The Coolest Thing That Happened at GenCon

So it turns out that I'm an idiot. I was completely and utterly wrong about there being no old school vendor presence at GenCon. Over on RPG Blog 2 there are some pictures of Raggi's stuff at the IPR booth, and there was a whole mess of Swords & Wizardry and OSRIC material available at the Expeditious Retreat Press booth. It was awesome.

But being an idiot worked out pretty well for me, because it meant that we dropped by on the last day of the con, once I'd figured out how terribly wrong I was. (Thanks to everyone who commented on that post last week!) We met Jon Hershberger, co-founder of Black Blade Publishing, who was very impressed with how well-worn my copy of Swords & Wizardry was. We were flipping through OSRIC modules and A Magical Society: Silk Road when another gamer showed up and started asking Hershberger about Swords & Wizardry, and what old school modules he'd recommend running with it. A certain, oddly familiar gamer...

I was there when Erik Mona bought a copy of Swords & Wizardry! Which was extra-cool because Trollsmyth and I had spent a lot of our first day in the dealer hall chatting about how neat Paizo's booth was, what makes their business model so interesting, and how awesome it was that they were clearly there to sell product and support people gaming. Not only did their booth contain huge stacks of their rulebooks and an entire wall of adventures, they'd gotten some third party gaming accessories lined up as well. Everything you need to run a kick-ass game of Pathfinder right there.

Gamers gaming, man. Actual people playing the games they want to play. As geek-out worthy as that picture is, that's what's really worth getting exciting about.

On Systems and Skills

So lately I've been jotting down notes for a new setting and discussing dice rollers for a Wave game with potential players and generally doing the things one does when one has a mind to run a game. I won't be able to really get it rolling for a few weeks at least -- no time until after finals -- but I've been thinking about it regularly and it's starting to sound like a viable idea.

The thing that I'm currently hung up on, besides matters of time, is system. I did something unusual, for me, and started sketching out a setting system-less, (Took a page out of Trollmyth's notes and started with themes, in fact.) and while I'm pleased with the results so far it means I still need to figure out the mechanical side.

While I haven't gotten quite down to the level of what the player characters look like and do, I know I'm going to need at least some kind of jedi-knight analogue, a mutation system, and some way to handle magical tattoos. I'm also considering a cyberpunk-ish or otherwise somewhat post-modern tech level. So Swords & Wizardry and Labyrinth Lord, which otherwise are my go-to systems right now, aren't a completely natural fit. I can crib Mutant Future's mutation system, but I'd also kind of like something that's more forgiving of acquiring them in play, in addition to your existing class/race. And I might be able to make clerics work as the jedi-guys, but depending on where I go with those I might need to make a full new class (which is something I've wanted to do for a while, so that wouldn't be too bad) and then I'd need to figure out what else to do with clerics, and healing in general.

But LL and S&W are my go-to systems for a reason. Right now, they do everything I want out of a system and nothing I don't: fast, deadly combat, magic with for interpretation and additions, a save system, and a couple of other odds and ends. None of the other systems I've used before or have the books for quite fit that bill; I was considering new World of Darkness for a while, but discarded it before I really got serious about the setting. I don't have any use for most of its skill system as implemented (in particular the social stuff; while I can understand the arguments for mechanical supports for certain kinds of characters, with the way I've been playing lately those skills would just get in the way) and I'm similarly suspicious about how the morality system would interface with the kinds of gaming I've recently gotten used to. While I still want to try Vampire, Mage, and all their ilk at some point, that game will have to wait.

One system that has caught my eye, however, has been BRP. I've been looking for an excuse to pick up that book and take it for a spin ever since sirlarkins started posting about BRP, and it has a reputed flexibility that appeals to me: I suspect it would be fairly easy to tweak its character power subsystems to support the character types I have in mind. It does have a lot of dependence on skills, but I'd feel more comfortable ignoring or downplaying certain parts of that system if it didn't mean tampering with some platonic grid of ability scores, and it might do me some good to have a skill system to mess with again. I've gotten perhaps too suspicious of them lately.

My Next Campaign Is A Long Way Off

I've been thinking a little more lately about running a game again. I don't have time right now (and that's not entirely bad, because the main reason I don't is the amount of gaming I'm already doing) but I've started thinking about it regularly again, sketching out ideas here and there, and figuring out when I might next have the opportunity. I'm determined to get back into it slowly: it'll be next semester at the earliest, and I very well might put it off until next summer or even later. But I'm considering it.

Part of the reason I'm taking it slow, beyond just the time constraints, is that I'm still not sure why the last few games I've run didn't work. I had fun, and the players had fun, but neither the Traveller game nor Is This Foul? ever clicked for me. They were both chores to prep for, and I didn't always look forward to game night. I'm starting to get a better idea about why that was, but I don't want to put the effort into running a regular game again until I've got, at the least, a new tack to take.

I'm also thinking I might actually prep for the game a bit before start up this time around. Normally, there's a pretty short time between idea and execution when it comes to my campaigns; it's normal for me to run a game within just a week or two of coming up with the concept. The trick there is that the two times that technique's been really successful, I was running a pre-existing world; in one case a published campaign setting (in this case, the Diamond Throne), in the other, the setting from a (terrible) novel I'd written several years prior. I'm thinking about giving that world-building thing a try again, so that suggests spending a bit more time on the game than usual.

I'm hesitant to make any dramatic statements about what exactly I'm going to run, because it's so far off that I'm almost guaranteed to change my mind twelve times before it hits the table. But at least for now, I'm thinking it's going to be a fantasy, location-based, sandbox-y thing, because I've been wanting to run something like that since I came to college and it keeps getting pushed back in favor of other ideas. That, in turn, means I want to use either Swords & Wizardry or Labyrinth Lord, with plenty of house rules and bits and pieces from other things.

I'd also like it to be a chat game. I've been having a lot of fun playing in the two Trollsmyth's got going right now, and I want to try my hand at setting one up myself. I also like the idea of pulling in players from my entire player base, which is currently pretty scattered geographically. It'd be fun to play some new combinations of people off each other, and starting with a larger pool gives me a better shot at getting a group all willing to put up with romantic shenanigans.

So that's where I'm at as far as running a continuing campaign goes. I might run some one-shots before I get that started (Vampire, Mage, and Promethean will probably get that treatment, since I can't see running a full campaign for any of them soon, but the reason I got them in the first place was to use them) but for now, it's going to be planning, and playing.

Old School is New to Me

Here's a secret:

About four, maybe five years ago, one of my friends showed up to our Friday night session with a big stack of rule books and a bunch of boxes full of miniatures. His neighbor had given him a couple boxes full of old 1st and 2nd Edition AD&D gear, and he was talking about starting up a game with some guys he knew from school. (We were engaged in another campaign at the time.)

I flipped through the books and started making fun of them. Class-as-race? Ridiculous. Individual XP charts for each class? Laughable. That weird system of saves? Archaic. The organization was impenetrable, the prose awful, the art hideous-to-non-existent. 3e, I knew from reading forums on the internet, was a great improvement.

That was back when I didn't know any better. Heck, even my friend didn't know any better. Based on, if I remember correctly, some vague knowledge of the Outdoor Survival Map, he explained to us how OD&D had been "a board game," where you moved your pieces around on hexes. What we didn't know about the games we filled in with crazy rumors and misinformation from other new-edition-playing twerps like us.

Then I started getting into RPG blogging. I started reading Jeff's Gameblog, and from there found Trollsmyth, Grognardia, and a bunch of other guys who knew what the heck they were talking about when it came to the older stuff. Not that any of them were, or are, gurus, but they knew that the older editions were fun, that 3e wasn't intrisincally superior to any of them, and they were interested in figuring out exactly what it was that made those old games tick. Luckily, that mix of enthusiasm and curiosity was enough to get through my idiot ideas on the subject, and I ended up coming along for the ride.

Now, I collect those old hardbacks, play in two Labyrinth Lord games, built my own Swords & Wizardry megadungeon, and have pretty much sworn off running 3e, at least for the next few years. I've taught people to play Swords & Wizardry who have never played an edition of D&D before in their lives. It's some of the best gaming I've done in my life.

A few final words, from Trent Foster:

Yeah, there are some "old guys" in our midst who actually were around back in 197x playing D&D in this style, watched the game/hobby move away from them, and are refreshed to see a new crowd pick up on what they liked about the game in the first place. But more of us are people who started playing the game later, after this style of play was already in decline, or had even disappeared altogether from the mainstream/commercial rpg scene, and are so interested in this style and approach to play now in large part because we didn't get to experience it then.

Scan of a Map

So I ran the megadungeon again last night, and Artemis drew this neat map. I've been hesitant to post scans of the main maps because (a) they're not all that interesting and (b) my players haven't seen most of them yet, but this handles both problems nicely.

Neo-Classical Is Better For New Players

On Thursday, I'll be running a six or seven person foray into my megadungeon. (Or perhaps another adventure. Not likely, but I haven't ruled it out.) I considered using 4e, because it's been on my mind a lot lately and I've pegged it as a good system for one-shots, due to its consistency. Ultimately, I decided that Swords & Wizardry would handle the group size better, and I've been looking for an opportunity to introduce this gang to neo-classical play for a while anyway.

Another consideration is that we're going to have a brand new player at the table. (The younger sister of the boyfriend of an old regular from my high school group.) I've already sworn off introducing new people to 3.5 D&D. Despite my occasional frustrations with it, I like the system, but I've been playing it on and off for nearly seven years now. I've read all the core books, cover to cover, multiple times.

New players don't have that experience, and trying to introduce them to the idea of roleplaying and actually play the game while also explaining the system to them is an exercise in frustration, even if they are interested in its intricacies. More often, they aren't. The last few times I've tried to run 3.5 with people, it's turned into tedious frustration. Boytoy had decided roleplaying "wasn't his thing" partly because of his lack of interest in dealing with that system, which I'd originally used to introduce him to gaming.

4e isn't quite as convoluted as its predecessor, but it's still a decision heavy, rules-mastery focused system. I'm comfortable running it (and, presumably, playing it) but a large part of that comfort is based on that same experience I have with 3.5, and such systems generally.

For new players, it's just too much hardware. They don't need all that stuff to "get" roleplaying, and if they're not interested in it, it just gets in the way. If I suspected she'd be a rules junky herself, and we were starting up a proper campaign, I might consider it. But for a one-shot, and a player I know basically nothing about? Much better to go with a system that gets out of the players way and puts the heavy lifting on me, rather than the book.

The Case For World Mastery

I'm having fun running Is This Foul? I've got a good handle on my notes and prep, the players are contributing, and there's plenty at-the-table banter so the actual sessions are always a good time. I don't want to create the impression that I'm not having fun.

But like most things do, it's gotten me thinking. See, 3e D&D, and Arcana Evolved after its example, has a big emphasis on rules mastery. Pretty much everyone who's played it knows that: there's a lot of options, and some of them are better than others. It's an intentional part of the game's design. So I shouldn't be surprised when it takes over five hours to build two characters. Nor should I be surprised when the first thing most of the players do, when presented with a problem, is to start going through the book.

It's not that these things are bad. Mastery is fun. Learning a system, figuring out how to exploit it and the optimal solutions, are things I enjoy, too. More importantly, getting better at something is all kinds of fun. I get that.

But these days, this isn't the only D&D I know. I'm also playing in a (hacked) game of Labyrinth Lord, and I've been running a bit of Swords & Wizardry here and there, when the opportunity strikes.

Those games have mastery, too. A different kind of mastery, but there's still a lot to learn and get better at, and a lot that players can do to improve and expand their control over the game world. (Because that's fundamentally what "rules mastery" rewards you with: the ability to alter the game world more significantly and determine outcomes more efficiently.) A big part of what makes that ever-present threat of death satisfying, rather than frustrating, is it's something I can learn how to deal with. I may not be great at it now, but every time I deal with (or fail to deal with) a challenge, I learn something.

I've been growing to prefer world mastery to rules mastery. (Or perhaps inductive mastery to deductive mastery? One involves introducing fundamentally novel ideas to a pre-defined (but malleable) system, the other requires searching for pre-existing but undiscovered solutions within a rigorously defined (and perhaps, but not always, malleable) system.) For one thing, exercising rules mastery requires breaking immersion, and immersion is, I'm discovering, kind of a big deal for me. I'd much rather base my decisions on purely in-world data, when at all possible; the conditions of the environment, my character's personality, the effect an action might have on various NPCs, and other such factors are much more interesting to me than which feats I've got.

Likewise, as a Dungeon Master, I'd rather have my players pay attention to me than the rules. A bit selfish, but true: part of why the "pause to look up something in the book" response bugs me is simple jealousy. But I also prefer to reward the kinds of behavior involved in world mastery over the behavior required for rules mastery. I largely don't care how much time a player spends outside of game reading the rulebooks and thinking up new builds, but it very much matters to me how involved they are with the world.

Most importantly, world mastery, and games that emphasize it, are much easier for the new players I've introduced to roleplaying to get the hang of. The few people I've tried to introduce 3.5 D&D to since high school have hated it; there's a definite sense that you'll make the wrong choices, and it's hard to figure out just what the right choices are without a fairly good grasp of the system. (Especially in feats. Skills and classes are fairly descriptive, but feats suffer from excessive proliferation and a certain arcaneness in their effects and phrasing.) By contrast, they love Swords & Wizardry, and it didn't take them long to realize that equipment list is there to facilitate MacGuyver-like shenanigans.

Beware the Bat!

The second session of my boyfriend's Mayan/Aztec/Ghost Conquistador dungeon ended poorly for my characters. But not for the bat.

We were using Google Voice Chat, since it's summer break and we live in different parts of the state, and aside from a few technical problems that aspect of it worked fairly well. It's not as immersive as text chat, and I could see it quickly getting very confusing with more than two people, but particularly when the DM needs the occasional explanation of what dice to use for an attack roll, it's nice to have the speed of voice.

The game served as a lesson, and a good one for a new DM to learn: it's the players responsibility to get out of dodge when danger threatens, but it's also important for the DM to understand and telegraph that danger. He didn't quite realize how tough the monster was, and so he described it in ways that made it sound less fearsome than it was; much smaller than it should have been, for one. But at the same time, I was knowlingly flirting with danger: I had one PC and a henchmen going up against what I thought was a CL 3 or 4 critter. So I'm not annoyed about it (all my protestations and threats to the contrary), it's just a good lesson. For both of us.

On the Merits of Dungeons

The other bit of gaming I did last weekend (besides Trollsmyth's Labyrinth Lord game, which was particularly excellent and which I know I haven't been writing about enough, even considering that it's harder for me to blog as a player than as a GM) was a couple of hours of Swords & Wizardry, in the previously mentioned boyfriend's brand new dungeon.

He's hooked. Wishing-he-had-graph-paper-in-class, can't-wait-to-play-again, completely, totally, fantastically hooked. He's got a bunch of ideas about how to expand his dungeon (currently a Mayan/Aztec/conquistador mash-up thing, but he's thinking the next level, accessible through a big ol' pyramid, will be Napoleonic Egypt) and has started suggesting new kinds of games to play, including a ship-going, ocean-hopping game. He finally gets why I spend so much time on this stuff.

Because he didn't, the first couple of times I tried to get him into gaming. (Real gaming, not that weak-ass computer stuff all the kids are into these days.) Part of it, the first time, was that he was gaming with a bunch of people he'd just met for the first time; part of it was he's able to get into it a lot easier when it's just me and him. He still kind of thinks of Dungeons & Dragons as something that he'll get made fun of for, a feeling that, while I don't really share it, I do understand. Less people means less waiting, too, which particularly helps with someone who's only other gaming experience comes from computers.

But I can't help thinking that maybe, just maybe, some of it is the style of play. He likes planning expeditions, picking out equipment, being cautious, and exploring. The other two games he's played were a lot more character based, more about goofy antics and "acting out a role." Which is great for a lot of people, but for whatever reason that kind of game didn't quite click with him. The dungeon does.

From here, I expect he'll branch out a bit, once he's got the core experience down and he's ready to move on to bigger and better things. But it just drove home to me that there is real value in the dungeon style of play, even simply as an introductory stepping stone: a straightforward, structured shallow-end in the pool of roleplaying. (Though that's definitely not all it is, as I'm learning in Trollsmyth's game.) Give up the dungeon entirely, and you lose players for whom it works in a way that more "sophisticated" styles of play really don't.

So score one for the Old School Renaissance. This really is turning out to be the Year of the Dungeon.

Megadungeon Session 2: A Learning Experience

Friday night also marked the second ever foray into the megadungeon. (Yet nameless, I'm still trying to figure out a balance between the ridiculous criteria I've come up with and keeping it from sounding like a 4e power.) Halfway through the Traveller session, two players had to leave, and rather than soldier on so shorthanded I suggested that we play this crazy dungeon I'd been working on. The idea was met with enthusiasm, and so we spent an hour making characters, and another two dungeoneering.

The party consisted of:
Din Aleboot, 1st-level Dwarf (Alice Dice in the Traveller game)
Fitz the Fantastic, 1st-level magic user (Shmiff)
Yui Fluorite, 1st-level Cleric (Nina Ka-Fai)

This party was significantly less cautious than Zane Archer was in his expedition. Still fairly cautious -- they listened at doors, looked up at the ceilings, and so on -- but they were much more willing to fiddle with things. Fitz smashed a glass gramaphone, Din dipped things into mysterious freezing pools, and Yui picked up tiny robots using acid to etch things onto the walls. ("There are robots in this dungeon?!")

They also mapped, which let them make some intelligent decisions ("this door probably just leads to that room we've already explored") and helpd them escape at the end of the night, when I declared that it was getting late, and that anyone who was still in the dungeon when I got too tired to run would be subject to a roll on "The Table of Probable Doom." That got their attention, because when I say "them," I mean "Fitz and Din," and shortly thereafter just Fitz.

See, they'd run afoul of a heat ray. You get zapped, you save vs. 3d6 damage and melting of your armor/other metal. (Which I neglected to mention at the time, but further expeditions will discover these corpses in the proper condition.) Yui got zapped and died, and then while trying to get back towards the entrance Din was also zapped, and promptly died.

They took it pretty well, since they'd been kind of expecting something like that to happen based on my brief descriptions of the enterprise, but I'm entirely happy with how it went. The triggering mechanism wasn't completely clear, even in my mind, and then once I did come up with a decent mechanism a few seconds later, it was still something that was going to be pretty close to undecipherable to the players, without some serious investigation and perhaps a stroke of luck.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. But this particular trap only gets set off some of the time, even when the triggering mechanism is met, and what I learned is that this actually can make a trap more deadly, not less. Because, for instance, you can end up with a character on the wrong side of potential death. And you can get PCs thinking they know something that doesn't trigger it, when really what's happened is they got lucky on a die roll.

So, learning experience. The players aren't bothered by it, and they've got a map so they know to avoid that room from now on. But I now I've got some things to do differently in the future.

A First Foray Into the Underworld

Last night I ran my megadungeon for the first time. We got off to a later start than I wanted (it was midnight by the time the game actually got going) but we spent a solid three hours playing, and a got a good chunk of the first level explored.

This was a solo game. I'm playing with my boyfriend, whom I've tried to introduce to roleplaying a couple of times before (he played Tim the Barbarian, who became the Mayor of Gnometown) but it's never quite stuck. He's not completely comfortable "pretending to be someone else," and I suspected that both the more player-challenging nature of dungeon and not having other people around to look stupid in front of would help. It did: he's been bugging me to play again today, and I have high hopes that this will become a regular campaign.

Solo gaming makes it a great third campaign, (you'll recall I'm already running Traveller and playing Labyrinth Lord online) because we don't really have to worry about scheduling it. When we've got a couple of hours, we can play. At some point, I'd like to run more players through it, but the nice thing about the dungeon is that I can have different groups of characters who don't necessarily all delve together, or even know about each other. So long as everyone picks up out of the dungeon and heads back to town by the end of the session, it's all good.

We're running Swords & Wizardry, with only a few rules tweaks at the moment (concerning shields, mostly) but I'm planning to add more as we go along, in response to both my own mad whims and actual campaign needs. We've already got a few changes that need to be made to the equipment list: he wants to buy jars, and finds the weapon weights woefully inaccurate. (That'll teach me to play D&D with a medieval re-enactor.)

He's running Zane Archer, fighting-man. (I told him about the Traveller game, and he likes the name.) So far, we've been running pretty light on background. I know the name of the small town where he's based, and I have a rough sketch of the terrain between it and the dungeon, but that's about the extent of my world information so far. We didn't determine much more about Zane, either; I suggested he was a follower of "the moon goddess," owing to the silver holy symbol he'd picked up while buying equipment (in case of werewolves) but beyond that he's just a guy who does crazy things like wander around in monster-infested labyrinths because he thinks there might be treasure.

I was impressed at how he handled himself in the dungeon -- apparently, he's been paying attention when I talk about how dangerous and weird dungeons are. He listened at doors, backed off from fights that didn't have to happen, brought a ten-foot-pole (which he used to carry his lantern and sack on, so he could easily set them down in a fight, as well as to push open doors) and generally dungeoneered. He was sort of annoyed that being "nice" to the monsters in the dungeon didn't always make him friends (trying to help down what I described as "a giant demon-frog" hanging on hooks got him attacked by said frog) but overall his approach of "talk first, stab later" kept him from getting killed.

Unfortunately, he's not mapping (yet) and he didn't bring any henchmen. I'm hoping the dungeon will convince him of the value of the two practices; he's already gotten a bit lost, and missed a couple of semi-important features that would have been obvious if he'd had a map in front of him. If a wandering monster check (brought on by his use of a signal whistle to taunt some goblins into following him out of the room they were looting) hadn't brought the intelligent white ape he'd bothered earlier and who was more than happy to lead him out of the dungeon, the session would have taken quite a while to end. As it was, we were both tired, and I was happy for a convenient excuse to get Zane back to town.

The main thing I'm not happy with about the dungeon is that it doesn't yet have a name. Zane knows it as "those weird ruins off in the hills" which is enough to get a game going, but at some point I really need to get around to naming the dang thing. I want to give it a color+noun name, and I think the first part of that will be either "jade" or "jet," but I've yet to think of a good noun that starts with "b" and isn't "blood."

Overall, though, a good session. It'll be interesting to see how things develop from here.

Quick News Blogging Go!

Dave Arneson is in the hospital, and he may not survive the next couple of days. His family asks that no flowers, cards, etc. be sent. They'd like any well-wishes to be posted at this thread so they can pass them along to him.

Wizards of the Coast has banned all sales of their products in PDF. Announced today and it goes into effect today. That includes out-of-print products and editions. Apparently they're worried about piracy. So now the only way to get PDFs is to pirate them. Good job, guys.

I've got Fight On! #1, #2, #3, #4, as well as Swords & Wizardry. (Thank you, Lulu, for not totally borking my order.) I'll be reading them over the next few weeks, and probably post something as well.

Together, this means that it's time to fire up the megadungeon again. I've got a commitment to test it out with a solo run this weekend. All I really need to do to get it expedition ready is rough out a map for Level 2; I can stock it randomly if need be. Best of all: if I print out Sham's Trap Tables, I can do it completely computer free now.

And the I am most definitely not running 4e again this summer. I don't want to be beholden to a company that I can't predict. Too bad, since I was kind of jazzed about trying out some of the stuff in PHB 2. (All divine gnome party for the win!) Most likely it'll be Arcana Evolved instead, but I'm not yet one-hundred-percent committed to the idea.

And as a final note: I'm experimenting with a MWF blogging schedule for the next couple of weeks, to try and smooth out my massive posting binges and droughts.

How I'm Writing the Dungeon

At least for now. This'll probably change, as I get better at it.

First, spend a couple days working on the map. Usually in class, because my teachers don't care if I "doodle."

Once I've got the map, I break out some lined paper and start keying, ten rooms to a page. Sometimes I just put stuff in the rooms that I think would be cool. Other times, I use Sham's Restock Tables to populate them, usually with a second die rolled for a 1 in 6 chance of a trap.

If I roll a monster, I roll on the Swords & Wizardry tables to figure its CL, and either invent one or pick one out of the S&W bestiary. Then I add it to the Wandering Monster table for the level, along with its stats, and roll number appearing for the room in question.

For traps, I either come up with something on my own (not great about that yet, but I'm learning) or a roll on Sham's Trap Tables. In either event, I spend some time thinking about a triggering method and warning signs. I'm trying to break out of my "traps are abstract, random damage" habits that kept me from using them in my 3.5 days.

Rooms with treasure often just get something I think would be cool. Otherwise, I roll on the S&W tables, or stick cash somewhere. I'm not real great about hidden treasures yet, mostly I stick things under loose bits of flooring. (Or on the ceiling.)

Empty rooms are rarely completely empty, and even rooms with something mechanically noteworthy in them get some bit of flair or dressing. So far I've got a bunch of mosaics on the floor, a room with poetry all over the walls, and spawning pools. So far I've only got one "trick," a dungeon feature that isn't strictly a trap, but still might be dangerous and takes some figuring out, but I'm going to add more as the mood strikes.

Oh, and all of the rooms have names, to help me remember them. Most of these are strictly utilitarian ("Music Hall" "Control Panels" "Beehives") but a few are whimsical or referential ("Fiery Doom" "It Has a Sense of Humor") because I enjoy amusing myself with that sort of thing while I prep. (I once named a monster "The Thing What Lurks in the Swamp" and nearly collapsed laughing as one player explained to another player their plan regarding said creature. Poor form, I know.)

The Year in Gaming

This was sort of the year of the one shot, for me. I didn't as much gaming done as I would have liked, but what I did do was pretty fun. Pretty much all new systems, too; besides three sessions of a tragically doomed D&D 3.5 game, I don't think I played any of my old standbys. Here's the break down:

The Aforementioned Tragically Doomed D&D 3.5 Game: Four brand new players, one of whom never showed up after the first session and another who I'd kind of dragged into it and spent most of his time playing mah jong. Theoretically wilderness exploration, except for some reason I'd dumbed most of the hex map I worked up in September and replaced it with a really terrible random encounter chart. The play environment wasn't great either; we used a college provided study room, and the white board was handy, but the big glass window, terrible fluorescent lighting, and total lack of snacks just didn't set the right tone. Despite some really great play from the two players who wanted to be there, I just couldn't muster any enthusiasm for the thing, and stopped scheduling the games after a couple of weeks.

Feng Shui: In a trend that will continue, I got very excited about this on the train home from New York, played a single session that had a satisfyingly level of Nazi punching and general ludicrosity, and promptly forgot about the whole thing. Despite the fun we had with it, I haven't had the urge to play it again since.

4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons: Obsessed over it for, oh, a good eight months before it came out, ran a mostly successful short campaign using Keep on the Shadowfell over the summer, and decided it wasn't for me. Fun, yes, but a little too slick, and a little too streamlined.

Traveller: Mongoose Traveller gave me an excuse to get the book and see what all the fuss was about. Very impressed, spent a month or two rolling up a subsector. Never got around to playing it, though a couple members of my home group have expressed interest in it, and it's still top contender for games next semester and over the summer.

Swords & Wizardry: Finally started paying attention when the PDF version came out (especially since it's available for free at the official website) and proceeded to get very excited and spend a month and a half working on a crazy sandbox setting, which I still haven't run, and might not ever. I had fun putting it together, but it's still an irritating pattern.

Paranoia: A game my home group has been talking about for years, we picked it up on a whim and went home to play a crazy late night session. We managed to get in another game, and have some vague plans for a session next year, so this one may end up being a regular part of our college diaspora gaming landscape. It's been fun, and nice to be a player for once.

Vampire: the Requiem: Developed a bizarre fixation on the line, then got the book and became thoroughly confused. That's one to sort out in the New Year.

So I kind of got distracted every five freaking minutes, but I had fun doing it all so I'm not too unhappy with it. Hopefully I'll be able to run an actual campaign next year, but I'll tackle that when I blatantly rip off Amityville Mike's Gaming New Year's Resolutions.

A Second Stab at Paranoia and a Possible New Year One Shot

Coming to you live, mid-session in a Paranoia game! A couple of the other players have left to take Maggie home, so the other half of the group is hanging out, fiddling with computers and things, and talking about Stargate.

I have a new appreciation of pre-rolled characters for one-shots. I'd been over at my Paranoia GM's house for about three hours before we finished our characters and actually started the game. It always takes my group ages to make characters, and yet somehow we always end up making them, even for short games, and characters we're never going to use again.

This is mostly because none of the other GMs in my group tend to bother rolling up characters ahead of time. Neither do I, honestly, but that's usually because the one-shot games I run tend to be out of the blue, "oh, hey, we're hanging out, we should game" kinds of affairs, or games where character creation is supposed to be short and easy. This is a lie. Character creation always takes between 30 minutes to an hour, even if it is entirely random or for a character that will be used once and then discarded.

I'm making an exception to this general habit, and rolling up characters ahead of time for the game that I might be running on New Year's Eve. I haven't decided whether I'm going to run it, and I haven't decided what system I'm going to use, but I'm rolling up characters anyway. (I was planning on using Swords & Wizardry, but apparently one of my players has a never before mentioned life long dream of playing Traveller, so I might end up running that instead.) Luckily, they're characters for Traveller, so the generation process is pretty fun in and of itself.

Anyway, I'll probably do a more thorough session analysis once the whole thing is over and done with, but so far the game is going pretty well. There haven't been a whole lot more treason accusations than last time, but we haven't gotten very far yet, and at least one other character is keeping track of possibly treasonous activity. I've also read a bit more of the (red section of the) rulebook, and discovered that there is, in fact, a reason for wanting to turn your team mates in for treasonous behavior. You have to do it to get promoted. So there's a mystery solved.

What am I doing with alignment?

I haven't completely decided what I'm going to do with alignment in my Swords & Wizardry game. (Which could really use a name, but more on that later.) The system, by default, doesn't make any specific requirements about how or whether alignment functions, and though it does have a couple of suggestions the document makes clear that it's up to the particular referee to decide.

I've never done a whole lot with alignment in my games. My long running games both used d20 Modern and Arcana Evolved, neither of which even have alignment in the D&D sense. Even on the occasions I've run straight up 3rd edition D&D, alignment has never been that big a deal. Mostly, I just accepted it as either part of the game or not, and didn't give a whole lot of thought as to how I was going to include it.

With this game, though, it seems to merit a bit of consideration. On the one hand, at some point I would like to "do something" with alignment, make it and deities generally more important in a campaign. I'd really like, at some point, see about taking the Law/Chaos axis as far as it could go, to the point where the Lawful Evil and Lawful Good deities team up against all the chaotic ones.

On the other hand, I don't know if this is really the game for it. I'm trying to go for more of a pulp/weird science vibe with it, and I don't feel like big cosmological conflicts really fit. Feels too high fantasy. From that angle, since there's no mechanics regarding alignment that I have to account for with the system I'm using, I might just drop the whole thing entirely. Because if I'm not going to have a big cosmological set up backing it up, I don't know that it's worth the arguments and hang ups that tend to come along with alignment.

On yet third hand, the hand we use to talk about mutants, there is the whole radiation thing. The Gamma Knights, and their likely radiation and mutation worshiping adversaries, suggest an interesting angle of their own for dealing with "alignment" and similar things. The problem with that is one of terminology. "Pro-radiation" and "anti-radiation" are a bit awkward as entries on a character sheet, and they don't completely encompass the distinction I'm thinking about, since the Gamma Knights use a fair amount of radiation powered technology themselves, they're just careful about it.

And, of course, I'm not really sure what the point would be, in setting up a system more complicated than a detect radiation spell and a few other things of that nature. The fight against those crazy mutants up in the hills, exposing themselves and anyone they can kidnap to radiation, (or, alternatively, those stuck up Gamma Knights who think they know what's best for everyone, and won't let "the common people" in on the ancient secrets) may end up being a big deal within the campaign. But I don't know that I really need to systemize it.

Which would mean, then, that I'm leaning away from using alignment at all. That's very likely what I'll end up doing, but I have this sense of alignment as fairly important for D&D, which is still what I'm trying to play, even if a fairly modified version of it. I don't plan to discard it without some serious thought.

What I'm Doing With Clerics

Kujhak is the only safe city for a hundred miles. Maybe more. Maybe even in the whole world. We don't get news from far off to often, so it's hard to tell. At any rate, it's the safest place near anywhere that matters.

The Gamma Knights keep it safe. They patrol the roads, they collect odd bits of lore and almost lost technology, they guard the secret places where dark things dwell in the night. They alone can turn back creatures infected with radiation, and the more powerful among them know ancient lore of healing and light, carried through the generations from the great cities of our ancestors. They keep to the old vows, too, wielding just blunt weapons and ray guns, as the ancient laws decree.

But they can't be everywhere. Outside Kujhak, off the roads, below the vaults, isn't safe. Even other towns, even places where the Knights have made treaties, it's best to watch your back, because those places may have new leaders with new ideas, who haven't heard of the Gamma Knights or at least don't fear them. The Knights would like to tame those places, but they don't have the strength or the time. At most, they can dispatch a few of their younger, rasher members out to do a bit of mapping and "creative diplomacy."

My Very Own Crazy-Stupid Random Chart

I've finally started putting actual material together for my S&W sandbox. No actual mapping yet, but I'm going to see about printing out some hex paper so I can start that tomorrow. (Assuming I don't get terminally distracted by some kind of White Wolf thing, or go back to obsessing over Traveller.) I've mostly been working on character creation material, and I have all the major ideas in place so now it's just a matter of putting pen to paper. (Or fingers to keyboard, as the case may be.)

See, I started playing Fallout 3, and a bunch of guys I know started playing Fallout 3, and then I remembered that, hey, post-apocalypse can be fantasy too, and it's got a long and noble history in D&D and the fiction that inspired it, and wouldn't it be cool if the players could be mutants? So now I've got Takalik Abaj, an underwater city that survived whatever great cataclysm that created the setting, and the players can choose to either be from there or to be a surface dwelling probably mutant.

If they start out as surface dwellers, they can play any race (including, knowing my players, some ridiculous ones of their own devising) but have to roll on the Starting Mutation Chart. (To be devised. I've got a bunch of pre-made ones, I just need to sit down and hack my favorite results together into one chart.) I may allow humans to choose not to roll on the chart, since it'll probably have a fair amount of less than helpful results, but mutants are fun.

City-dwellers have to be human, and can't be wizards ("The sorcerous arts are unknown in the technological city of Abaj." I may write-up a technologist class to make up for it.) but they have a better chance to use pre-cataclysm tech without it blowing up in their faces, and they get to roll on the What Did You Smuggle Off the Boat? Chart, reproduced in its current form below.

1. A set of two linked communicators*
2. A fancy science lock pick* (It may resemble a ray gun, an unmarked sphere, or another odd but unassuming device)
3. 3 vials of highly refined lazarine (each can be used as a powerful healing potion, or as an ingredient for more exotic purposes by a skilled technologist or enterprising wizard)
4. 2d4 power cells
5. Fold-out boat (Just add water!)
6. Autograpnel*
7. An oracular skull, answers 1 yes/no question per day and only occasionally poisons its user with radiation
8. 60 ft. of power cord
9. A dashing cloak with a pin of gold and human bone
10. A flying (and air breathing) fish companion, maximum flying height of 20 ft. It is not otherwise a magic fish.
11. Several bottles of fine Abajin wine. No, you don't know how they make wine underneath the sea.
12. Steel crowbar
13. Several wrenches of various sizes and a bag to keep them in. Also some screws.
14. A box with many mysterious symbols on it. Inside are 3d12 bones.
15. A box with many mysterious symbols on it. Inside are bees. You don't know exactly how many. Probably a lot.*
16. A Universal Detector* (see note below)
17. Tin of mustache wax
18. Duck tape
19. A pen that writes on anything. Sometimes it glows.
20. Firestarter cube*

*Requires a power source

Some of the above items may or may not be stolen from Jeff Rients Deck of Stuff, which is where I got the idea for the chart in the first place. I also snagged a few from my copy of Darwin's World--I've got that and a couple of other books with science fiction equipment lists that I intend to borrow from for Takalik technology. And with any luck, I'll be able to con my players into adding to it, or at least to my general tech list. They get to choose what they start with if they make it up themselves, assuming it's not too ridiculous.

The Detector, incidentally, gives the user the direction of the closest example of whatever material it's set to, but there's no way to tell what that material is without following where the Detector leads, and a lot of the presets it comes with are weird. Could be gold, old bits of fish, could be bees. No way to know. It and the other more complicated items could all use better descriptions, especially visually. It might even be a good idea to put together an actual equipment list, for record keeping and treasure generation purposes.

Back to the Hex Map

The idea of a hex map has been back on my mind lately. I've been thinking more generally of running an exploration-based game with no regular player group for a while, mostly because college gamers are flaky and I want to do something diametrically opposed to the dirty hippy indie games/Exalted that usually gets run around here. Since Swords & Wizardry came out, I've been thinking even more seriously about that, because I think it'd be a good fit, better than thed20 Modern that I was originally considering.

Plus, hex maps are cool. I had all kinds of fun making my first, despite never getting to run it. Game prep should be fun, and filling out a hex map is a good way to fill an afternoon.

I've already been doing a bit of thinking about what I would put on this theoretically hex map, despite really needing something other than a list of names from the 1972 census for my NaNoWriMo novel. Things that should be on the hex map so far:

• Alien artifacts
• Tombs of ancient tyrants
• Temples to forgotten evil gods, preferably infested with snake-men
• Several different tribes of goblins that the PCs can screw with and start wars between
• Dinosaurs
• Underwater Atlantean-analogue dungeons and relics
• Robots gone berserk
• Little towns with dark secrets
• A mad wizard in a tower
• Entrances to the Underworld, realm of the Twelve-armed God
• Football-sized ruby
• A dragon
• A crashed spaceship
• Carnivorous apes
• Blind, death-cheese making monks

That covers most of the bases, but is there anything I'm missing?

Swords & Wizardry, NaNoWriMo, and that Dang List

Who, exactly, was responsible for the decision to release Swords & Wizardry two weeks before National Novel Writing Month? I was getting ready to run an online game with some pals back home when I remembered that, in a week's time, my life will be consumed by that thing the innocent call a novel.

So now S&W is on the list of games I want to run, from which no man ever returns.

Okay, so Feng Shui returned. Also 4th Edition D&D. But neither of those were on the list for that long. Iron Heroes has been on my shelf for ages, and once came within a few hours of seeing play, only to have me decide I was insufficiently prepared and ditch it in favor of the madness that became Gnome Town. Traveller and Encounter Critical seem headed towards the same fate.

Someday I'll run all of those games.

But Swords & Wizardry is a little more than just "a game I want to run." It's a cleaned up, modern version of OD&D.

OD&D has been on my mind for a while. It'd be worth playing just for it's historical value, the game that started it all. But I've also been reading Sham's Grog & Blog and Grognardia, and drinking the rules-not-rulings, do-it-yourself, old school kool-aid. It reminds me of the way I used to play games, hacking stuff together at lunch that seemed like it would work, not worrying too much about game balance or GMing technique.

But OD&D, the three little brown booklets, is intimidating. I've put off picking up the PDF for a while, because I've had other stuff going on but also because I was worried about how much work it would take to piece together how to play. I know there's a lot missing out of the S&W PDF, a lot of the weird essential charm that makes OD&D what it is, but it's neat and it's clean and it's exciting. It's got me thinking some things that I don't always think -- not "how can I use these neat things in my game?" but "what neat things can I make for my game?"

That alone makes Swords & Wizardry too cool to just languish on the list. With any luck, I'll pick it up again after NaNoWriMo, in that post-novel rush of crazy ideas.