New Stuff... Every so often.

So, I've been running a Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign on Google+, with its awesome Hangouts feature. I settled on the Barrowmaze megadungeon by Mssr. Gillespie.  The administering and thinking about this campaign peaked out (piqued out?) maybe a month ago, and now it's on a simmer instead of a rapid boil.  I've met a lot of great gamers (just great people generally) and had a great deal of nefarious fun.

The Barrowmaze itself ought not to need any introduction and crystallizes a great number of things I felt as a wee young tike all o' 8 years of age, ugly blue plastic dice in hand, idolizing my brother and feverishly fumbling through the Fiend Folio.  Scourge of the Barrowmaze lets me chortle and plot and connive in the way that I imagined my brother's friends did long ago, and I find that it's helped me as a player, although I rarely am able to play as a PC these days.  Now that I have the DCC ruleset mostly under my belt and understood, I have painstakingly rather loosely converted the Barrowmaze's random encounters into an easy to use DCC chart! To save myself a good deal of .pdf page flipping and verbal pauses ("Ehmm... Uhm...  Bear with me guys... Almost there...  Mmmm...")

Here it is, and enjoy it if you like.  I had started to make a conversion of ALL the monsters in the first book to DCC stats but when I set up the spreadsheet and counted 'em all up it came to 89 different monsters or so and then my evening tea wore off and I passed out.

Thanks to Jeramy Deram and his conversion document, that was as good a guide as any you could hope for.  Feel free to give constructive criticism, or what-have-you.  And to Paul Wolfe who inspired the idea and gave a good headstart.  By way of crowdsourcing, if'n you are interested in helping me convert the rest of the BM1 monsters to DCC, then gimme a shout out here or on G+.  I could make the spreadsheet publicly available, I suppose... (note, it's in Word 2003 format since I suck, but I guess I could make it a Google Doc if any fish bite this hook).  This would spread the word on the Barrowmaze slightly farther, save some poor be-knighted DCC judge some footwork, and bring the end and doom of some hapless PCs slightly ahead of schedule.

The Crawling Horror of the Playerless DM

Interesting, to me at least, is the fact that while there is a super-abundance of players and games on G+, it can be somewhat difficult to actually get a game going as a DM.  That's my experience, I don't know how it goes for you, Dear Reader.

This is partly due to scheduling, and also partly due to the fact that no one knows me from fuck-all, except a couple of really cool people I've gamed with who are also hip deep in a couple of ongoing games, already.

So what's a floundering and up-coming DM to do?  Is there some method aside from the "attract-players-you-like-and-hope-for-the-best" approach?  It seems to me that my throwing out "game on Wednesday night" is bound to get about a less-than 30% success rate, even with a sound campaign that is well known and atmospheric (i.e. the Barrowmaze), and a system that has a strong foothold in a certain type of gamer (i.e. DCC).

These animated skeletons and the risen corpses of previous adventures are growing bored with sharpening their rusty blades.  Wights and wraiths and ghouls fight a slow and endless war to gain favour with Nergal, Kyuss, Gax, Nyarlathotep... let us say that the list of god-things that scrabble over the salted earth of the marsh is wearying and nigh endless.  What the campaign needs (when it starts) is something, not just the standard creepy horror, but some kind of imminent disaster.

I'm toying with an "apocalypse counter" a la some great Mythos-flavored board games that counts inexorably down to '0' at which time the horrors of the Barrowmaze will simply break free of their constraints of stone and turn the whole of the land around Helix into a hellish wasteland.  The only thing that offsets the countdown is the number of Luck points or XP earned by the party, in some totally unfair and unpleasant ratio.  The only way to stop it, well, I mean you'd need to have read it to know this but .... well, let us say there are clues in abundance if the players will only play.

In my head and campaign notes, I run the luckless meatshields I have at hand through the first few rooms, chuckling at their demise.  To turn them into dungeon dressing, or have them await the next batch of heroes in their undeath, that is the question!

The Tomb of the Ssessarids (map doodling)

So, thanks to G+ and the hangout phenomenon, I have been lucky enough to find a semi-regular play group. Got me really thinking about DM'ing again, although I love play and have insight that my role-play has become very very rusty.  One thing I really dig is tossing dice and generating PCs and NPCs from random stats.  I find that DCC does this very well with the luck roll and occupation.  I'm off after this to purchase a thing from RPGNow.

Meantime, the other thing I like to do is mapping.  I no longer have reams of maps I made as a wee git, plunging ever downward with my Kayen Telva (lifted from A1 The Slavepits of the Undercity) and magic markers.  However, with my fancypants scanner I am able offer a thing I made last night in a couple of hours, namely the tomb of the Ssessarids, the hideous mercantile family prone to internecine warfare with other traders in the capital city of Thrax.  They were rumored to be snake worshipers who mingled licentiously with reptilian things that slithered up from the pits beneath the capital city.  They searched for long-life or perhaps immortality but instead turned into a degenerate pack of corpse-eaters, lead in the end by a blue-black scaled she-demon.

In the interests of digitizing the thing, I had made a key but chopped it out with PS and cleaned it up with threshold etc.  I intended to feed it into Illustrator as a LiveTrace thing to clean up the lines but, meh.  I ran out of steam.

The entrance is an underground dome with a basin, guarded by caryatid columns who will attack if the players do not cleanse themselves in the basin's waters, first (Although this carries a risk of disease).  Packs of ghouls crawl from the various holes in the structure and broke free to maraud when the hidden entrance was revealed in a rockslide.  The whole complex is highly trapped - the Ssessarids loved Blue Cobra poison and the disfiguring scars that remain should interlopers not die shortly after injection.  At the far end of the complex, 'asleep' on his bier, lies the body of the clan's founder, a ghul sorceror of some potency who does not hesitate to call upon his patron's representative - an elegant Naga with the face of a seductress.  She has ties to the Yuan-Ti, and the crafty Serpent Men who first taught the clan to use and distill poisons, and who coached them in the arts of subterfuge.  Since the geological event that re-opened the tomb, the ghul raiders have swept into the nearby town nightly to feast on children, the elderly, and local beggars.  They had much wealth in life, and are jealous of their gold.

Anyways, it's all there in the map.  As always, the ascent is treacherous so take heede

The Solo Hex Crawl Percolates

Something, some memetic brainworm has got me thinking and the caffeine makes my fingers itch.  I got Lathan's Gold - TSR's XSOLO 9082 a few weeks back and it opened a whole can of nostalgia.  I read about somebody's sandbox hex-crawl (west crawl?) campaign.  I found my standby solo game of long-ago, Barbarian Prince, here. (and doubtless I will take up Cal Arath's sword again nigh the end of the day).  For a guy like your humble author, out in the woods with little bandwidth and few social contacts that game, solo adventuring reminds me of the early 1980's.  At that time, I had Telengard and The Temple of Apshai.  When I grew weary of those, I turned to Choose Your Own Adventure (hideously unplayable) and the Lone Wolf series, later.

The rise of computer gaming and the internet has brought thousands of gamers and role-players together instantly and without distance as a consideration, and I kind of dig the whole OSR that has spurted up.  Frankly, I don't much like the 3.5 version of AD&D that is very popular where I live.  My first "sort of" invite to a gaming group in about 20 years occurred yesterday in the front end of a Staples and although my heart hammered when the guy started talking Call of Cthulhu he said the group's standard fare is 3.5 D&D and my mouth went dry.  I can't afford new books after this DCC purchase - the reason I got out of RPGs in first place was the way my group got into powergaming and feats.  I dunno.  We'll see if beggars are choosers and how the thing plays out.

Where was I going with this?  Oh yeah, I have been thinking about using Twine as a way to cook up a solo PnP gaming diversion in the style of Lathan's Gold and Barbarian Prince.  Sort of a pre-IBM micromanager's dungeon quest.  I envision a caravan of Rothe guarded by grim soldiers who quiver at the sounds of the mushroom forests that circle the city of the deep gnomes with whom they trade.  Pretty nebulous at the moment, but I drew inspiration from the Lathan's Gold cover (IIRC was prone to almost instant destruction when erased by a pencil).  I can offer THIS hideous concoction to the gaming world, on which you may tally and check-mark to your heart's content, should you aim your caravan into the depths of the underdark or across vast sandy wastes.

Cherrios - they count as standard rations, if you're wondering.

Next up: a slithering, ghoulish patron for DCC.  Possibly another persistent horror.  Both in the style of the Old Ones that haunt Aereth.

Further down the line:  A campaign-setting using a mix of Clark Ashton Smith's France, and the Darklands RPG of the early 1990s.  Saints as patrons?  Of course!

Dungeon Crawl Classics - Woe Be to The Wizards

"Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes." - H.P. Lovecraft, "The Festival"

I have bitten the bullet, and finally (after much heartsickness) bought a digital version of Goodman Games' Dungeon Crawl Classics.  Why the pangs?  Well, I should have just borne the cost and purchased a hardbound version so that I can lay awake at night in bed giggling like a 12-year old.  It is strange to see what I remember about 1st ed. D&D and the Red Box set (I always add "pre-Unearthed Arcana") lovingly captured and improved upon with mechanics that add to rather than subtract from the spirit of the thing.  I think this is the D&D that I have carried around in my head for 25 years, given form.  It's not the same as the 1st ed., obviously - I think Labyrinth Lord is awesome in that regard.  But it allows a knowledgeable DM with experienced players a wide amount of leeway to play a game that is what AD&D tried to capture, I think.  Without all the damn 18/00-25 baloney.  It leaves rules out to avoid MinMax builds and rules-lawyering and all the stuff that wearied me about role-playing in the late 90's after I grew to love D&D and gaming in the mid 80s.

I love the Luck mechanic, and the burning of it to add spice to the statistics and chance.  And the Warrior and Thief rules are great.  The Halfling and Dwarf classes are included, of course, for historical accuracy.  Each class has a niche that has something to commend it.  Except maybe the Elf - I could always do without elves, but hey, YMMV of course.  The cleric rules (and to a lesser extent the alignments of all characters) draw you in to the machinations of the gods and demons that run the show.  However, I think the game really shines in the vast amount of material that is included for the Wizard.

I mean, you can't read through the book without understanding that the magic system is intended to be mysterious and baleful and dangerous.  The fate of the magician is sealed almost from the start.  That being, harnessing the power of magic is bad news and should be avoided at almost all costs and can only end in tragedy.  The patron system and spell duels are nice touch that I can't wait to see unfold in an actual game - something that's often portrayed vividly in fantasy fiction but not always done well in gaming.

Anyway, once I've read through it again, I will post a few hooks and a patron daemon or two.  I have already progressed a funnel group of 4 hapless peasants through their adventuring careers to end with a benighted Chaotic Necromancer, vainly struggling to undo the damage his tinkering with awful powers has done his body and soul.  He is accompanied by a foul-mouthed and cantankerous Neutral dwarf sidekick (started as a apothecarist) who has a nose for gold and rare herbs that keep his benefactor preserved and on just this side of the brink of liquifaction.  They move from place to place one step ahead of a former colleague and friend, a witch-hunting monomaniac bent on vengeance.  Their patrons constantly put them at cross-purposes in the manner of the old Elric of Melnibone stories that I loved so much.  Maybe they both loved a fair-haired elven lass who saw her fate in the stars before either of these figures was born - who knows?  Did she set the whole tragicomedy in motion with her studies long ago?  When they meet now, the air around them boils with mutual hatred and the figures of their patron gods and demons clash in the air around them and they leave waste and ruin behind

It's a well thought out system, and I like it.  Now I need to meet up with some like-minded folks and let some d7's and d16's fly.  Or not - the thing is worth reading and thinking about on its own merits as a stimulus to cloud my brain about reality.  I am choking on the air around this election, for Vecna's sake.

I just thought of a "Vecna for President 2012" T-shirt that I should have thought of months and months ago.  Dammit.