the face of threats both military and environmental that make long-term “success” an ephemeral and strange objective that would not resonate with the determined rulers of their postage-stamp territories.

The writing is a pleasure to read, even when it is being utilitarian. The fine sense of how much structure is enough, and how much is too much, is a well-struck balance. The art is evocative and very Warhammer. The tools provided give a foundation that should power even an uninspired DM to create a fantastic setting.

Consider the magnitude of this book’s victory. It manages to serve as a hex crawl stocker, political sketcher, spice rack of flavor, history generator, and campaign creator–in 128 pages. In addition, the book provides additional character careers. And, to cap the triumph, it has systems for gaining power, dealing with a variety of internal and external threats, and ways to run a campaign that are more informing and liberating than most published scenarios I’ve seen!

This toolkit is passionately engaged with empowering stories. It’s got the same level of flavor and utility as Vornheim, on a vaster scale. I’m impressed.

This is one of those books where I look at it and wish I’d done it, it is something the creator and the company can be very proud to print over their names. I doff my cap to David Chart, the man who did the design and writing.

If you can get your hands on this book, do not hesitate. It is amazing.

FIVE STARS.

Now with Dino Damage! “Out of Time” Review

I have linked to JB’s resources at B/X Blackrazor before (check the OSH page I’ve got, for examples) and I’m doing so again. He has offered a one page dino-game using 4d6 and playing cards to flesh out a character whose main purpose is to evade mastication long enough to return home to a time and place on earth. This is a neat game that would certainly be fun to try out over an afternoon, and I recommend taking a look! Having said that, I’ll offer something of a review.

The down side:

• I don’t like generating hit points from scratch randomly each session. Considering the number is based on “attributes” and only 1d6 is randomized, I don’t get that; why invoke chance at all?
• “Advancement” involving moving existing resources instead of gaining more is awkward; seems a character should gain a card a session.
• I would reverse the damage situation: the game says unarmed combat does 1d6 hit points, and adding a weapon is 1d6+1; I’d have unarmed combat do 1, and adding a weapon is 1+1d6.
• I would probably also differentiate between a hefty guy with a massive club with a dino-tooth in it, and a switch of thorns, even on a system stripped down to this level.
• I would have a point-buy system for “supply.” A pistol costs this, rifle this, ammo this, etc. I would also change it to “gear” since it has more to do with knowing how to use things, and offers no guidance on how many things you have (as I understand it now.) The example of using vines and improvised climbing spikes, for example is found gear used because the character has ingenuity.
• This part is too loose for my liking; players will be within their bounds to ask how many bullets they have so they can make decisions about when to use firearms, for example.

The up side:

• I think the division of attributes (assuming some tweaking of supply) is very creative. I like how the attributes are dealt, and how they affect hit points, and especially how they can be expended for mighty effort but are not permanently lost, regenerating at the next session.
• I find the goal of getting home to be intriguing. An easily grasped objective you can sit down at the table and immediately be prepared to pursue.
• I like the use of the Joker, and also of requesting a Luck die once per session (and setting up potential complications.)
• The idea of needing successes by rolling 4+ on 1-4 d6 is standard, tried and true, easy to grasp, and fun. Also, no math!

There is enough here to start with play testing. I think it will be great when a more fleshed-out version comes out, addressing several questions; what kind of long-term sentient bad guys live here–or good guys? Is this jungle/swamp/area the zoo or playground of aliens whose array has crashed, and they’re stuck here too? And so on. But that is the sort of thing that they’d have to figure out to get home. Until then, this is all they have to start–stuck in Dino Land!

Seriously though, check it out. It looks like fun.