review – The Dice Pool

The Editioning, AD&D 2nd Edition, Part 7

Nostalgia v Nowstalgia

Nostalgia rarely serves you well, I always think. If you let yourself be solely motivated by nostalgia, you’re destined for disappointment. Nostalgia is a feeling; it’s the feeling you get when you yearn for the feelings things in the past stirred in you. It often gets mistaken for the things themselves. I certainly worried that I was making that mistake when I came up with the Editioning, our challenge to play an adventure in every edition of the venerable dragon game over the course of about 24 months. I told myself I had academic motives; I wanted to compare them, see how they changed through time, how the changes in designers affected them, what happened with the emergence of different play styles, character first stories, actual plays. All that. But, I was particularly excited to run AD&D 2nd Edition. There was no doubt this was driven by nostalgia. I played 2E more than any other edition of the game, concocted some of my favourite campaigns with my players, created worlds for their characters, some of whom would live forever in infamy. Those games live large in my memory.

But I’ll give myself credit for going in with my eyes open. I understood that nostalgic feeling in myself from the start and decided to approach the experience almost as if it were a new one. This turned out easy enough. I really did have to reread the books, relearn the rules, refamiliarise myself with the setting and the adventure. I had no concrete memory of any of that. Before diving back in, I couldn’t have told you that initiative was rolled on a d10 and the lowest roll wins. I didn’t realise that paladins only got spells at level 9 and certainly couldn’t have explained the surprise rule to anyone.

A Collection of Complete Handbooks for player classes and races.

Taken from that perspective, here’s what I learned. Character creation in this game is a task to be endured. It might have been less difficult and time-consuming if I had not chosen an adventure in the Planescape setting with its peculiarities of race and place and faction. It might have been easier if I had not insisted on everyone at least considering the kits in the various “complete handbooks.” I did that because it felt like a uniquely 2nd Edition experience that I didn’t want my players to miss out on. If you only allow the races and classes from the Player’s Handbook and you leave out the optional non-weapon proficiency rules, your Session 0 might involve fewer players tearing their hair out, and it might only take two hours instead of four. Whether or not my players appreciated the pure, unadulterated, 2nd char-gen, I’m not sure. I think some got more mileage out of it than others. But here’s what I am sure of, once that process was over with, we all loved those characters and the adventure we went on. Eventually, it became clear that the best way to play it was to embrace the long-winded spell descriptions, the needless crunch, the haystack-like books and the needle-like rules. If you can laugh about those things together at the table, while also using those rules to create cool stories together, then you are doing AD&D 2nd Edition right, I think. I got frustrated with it on occasion, but that was mainly during prep, when I tried to do most of my rule research. I know some of the players struggled with spells, spell slots, spells per day etc. But, importantly, my priority during play was always to try to keep the session moving. So, in some instances, I made rulings that maybe didn’t reflect the rules. But that’s in the spirit of the game in my opinion. Generally, that would be my advice for any GM and any game, to be honest.

The Eternal Boundary Crossed

The cover of Planescape adventure, the Eternal Boundary. A pale, bald dustman pushes a gurney with a sheet-covered corpse in the foreground. The silhouettes of adventurers peek through an archway in the background. — The Eternal Boundary

Dear reader, this is the last instalment! If you are interested to read all the previous ones, go here. If you think, however, that you might be a player in this adventure, The Eternal Boundary, someday, maybe give it a miss.

Last time, our heroes’ investigations brought them to somewhere unexpected. They’d leapt through a portal in the Mortuary that would take them to the Elemental Plane of Fire. There, they found themselves on an asteroid-like rock floating amongst the never-ending inferno, protected, somehow from being burned to cinders. The rock played host to a citadel of sorts. It had platforms with great ballistae to protect it from the more hostile denizens of the plane, a marble-clad temple complex of some sort and guard tower watching over everything. After killing some sentries, the PCs tricked some hobgoblin mercenaries into believing they were new recruits. They’d been advised to report to the high-up men in the temple. To do so, they tried to by-pass that tower, but the guards questioned them and their prisoner, Toranna the Grey, shouted for help. A fight broke out! The paladin ran in to take on the guards at the door while the thief fired some arrows and the cleric used his Spiritual Hammer to attack the archers on the roof. Even the witch’s goat got in on the action. They took some damage but eventually managed to defeat all six guards inside, steal their uniforms and stock up on weapons and supplies before heading on to the temple. During the chaos of the battle, they misplaced Toranna.

It turned out, once they entered the temple, that she had alerted the guards, the priests and the citadel’s commander, Green Marvent, that they were coming, so their clever disguises counted for naught!

It was a long, wide chamber with a series of columns on either side and an altar at the far end. A large, glowing gem hung, suspended in the air above the altar. It seemed to be important. The PCs were outnumbered here. There were just the four of them and they had just been in a couple of fights. They were not at their best. So they had to think laterally. They played a delaying game as they were engaged in combat by the guards inside the door, the human captain of the guard and the head of the hobgoblin mercenaries. They cast Silence on the spell casters gathered near the altar, forcing them to move, and preventing them from casting things like Command and Scare. This helped Trance, the thief to get close to the altar, before being rendered unconscious by Green Marvent. The Githzerai commander of the faction in charge of this place, the Illuminated. I gave the others one round to help Trance before she would die. Devansh came through with a heal just in time as the fight continued. Aurora, the bariaur witch, was down to using her sling-staff and no-one except the paladin was doing well for hit points when Trance managed to grab the gem and threaten to destroy it. This brought the fight to an abrupt end. Green Marvent explained that the gem was all that was preventing the rock from being consumed by the flames. The hobgoblin chief was swayed by Glaermond the paladin’s superior charisma and agreed to switch sides, seeing how the wind had changed direction. He went out and ordered his lads to go after the other Illuminated guards.

Finally, Devansh used Command on Green Marvent to “Explain.” And so she did. The Illuminated, she said was her faction. It was young and still light on power but she had come up with a way to bring the other factions of the Planes down from the inside. The plan was kidnap the barmies off the streets of the Hive, cure them of their madness and then convince them that their very own deities had brought them back from the dead, assigning them with one task, to join the Society of Sensation, or the Governors, or the Dustmen or the Doomguard or any faction, and to do as they were bidden when they had done so. Of course, Green Marvent was the one using illusions and disguises and appropriately fitted out chambers in the citadel to persuade the former barmies of this. And she would be the one giving them their orders, rather than Saint Cuthbert or Bahamut or Gruumsh or whatever deity they worshipped. It was a long game, perhaps, but she was patient. And she would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for these pesky adventurers.

Once the hobgoblins had dealt with he rest of the guards, the PCs rescued the few ex-barmies who were still not eh Rock and delivered them and Green Marvent back to Sigil. The Governors would deal with her treachery, if the Lady of Pain didn’t get to her first.

Meanwhile, Aurora considered the citadel for a new lick of paint and took its measurements for some more witchy decorations…

Conclusion

I had to make some changes to the adventure in the end. “Green Marvent” was the big bad hinted at in the body of the adventure. They were the one issuing orders via messenger and letter. They were the one with the plans for the Illuminated. But, as written, they never appeared in this adventure. I can only assume they were meant to turn up in a sequel to the Eternal Boundary that never happened. So I swapped out the commander of the citadel, Imogen, for Green Marvent. That way, the PCs get a sense of closure to the plot, at least. Other than this, I wouldn’t change too much about this adventure. I do think it was slightly too linear for my liking. I occasionally struggled to fight the text’s efforts to get the party back on the rails. In the end, they got where the adventure needed them to be, but maybe in a different way. As I think I mentioned before, having a member of the Dustmen faction on the team was a shortcut that ensured they did not have to treat the Mortuary section like a dungeon crawl, and that was a significant proportion of the adventure as written! I would imagine, if that hadn’t been the case, or if the PCs couldn’t come up with a clever plan to bypass it, the adventure would have taken at least a session or two longer than the 6 it took us.

In the end, we all agreed that we’d go back to these characters and this campaign and the Planes. I loved the PCs they created and I want to see more. I would like to give them a chance to pursue the original adventure hook given them by Bendon Mawl of the Senstes, the seek out the key to the portal to the Isle of Black Trees, which had been teased several times throughout the game. And I want to see how Devansh’s little temple turns out, not to mention Aurora’s new wizard’s sanctum.

But all that will have to wait. AD&D 1st Edition will continue for a while, but I won’t be running any more D&D until the New Year. I just need little break. I’ll run something else though so be sure to come back, dear reader, and see what that is.

Star Trek Adventures 2E, Dare to Be Wise

Success at a Cost

This phrase comes up a lot in the second adventure from the Star Trek Adventures 2E Starter Set Campaign Book; success at a cost. What it boils down to is that, no matter how well or poorly the PCs do, this here train is going to stay on its rails. This is one of my main gripes with “Dare to Be Wise,” but not the only one.

Dear reader, if you’re following along with my Star Trek Adventures adventure, welcome back! If this is your first time aboard ship, that’s cool too. But you might want to go back and take a look at some of my other posts in this series. In fact, my review of the preceding adventure, Incursion Point, is probably where you want to start. It should give you context for both the game and the campaign.

Going back to “success at a cost;” I think it describes the adventure pretty well. This second of the three full adventures presented in the Campaign Book continues the mission of this boxed set to teach you how to play the game. But, I think it does that at the cost of something essential to a good adventure, something Incursion Point had, freedom. The freedom of the PCs to decide what their next steps would be, what tasks they wanted to try, what ends they wanted to pursue, what mistakes they were willing to make. There was an inevitability to the events of Incursion Point; that city was always going to fall into the core of the gas giant, after all. But the PCs were more or less free to decide what they were going to spend their time doing while that occurred. Dare to Be Wise, though, in two different acts, is trying to teach you how to use the linear challenge, a mechanic that requires the team to complete a series of key tasks in a particular order to achieve a greater goal. The tasks they are to complete are prescribed in the text, and there is a note at the end of several key tasks to say failure allows they to success at a cost. This was dull to run and the tasks themselves felt relatively inconsequential (at least to me; I didn’t tell the players that they would have succeeded at a cost even if they failed) so we sped through them, and the entire scene that they consisted of. Maybe it’s just this mechanic that I don’t like. But I feel as though there was a way to make these tasks feel more like they mattered, by simply giving the PCs the series of problems to solve, but leaving the solutions to them.

The Adventure

There’s a handy summary of the whole adventure on the first couple of pages, along with a callout that indicates that it can be easily adapted for other eras, even though it is meant for the mid-23rd century. There’s a short section on the spotlight roles of this adventure (engineers, flight controllers and communications officers) and another with suggestions on what sort of actions other types of officers might be able to take.

There is also a prelude section here, before the start of the adventure proper. It suggests a period of shore leave and that’s where I got the idea for our heroes to explore the starbase which got extended with my little haunted ship episode, both of which I detailed here. I really appreciated this suggestion and I suspect its the kind of thing I’ll come back to in future.

Spoilers from this point on for “Dare to Be Wise,” by Al Spader.

The USS Challenger received new orders. It was a nice, easy survey mission to an asteroid field that’d been rumoured to contain a lot of heavy metals. Leaving Starbase 343, they were looking forward to a quiet, scientific survey, but they were unaware that the ship had been sabotaged by Urotoxa, the Nausicaan archaeologist they rescued from Cressida in the last adventure. At first, the sabotage revealed itself only in a couple of negative traits, which the GM was supposed to apply to the ship. These traits made any navigational or sensor tasks more difficult. In play, I indicated to the players performing those tasks only that they seemed to be more complicated and difficult than normal. They noted that, but didn’t immediately pursue it.

The first roll the text has a PC make is to create a trait. This is for the conn officer to plot a course to the asteroid field. This is a Difficulty 2 Reason + Conn task, but it has been raised to Difficulty 3 because of one of the negative traits I mentioned above. This roll also let the players practice getting assistance from the ship. I don’t think this should have been a roll at all, and, if had it to do again, I wouldn’t have made it one. There were no stakes, nothing interesting would have happened if they had failed. It did alert them to the fact of the extra difficulty, but this might have been done more dramatically later, when we were in the tick of the action. The other thing it did was give the conn officer -1 Difficulty to any Conn-related tasks for the rest of the adventure, which doesn’t make sense to me either.

Once they got to the asteroid field, they revealed the presence of gradon particles amongst the rocks through the use of a Sensor Sweep major action (also hampered by the sabotaged systems) and the spending of Momentum to Obtain Information. They also detected gradonic radiation around the trimetric spatial fractures that allowed Bryozoan beings to come through from another dimension during the Cressida disaster in the last adventure. I just don’t know what would have been gained if this sensor sweep failed. They would not have gotten this interesting piece of information and the adventure would have been the poorer for it. Anyway, at this point, the impulse drive kicks in of its own accord and they are launched into the first of two linear challenges in this adventure. I have already outlined my thoughts on these challenges above, so I won’t go into detail. Suffice it to say that the PCs had to fix the navigational controls, then the impulse drive and then modulate the fluctuations in the engines. Once they had done all that successfully, it was time for Act 2.

Uss Challenger - shields being drained by Bryozoans — Uss Challenger – shields being drained by Bryozoans

In Act 2, the crew were much freer to perform any tasks they wanted to try and determine what was happening. We had sensor sweeps, telepathic links, and computer searches. These revealed that a trimetric fracture had opened here, releasing large numbers of Bryozoan beings, which draining the Challenger’s shields. The longer this went on, the more danger they were in. So they had to figure out how to get away. With a Control + Engineering task success the Chief Engineer discovered a pulse in the warp core that aligned with the frequency of the pulses from the fracture.

At that moment, a bunch of Bryozoans entered Engineering and formed themselves into a vaguely humanoid form. It was clear it was attempting to communicate with them, but the universal translator was not up to the task. Time for another Linear Challenge. This time they had to identify the manner of communication, modify the universal translator and, finally communicate. This suffered from the same issues as the first one, in my opinion. I think there is a way this mechanic can work better. I just need to think of it for the next time it comes up.

The final act had the crew getting some answers from this Bryozoan Conveyor, racing against time to repair the ship and escaping the trimetric fracture. They talked to the aliens and found that they were an ancient species which used to travel the dimensions, exploring. But, essentially, they got sick of everyone else’s bullshit and decided they would rather not be sentient. In their home dimension, it was possible to live separately, blissfully unaware of their own place in the universe. With the incursion of our dimension they were forced to combine into sentient colonies for some reason. Turns out the colonies voted and decided that the source of the pulses that created the fracture should be destroyed. That was the USS Challenger, of course. But this one colony dissented and came to warn the crew, which was nice. At this point, the PCs had a moment to determine what was causing the issues with the ship and to find the cause of the pulses in the warp core. With a bit of investigation, they discovered Urotoxa’s worm-like virus that she deposited at the starbase when she was aboard the Challenger. This virus affected the systems but also caused the resonance in the warp core that she knew would create a trimetric fracture under the right circumstances.

Armed with this information, the crew got to work on a Timed Extended Task. This was like the extended task to evacuate Cressida in the previous adventure, but with the added pressure of a timer. It was a 12 point progress track. But every time the PCs completed a task towards the goal of breaking free, it took two Intervals. Once they reached 10 intervals, they would have failed. Now, I had been doing the extended tasks wrong last time. Impact is the number of points of progress a PC makes against an extended task’s progress track. I thought they only got 1 Impact per task last time, even though that didn’t make sense because an extended task with a Resistance of 1, would mean they got no progress at all. I had thought that only every second task had any Impact at all last time. Looking back that was so obviously wrong that I wish I had just double-checked the rules in the core book. In fact, the Impact made is equal to the Department rating used by the PC in the performance of the task. So, if it was an Engineering task performed by our Chief Engineer, Burk ven Jaxa, the Impact would have been 5, reduced by the Resistance of 1, to 4. This made a lot of sense I was glad to have come to this realisation.

Anyway, an extended task like this allowed the PCs to do whatever sort of task they thought could be of help and they did. Lt. Kemal gunned the impasse drive to try to escape, Tennan, somewhat cursed by complications brought about by my spending of Threat points ran from pillar to post around the ship trying to find a working communications panel to let the aliens know they meat no harm, and finally Burk created a barrier around the warp core, to contain the pulses. The fracture collapsed, the Bryozoans retreated and the ship escaped.

Our session ended up with the PCs describing how they gained milestones, linking their actions in this adventure back to resonant moments in the last one. This allowed them all to improve in some way and then we totted up their Acclaim points so the could increase their reputations, gain awards, curry favours or earn promotions.

Bryozoan Conveyor in Engineering - a vaguely humanoid collection of beings surrounded by flabbergasted crew. — Bryozoan Conveyor

Conclusion

I had my problems with this adventure, as you will be aware, dear reader, if you made it this far. There was not enough freedom for PCs to do what they wanted. It should have presented more problems and fewer solutions. Some of the plot points felt like they were full of holes and still do. But, it did succeed in teaching some major mechanics of the game and linked the first adventure with the upcoming final one. Was it worth it? Sure. I mean we still had fun with it and there were parts that were genuinely dramatic.

Our trek through the stars will continue soon, dear reader. In the meantime, live long and prosper.

The Editioning, AD&D 2nd Edition, Part 6

Who Plays RAW Anyway?

AD&D is a famously crunchy system. It took the relative simplicity and, dare I say, elegance of OD&D, and started piling on subsystems for magic, combat, falling, drowning, encumbrance, surprise, skills and proficiencies, experience, encounters, etc. etc. It’s not an easy system to learn and I’m not sure anyone is really meant to learn the whole thing. Rulebooks are reference books, of course. That’s the case for any game, but it’s a necessity if you want to play AD&D rules-as-written.

Encumbrance for animals — Climbing and geting down

I played a lot of 2nd Edition in the 90s. I ran my own home-brew world campaign, I ran Dark Sun, Ravenloft and Planescape and played in some Forgotten Realms games too. I have a lot of experience with the game. But I don’t remember using a ton of the more nitty-gritty rules. Encumbrance is the obvious one that I think many groups would have hand-waved, and continue to. But things like specific rules for climbing (and getting down again,) and rules for specific weapon types vs specific armour types, were all just, well, too specific. I suspect that other groups handled things in a similar way. I don’t think our games suffered due to a lack of these rules. As DM, if the situations arose where a character needed to rappel down a castle wall, I would have made a ruling and we all would have moved on, instead of searching the DMG or PHB for the precise way to handle it according to Zeb Cook. I do remember doing that on occasion, usually when challenged by a player that something should be handled properly. Generally, this would bring the session to a grinding halt while we found the rule in one of the ten different books it might have appeared in, and then read it, read it again to understand it, and applied it to the situation. This would rarely be worthwhile, although, sometimes we uncovered a rule that actually made our play better.

RAW Editioning

The Editioning, our challenge to play and adventure in every major D&D edition over about a 24 month period, has made it far more likely that I will deal with any given situation as the rules require. I am trying to play these adventures that way. But what I have discovered, playing the Eternal Boundary, is that the adventure doesn’t care about most of those rules. The writer got the 2nd Edition surprise rules wrong, the plot does not involve wilderness adventuring, dungeoneering or, really, any type of traditional D&D shit, and nobody has been required to rappel down anything. As I have stated here before, it is far more an investigation scenario than anything else. Each session has been an exercise in pushing the plot forward. When I think about it, many of the ‘90s adventures were like that. It was, I think, a side-effect of having settings with their own histories and stories, exemplified in hundreds of novels, rife with famous and powerful NPCs, where the canon events impacted the types of adventure modules written for them. The plot-heavy adventure became the norm for D&D.

The Eternal Boundary appeared very early in the life of the Planescape setting but well into AD&D 2E’s middle-age. So, although it had not been confined by published canon yet, you can tell that it was trying to define it. It establishes NPCs that could be involved in major events in the future of Sigil, it is more interested in establishing the setting, its factions and its political situation that in providing opportunities for the DM to apply the rules of the system to the situations the PCs get into. I don’t want to go to far into this area right now. I’ll save it for a more thorough review of the module when we are finished. I’m saying that, when it comes to adventure selection, I could have chosen better if I wanted a quintessential AD&D 2nd Edition experience. But then again, maybe such a thing doesn’t exist.

Plane-hopping

If you need a recap, please go and revisit my previous posts here.

Session 5 of the Eternal Boundary kicked off with another fight. The party, reunited and determined to get some answers, decided to take on Toranna the Gray on her own turf, ie, the portal room right at the top of the Mortuary, under the dome. It was a cool location and a cool set up. She was preparing, with the help of an assistant, to send another barmy’s corpse through the portal to the Elemental Plane of Fire, ostensibly for cremation. There were a few zombies lurching around the chamber doing odd-jobs as well. We rolled for surprise, which neither side got, and then initiative which the PCs won. Devansh, the Cleric, immediately turned the zombies, just in case, and Trance, the Thief, tried to use her grappling hook to swing of the chandelier and take down the assistant before they could act. She failed the grappling hook roll (used the Thief’s Climb ability for this) but hit with her attack, killing the 0 level assistant instantly. Meanwhile, Glaermond the Paladin ran into the fray, taking on one of the turned zombies, and Aurora, the Witch, sent her goat in to butt Toranna. What followed was a few rounds of Toranna running around, trying to escape while restricting the party’s movement as much as possible with her magic. Hold Person is a powerful spell in this edition, by the way. Mainly because it is hard to save vs Spells.

Hold Person
(Enchantment/Charm)
Sphere: Charm
Range: 120 yds. Components: V, S, M
Duration: 2 rds./level Casting Time: 5
Area of Effect: 1d4 persons Saving Throw: Neg.
in 20-ft. cube
This spell holds 1d4 humans, demihumans, or humanoid creatures
rigidly immobile and in place for a minimum of six rounds (the
spell lasts 2 rounds per caster level, and the priest must be of at least 3rd level to cast the spell).
The hold person spell affects any bipedal human, demihuman, or
humanoid of man size or smaller, including brownies, dryads,
dwarves, elves, gnolls, gnomes, goblins, half-elves, halflings, half-orcs, hobgoblins, humans, kobolds, lizard men, nixies, orcs, pixies, sprites, troglodytes, and others. Thus, a 10th-level fighter could be held, while an ogre could not.
The effect is centered on a point selected by the caster, and it
affects persons selected by the caster within the area of effect. If the spell is cast at three persons, each gets a normal saving throw; if only two persons are being enspelled, each rolls his saving throw with a –1 penalty; if the spell is cast at only one person, the saving throw die roll suffers a –2 penalty. Saving throws are adjusted for Wisdom.
Those who succeed on their saving throws are totally unaffected by the spell. Undead creatures cannot be held.
Held creatures cannot move or speak, but they remain aware of
events around them and can use abilities not requiring motion or
speech. Being held does not prevent the worsening of the subjects’ condition due to wounds, disease, or poison. The priest casting the hold person spell can end the spell with a single utterance at any time; otherwise, the duration is six rounds at 3rd level, eight rounds at 4th level, etc.
The spellcaster needs a small, straight piece of iron as the material component of this spell.

Also, bonus points for use the word “enspelled” there.

Anyway, this allowed her to last four rounds against the party. The had almost made it down the stairs to look for help when Glaermond jumped on her from the top of the stairs doing a shit ton of damage and leaving her at 0 HP.

They questioned her. Trance even used her Intimidation non-weapon proficiency to good effect. Eventually they got Toranna to tell them about the plan, or at least the part of it she knew. She was working for a faction called the Illuminated and a person call Green Marvent. Green Marvent had asked her to take the “bodies” with a mark behind the ear and send them through the portal to the Elemental Plane of Fire, just like the other corpses. But those ones would not be burned up, instead, they would be taken by the Illuminated on the Rock, the Citadel of Fire beyond the portal, and revive them. Now Toranna didn’t know what they did after that. But the PCs, having already run into Eliath and the Dancing Man, supposedly returned from death by “their own gods,” were already aware of what was happening afterwards. They are still not sure why, though, and they knew they needed to stop this plot so they grabbed Toranna, took her red glass beads, the key for the portal and jumped through…

The Citadel of Fire hangs in the eternal flame of the Elemental Plane of Fire — The Citadel of Fire

On the other side, they found themselves on a wide platform at the bottom of a long set of steps that clung to the side of a cyclopean rock, floating, impossibly unburned through the eternal flames of the Elemental Plane of Fire. They could hear the inferno raging just yards away, though muted, and they could even feel a portion of the hellish heat, but they were not in danger of being roasted. They were greeted by a number of Illuminated guards, led by a priest. The party’s fast-talking fell on deaf ears and another fight erupted. The Illuminated priest sent one of the guards to get help from the next guard post at the top of the stairs, but Trance, the thief was too quick for him, felling him with a backstab before he could get too far. The priest took his first action to cast Command on Aurora, forcing her to Jump. On her turn, she was going to be forced to jump off the edge of the platform into the flames below. This would have been instant death, but, Devansh, taking his turn before her, countered it with another Command to “Stay.” This was such an ingenious use of the spell and saved Aurora’s life, without question. Meanwhile, Glaermond cut one of the guards in half. The others didn’t last long after that. I realise now that I was rolling Morale for them wrong. This is the danger of playing so many editions. I rolled 2d6 for the Morale check instead of 2d10. I can’t say for sure if this would have made a difference now, but at the time this meant they did not run for their lives when they probably should have.

Hobgobln entry from the Monstrous Compendium for AD&D 2E

The party ascended the steps and got a better view of the Rock. A platform jutting out from the side of it held a couple of ballistae and a quintet of hobgoblin mercenaries. Up some more steps and rising into the fiery sky, a tower stood, and, to their left there was an opening into the interior of this asteroid-like floating citadel. Beyond, in the darkness, they were able to make out a forbidding, dark hallway, draped in ceremonial-looking finery and decorated with sinister carvings. The PCs were challenged by the hobgoblins, who seemed more clueless than the Illuminated guards below. The PCs convinced them that they were new recruits, hired by Green Marvent. Dropping the boss’ name did the trick. The party asked the mercs who they should report to and they were told to go to the Temple, up near that guard tower they could see.

So, off they went. At the tower, they attempted to just ignore the guards standing outside it and the archers on the top of it but Toranna, still their prisoner and reduced to a single hit point, called out for help from her Illuminated allies, who turned to take on the PCs…

And that’s where we left it.

Conclusion

I guess my conclusion from all this is that, if you interact with all of the rules, some of the rules or maybe even none of the rules, you will probably still have a good time. In the Eternal Boundary, the wondrous locations of the adventure, Sigil itself, the creepy Mortuary, the Citadel of Fire, are almost enough to make it a fun experience to play. The addition of the PCs, their idiosyncrasies and personalities, and the cleverness and excitement of the players is always going to elevate any adventure to the realm of actual fun.

Next time will probably be my final update on the AD&D 2E part of the Editioning as the Eternal Boundary is unlikely to go any longer. Will they uncover the truth of the Illuminated plot? Will they find and confront Green Marvent? Will they all go up in flames? You’ll have to wait and see, dear reader.

Old School v Old School Essentials

Downtime Discussion

I had a really interesting discussion last night with, friends of the blog, Tom and Isaac. They’ve both been along with me for the Editioning ride and have some great insights. We have started a monthly round-up of games in a Discord video chat. We’re calling it Tables & Tales Downtime. It’s a simple opportunity, that we don’t generally get at the table, to talk about the games we’re playing. We’ve only had two of these Downtimes and they have each turned out quite different. The first went into detail on the games themselves, what happened in the sessions of the previous month, how the systems and mechanics worked at the table, what surprised or delighted players, or what didn’t work for them. In this second one, it was just the three of us so we got into a fairly free-wheeling discussion of the things we had been thinking about games in general recently.

Isaac has been preparing to run the classic AD&D 1st Edition module, Ravenloft, grappling with its copious verbiage and unwanted levels of detail. Meanwhile, I have been reading a couple of OSE adventures and coming to grips with their house-style, which feels like the exact opposite. Tom’s perspective was unique in this mix as the DM of our Dungeon World game, coming up with all their adventure ideas off the dome, which presents its own challenges and opportunities.

The Keep on the Borderlands

I can’t comment too much on Ravenloft since I haven’t read it, but it sounds similar to many adventures of the time. It is arranged in paragraphs, long and wordy. It’s got stats and descriptions for NPCs and areas that are almost certainly never going to be needed. It makes a lot of assumptions about what the PCs are going to try to do and it provides the DM ways to thwart their idiotic plans.

Another prime example is B2 The Keep on the Borderlands. As a beginner module, it has a lot of advice for the starting DM and even for players included. But it also spells out the consequences if the party decides to go on an anti-social rampage through the keep, the exact numbers and stats for the guards, their locations, how many are on duty and in armour, etc. etc. The cognitive load this requires of a DM is not to be underestimated.

Description of hte guard towers in the Keep. — Description of the guard towers in the Keep.

We’re going back in time with adventure modules like this, of course. Maybe comparing them to more modern styles of adventure presentation is unfair. Every adventure produced relies on creators who learned from the mistakes and successes of those who came before, after all. But, in preparation for this post, I read some reviews of Holy Mountain Shaker, the OSE adventure I’m going to use as comparison. Some reviewers and commenters simply hated the OSE house style used to present it because its terse bullet points and single phrase descriptors didn’t include enough sentences or actual paragraphs. Some DMs feel like they need a piece of prose to get to grips with the atmosphere, the setting or the characters. Some people want to have to read through a module two or three times before they feel ready to bring it to the table. The Keep on the Borderlands suggests this approach in the “Preparation for the Use of the Module” section.

Now, up until this point in the text, Gary Gygax has been really bigging up the DM, Here’s an except. Sorry it’s so long. Gary needs an editor tbh:

So, you can see that he has been buttering up the poor rube who agreed to run this classic adventure before telling them they have to learn the damn thing off by heart in preparation. And you can see that that would be no mean feat given the style of writing, the denseness of the prose and lack of distinction between description and stats.

I want to make one thing very clear at this stage; I played The Keep on the Borderlands recently and thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought it was a great module with lots of player freedom, options for the DM to customise and almost endless possibilities for how it might play out at the table. But its the reading of these older adventures that’s a chore. I don’t really want to read them through once, never mind three times. It takes a long time and it’s boring.

Adventures are for playing, not for reading. Is that controversial?

Holy Mountain Shaker

Holy Mountain Shaker is a 2021 adventure module for Old School Essentials by Luka Rejec of Ultraviolet Grasslands fame. I think it’s interesting that UVG was the first RPG book that got me to stop reading it so that I could start playing it. The longer I spent reading it the more it dawned on me that it was a reference book, not a work of fiction. Anyway, Holy Mountain Shaker is an ambitious adventure that includes a really large number of compelling and enormous locations as well as a town with a few relatively unimportant factions. This is a point crawl where each point is big, like a massive underground chasm, an enormous ziggurat under a mountain, an entire mine. That sort of thing. These are not accompanied by maps of the areas. This is only a 56 page adventure. Instead, the DM is given some of those terse descriptors, a few options for what a party might do in the locations, where their investigations might lead to and some encounters and events.

Sure, it might help if you read some of the location descriptions ahead of time to get an idea of what’s coming for the adventurers, but that won’t take very long and you could absolutely get away with not doing it. It’s easy to see, at a glance, what you need to give the players, what they will need to do some work to find, and what might happen if they do certain things. Personally, I think this gives you just enough to improvise with. We’re playing a use-your-imagination-game here, and I like being given the chance to use mine, even on the fly with minimum prep. Admittedly, having run UVG for a while, I have quite a bit of experience doing this, as it is laid out similarly. But, equally, if you play Blades in the Dark, Heart, the Between or any other story game, you are faced with making up locations, NPCs, items constantly. That’s part of the challenge and part of the fun.

The lack of location-specific maps is a little jarring. I get that. I wanted a map of the ziggurat like we got a (kind of) map of the Pharaoh Fish, but, ultimately, I understand that the exploration is meant to be abstracted, and occasionally cut with scenes of discovery where a PC finds one of those wonderful magic items, or by combat, where we zoom in on the action when a random encounter occurs with one of the creatures that is described at the beginning (and only at the beginning) of the book. It reminds me of a Final Fantasy game. Your little guy is travelling by map across country when you suddenly run into a rabid chocobo or whatever. The map disappears and your party are gathered there in a fully realised location facing that one poor flightless bird.

You don’t have to slog through descriptions of endless empty rooms or 30 ft long corridors. We’ve all done that. I get that that’s D&D and I also enjoy the sort of play that involves precise measurement, perfectly drawn maps and searching for traps with ten foot poles. But reading this was refreshing. It presented me with a different way to play even large-scale locations in a mega dungeon that won’t take the rest of your life to play through and was packaged in such a compact and attractive book.

But, for the sake of comparison, we looked at the Keep from Keep on the Borderlands above so let’s look at the town in Holy Mountain Shaker. The town of Plish is described in two pages, both of which are half illustration. The factions get a bullet point each. This actually seems fair since they don’t come into the adventure itself much. Then you get a paragraph about the native Plishlings compared to the Newfolk who have come to mine the mountain. And lastly, there is another short paragraph describing the Cult of the God Carp. On the second page we have a couple of lines about the earthquakes plaguing the town and then a table of rumours. That’s it. No descriptions of fortifications, no guard stats, no structural engineering reports. What it’s doing is trusting that we all know the kinds of things you might find in a fantasy mining town at the foot of a holy mountain. And it’s giving us permission to come up with that stuff at the table (or for the DM to make it up before they start, I suppose.)

Conclusion

Now, I have a some issues with Holy Mountain Shaker as well. I think some of the descriptors used are too obscure for the average DM to know without looking them up. And that sort of stumbling block is a big deal if you only have one word to go on (what is a vitrine, anyway?) Some of the illustrations do not really illustrate what I would want them to illustrate about some of the locations. And I would actually like a bit more involvement from the factions. But I’m not really here to review this adventure, especially as I haven’t played it yet. I’m just here to compare these two styles.

I think it’s worth mentioning that the former style has not completely died out. Some trad games are still presented using dense paragraphs when, in my opinion, bullet points would be better (looking at you Dragon Age RPG, Call of Cthulhu, DCC) but, as I mentioned above, that style still has its fans and adherents. More power to ‘em. But, for me? Keep it minimal.

Star Trek Adventures 2E, Incursion Point

Starter Campaign

Dear reader, last week, I created a character for Star Trek Adventures 2E. His name was Mesh and he was an Orion Star Fleet Officer on the command track. The lifepath character generation system was satisfying and sufficiently different from other games that I felt it novel and enjoyable. But, the fact is, I’m unlikely to ever get to play a character in a Star Trek Adventures game, since I’m the one running it.

I picked up the Star Trek Adventures 2E Starter Set and Core Rulebook a couple of months ago when Modiphius was having a sale and I haven’t regretted it. Sometimes, when I buy the core rulebook for a game that I’m interested in along with its Starter Set, I wonder why. The starter set can feel like a waste of money. But, the truth is almost always contrary. The general quality of boxed starter sets recently has been really good. Free League are the masters of producing sets of such high quality and with such a wealth of content that I would generally always advise you to pick it up, even if you’re getting the core rules as well. I have played or run starter set adventures of the One Ring, Tales from the Loop and the Bladerunner RPG. All great quality adventures too! The Bladerunner one sticks out as a real highlight for me. The casefile, Electric Dreams was a brilliant intro to the game and the world but was also an engaging and evocative adventure in its own right. That’s a game you could run without ever reading the core rulebook, as long as you have the starter set and you don’t mind pregenerated PCs. We got four sessions out of that game, and I considered that extremely good value for money.

Cover of the Star Trek Adventures 2E Starter Set featuring a group of Star Fleet officers ont he surface of a planet. — Star Trek Adventures 2E Starter Set

Back of the Start Set box — Star Trek Adventures 2E Starter Set

And then we have the Star Trek Adventures 2E Starter Set. In the box, you’ve got a set of five Star Fleet themed d20s, a sheet of tokens, a bunch of handouts which include pregens and rules references and, of course, a rules booklet. This booklet provides you with almost everything to run this game. The biggest omission is, of course, character creation rules. But, as I said above, if you don’t mind the pregens, that’s fine. The campaign booklet is just that: a booklet with a campaign in it. Inside the sixty pages are three interconnected adventures and three mission briefs, which act as adventure frameworks. After three sessions, I can confidently say, the Campaign Booklet, if played in full, is likely to bring you fifteen or sixteen sessions of play in the Star Trek universe. Now that’s making your latinum strips go a long way! Quark would be proud of you, Modiphius!

Rules

Star Trek Adventures 2E uses Modiphius’ own 2d20 system. Despite owning multiple Modiphius games, this is the first time I or, indeed, any of my players have had the pleasure of using it. I was expecting this to be a lot more trad than it is. It is actually really narrative-focused.

The core mechanic is simple. Every character has six attributes and six departments (see my last post for more detail on these.) When you are asked to perform a task, the GM will tell you which attribute and which department you need to use. So you might be using your Daring attribute of 9 and your Conn department of 3 to chase an enemy craft through an asteroid belt. You add the two scores to give you you target number. In this example, that would be 12. If you roll equal to or below that, that’s a success. You automatically get to roll at least 2d20, but you have various ways to add dice to that pool. A task’s Difficulty rating tells you how many successes you need to complete the task. So, for a Difficulty 3 task, you better get more dice, pray for a crit (a 1 counts as two success) or reduce the Difficulty somehow.

Momentum is a resource that the PCs share. They build it up by scoring more successes on rolls than they need. So, in the example above, if you managed to roll four successes on the Difficulty 3 task, you get to add 1 point of Momentum to your pool. That Momentum pool can’t go above 6 points so you are incentivised to use it up. They can use a point of Momentum to add a die to a pool, three points to add two dice and six points for three dice. There are other ways to spend this resource too, such as to get the GM to give you more info on a particular scene.

Threat is a resource for the GM to use that mirrors Momentum. The PCs can add a Threat for more dice in the same sort of way as spending Momentum. The GM gets to use threat to increase the likelihood of Complications occurring (this happens on the roll of a 20 usually.) Complications can come in many different forms. They might be a simple and mechanical as causing an injury. But they also might take the form of a massive narrative twist that really sticks spanner on the works of the PCs’ plans. This comes up way more often than I expected.

Those are the basics. There’s other stuff like taking Stress to Avoid Injury, Extended Tasks that use tracks, Resistance on tasks and in conflicts that absorb successes, but we don’t need to go into them here. If you are interested to learn more, check out the free Quickstart guide here.

Part One, Incursion Point

Opening page of the adventure, Incursion Point. Two page spread. One page features and illustration of Kirk and Spock. — Incursion Point

Incursion Point is the first adventure in the campaign contained in the Starter Set. The campaign is entitled “Infinite Combinations,” but the reasons for that are not really obvious from reading or playing this first part of it. It was written by Meric Moir.

Summaries of each part of the campaign, Inifinite Combinations.

This is quite explicitly a teaching adventure. In fact, the whole campaign is there to teach you how to run and play this game. It has lots of callouts to help out the new GM, from suggestions on what each type of character might do in the current situation, to advice on what to do if your players roll real bad. Much of the text itself is also devoted to explaining how to handle each situation as and when it’s likely to come up. For instance, the first scene has a high likelihood of conflict so the text runs you through how to order actions, resolve and attack and what to do if a PC gets injured. Where necessary, it will direct you to the relevant part of the Rules Booklet. In my experience, it was incredibly effective in teaching me what to do in my first few sessions. Of course, my clever and adaptable players got the hang of it without the need for such hand-holding. Before the first session was over they were stacking and spending Momentum like they’d been doing it all their lives. By session two, the risk of adding more Threat points to my pool was outweighed by their ambition and they were using it to do just oh so much cool shit.

Dear reader, if you think you might be lucky enough to play in this adventure, stop reading now. I’ve got loads of other posts, go and read one of them. There’ll be SPOILERS below.

Stardate 3422.1: We have received an urgent distress call from the independent floating city of Cressida, a resource-gathering collective on the gaseous world Kizomic VI. Creatures of unknown origin have attacked, causing casualties as well as compromising the city’s superstructure. We have responded to the distress call and are proceeding to Kizomic VI at high warp.

When we arrive, we will have only a few short hours to evacuate the city’s 600 inhabitants before the structure fails entirely and sinks into the crushing gravitational depths of the planet. With the number of beings to be evacuated, our first order of business will be to set up pattern enhancers and then direct the locals to the beam-out sites.

The Captain or other commanding officer is supposed to read out this log entry to introduce us to the current situation. We didn’t really have such a PC in our group, so I read it, which was fine. I like the conceit of this as it immediately feels trekkie.

Map of the initial beam in point. Also has details on taking a hit, healing and concluding the conflict with the Bryozoans. — Map of the initial beam in point.

The situation is dire and quickly worsening. The PCs are left to come up with ways to evacuate the citizens as quickly as possible. And that’s when the plant-like aliens they will come to know as Bryozoans seem to attack the evacuees. This is the start of Act 1: Operation Evacuate! In our game, the PCs, Lieutenant Commander Burk ven Jaxa, the Tellarite engineer, Lieutenant Junior Grade Rashid Kemal, our hotshot pilot, and Ensign Laniyar Tennan, Betazoid technician, stunned one Bryyozoan and frightened off the other before quickly moving onto ways they could speed up evacuation. Everything from locating more survivors to constructing elaborate containers to transport more people at a time, (the human cattle container was the term, I believe) were put into practice. With each success, they ate away at an Extended Task track which continued for the rest of the adventure.

Cressida Falling apart - illustration shows a shuttle pursuing the plummetting dome that broke away from Cressida. — Cressida Falling

Act 2: The Fall of Cressida started with a huge chunk of city breaking off and falling into the lower atmosphere of the gas giant. The PCs hopped in a shuttle without so much as a call to the bridge of their ship, the USS Challenger. They shot down after the plummeting hunk of city and managed to land almost safely. This is when I started to really spend Threat and introduce Complications. The shuttle door was jammed and they began to be attacked by more Bryzoans. The PCs quickly took steps to uncomplicated matters and save the citizens who had been trapped on the falling district just before it broke up into so much debris. They brought them back to the ship and escorted them to Sick Bay. Here the PCs encountered some NPCs. This was really the first opportunity any of had to do a little roleplaying in this adventure, and this was session two. It’s a high-speed scenario that demands quick action and decisive play.

Anyway, a well-dressed Orion woman, Administrator Demaad wanted use of the transporters to beam up valuable trade goods. Meanwhile, Urotoxa, an older Nausiccan academic, wanted them to help the humanoid inhabitants of the planet’s fluidic layer far below by bringing them a shipment of phasers. She was sure they would be decimated by the Bryozoans, and, as she had been in communication with them, she wanted to help them.

During this three-sided interaction, they discovered a lot through the use of Tennant’s Betazoid telepathy. They found out that Demaad had an underhanded ulterior motive and that Urotoxa was probably the cause of the entire disaster befalling the planet and its inhabitants. Despite neither woman coming out of the conversation smelling like roses, the PCs decided to try to convince the Captain of the Challenger to let them help the Kizomans, although, perhaps not by breaking the Prime Directive to furnish them with advanced weapons.

In Act 3: The Fate of Kizomic VI, we saw our heroes contending with the Bryozoan Terror, a massive amalgamation of smaller aliens that they had detected swimming towards the main population centre of the Kizoman people in the fluidic layer. They boarded the shuttle Galileo with a probe ripe for jury-rigging and a trio of EVA suits. While Tennan and Burk worked to modify the probe to emit a high-level of gradonic radiation, (they had figured out earlier that that’s what the Bryozoans fed on, destroying the inanimate objects that contained it in the process) Kemal piloted the shuttle down, down, down until it became a submarine. In modifying the probe, they were too successful, as it turned out. It drew the Terror to them before they had even had a chance to launch the probe towards one of the few remaining rifts that the creatures had emerged through in the first place. The shuttle took corrosive damage that left it immobile and losing structural integrity. They eventually managed to launch the probe to draw the Terror away, but two of them had to exit the craft to effect repairs. They managed it with only moments to spare before their suits ruptured. Kemal got them to the gaseous layer before the hull gave out, just in time to be transported back to the ship. Whew! That was quite the finale! Except there was more.

Here’s where the PCs get one final opportunity to make some headway on that Evacuation Extended Task. They had to each take actions to try to help save some more citizens of Cressida. And they did fine, managing to rescue most of the inhabitants before the city crumbled away to nothing in the atmosphere of Kizomic VI. This felt anticlimactic, though, I won’t lie. I should have taken this part of the adventure and moved it to a point before they went to deal with the Bryozoan Terror.

Conclusion

This was a very well put together adventure. As I mentioned above, the teaching elements worked very well, at least when I got to use them. Actually the most gratifying part of it was that the players avoided doing most things the adventure expected of them. Generally, they avoided violence whenever possible, which felt very Star Trek, and this was great because it got me to engage fully with the mechanics and think on my feet as a GM too.

But also, each Act lasted exactly one session. No overlap, no worries about not getting it finished on the night. Nothing but net. They clearly play-tested the hell out of it.

It could maybe have done with a few more opportunities for role-play, but then again, that’s just not the type of adventure it was. In Act 2, there was that interaction between the PCs, Demaad and Urotoxa, which highlighted social conflict and it worked really well.

Honestly, the only real issue was that ending. The adventure directs you to ask the PCs for more tasks to help complete the evacuation once the finale had already occurred in my opinion. It was an anti-climax and the players agreed. If I had it to do over, I would have taken this and placed it before the Bryozoan Terror encounter.

We are looking forward to continuing the campaign! The players are looking for a bit more of a chance to role-play so I think we’ll have a Starbase episode next!

The Editioning, AD&D 2nd Edition, Part 4

Investigations

I wrote a post a couple of years ago comparing a D&D mystery/investigation-based scenario to one for the Blade Runner RPG. D&D didn’t come out of that head-to-head too well. It was unsatisfying to create powerful, combat oriented characters only to be stuck questioning party-goers and looking for clues when your abilities were not really suited for that.

So, I suppose it’s a wonder that I chose an adventure like The Eternal Boundary for the AD&D 2nd Edition portion of the Editioning. But let me tell you the difference: the Eternal Boundary has a little bit of everything you could want as an introductory module to a Planescape campaign. Yes, the theme of the adventure is one of clues, schmoozing and sleuthing, at least in the first couple of acts. But, underneath all that, the players are discovering the dark of Sigil, its razor vine-choked alleyways, its legendary landmarks, its numberless portals and its ineffable nature. They’re hearing the chant on the streets of the Hive, from the barmies and the bubbers, out of the mouths of dour Dustmen, hopeless Bleakers and frenetic Chaosmen. As they try to find out what happened to poor Eliath, they visit the Mortuary, where they learn about the morbid philosophy of the Dead, they come into conflict with the Xaositects and discover they have no respect even for the order of sentences, never mind the universe. They hear that they should never cross the Lady of Pain and that even the gods have no direct influence on the City of Doors. They hear a lot and, as they get more involved and feel more like they belong to this bizarre place, they start to contribute their own two coppers to the philosophical undercurrent of the city’s discourse. Every session, our Dustman and our Sensate get into a blazing row about whose thinking is right. What a genuine joy.

The Lady of Pain - line drawing. The masked woman stands on her own in long robes with blades ringing her face. — The Lady of Pain – line drawing. Tony di Terlizzi.

Even though most of the adventure has taken place only in the Hive Ward, the PCs have been exposed to the bones of this city, and the major themes of the setting. The investigation is incidental.

Also, the investigation can be handled in any one of a dozen ways. So far the PCs have utilised deception, bribery, intimidation, local knowledge, ambush, kidnapping, false imprisonment, and they’ve done a “Weekend at Bernie’s.” And many of these instances could have been fights but they wisely avoided violence in most cases. The point is, they were presented with a mystery and were asked to solve it. They were never told they couldn’t do it the way they wanted to. That’s proper old school. And that’s where it differs most from An Unexpected Wedding Invitation (from that Investigations post,) which went out of its way to proscribe certain actions, avenues of investigation and even the freedom of PCs to go to certain places at certain times.

So, although their investigations are meeting with varying levels of success I think I can say with some confidence that the players are having fun anyway.

Finding Eliath

Before getting into our latest session, I had some admin to do. I realised that I had not been handing out XP at all. The poor PCs were not getting their rewards for all their clever little actions. I had to really stretch my memory muscles on this one, as we were talking about two sessions over the course of six weeks. The AD&D 2nd Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide recommends that you award XP at the end of every session, because, otherwise, you’re likely to forget what happened. The XP system in this game is extremely granular, with warriors, wizards, priests and rogues all getting XP for doing different things. For instance, warriors (fighters, paladins and rangers) get an extra 10XP per hit dice of creature defeated per warrior level. However, priests (clerics and druids) don’t get that. Instead they get an extra 100XP per spell cast to further their ethos and even more if they use one of their granted powers like Turn Undead. Rogues (bards and thieves) have it pretty easy since they get 2XP for every gold piece worth of treasure they obtain. But Wizards (Magic Users and Specialists) have it toughest in my opinion, they get a mere 50XP per spell cast or 500XP per spell researched. Now, sure, they can cast spells but only when the occasion arises, and as for researching spells, that is a time-consuming and expensive activity that there is not much space for in a short adventure. Anyway, they all also got some common awards for their investigations and a combat encounter. The combat XP is calculated in a fairly logical way using these tables from the DMG:

Special Ability adjustments to HD for monsters.

XP Award per HD of monster defeated table. — Special Ability adjustments to HD for monsters.

Dear reader, if you can’t remember what went before, frankly, I don’t blame you, so here are a few links to the other posts in this series:
AD&D 2nd Ed Part 1
AD&D 2nd Ed Part 2
AD&D 2nd Ed Part 3

Last we left our intrepid heroes, they were staking out the pub in the hopes they would run into their target, Eliath. They had rented a room and even stayed there for the night without the man in question showing his face. The second day, they decided to split up. Trance and Aurora would return to the Butcher’s Block, the Hive’s diviest dive, where Trundfeld Three-teeth, its stinking Ogre proprietor would hopefully have some information for them. Meanwhile, Devansh, the Cleric and Glaermond, the Paladin continued the riveting stakeout.

After only moments back in the Hive, the first group heard sounds of a yet another attack in yet another alleyway. Aurora sent her goat familiar to scope it out. He is a very sneaky goat, ok? Kid spotted a group of men standing over another after, seemingly, killing him. They talked about leaving the poor bubber for the Collectors to find before scarpering. The goat got a good look at the ring-leader, a half-elf in a dark leather hood. Aurora, our Witch, examined the body and even cast Detect Magic on it. The man seemed completely dead, but was also emanating magic. They decided to take him to the Mortuary, where Aurora’s Dustmen buddies were sure to know what to do with him. So, she and Trance slung the body between them and pretended he was dead drunk, and not just dead, as they “escorted” him through the Hive. Unfortunately, their ruse was not sufficient to fool the Bleak Cabal gang that turned up. Turns out they were out looking for the berks who were putting their barmies in the dead book, and it looked like they’d just found their suspects. Some fast talking from Trance convinced the Bleakers that they were not the bashers they were looking for, by telling them almost the whole truth. Still, Derioch Ysarl, the mage in charge, demanded that, if anyone was going to take the body anywhere, it would be them. Derioch also used detect magic, and, at a higher level was able to figure out that the spell cast on the man was necromantic in nature.

Back to the Black Sail Tavern. Devansh and Glaermond ordered some cranberry juice and watered down wine and a couple of bowls of forever stew from Salja, the tiefling serving maid. They also purchased a hot bowl of information. She was able to tell them that, not only was Eliath in the bar right at that moment at another table, but also, that he had a room in the Black Sail. Rather than confront Eliath in the pub while he sat with a group of his fellow Doomguard, they decided to keep an eye on him and wait for the others to come back, when they would corner him on his own.

Meanwhile, Trance and Aurora were talking to Trundfeld. He gave them a bit of a run around, more-or-less telling them only things that they already knew. They didn’t trust him but they had little choice but to accept what he told them. So they went back to the Black Sail to meet up with the other party members.

That night, Trance took it upon herself to use the skeleton key Salja had kindly provided for the low low price of 1GP and enter Eliath’s room. She hid there under the bed for an hour or so before he returned. When he did, she leapt up and threatened to kill him if he didn’t co-operate. The others then helped her to kidnap him and take him back to their own room. Finally! They had found the barmy they were looking for! But he wasn’t barmy no more. He tried to tell them that he was a Clueless prime, only recently arrived from Toril when he was immediately recruited by the Doomguard. But when they pushed him he confessed that he had been in Sigil for fifteen years, most of which he spent insane on the streets of the Hive. He said that he had died there, a raving loon, but rather than being brought into he arms of his loving god, Lathander instead returned him to life, claiming that for Eliath to join the Doomguard would be all he would need to do to fulfil his god’s wishes. He had no memory of a key to the portal they were looking for, though he did direct them to a wizard’s tower in the Lady’s Ward, which might contain the Rhaunades Collection, a library that may house the information they’re looking for.

The PCs felt they had run into a major roadblock in their investigations. Despite finding the man they were looking for, they were no closer to the information they needed, the key to the portal to the Isle of Black Trees was still a mystery and the Rhaunades Collection seemed like a long shot since there were a thousand towers in the Lady’s Ward and they didn’t know where to start. So they returned to their patron in the Society of Sensation, Bendon Mawl, for advice. On the way to the Civic Festhall to see him, they ran into another familiar figure, the Dancing Man who Aurora had encountered in the Hive. Another barmy turned sane. This time, they questioned him and when he tried out his cover story, one very similar to Eliath’s they found out that he remembered dying and being greeted Saint Cuthbert, who sent him back with the divine command to seek out and join the Society of Sensation to fulfil his wishes. The party began to make some connections. And when they went to see Bendon Mawl, he was very concerned about the possibility of some conspiracy between the Dustmen and the Doomguard, possibly at the expense of the Senates. He promised them some help if they would go and investigate this new threat. Even the Dustman on the team, Aurora found herself wondering if her own higher ups might have some nefarious plans she was unaware of.

They went back to their decrepit church to rest for the night and think about what they were going to do next but were rudely awoken by armed men busting down the door and attacking them!

Conclusion

The mystery has been preserved even after they discovered Eliath. They have unwound a part of it, of course, in finding him and the Dancing Man alive, but they don’t know the purpose of these “resurrections” or who is really behind it. Meanwhile, there are several factions in play and list of NPCs with their own agendas as well. It’s been low on action, but high on intrigue and that is suiting us just fine after the highly lethal, combat heavy OD&D and Basic.

Can’t wait to get further down this rabbit hole but I’m going to have to. I have holiday coming up so our next session won’t happen for a month! I’ll be back in the meantime with musings on other RPG-related things dear reader.

Stay Frosty, Forneus Research Base Review

Zero Prep

It’s the dream, wouldn’t you say, dear reader? Pick up and play. Many claim it, few deliver. One thing I’ll say about this Stay Frosty adventure, and, to be fair, any Stay Frosty adventure I’ve read (which isn’t many,) is that you can pick it up and play it with pretty much no preparation. I mean, that goes for Stay Frosty to a certain extent too. I discovered that when I reviewed the game itself last October.

The cover of Stay Frosty Remastered by Casey Garske. Space Marines fighting aliens/demons — Stay Frosty Remastered

But, of course, zero prep is not all you might want from an adventure. In fact, for some GMs, prep is as much fun as play. So what else has Andrew Walter’s Forneus Research Base got going for it?

Well, Tom, Isaac and I played it over the space of three sessions recently. In fact, we just finished it the other night. I have thoughts.

Action

There’s no fucking around with Stay Frosty, no long opening scene to allow for introductions of our characters, just a short summary for the PCs, of what they’re doing out there in space and an immediate crash landing at the eponymous Research Base. Oh, the crash landing was caused by black ooze exploding from the controls of their shuttle btw.

As I stated, there is a short read-aloud piece of text at the start. It explains that the PCs are private marines, employed by the United Universal Corporation to check in on its research colonies. As they are doing this, they are forced to crash land.

As I said, Stay Frosty is not really interested in your PCs feelings, unless they involve terror or going apeshit. At no point is anyone encouraged to take a moment to express their concern for their fellow marines or, for that matter, the colonists they were supposedly there to protect. This is a DOOM simulator. The PCs are there to shoot shotguns and blow up demons. And Forneus Research Base is all action from the get-go.

The Frostiness Tracker goes from Warm to Ice Cold — Frostiness Tracker

As soon as they emerged from the wreckage, the PCs realised they were not going to be able to take off again without significant work on the shuttle, so they decided to make their way to the base. Meanwhile, I’m rolling the Danger Die every time they move from one location to another, take a look around or stop to think, as intended by the rules. The Danger Die works a bit like a random encounter table. You roll a d6 and the result will give you one of the following:

Encounter and Stress – i.e. roll on the relevant encounter table. Forneus has one table for the moon’s surface and one for inside the base. Stress is added to the PCs to build Tension. Tension also equals Frostiness. They higher the Frostiness level the better as it gives PCs bonuses like advantage on initiative and even extra attacks. But Tension can also explode. See below for more on that.
In dangerous areas, Encounter, otherwise, Environment – Forneus has its own Environment table also. But this didn’t come up too often, to be honest.
Environment – as above
Stress – see point 1
Entropy – for some reason, I rolled this one a lot and it had no effect. It’s only relevant if the PCs are using a thing constantly that has its own Supply die. For instance, if they are using Combat Drugs or Fuel when they’re driving a vehicle. The idea is that when Entropy is rolled, the Supply Die for that thing goes down to the next lowest die size. But whenever this was rolled, they had nothing to decrease.
TENSION EXPLODES! – Only rolled this once. The idea here is that when this comes up, the PCs make a Willpower Save. If they succeed, they get to reduce their Tension by one. If they fail though, they take Tension x level damage and reduce their Tension to 1. Then they roll on the Going Apeshit table if their HP are reduced to 0 by the damage. The effects of this can be anything from getting Advantage on damage rolls but constantly rolling your Ammo Die (like a Supply Die for your weapons,) to Last Stand: going down mano-a-mano with your enemies. I actually adjudicated this mechanic incorrectly at the table. I didn’t allow them the Willpower Save, I just rolled the Tension damage and gave it to every PC. Also, this damage is not supposed to be applied to attribute scores when all HP are gone, as normal damage is. Only one PC had to roll on the Going Apeshit table. She ran for her goddamn life and they had to manacle her to the ATV to stop her.

(I only just realised I was calling this the Doom Die the whole way through our game. Oops.)

The Danger Die is the mechanic that really keeps things interesting in Stay Frosty. Many of the locations in the Forneus Research Base, for instance, have no pre-written encounters or much of interest at all, so the random encounters, environmental hazards and ratcheting Tension from the Danger Die are doing a lot of the work. This works fairly successfully but I found I was rolling up Encounters a lot, since a third of the possible Danger Die results give you one most of the time, and after a certain event in Forneus, you actually get Encounters on a roll of 1 to 3. So the marines were drifting from one Encounter to another with only cursory exploration in between.

At least the variety of enemies is suitably gristly, demonic and fun. You have the obvious demons, like the Black Leathery Imps, that used poison to make their enemies fire on each other. Then you have the basic cultists who just have guns, the mutated cultists who have been transformed to allow them to fly with their fiendish lord Xithrabla through the cosmos, sucking from his hellish teats and the Centiservitor who is a cultist combined with a centipede with a plasma cannon in its chest. On top of that you have the real horrors like the Cadaverous Persecutor, a giant cyborg corpse with a rocket launcher, and the Fledgeling Pest (The Final Boss,) a sickening, enormous baby’s head with a partially exposed brain and a vicious bite.

The Mutated Cultist has an eye where his torso should be — Mutant Cultist

The Centiservitor is a mashup of a human and a giant centipede with a plasma cannon in its chest. — Mutant Cultist

We found the lower level encounters were essentially just target practice. Since we only had two players, I gave them each three marines and decided to treat it a bit like a funnel. I think this was too many for this adventure. Four would have been a bit more balanced. The main reason I think this is because of the initiative roll in Stay Frosty. Whoever makes a successful Dexterity check gets to go before the enemy in this game. This generally meant that a significant portion of the six characters got to act before the demons and cultists. There were enough weapons between the marines that could do blast damage (flamers, grenades etc.) that they could wipe out the opposition before they ever got a shot off. It felt too easy at times. But, it also seemed to accurately emulate the feeling of playing a video game like Doom. At one point they were crossing a bridge over a chasm and being swarmed by imps and cultists. There were 26 opponents and the party defeated them in two rounds, just mowing them down in waves of gunfire and explosions. In only the second encounter, they came up against a group of six foaming cultists, one of whom was holding a grenade in each hand and standing near a leaky fuel tank. One well-placed shot from the grenade launcher took out the whole bunch with a mushroom cloud left in their wake. These moments felt hilarious, exhilarating and hilarious.

But when it comes to the more challenging opponents like the Centiservitor, the Cadaverous Persecutor and the Fledgeling Pest, I can’t stress how important it is to use the Powerful Opponents mechanic in Stay Frosty. That rule states that when there is a disparity on either side of a fight, the side with fewer Hit Dice, should subtract the difference between their HD and their Opponents’s HD from their attack rolls. For example, when my PCs were facing the Fledgeling Pest at the end of the adventure, the 1 HD/Level 1 marines had to subtract 3 from every one of their attacks against it because it had 4 HD. This meant that they were not able to overwhelm it by sheer numbers in the first round or two. Many shots that might have hit, did not, because of this nicely scaling rule. However, when they were up against the Centiservitor, I forgot to apply the Powerful Opponents rule and they slaughtered it before it ever got a chance to fire off its cool weapon.

My main complaint when it comes to the action in this adventure is that the Fledgeling Pest, labelled as the Final Boss, is quite avoidable. It is described as being attached to a wall by its very flesh in one of the Hangars, which have been converted to perform devilish rituals. But there is no reason for them to go to the Hangars in the adventure. I made one up, of course, to try and get them there. One of the NPCs they met told them there could be a working shuttle in one of them. This did lead them to the Hangars, but as soon as they got there, Tension Exploded and one of their number went running off across the moon’s surface so they hopped in the ATVs they had just found and booked it after her. After that, they decided to leg it as well. Since they had the ATVs, they were better able to make it back to their own shuttle. I had to think on my feet here or they were going to miss out on the best couple of encounters of the whole adventure. So, first, I had the Demon Arms (also restricted to the hangars) appear out of a hellish portal in the ground ahead of one of the ATVs, grabbing the driver and causing the vehicle to flip over. The mouth in the hand of one of the arms devoured one of the party but they won out. Then they moved on again and just as they were about to reach their shuttle the giant demonic archway (also found in the hangars) appeared in the air before them, with the Fledgeling Pest emerging out of it to attack them along with a few of its cultists. This was a genuinely tough fight and resulted in the death of a couple more party members. I might have just let them make it to the shuttle, I suppose, but I didn’t want to deprive the players of the Final Boss.

Non-action

Of course, it wasn’t all action. There was some exploration. This is done in a point-crawl style as you can see by the map here.

The Forneus Research base point-crawl map. — Point-crawl Map

The descriptions of the locations in the adventure are pretty bare-bones. At times, I found I wanted a bit more. For instance, the Systems, Generator & Atmosphere area is supposed to be enormous and encapsulates everything from winding, labyrinthine machine rooms to massive bridges spanning deep chasms. To be honest, these feel like they should be separate, individual locations. Another point about this area in particular is that we’re told that the communications can be turned back on and full computer bank access can be gained here, but not what that might achieve. I had no idea what the computer banks might tell them and I had no idea who they might communicate with off-world. That’s a lot to leave in the lap of a GM, especially when the rest of this adventure is pretty much zero-prep, as I mentioned before.

Apollo

Actually, it is really hard for the PCs to get much information about what has happened here. Even the few living, rational NPCs they meet had no way of knowing what happened on the base, since one was a prisoner and had been kept out of the loop the whole time, one was in a coma and one was a talking chimp, named Apollo, who was in stasis the whole time. It would have been more interesting if at least one of these guys had the full story for the marines. I should have improvised that, in hindsight. Of course, the PCs did recruit both Apollo, the chimp, and Jamal, the prisoner, gave them guns and got them shooting, so that was fun.

Conclusion

I ran this, as I mentioned above, for two players with three PCs each. I think this was a mistake. I mean, once they had recruited the NPCs, they had a squad of eight and they were just mulching the hostiles at every turn, until the very end. Four PCs would have been about right to make it a challenge. Also, I thought I might be able to run it as a one-shot, but that was highly unrealistic. It took three sessions in all, and they did not explore any more than about half the locations.

If I had to do it over again, I might have seeded some of the locations or NPCs with a bit more information on the background of the adventure, but I would still keep preparation time to near zero.

All in all, it was a fun, exploding demon sort of romp as an adventure and a system that we all enjoyed, although I expected Tension to Explode more often.

DCC Day 2026

Collections

It’s been a long time since I collected anything. I used to collect comics, although it wasn’t a conscious choice to build a collection. I just bought 2000AD every week and didn’t throw it out as that seemed rude. Those comics went the way of all things for one reason or another, and any comics I bought after that were digital. I even gave up on that when Amazon bought Comixology and ruined it as a service. I used to have a small collection of DVDs and Blurays. Still have a lot of them in the attic, actually. But with the advent of streaming services, I don’t purchase too many of those anymore.

RPGs, though… When I got back into playing them around 2014/2015, I was only playing 4E because I had the books. Then I decided to see what this whole 5E thing was about. That quickly ballooned out of all sense. Frustration with that brought me to discover indie RPGs starting with Spire and then everything that Rowan, Rook and Decard ever produced. That’s when things started to really get out of hand. Now I seem to never have quite enough shelf space. Every time I buy a new set of book shelves, I fill them immediately and then a new kickstarter fulfilment or three arrives.

DCC has been a major contributor to my collection woes. I have backed a number of Goodman Games crowd-funders in the last couple of years, including the recently arrived Dungeon Denizens II, Terror from the Underdeep (a 5E set, but still Goodman Games) and Caverns of Thracia. Also, there are just so many adventures, taken on their own, mere booklets, a few pages. But its hard to buy just one…

The cover of Dungeon Crawl Classics Caverns of Thracia. :arge face of a savage fighter in a bronze helm, lizard man in the background, Minotaur with axe and shield in the foreground. — DCC Caverns of Thracia

Anyway, back to the Caverns of Thracia. The kickstarter was to produce a book that included both the original Judges’ Guild mega-dungeon adventure by Jennell Jaquays and the newly realised version for DCC (or 5E.) It came with a bunch of add-ons like fold-out maps, a handout booklet, a GM screen and a few side adventures that were set in the same general area as the main one. So, I have been thinking recently, especially as I retread old ground in the Editioning, that I should be using some of these books! I thoroughly enjoy DCC but I have only ever run two funnel adventures and a 1st level one. So, I decided to take one of those side adventures from my Caverns of Thracia haul and run it for DCC Day 2026, which just passed on July 18th.

Beneath the Isle of the Serpents

Beneath the Isle of Serpents inside cover illustration shows a band of adventurers filing down a narrow corridor with a warrior in front, a Wizard in the middle and a hypnotised Dwarf in the rear, attacking the Wizard. They are being attacked by a Serpent man who looks a lot like a Lizard man if I'm being honest about it. — Hypnotise!

I settled on DCC # 109 Beneath the Isle of the Serpents by Bob Brinkman as a suitably evocative scenario that would showcase a pretty cool dungeon and could easily be finished in two sessions. I have already learned that, no matter how short a DCC adventure is, you are not likely to finish it in one session without severely editing it or via TPK. Turns out I had more lessons to learn.

We started the adventure in montage. My players, just two for this DCC Day, had a couple of PCs each. One of these was a Wizard, and one of the adventure hooks is that the Wizard’s patron calls in one of the many favours owed them. Hilda’s patron Ydd’grrl, demanded that she and her friends deal with the burgeoning evil beneath the Isle of the Serpents on the Starry Archipelago. So they trekked across the continent, traveling largely by map. They got to a fishing village on the mainland closest to the Isle of the Serpents and then a fisherman, named Kamay, offered to take them where they wanted to go. No-one else would…

Map of the Starry Archipelago. A number of green islands dotted acorss a blue sea. — Starry Archipelago: its fun to say. Try it!

Kamay dropped them off at the black sand beach on the south of the island. Here they faced the terror that was a Giant Devil Crab. They largely had the measure of this thing, but when it hit, it hit hard. After a couple of rounds where they battered away at its devilish shell, one of its claw attacks impaled Hilda, killing her instantly. Kinda, I mean, we fucked up here. It has been about ten months since we last played with these characters so we forgot how they worked. It looked like our Hilda had 15 HP, but we all thought that must be some mistake for a level 1 Wizard, right? Wrong, it was only after the session, when Hilda’s player, Tom, was trying to figure out where the 15 came from that they realised it was one of the benefits she got from her familiar! So, when I ruled that she couldn’t have had so many HP, and must have been killed by the 8 devil claw damage, I killed her without due process or any real legal basis. Some Judge! Anyway, once we knew what had happened, we ret-conned the death. Instead, she awoke amidst the devastation of the devil crab, stripped of all her belongings by her fellows, and badly injured. “Fuck this,” she thought, and went back to the boat.

While she was “dead/unconscious” however, I asked Tom to roll up a new PC using purplesorceror.com as I was worried about the ability of the party to survive the dungeon when there were just three of them. Tom rolled up Glagrill, a Dwarf who they’d all forgotten was asleep in the hold of Kamay’s fishing boat the whole time.

The Island

The map of the isle of Serpents. It is vaguely oblong with a volcano with a face in the middle. No hexes. — No hexes here.

The adventure provides a really great random encounter table for those parties that decide to explore the island’s surface. Now, there’s a perfectly good, relatively recently forged path through the jungle that leads directly to the main dungeon entrance. If they take that path, they get to move full speed and forgo having to roll for any random encounters at all! so those PCs who avoid that are probably just paranoid. No good reason to do that, surely!

Now, I will say that while the encounter table is great, if a bit over the top for what is probably going to be a very minor aspect of the adventure, the text tells the Judge to roll for a random encounter every two hexes traveled by the party, but the island map ain’t got no hexes so you would need to kind of guess how far two hexes might be, I suppose.

The Dungeon

Anyway, my clever party took the safe option and went straight down the path and straight down the ancient, root-choked chimney to the buried temple to some chaos God. Here they discovered some indecipherable wall art, a room filled with rust-midges and a grate in the floor, below which those blessed with infravision could see barely living bodies of humans hanging by manacles from the sloping ceiling of what looked like a sluice. And that was the end of session 1.

Session 2 saw them descend the winding staircase out of that first chamber. They found it ill-suited to them, too narrow, with steps too long and too low, as though built for a very different type of body. Before long, they encountered an opening in the wall on one side. Our Dwarf, Glagrill, checked it over but made some noise in the process. So, when he made his way into the chamber beyond, he found two Serpent Men and one Cobra Sub-commander on their way to attack. Unfortunately, the narrowness of the doorway meant only one PC could stand in the front. The Sub-commander attempted to hypnotize the PC right behind the Dwarf, but Glagrill did his best to defend, and Helfgott, our Cleric, cast darkness to prevent any more hypnosis attacks. Three against four, this turned into a war of attrition, which is bad news for a band of 1st level characters. Eventually, the darkness failed and Magnolia, our Halfling, was hypnotized by the Cobra Sub-commander. She had no choice but to attack Helfgott. She critted and did an extra 2d6 damage on top of her normal weapon damage. Helfgott only had 3 HP. He was one of the longer lived PCs. Isaac had had him since Sailors on the Starless Sea. It was a tough way to go but the others looted his corpse and moved on after they killed the two guards. The Sub-commander had locked himself in his room in the back of these guard quarters. On their way through they found a pair of lucky dice, some coin and a barrel of human hands, feet and other bits.

Eventually, they decided to open the door and deal with their opponent. This time, Melmoth, Isaac’s Elf character was the one to suffer the hypnosis of the Cobra Sub-commander. He was forced to turn on his new associate, Glagrill. He critted… Glagrill, so new to the world, was sent out of it again in but a moment. The two remaining adventurers, taking no chances, fire-bombed the trapped Cobra Sub-commander to death and found a bunch of treasure in the ruin of his chamber.

Not even half way through this adventure and technically, three PCs down. This was the dice telling a story. I was rolling so well, I felt bad about it. Tom and Isaac had never rolled worse, except when they were under the Cobra Sub-commander’s sway and they critted. There was shock, sorrow and outrage on display at the table. Everyone was questioning their choices. We laughed and cried. This is why I play these games to be honest. Not to kill characters but to experience the extremes of those moments.

Conclusion

The Cover of the Special Edition of DCC RPG. it has a gold embossed demon skull complete with horns on the faux-leather black cover. — DCC RPG Demon Skull

Eventually they trudged back towards the beach, thinking to retreat. Meanwhile, Kamay the fisherman started lifting the anchor. Hilda asked where he thought he was going. He told her his business was done here. She sent him into a deep and magical sleep and made for shore where she reunited with her former companions. They decided one more try was in order.

DCC Day 2026 may be done, but the expedition Beneath the Isle of the Serpents is far from over, dear reader. Join me again soon, when I will complete my review of this deadly module.

The Editioning, Basic D&D, the End

The Kept on the Borderlands

You see, it’s past tense because the game’s over now. Anyway… dear reader, if you are reading this and you don’t know what any of the words in the title or sub-heading mean, maybe go back and have a read of the entire collection of posts on the Editioning, our challenge to play every edition of the original fantasy RPG, and on this game of B/X or Basic D&D.

We finished up the game on session 11 a few of days ago and I have been thinking about it a lot since then. There’s a lot to consider! After all, this was the adventure that kicked off the role-playing lives of so many nerds from 1981 on, since it came with the Basic Set. Not only that; in the context of the Editioning, playing it now, in 2026, allows me to think about it in a way that players at the time could never have. As well, it’s the adventure that launched a thousand clones. Could Gary Gygax ever have foreseen the enduring popularity and desire to emulate this scenario, when he first designed it?

But, when it comes down to it, I want to take this game that we played at face value. That’s the real purpose of the Editioning as I see it. That, and comparison. I want to compare this experience with the experience of playing every other edition of D&D. And that’s something I can usefully begin to do now that two of them are done and another is under weigh.

Beginnings

The About page of the Keep on the Borderlands - inlcudes a gnraly illustration of a band of adventurers fighting an owlbear in a dungeon. — Info Page

One of the major attractions of Basic D&D for many will undoubtedly be the ease and speed with which you can create and even detail your PCs. You can easily roll up stats, choose a class and equip a level one character in about half an hour, maybe a bit more depending on your familiarity with the game and the genre. Genre is an important point here. There are no gonzo elements, really. It’s pretty straight-forward medieval Europe with dwarves, elves and goblins. Most anyone interested in playing D&D is going to have at least a passing cultural understanding of the broad strokes and tropes. This ease of character creation is a major bonus, from my point of view, it allowed us to have our session 0 and session 1 in the same evening. But, maybe more importantly, it allows you to roll up a new PC on the fly while the others mourn the loss of the one that just got an arrow through the eye. What this means, in many instances is that any particular PC can be easily substituted by another of the same class.

To compare this aspect of the game to OD&D all I can say is there is not a huge amount of difference, except to say you have slightly fewer decisions to make in Basic. OD&D allows you to choose race as well as class, so, for instance, we had a halfling thief and an elf magic user in our OD&D game. From this perspective, I often think of AD&D as the natural descendant of OD&D rather than Basic. AD&D 2nd Edition is determined to overwhelm the player with options, however, and requires multiple decisions to be made simultaneously. From alternative ability score rolling methods to the inclusion of kits, non-weapon proficiencies and schools of magic, the complexity is ramped up ten-fold from Basic. This is a matter of preference, I think. Some of my players enjoyed all the options quite a bit. While others would much rather get to the game more quickly, like you can with Basic or OSE or most OSR games these days.

Map of the Wilderness from Keep on the Borderlands. A great forest in the north surrounds the Caves of Chaos and the Cave of the Unknown. A river meanders through the central part of the map, with marshes along its edges and more forest to the south. The Keep stands just north of the river on the western side of hte map. — Map of the wilderness from Keep on the Borderlands

As for the beginning of the adventure itself, The Keep on the Borderlands encourages the DM to take the Background section and expand on it or tailor it to their own campaign. Isaac did this for us by indicating that we were the last surviving members of a mercenary band that was returning from a failed campaign in the wilderness. This worked well to explain the relationship of the PCs, why they were traveling together and to give us a motivation to seek out gainful employment so we could get back on our feet.

My experience with OD&D and AD&D 2nd Ed is quite different. Of course, I created the OD&D adventure from scratch so I necessarily created the starting situation for them as well, but for the Eternal Boundary in 2nd Ed, the DM is presented with two options to start, and it’s quite proscriptive otherwise.

Middles

The map of the caves of chaos - a finger-shaped ravine with cave systems branching out from it. — Caves of Chaos Map

The Keep on the Borderlands adventure booklet consists largely of location descriptions. The “plot” such as it is, is contained within those. This is a familiar adventure design methodology for anyone who has been paying attention to the OSR. One of the first descriptions is of the Inner Bailey of the keep. In the two paragraphs devoted to it, the major points made regarding it are that the PCs must do a great service to the keep to gain entrance and if they do that, they’ll have a feast thrown in their honour, where the Castellan will gain the measure of them. If they impress him, he will send them on missions later, have them blessed on the way out and pay them a reasonable rate each time.

Isaac nicked a great little mechanic from the Root RPG for handling our reputations with the various factions involved in the adventure. Root uses reputation trackers to record how well liked or despised your PC is by the various woodland factions, with PC actions able to add points to or subtract them from the tracks. You can find a good description of that here on the Cannibal Halfling Gaming site. Gaining rep with the various factions and being aware of it definitely made us push our characters to make certain choices that we might otherwise not have. Mostly, we wanted to build reputations with factions we were already friendly with and tank all the others. The fact is, the way we ended up playing the adventure, it was about 75% impressing or pissing off factions, 15% dungeon crawl, 10% getting absolutely fucked by random encounters. So, the gaining of rep was at least as important as gaining experience. The module does refer to the possibility that the PCs might become aware of the conflicts between the denizens of the Caves of Chaos and use that as a way to set them against one another. But, it doesn’t provide any useful advice as to how to handle it beyond, “be careful to handle this whole thing properly,” which is genuinely worse than useless. What it does not do, at any stage is present the monsters as anything other than elements to be eliminated. We don’t need a name and background for every monster NPCs but at least the leaders should get that! Once again, Isaac took it upon himself to fill in those blanks, naming the leader of each faction, giving them personalities and motivations that we could attempt to work with or butt up against. He never managed it from a combat-first perspective, and I really appreciated that, because combat is exceedingly lethal and to be avoided at all costs. This might have just been the random encounters which included monsters of higher levels than us who were quite capable of one-shotting our toughest members, but it did feel more lethal than the other two games I’m comparing here.

Comparing all of this to OD&D, once again, in my own home-brew adventure, I actually felt there were some things I could have learned from it. I often felt I should have had more factions and even NPCs in general in my OD&D game, even though the concept I had for it did not require that. Combat-wise, OD&D and Basic both have a hitting problem, in that it’s really hard to do. We missed a lot and it was generally agreed that having a shit-load of hirelings was a necessity, if only so that the law of averages would be on our side. This was true of the enemies killing our party members too. We lost two PCs throughout the campaign, but oh so many more hirelings.

It’s harder for me to compare the middle of the adventure to 2nd ed, since we are not there yet, but I can compare the style of adventure. The Eternal Boundary is an entirely different beast. Of course, it does have the factions of Sigil baked into the adventure, and the factions the PCs belong to have a real effect on things, but they are not trying to ingratiate themselves to the factions, really. It involves a lot of investigations that may involve factions, but that’s about it. Actually, it would be interesting to include a Root-style rep track but, there are so many factions involved in the city, it might become like too much overhead. One thing is for sure, so far, it seems like a more diplomatic than combat-oriented adventure. Combat-wise, I can’t comment too much. We haven’t had any fighting yet, but, from what I remember, combat had the potential to take an age and to be very crunchy compared to Basic. Still quite lethal but with a lot less instant death. I’ll revisit this after we have a few more fights in Planescape.

Endings

An illustration of a minotaur, GHolds a weapon. Looks angry, — Minotaur

Isaac gave us an ending more because we had to move on to other games than because we came upon it naturally. The fact is, looking at the adventure now, we had barely scratched the surface of the Caves of Chaos. We missed the entire minotaur labyrinth! There are caves denoted by letters A to K and we only entered three of them. That third one, though, that was a doozy.

Isaac had been coming up with a variety of events through the course of the adventure, and we had no idea they weren’t detailed in it. The main area of his invention involved the Serpent Cult and its relation to the Curate of the church in the keep and his relation to the Castellan’s advisor, an elf. Now, we had immediately discovered the Curate’s elf-racism since one of our party was an elf, but it ran deeper. One day, we returned to the keep to find that the advisor had killed the curate when he accused him of being a spy for the Serpent Cult. We investigated and found no evidence that the elf had anything to do with the cult, but did discover evidence that the cult was operating from one of the Caves of Chaos. On our word, the Castellan released the imprisoned advisor and then promised us a permanent residence in the keep and his eternal gratitude if we would clear out the cult. In order to take on the cult, we recruited the assistance of the goblins we had previously made friends with and then marched on the evil cave.

This led us to the last session of play. As a cleric-heavy group, we turn-undeaded our way through the majority of the encounters leading to the final boss, the Chaos Priest hiding in his chamber beyond a chapel swarming with skeletons and zombies. We used Hold Person on him, he failed his Save against it and we stabbed him to death and cut off his head to bring back to the castellan. Hurrah! We lost the majority of the goblins on our team but otherwise came out a great deal richer and even more experienced.

Isaac had us do epilogues for our PCs, since we are unlikely to return to them and I will genuinely miss playing Thaddeus Nightbane. He finally proved that not everyone he cared about had to die and that felt like a good end to his arc. I will say that, as far as running this only in Basic D&D goes, I think it could be difficult. Thaddeus ended up as level 5 and, thechnically, Basic only goes to level 3. You would have had to have the Expert set on hand before you finished playing the adventure, I feel. Or, just make sure, as DM, that you don’t hand out too much treasure or encounter XP.

So that was the end for us. But, I’m quite sure you could continue playing in and around the Keep and Caves for twenty or more sessions if you wanted to explore every cave and every faction. It’s even got re-playability, especially with a different DM. Isaac put so much of himself and his ideas into it, I’m sure, if I ran it myself, for instance, it would be a very different game.

Comparing to OD&D’s end, it’s difficult, once again, but I can say that my adventure, the Woes of Sorrowfield had a very clear ending, although they might have approached it from different ways. This has nothing to do with the edition either, of course, more the adventure. Woes was a totally different type of adventure compared to Keep, so, like I said, it’s hard to compare.

As for the Eternal Boundary, although we are a long way from the end of that, I know, for sure, that the ending also be at a very definite time and place, although, once again, they might arrive at it in any one of a number of different ways.

The main difference, here is that Keep on the Borderlands is not really interested in telling a particular story, so much as presenting a situation, but both the AD&D 2nd Ed adventure and my own OD&D adventure, had a specific story to tell.

Conclusion

I liked it. I liked it a lot more than I expected to. This adventure tops a lot of people’s favourite adventures lists and I can see why now. Although, I would say a lot of my enjoyment came from the way in which Isaac ran it rather than from the contents of the module itself. But the module gives a DM the freedom to expand and improvise as they want, so that is a very cool aspect of it. As a teaching adventure, I can see its value.

Useful tables in the Keep on the Borderlands - Including Character Attacks, Saving Throws, and Cost of Equipment and Weapons — Useful Tables in KotBL

Useful tables in the Keep on the Borderlands - Including Clerical Abilities, Armour Classes, and Wandering Monsters — Useful Tables in KotBL

As for Basic D&D, I thoroughly enjoyed this pared-down version of the game. It’s freeing having no real skills and only a few stats you need to keep track of. Some things like saving throws and THAC0 still bother me but I look at them now as more of a nostalgic idiosyncrasy than a real bother. They are not difficult to get used to and they don’t get in the way too much in play.

The Editioning will continue, dear reader, but its time to leave the Keep on the Borderlands behind along with poor Edmund, my cleric who died in session 2 and whose corpse we found shambling around in the Chaos Cult’s lair. We put out his other eye and chopped off his head for good measure.

Blades in the Dark, Thoughts

Set-up

I made quite a big deal, last year, about the process of choosing an RPG to play. For months, I perused books and created characters to get a feel for a selection of games. Most of these games I would put squarely in the story game or, at least, narratively focused category. Blades in the Dark beat out Triangle Agency, Slugblaster, Wildsea and Deathmatch Island to name a few.

Once I had decided on Blades, I wrote a bunch of posts relating to the advice presented in Blades and its recent expansion, Deep Cuts. Reading the books and absorbing the advice helped to boost my enthusiasm for it.

We got into Blades well. We had a regular game every three weeks and we found a natural rhythm of having a score session followed by a downtime session. I had always planned to have only six sessions in our Season 1 of the game. This seemed like a reasonable amount of time for all of us to get a good taste for the game, the setting, the system, the characters and the crew.

We had our sixth session last week, so I thought I would take this opportunity to gather my thoughts, lay them out and examine them.

Up-sides

The scores; it’s what it’s all about. Even in the instances where I had no time to prepare and found myself recycling old ideas, we got really into the scores. The players seemed to enjoy the freedom of the narrative-first style that allowed them to fully describe an entire action scene rather than just rolling a die to see if they hit a guy. This bred inventiveness both in-score and out so that they pushed the envelope of what was possible even during downtime.

I enjoyed them because I found I had a curious amount of control over the proceedings. If we had a full session for the score, it was easy and fun to allow the PCs as much leeway and time to describe and indulge in their scenes. Conversely, if time was against us, I was able to push things to a conclusion with the flick of a narrative switch. I used clocks in every score, which will be no surprise to anyone, but, for me, it was remarkable. Looking back, I feel like I could have utilised them more often and to better effect. Almost every score involved just one clock representing the PCs goal and one representing the potential negative consequences. Especially in the final score, it would have been fun to introduce other clocks representing minor peripheral goals or dangers as well, but I didn’t think of it at the time so it didn’t happen. But, what I’m saying is that I like the use of clocks to track eventualities and possibilities. They are easy for everyone to understand and impress on all players the urgencies and exigencies of their situations.

Secondly, I loved the player-characters. The playbooks are iconic and the players loved to lean into them in fun and notable ways. I think the players all became attached to their characters in short order, which was essential since we had only six sessions. The crew became almost a character of its own, especially with its reliable cohort of thugs. I liked that the crew had a sense of ambition. They wanted to become the number one gang in Crow’s Foot, and by the end of the season, they had made significant headway towards that goal, defeating the Red Sashes in a war and capturing their leader. But they also each had their own motivations, religious or “scientific” or naval(?) I think the game itself has something to do with that, with stress and heat and reputation all conspiring to drive them in certain directions. But, I also know that my incredible group of players would build memorable characters no matter the influence of a ruleset so I don’t want to overstate that.

Thirdly, the setting. Duskwall is such an evocative setting. The eternal darkness, the ghostly hauntings, the leviathans and the empire. The nobility, the workers, the weird science and the gangs. It is rich and deep and you would be hard-pressed to fail to come up with interesting things to do in it. But it is not oppressive in its richness. We never felt as though we had to stick to some Akorosi canon. There is a freedom to create parts of the world that you would never get in, for instance, a published D&D setting. But, on the other hand, the books provide a wonderful assortment of factions, places, NPCs and items that can come in handy when you need something specific or general in a pinch. I was rarely left scrabbling for a needed detail. There was always something close to hand.

Up-hill Climb

Light shines down from above on a scoundrel running acorss the rooftops of Doskvol — Light shines down from above on a scoundrel running across the rooftops of Doskvol

But we had some significant issues in our six sessions. Now, some of these are entirely my fault. Some of them are a symptom of having only six sessions to become familiar with the game and some arose because we sometimes struggled to keep our sessions regular. But still, they were there so I’ve got to discuss them.

Downtime was the biggest struggle for me. Now this was, perhaps, the part that I can take most responsibility for, but there are elements that we found just rubbed us up the wrong way. So, firstly, about half way through, I decided to start introducing downtime rules from Deep Cuts. I liked these alternate rules. They were largely diceless and gave the PCs a bunch of other things to spend Coin on. I thought they would speed things along a bit more, compared to the original downtime rules. But it introduced confusion more than anything else. Because we had had so little time to get used to the original rules, and I had an imperfect understanding of the Deep Cuts rules, we ended up often very confused about what was needed for any given downtime activity. We often ended up mixing the two rulesets into some unholy abomination that we could never remember at the next downtime. I wish now that I had started with the Deep Cuts rules and used them the whole way through. I think they are, comparatively, smoother and more interesting overall.

But the main issue I had with downtime was the idea of having a separate and overtly different phase of play. The fact that you need to use a completely different set of rules for it delineates it deliberately from the score. It slows things down, it deals with each PC so separately that they are largely on their own for long periods of the game. This meant that the only other person they were interacting with most of the time at the table during downtime was me. This is a significant increase in mental load for the GM. On top of that, each PC has a few notable NPCs and I was responsible for voicing, playing and inventing them almost from scratch. That’s a lot to remember and a lot to do at the table.

And, the mechanics themselves, to me, made this part of play feel like I was constantly explaining the rules of a board-game to the players. All those currencies and meta-currencies, Coin, Rep, XP, Heat, Wanted Level, Status, Stress. There is so much to keep track of and it often feels like shuffling tokens and cards around on a board. I am not a big player of board-games. Given a choice, I would choose an RPG any day. Combining the two in this manner did not endear the game to me. And all the sheets required to keep track of everything go to evidence exactly how much admin is involved in Blades in the Dark. Now, I understand that this is actually a positive for many people. It’s just not for me.

In general, I found that role-playing, as one might traditionally think of it, was difficult to work into sessions of such heavy admin. Even in the score sessions, there is little time for inter-character development, so focused is the whole crew on the goal of the thing. This is, perhaps, a symptom of the style of play I am used to. Generally, in OSR or more trad games, the players are often role-playing amongst themselves constantly and then with me, as the GM, whenever they need to interact with an NPC in the world. Blades requires the players to know what sort of scenes they might want to role-play, set them up with the GM and know when to end them as well. So, that might be our relative inexperience with this type of game showing. But, if I might be allowed to make a comparison, I never felt like this when playing Spire or Heart, which are hardly OSR or trad. It think they sit more firmly on the story-game side of the divide, but we never had any issue with fitting in role-play in our campaigns of those games. I think this is due to the fact there was so little admin in those games. They feel more streamlined to me. Not perfect, by any means, but, perhaps, more to my taste.

Everyone agreed the character sheets were an issue. This was more from the player side than from me. The design of the character sheets is too busy and the text is too small and the little boxes to fill in are fiddly. In general, there is far too much text on them, even though I know the idea is that the player has everything they need at their fingertips. Interestingly, one of the things some players said was that, even with the quantum equipment rule where you don’t have to mark a piece of gear until you say you’re using it, they found the item list restrictive. They would often look at that list when trying to figure out what to do with their turn. Too often, they could see nothing of use, and instead, just defaulted to the usual skirmish or shoot. I thought this was a very interesting observation, that the design of the character sheet or the item list, at least, conspired to stunt their creativity in the moment.

Up-shot

Now, like I said at the start of the last section, its possible that a lot of these negative views are due to the way I ran the game, the irregular nature of the sessions, the limited exposure to the game, but I think its equally possible that I bumped up against it because I have a particular preference for a different type of game.

I confess that most of my best and most memorable experiences with RPGs recently has been with the OSR. Mythic Bastionland, Mothership, Black Sword Hack, Old School D&D. I am rooted in old school play after all. But, then again, I have played other story-games, like Heart and Spire, like Trophy, Root and Dungeon World and I have enjoyed them immensely. I might be forced to come to the conclusion that Blades is just not for me…

I guess we’ll see when we go back for season 2 of the Death Knells.