Sneak Preview Teaser of HHSOLO1

Now with much light-hearted (but deadly nonetheless) Old Skool feels

Still mostly on track for late summer 2014 - this is a rough cover treatment that I'm trying to get together for inspiration - the art is by an amazingly fun illustrator named Sam Schultz who will even do some custom paper minifigs for you for a nominal fee.  (I'm not sure Sam still does it but you can take it up with him)

Check out Sam's stuff over thither:

tumblr: http://slamschultz.tumblr.com
email: sam_schultz@me.com
Twitter(optional): @slamschultz
I have another surprise illustrator (besides me) that I'm mostly going to pee my pants about, but I ran into the real and thorny problem of money - which makes this kind of stuff pretty dicey.

Who woulda thunk that all this work and money goes into a thing up front?  Here's hoping that I can keep the wind in my sails and finish the text and the interior illustrations long enough to put out a first version, nevermind the deluxe version that I have in mind down the road (maybe better as a follow-up or sequel)

Promoting Desperation in Games - What I learned last year from DCC

<<I think I thought this up a couple of weeks ago, and it's been waiting for me to finish and publish it, so here goes, sort of a WHAT WORKS FOR ME PT. DIEUX although I haven't got the balls to implement these kinds of things all the way since it would be like TPK after TPK after TPK>>

One of the things that appeals to me about the OSR, particularly Barrowmaze and Stonehell and the ASE (I guess megadungeons in general), is the sense of desperation that comes with being a schmuck underground with a dull sword and a torch, and maybe a slightly bonkers religious friend and a guy/gal who tends to take things when nobody's looking.  I often feel desperate in real life, or at least I have in the past.  There were a couple of lean years where I was hungry all the time, penniless, and spending a good deal of time in the FSU Strozier Library at night looking for something.  I knew some Greek then, and Latin, and a meager smattering of Hebrew, and my dreams were infected with hunger and longing and the endless quiet of a half-empty dorm room.  I'd spend hours a day hunting for foot-notes in musty disused books, trying to synthesize my understanding of the Gnostic Heresies and POVRAY and Angband.  I may have been a little mad.  I would save up my dimes and nickels for a black bean sub at Subway back when they did that, and I sometimes prayed an atheist prayer that the Krishnas would come and try to convert the kids with free food... Looking back they was some weird times, yes.  But I was sharp as a tack, then.  It were the desperation that made me sharp, I think.  Maybe it was a burgeoning Krishna Consciousness or something.

There's no way my younger mind could have anticipated those real lean years from 1995 to (2014?) 1998... By that time I had given up on RPGs - our group had just tipped into 2nd edition and things started to seem dull to me.  We had tried Ravenloft, and Dark Sun, Spelljammer (very briefly).  I started a job and picked up the 1st Vampire WoD book to try and keep up with the group and then when they started to play it almost exclusively I bowed out into (get this) Necromunda.  I'm not about preying upon the weak and leaping tall buildings and blending seamlessly into the shadows.  I'm about the grotty, filth covered, desperate picking through goblin-stained rags looking for a couple of silver pieces to make all this poking around in the sewers worthwhile.  When I started to hang with the wrong kind of skinheads over the gaming table, I gave up tabletop gaming and RPGs entirely until about 2008 or so.

I don't need empowerment in my fantasy, really, I think maybe I need a similar situation in which I get some imaginary return on the dreariness of humdrum existence.  I guess maybe it is empowerment, of a kind.  Don't get me wrong - in my waking world I'm fairly fulfilled in that I'm happily married and have a great kid, and my day job allows that I make other peoples' lives marginally less dreary...  So, how do you (well, how do I) promote desperation in my games?  Somewhat more importantly, if others don't look for this in their games but look for something else, how ought I to mesh my deep psychological drives with theirs, so that we can have a fun time and get the thing we need?

1) Maybe the setting.  Barrowmaze appealed to me since resource-management and desperation is implicit.  Looking back, I think DCC isn't such a great match (for what I'm talking about here) since 1st level DCC characters are a little heftier and tricksy-er than other OSR types.  It's perfect for the funnel, though.  After a bunch of funnels, I find I'm worn out on it a little, but it's a hoot for the most part.

2) No permanent spell effects.  Continual light on a rock is a game breaker for resource-worrier types.

3) Spell limits that are a little heftier than what DCC has, so a modification to the system or else a significant ramping up of spell-resistance in encountered creatures, and a boost to the use of spells in humanoid/human NPCs.  I think making loss of the spell connected to any failed roll, or else 

4) CRUSHING DEATH AND GRIEF, SOAKED IN THE BLOOD OF THE TRESPASSING THIEF

5) Frequent random encounter rolls, but I think maybe tandem use of the reaction table to keep things interesting.  Murderhoboing all the other NPCs was hilarious but stymied my attempts to introduce sinister plots, kind of.

6) Bleed the characters of resources if they aren't used up quick enough.  Waves of zombies to get the PCs worried about lamp-oil.  Gusts of wind and dripping water for torches, crossbow-using undead for lanterns and lamps, monsters attracted to spell use and loud noises (It occurs to me that I am stealing all this from the intro to Barrowmaze I).  Gygax said you have to track time and make them sweat resources.  I came up on 1st ed. and YMMV of course.

7) Hideous awful curses, and not the regular vanilla kinds, on magic items.  A good peppering of weak magic weapons and tantalizing miscellaneous stuff right out of the Friday the 13th TV show.  So bad that PCs will hesitate every time they spend a charge.  I know this is not the kind of game everybody wants, but refer to the title of the article, if you will.
8) Grottiness.  This ain't Krynn, it's Newhon or Discworld.  You can die from disease and poison or malnourishment or fatigue.  Kinda sucks, but adventurers adventure so they don't starve, and they need money to fuel the benders they go on, and maybe save up a little at a time for that banded mail for an extra edge.  I was reading ACKS this morning, and it explains that a GP equals one month's worth of destitute subsistence for a peasant, so adventurers are naturally going down into crypts to find a couple of years' worth of wine, wo/men, and song.  I like that policy.  DCC states up front that most 0-level characters have never seen a GP up close.  I think it's in there, somewhere.
9) I don't think I feel great about purchased potions of healing/scrolls of cure light wounds.  Or neutralize poison/cure disease (maybe cure disease is okay, if it comes with a price...)  I want my magic to be a little weirder and more dangerous than that.  Is it okay I say that?
10) I dig the KEEP FIGHTING mechanics of WHFRP 1st ed. in which you can stay up fighting if you save vs. death, but you're incurring wounds and damage so bad that you may never adventure again without some kind of magical/divine assistance.  Or a wooden leg.  High level characters (i.e. 4th level) are riddled with scars and have excellent and thrilling stories to tell.  Necromunda and Mordheim were fun this way, if you went out of action you had a chance to just have been conked out and scrambled back to camp with a concussion and a good story.
11)  Come to think of it, maybe divine assistance isn't so meaningful until PCs reach a certain amount of importance in the world (i.e. never - Lovecraft's mechanistic materialism).  The gods are petty and jealous and underpowered, and arcane patrons are the same.  They want power in the material world and every follower is tested constantly and held to strict standards...  I like ASE's flavor in this way
12) Coins are rare and the high powered stuff like platinum is generally out of circulation - any treasure-y stuff a party finds is going to be chewed up by fences and pawnbrokers and banks and taxation.  That 1000 GP vase you found?  Likely to get broken on the way back and also if you don't have a trusted appraiser then you can expect about half of what it states in the guidebook.  Reaction rolls might make this better, but haggling may be role-played for better results.  Maybe people don't like roleplaying haggling anymore, I dunno.  You could lose the jewels to a pick pocket on the way to the fence!  Adventure!  I mean, what is the pickpocket skill for if not for NPCs to cut your purse?  Also, better be nice to your henchmen or they may just pull up the ropes and leave you down there...
13) TRAPS TRAPS TRAPS  a party full of anxious thieves is better and more fun than a party full of dead clerics and skewered dwarves (in DCC I bet this would be pretty slick).
14) Rust monsters ought to be as terrifying for a party as wights are, IMHO
15) +Zak Smith proposed a rule, I think, in which you voluntarily raised your fumble range in order to expand your crit range.  I think, amongst the number of other clever things the man has written and thunk up, this is one of the clearest uses of simple mechanics to add zest to the game that I ever heard of, since it promotes FUN.  He's really a very smart guy, and make no mistake.
16)  Speaking of crit ranges, maybe the monsters could use the same rule, and cause crits on 19 and 20, and (for DCC) bump up the crit die a couple of notches.  A simple skeleton could turn into a skeleton brimming with serious necromantic energies - feeling worried, with the smell of mould and hate floating around everywhere?
17) for undead, in DCC, you could do worse than unique-ify 'em with my own awesome d100 table (for some zest and laffs)
18) don't let the party just send henchies and hirelings headlong into disaster without reduction of morale, increase in difficulty hiring down the road at the very least, and it cost a share of the treasure for certain
19) if the party burns enough NPCs, then word travels fast and they get dogpiled by a couple of adventuring parties, also (but at least make it dramatic).  A party of murderhobos with a bad reputation is sure to get a comeuppance sooner or later

Right now I can't think of anything else but I'm sure a glancing over of the AD&D DMG later will spring some things into my brain.  I think after some reads of my blog nobody will want to play in a game I run from here out...

Indeed, the Gods Are Crazy

Thinking about the wide range of Orbital Gods that pop up in the first book of the ASE, and some of the games I've played as clerics, lately.  I read this post about what things a fantasy deity would want from boots on the ground, and here goes the list of stuff the two "on the fly" beings I invented might want:

The Great Albino Catfish, the Lord Who Floats in the Deep, Dark Water (from the STOUTFELLAS game by +Doug Kovacs with +Wayne Snyder +Paul Wolfe and +James MacGeorge).  In this I was "Fishbit" Burris, Lawful (but Evil!) Dwarven Cleric - former smuggler turned low-level gangster, turned hamburger by some mighty Pro-Sex Warrior Priestess Woman.

Wants you to (based on the play):

1) Drown
2) Drown things, or murder them unawares
3) Throw nice things in the water
4) Be cold, and/or wet
5) Move quietly in darkness
6) Murder things and dump the bodies in the water
7) Smuggle, but only in boats at night

His granted spells (this is in DCC) manifest as coldness, dark water, catfish-y tentacles, and the silence of the deep.  I think I had Darkness, Detect Magic, Paralysis, and Holy Sanctuary (which didn't get cast in the course of the game).  I was thinking of a big white Aboleth that masqueraded as a fish...  My chosen weapons were the spear and the javelin (recast as a harpoon).  Distinctly a Lawful Evil god, I guess if I needed to pick domains for other game editions I would say, Water, Evil, and Darkness.  Incidentally, the slow-moving and cold sewer water under the city of Cube sufficed for holy water in this case.

Then there was a DCC game I played in as Forthelbert, 1st level Cleric of The Lady of Day Old Baked Goods; as yet unnamed.  Forthelbert was a homely but pleasant artisan (baker) in his former life, and so tried to give succor to the roving bands of adventurers that sprung up like weeds in his hometown.  This is in +Darien Mason 's game, but I didn't get to follow up in it - not sure if he's followed up, either (I think we played a couple of games since then)

If you read this, suggest a name for the Lady and I will include a reference to you in my upcoming solo module for DCC.  Multiple entries will make for better references ;)  (Note: funny that I studied Greek and Roman mythology in college pretty well and didn't recall Fornax)

She wants you to:

1) Break bread with strangers (even evil ones)
2) Pelt non-believers with stale rolls, or hit them with stale baguettes fortified by faith
3) Heal companions
4) Feed the poor and sick
5) Sell leftover (never fresh!) baked goods at a mild discount and tithe it all to the nearest Lawful temple

Spell effects manifested as heat, with the smell of freshly baked bread that passes quickly.  I think the spells I had were Resist Cold/Heat, Food of the Gods, Blessing, and Detect Evil.  His staff was actually a peel (the baking kind), and his sling sent divinely staled rolls shattering upon the brows of the faithless...  I guess in both instances the spells I rolled suggested the god rather than any other method.

The cool thing about ASE is what it suggests - essentially the gods are sort of like the fractured AI from Gibson's Sprawl Series - intelligences spun out into wild personalities that suck up symbolism from human culture.  I think of some God of Orbital Laser Platforms and how a Flame Strike would look as a laser strike from space, silent and blinding and happening here and there as the platform adjusts to the coordinates, like in the final fight in Akira...

Anyways, thanks to +Daniel Davis for the ideas - what do your non-traditional deities do and want?

Late edit: I just came across this thing by Gorgonmilk which is a sterling example of what I have discussed.  Literally Petty Gods

Also, generating minor deities from games with others

If I may say so, these last two are utterly fantastic.  Why are you still here?  Read those things instead, already!

Spreading the Love Around with some Reviewage and Digressions

I buy a good number of low-cost (but high quality) RPG things every week. I try to limit myself to about 10 to 20 bucks weekly, and usually try to pick up a good deal when I can... I hope I'm not running people out of business with my thrift!

Anyways, I saw mention on one person's blog that there wasn't a review out for his thing yet, and frankly I am amazed since it's all kind of fun. at least on paper.

Just looking at my queue in RPGNow, it appears I have about 666 things to review if I were going to do it right, including a lot of Crawl! stuff, many of the things by Purple Sorcerer and Purple Duck, Goodman Games modules and a wide range of little tiny indy things. I wonder if maybe it must be hard to survive and thrive in this industry because I imagine that each little thing has a niche... You pour your heart and soul into things and it turns out of course the other 4 people in the world who love EXACTLY the same subset of Mechanoid Cowboy Schoolgirls Dungeon RPGs Feminist Narrative Gaming are of course going to buy it but the whole rest of the RPG world is focused on their own stuff.

Alright, here goes (in no particular order) - all the stuff on here came from RPGNow, I think.

Go Fer Yer Gun! by Beyond Belief Games

I was interested in incorporating some Wild West/Frontier elements into my DCC game, in the vein of Spaghetti Westerns.  I'm not sure if this thing was free at the time, but since I picked it up it's gone down to free.  You could do worse than to head over and grab it.  It has some pretty good character classes that fulfill most of the American and Italian Western traditions, and I'm finding with only a little bit of mental gymnastics they could be incorporated into almost any OSR game.  I think they must be based on some version of d20, which makes it pretty easy to drop them into a Flailsnails thing if they are so inclined.  I am having visions of PCs with Colt revolvers mowing down bad guys for a couple of scenarios and then having the tables turned when the cultists hire/incorporate gunslingers into their own crews, gunslingers who happen to be undead or something.  I don't know, Weird West.  The good thing about this work is that it doesn't have any Fantasy or Weird or Steampunk elements on top already, and it has stats in the back for a wide range of real frontier men and women from the American West.  Hey YMMV - it's free.  The production values are pleasingly simple and it's well-made, and the combat is not as wonky as (for example) Boot Hill or GURPS: Wild West or whatever it was...  I like this, and it's too bad these micro-publishers aren't all switched over to a PWYW model, since... I digress again.

Crawl! #9 "The Arwich Grinder" by Daniel Bishop

I try not to gush whenever I read or review something by Daniel Bishop, and the Crawl! series in general is pretty great.  Daniel's practically running the show on a small corner of the DCC universe and it seems he doesn't slow down, or if he does slow down then he must have a backlog of stuff waiting to be published... (note: I think this is actually the case).  Disclosure:  I love H.P. Lovecraft - like many of the people who might read this blog, Ol' Granpa landed on me in my formative years, after I got some references in the Deities and Demigods and found him in my High School library in maybe the 10th grade.  So it goes for many of us, yeah?  This story is so common, and creative people know HPL so well that the popular culture is inundated with Cthulhu references and He Who Sleeps in R'l'yeh A-Waiting is cutesy-fied and belittled and now Mythos elements are creeping up on Primetime TV!  I don't do TV so I can't watch it, but it's for the best since I don't need my Sanity blasted any further.  If I were paranoid, I would say... but anyways I digress.

This funnel adventure draws upon one of my favorite hair-raising Lovecraft stories that doesn't itself contain Mythos elements, and then pops that story into the context of a Weird Fantasy world.  I won't tell you which one, but if you gobbled down lustily all of Lovecraft's works in your youth like I did, I imagine your ears will perk up like mine did in about 5 seconds and your hairs will be on end in short order.  In fact, it appears that Bishop anticipates this and maybe it happened even in playtesting since there is reference to a way to handle stubborn players who won't get with the flow of the fiction...  An attempt to curb a lifetime of player knowledge, probably, in a subsection of the population whose fandom would never allow them to eat something from those generous woodsy folks who never come into town except to buy salt and nitrates.

I think that this'd be a great way to get a funnel group started in a low-magic Weird Fantasy campaign, or even as an interlude in a normal campaign, maybe to set events up for a party of ass-kickers to find what's left of the first group...  The TPK would be satisfying but not a foregone conclusion, although it does appear (on paper) to be pretty dangerous.  I've not played it yet but I found that, like the story it's based on, the more I read, the more I knew for certain what was coming next until the inevitable conclusion hits with a horrendous wet smack, or a dribble of unidentifiable fluid from the rafters above...  This anxious expectation is IMHO the whole hook of this adventure; the wide-eyed grinning certainty and terror that you know for sure what is happening already and that finding the truth is the only inevitable outcome, and maybe if the gods are with you, your hero can put a stop to it...

The art is great and moody, and suitably horrific - even the maps!  I wouldn't probably want my kid to get her hands on it until she's about 13 or 14, but YMMV.  Not for the faint of heart, for sure.

Also, by the way, if you want a hair-raising rendition of the story this adventure is based on, you really can't do better than to listen to THIS on a lonely car-ride home some dark and stormy night. Whatever you do, don't pull over or get hungry while you're listening, or it'll cost you serious Sanity.  I'm not joking, I've read this particular story a thousand thousand times, in fact you could say the copy I own sometimes just falls open to this page, and when I heard this thing on my iPod I almost pissed my pants.

Unlikely Heroes: OSR Races by Nordic Weasel Games

I say this a good deal:  I don't like elves.  Not the ones I see today, anyway; things were different for elves back in the old days.  One thing I like about DCC is that they are given to you mildly different, mechanically (but not by much), and slightly alien.  From the get-go, you're aligned to something else and the normal world doesn't fit you correctly.  This is different from the usual contemporary rendition of elves as this gauzy ubermensch with beautiful hair, THANKS PETER JACKSON.  I may hate Legolas simply because I came up on the Rankin-Bass thing in which the elves really did look alien and unsettlingly different from humans, and not just like supermodels with pointy ears...  Anyway, I digress.

This is geared toward OSR games, and it's ostensibly for people like me, who don't mind Chocolate in their Peanut Butter and Rice Noodles.  OK, bad metaphor, but you'll find in this a Catman, a towering pacifist Rockman Warrior, Werewolves, Bugmen, Skaven-type Ratties, Weird Dwarfs, Androgyne Treepeople, Cosmic Elves, a variety of half-human races, and (most interesting, to my mind) a smattering collection of normal human subtypes.  I haven't incorporated it into my game at all, but I like it on paper, since I went on a Talislanta bender a couple of weeks ago (by the by, all that stuff is free!) in the interests of thinking about class and race differently.  It's pretty reasonably priced, and a good resource for a game that needs something slightly different.  It is well put-together, simple, and clean, with few typos and a scattering of public domain art.  Nothing too out of the ordinary, here, and it highlights that most gamers want bilateral symmetry and roughly humanoid shape in their fantasy RP.  Which reminds me, I need to work on that "WEIRD-ASS ALIEN RACES FOR FANTASY RP" thing, essentially a crib of stuff from Star Frontiers and some other more gonzo sources...  Alas, I have no originality in me, since there is nothing new under the suns.

Shorty Monster's guide to Historical weapons in RPGs by Shortymonster

I don't know, this one kept coming up as a recommendation for me, and the price was right, and then I had it on my wishlist to take a look at.  It's very brief at 12 pages, put together in a simple way, and very informative.  Shortymonster is evidently a history buff, and this is all background and no mechanics.  He has some pictures culled from open sources (I think) and you will think of things differently - particularly the use of two-handed swords and sling bullets - after you read this. It's worth it at the price it's offered at.  And it's good to support a wide range of biodiversity in publishers, I think.  My favorite part?  The information on the Murder Strike and the making of sling bullets.

That's all for now: next review will be The Croaking Fane and the wide range of stuff I've collected for the ASE (not that either of these will need reviews from me, but they are pretty fun)

Tomb Rustler for DCC/Transylvanian Adventures

Tomb Rustler for DCC and Transylvanian Adventures

Anywhere the dead are interred with grave goods, there are those who do the work of the Cthonian gods by collecting those goods and spreading them again through the land of the living. Murderhobos, tomb-robbers, defilers – these terms carry serious negative connotations and sometimes sizable legal penalties. It may be that curses and fines and the occasional death by poisoning or trap are well-merited, but these hard-working men and women do not call themselves by the monikers so casually strewn like mud. Among themselves, they are “specialists”, “adventurers”, very rarely the more highfalutin’ “archaeologist”. They can be generous and free-spirited, taciturn and business-like, or miserly and cruel just as other men and women can be, but (as most professionals of any class) they all have a specific set of skills that come to bear on their circumstance.


Tomb Rustlers poach the goods of the dead and buried – sometimes on a small and parsimonious scale, sometimes in grand fashion. To do so, they often must defend themselves from danger and also be able to cope with the mechanical and physical challenges that face them. Further, a good Tomb Rustler knows which goods to take or leave, and the more long-lived ones know a little bit of the sorcerer's tongue so as to avoid curses, poison, and the magical methods by which treasures might be secured.

Action die progression – as Thief

Saving throws - as Fighter of the same level

Hit Points – they get d8 Hit Dice per level, hit points modified by Stamina. Any 1’s are rerolled – the lifestyle does not permit those of ill health and low fortitude.

Alignment: Any

Weapons: Club, mace, short sword, hammer, pick, spear, staff, lasso, crossbow, sling. Tomb Rustlers prefer one handed weapons that can be put to multiple uses besides murder e.g. bashing, prodding, poking, climbing, and setting off traps from a distance. In settings in which they are allowed, a pistol may be used.

Abilities:

Tempt Fate (optional): At any time, if the Ruin system is used, the character may opt to add a Ruin point to recover one Luck point, up to the character’s starting Luck score but not over

Favored save: pick 1 save at character creation, always add the character’s level to the save in addition to any other modifiers.

Pick 3 of the thiefly skills and progress in them as a thief of the same level and alignment of choice (not necessarily the same as the character’s – so for the best modifiers)

Lucky Strike - A Tomb Rustler may declare an attempt to Lucky Strike on any attack – essentially a Mighty Deed roll, on a 1d4 roll of 4 the strike described performs as a Mighty Deed does, although in order for it to take effect the Tomb Rustler must burn a point of Luck. The d4 roll _does not_ add to the to-hit roll but is merely a matter of chance. The attack occurs at the end of the combat round if successful, otherwise it is resolved in the usual fashion. If the Lucky Strike does not occur, then it is still possible for the attack to succeed, and it will not succeed if the Attack roll is insufficient to hit (but at the Judge's ruling other interesting events may unfold from the efforts)

Sense Danger – once per game session, the player may opt to re-roll an initiative roll, re-roll a missed strike, re-roll a saving throw, or re-roll a damage die rolled by an enemy against the character. This costs no Luck, and the better of the rolls (for the character!) is kept – so if the player opted to ask the Judge to reroll the Dragon’s d10 damage die which was originally a 9, and the second die roll was 2, the 2 would stand.

Use magic from item – for the purposes of using a magic item, the character’s alignment and class is considered the necessary one, if the player rolls _over_ the character’s current Luck score on the Action die. This is checked at every use of the item.

Use scroll - The character may cast a spell from a scroll at -2d from the Action Die. This does not impart any protection and may place the character unduly in harm’s way in certain situations.

Sense magic – the character may sense the presence of magic on an item held or touched with a successful Intelligence or Personality check (player’s choice). This imparts no protection and may activate certain items!

Appraisal – The character may determine within an order of magnitude the approximate value of an item with a successful Intelligence check by handling or inspecting it for 1 full turn. If two or more similar objects are appraised, one successful check will determine the more valuable of the two.