Rules

The Editioning, AD&D 2nd Edition, Part 5

Surprise!

Welcome back, dear reader, to the Editioning, our challenge to play an adventure in every major edition of D&D over a period of about two years. We’ve already completed OD&D and Basic D&D adventures. Had a great time with them. They were both quite rules-light, even if some of the mechanics were not exactly instinctive. And, even if you didn’t know any given rule and you couldn’t find it in the book, the DM could easily make a ruling in the moment. AD&D 2nd Edition is another beast.

Now, I will preface the following complaints with the fact that I am really trying to play each edition as close to rules-as-written as possible. One of the things I wanted to get out of the Editioning was to be able to learn all those rules and another was to be able to compare them to each other. There are, of course, a lot of similarities across each of the editions. They’re all still D&D, after all. But some things change in every edition for some reason. Surprise is one of these things, initiative is another. Today, I want to discuss Surprise in AD&D 2E… because I have a bone to pick.

You know, it’s not even the rule itself that I have a problem with. The rule is pretty simple, actually. Each side, if there’s a chance they could be surprised in the situation, rolls 1d10. If they roll a 1, 2 or 3, they are surprised. There are a bunch of modifiers that can be applied to this roll, including a PC’s reaction adjustment, which comes from their Dexterity. But that’s it. Easy, right? Easy to find? WRONG!

Where would you expect that rule to exist, dear reader? Well, let me tell you where I thought it would be. I thought it would be in the Combat chapter of the Player’s Handbook. But to narrow things down, I checked that book’s index. S, s, s… there it was! Surprise, pages 89, 112 and 113. OK, I thought, now I’ll find out how to determine Surprise in AD&D 2E. WRONG! Page 89 provided me a definition of the term, “surprise.”

Surprise can happen any time characters meet another group unexpectedly(monsters, evil knights, peasants etc.). Surprise us simply what happens when one side–a person or party–is taken unawares, unable to react until they gather their wits. Their opponents, if unsurprised, are allowed a bonus round of action while the surprised characters recover. It’s entirely possible for both sides in a given situation to be surprised!

This is only the first of three paragraphs telling me about the concept of Surprise. At no point does it actually explain the rule to me, however.

I cannot quite express to you, dear reader, how much unnecessary text is contained in the PHB. I don’t think the majority of people reading this book require a definition of surprise, especially when it is not immediately followed by the rules for it.

On to page 112 and 113 then. The index gets this slightly wrong. It should read 111 and 112. 113 is a full page illustration. One of my favourites in the book actually, medieval Cheers! Anyway, we are now in Chapter 11: Encounters. The Surprise Roll is finally described here in some five paragraphs. Here’s an example of some of the absolute sawdust they used to fill out this book.

Naturally, surprise does not happen all the time. There are many easy and intelligent ways it can be prevented. The most obvious is if the player characters can see those they are about to encounter well before getting close. For example, the characters may see the dust of a group of horsemen coming their way, or notice the lanterns of a group of peasants coming through the woods, or hear the grunting barks of a gnoll war party closing through the trees. In these cases there is no way the characters are going to be surprised by the encounter.

And it’s not just a matter of ignoring this bumph. The rules are cleverly hidden away within paragraphs like this!

Anyway, this section has finally described the rule for me, and even told me what the effects of surprise are for both sides! The surpriser gets a free round of attacks but not spells and the surprisee is caught flat-footed so loses their Dex bonus to AC.

But here’s the kicker:

The surprise roll can also be modified by Dexterity, race, class, cleverness, and situation.

I’m sure the designers of this fine game thought to do something as convenient as to provide the potential modifiers to a rule on the same page as the rule itself. WRONG!

The DM has the listing of modifiers that apply to given situations.

“I do?” I thought.

At this point, I was close to despair, dear reader. I had a little cry and a big swig of my beer and dove back in. But this time, I used my noggin. I googled it and found the answers I needed here on the Murphy’s Victim blog. By which I mean I discovered that the table of modifiers I needed was on page 102 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide, in the Encounters chapter of that book. So, at least it’s consistent.

The Surprise Modifiers table from the DMG

Anyway, there I discovered that the PCs, being in poor light, would have a -1 modifier to their surprise roll. None of the other modifiers applied in their situation.

Dear reader, they rolled a 6, meaning they were not surprised. Nonetheless, they still lost a full round of attacks because they had just been rousted from their makeshift beds and were still a little bit eepy.

I went exploring this rabbit-hole because of a single line in the description of the encounter Sunday’s session started with. This is from the Shadows Abroad in Sigil section on Chapter II The Mortuary:

If the PCs have no watch and are awakened in the middle of the night, the Shadowknave and his men have a +4 bonus on their chance of surprise.

This is an awkwardly phrased sentence, but, essentially, what it means is that, should the Shadowknave and his mates roll to be the ones who are surprised, they would get a +4 bonus on that roll. This would, most certainly, make it more harder for them to be surprised. But, why in the Nine Hells would they ever have the potential to be surprised in a situation where they are breaking down the door to the home of four sleeping individuals who they know for a fact are inside and sleeping? But, since I didn’t understand the surprise rules when I first read that sentence I had to look them up to understand what they meant.

Dear reader, I did not make a surprise roll for the Shadowknave and his lads. That would have been absurd.

This is a pretty good point to segue into what happened last session.

To the Mortuary

It was a hard fought battle in the little run-down church to Varuna that they call home. The PCs were caught off guard (if not precisely surprised) and lost a full round while the mercenaries burst into the church. The enemy spell-caster immediately used his Sleep spell, downing Glaermond the Paladin again straight away. I ruled that our tiefling, Trance, as a half-lower-planar creature, was allowed a saving throw. She managed to save and, somehow, avoided getting hit by the three mercs attacking her and immediately kicked the Paladin to wake him up. The three attackers on Devansh Rao, our Cleric, were not so unlucky (he’s got a Dex of 4, so no surprise.) They knocked him out and then went to focus on the Necromancer who lived in the basement. Aurora managed to use her wand to move the earth from the walls and floor to block off the entrance to her underground lair, while her goat familiar and Spectral Hand continued the attack. Back upstairs, the spell-caster Scared and Slowed everyone in the church, his own men included, and Trance cast a sphere of Darkness that encompassed the entire interior. The Paladin, who had the Blind Fighting proficiency, managed to get a couple of licks in. Trance climbed up into the rafters and then through the front window dropping down silently behind the hooded spell-caster to successfully back-stab him. When he turned to face her, she saw that it was the same half-elf they had seen leaving a “dead” body on the floor of an alley in the Hive the previous day. At this point, the half-elf issued the order to retreat. The mercs grabbed Devansh and his stuff and scarpered. Glaermond managed to take out one of them as they ran off but they soon lost them in the maze of Sigil’s streets.

Devansh woke hours later in a vault otherwise occupied by a foursome of skeletons and a sarcophagus. He had a look around, experimented with the skeletons and examined the sarcophagus. He discovered the skeletons only reacted when he made for the door and then found that there was a cache of useful and incriminating items inside the sarcophagus. Long story short, Toranna the Grey, of the Dustmen faction was involved with someone called Marvent and had something to do with the disappearances of the barmies from the Hive. He also got his stuff back and immediately turned the skeletons with his holy symbol. Unfortunately he was still locked in the vault.

Meanwhile, the others returned to Bendon Mawl, their patron, to explain what happened and to pick some useful items, Oil of Elemental Resistance (fire) and a Potion of Invisibility. Interestingly, these matched the sorts of useful items that Devansh found in the sarcophagus. Then they formulated a cunning plan involving a coffin delivery that allowed them all to enter the Mortuary by the back door. Once there, they soon heard Devansh calling for help and freed him from his vault. Once they were all together and disguised in Dustmen robes, they ascended all the way to the Overvalue where the portal to the Elemental Plane of Fire was. All the evidence they had gathered so far suggested that there was some connection between Toranna, this portal, the disappearances of the barmies and the return of Eliath and the Dancing Man to Sigil. Toranna was there, feeding another barmy into the portal. The party watched as they planned what to do next…

Conclusion

I was glad I didn’t have to look up that surprise rule at the table. I did all that before the start of the session. But just imagine if you did have to? I would simply not have bothered. I would have made a ruling as soon as I got stymied in the PHB Combat section.

I don’t really remember how I dealt with these situations when I was originally playing AD&D back in the ’90s. I do think I had a better grasp on the rules back then, but I also remember having a fair amount of frustration with the game too.

Despite all of this, I think we’re all having a good time with the adventure still and even with the system, in many ways.

I’ll be back with more Editioning in a couple of weeks, dear reader. In the meantime, don’t be Surprised if I am back with some other post next week.

An elven king on his throne with a guard on one side and an elven woman on the other — Elven King

Star Trek Adventures Advancement

Character Growth

There are more ways to deal with character advancement in RPGs than I could even attempt to name, never mind describe. A number of them depend on XP, whether it’s in large numbers, like D&D, or in relatively small numbers like Dungeon World or Blades in the Dark. Maybe you use those numbers in a direct, 1:1 ratio to improve abilities or add new powers. Then again, maybe you just add them up until you hit a new level.
Maybe your favourite system eschews XP in favour of improvement rolls, like in Troika, Mörk Borg, or Call of Cthulhu, where your fate might be to not improve at all, or even get worse, despite everything you’ve done. That one can seem cruel sometimes, but, then again, rolling dice is fun, right?
Well, the advancement mechanic in Star Trek Adventures 2E is not like any of the above, and that’s what I’m here to discuss today.

The Character Arc

Player-Facing
Advancement:
This system of milestones is designed so a main character’s
advancement is driven by the player, rather than
something which happens passively in the background
or at the gamemaster’s discretion. All the decisions
made when adding a log entry, reaching a milestone, or
completing a character arc are made by you, the player,
and they all stem from the decision to use a value.
As you begin each session with 1 Determination, you
always have the potential to use at least one value or
Directive in every mission, so there should always be at
least a little potential for growth if the character plays an
active part in the mission.
The gamemaster can help you along by creating and
suggesting opportunities where a value might be useful,
but ultimately, the power to guide your character’s
growth rests in the hands of one person: you. — Player-Facing
Advancement

We’ve all heard of a character arc in a TV show or movie. We want to see growth and change in our favourite heroes or, for that matter, in our antagonists too. That change we want to see? Is it a matter of them growing tougher, or more powerful? Do we want to see them gain new skills or contacts? I mean, maybe sometimes, but growing in power does not produce a character arc. Not alone at least. Is it more important that Peter Parker gained the proportional speed and strength of a spider, or that he learned that with great power comes great responsibility? Because without internalising that lesson, suddenly, Spiderman is a villain, or, at best like one of those “super heroes” from “the Boys.” Of course that wasn’t the end of Peter’s character arc, though you could argue that it was the end of one of his character arcs.

How about an example from Star Trek, since that’s what we’re talking about. Ben Sisko, Commander of Deep Space 9 arrived on the station, not expecting to be there for more than a few months. He was scarred and bitter from his experience with the Borg when he lost his wife. His only joy in life was his son, Jake. The Bajorans name him the Emissary, a religious figure of great significance. He is uncomfortable with that. Through the course of the show’s seven seasons, he heals the scars caused by the Borg and the loss of his wife, which leads him to accept his new life fully, and eventually, a new love. He becomes devoted to Deep Space 9, its crew and everything it represents and goes to any lengths to defend it. He embraces his position as Emissary and even prioritises it above all other concerns on several occasions. Through all of this, he is promoted, left in charge of the defence of the Alpha Quadrant against the Dominion, gets a cool new ship and enjoys political influence across two quadrants. But the recognisable gains in temporal power are all reflections of his emotional and personal breakthroughs.

This is what Start Trek Adventures is trying to do, and I think I might love it? I am reserving judgement until my PCs get to the point where they can actually achieve a full character arc themselves.

Milestones

A variety of TOS era Star Fleet officers on the surface of a planet.

This is not an unknown term in the area of levelling up characters, but in the context of this game, Milestones are handled somewhat differently than in D&D 5E. In D&D, Milestone Levelling is simply an alternative to doling out XP. The DM decides at which points of their adventures the adventuring party deserve to level up. It rarely has anything to do with what the players want, although, if timed correctly, it has the potential to be narratively pleasing.

In Star Trek Adventures, each PC makes a note about each adventure in their own personal log. They can write as much or as little about it as they like, but, at the very least, they should note the name of the adventure. I think it could be helpful to also write down the major events of the adventure and the Values they used during them, as that will be relevant to the advancement process.

All PCs have Values. They are important to this process. You can take a look at my character creation post for a bit more on Values, but I can also save you a little time by quoting myself here:

Values – a few brief sentences that describe what your character believes, treasures, and thinks. They should guide roleplaying more than any other aspect of the character

A PC uses their Values to either spend or gain Determination, one of the several currencies you use in this game to improve your chances of succeeding at tasks. After a PC either Challenges or Complies with a Value, they gain Determination. If they chose to Challenge it, they get the opportunity to change their Value to something new, reflecting the lesson they learned in the situation.

If you used a Value during an adventure, you can take the chance at the end to make an adjustment to your PC:

Improve an Attribute by 1 point to a maximum of 11 and at the expense of a point from a different Attribute, which cannot be reduced below 7
Improve a Department by 1 point to a max of 4 and at the expense of a point from a different Department, which cannot be reduced below 1
Replace an existing Focus with a new one
Gain an existing Talent with a new one
Change a Supporting Character in a similar way

Later, you need to reach a point in another adventure when you want to use one of your Values, and when you do that, link it to a previous adventure when you used that same Value. You have to show how the current situation is influenced by that first one. If you can, you gain a point of Determination. You can only use each log entry once like this, so you mark it to show it has been used. Then, at the end of the latest adventure, you write down in your log that you gained a Milestone and the log entry you used to get it. When you do that, you can make an improvement to your character!

You can do one of the following:

Improve an Attribute by 1 point to a maximum of 11
Improve a Department by 1 point to a max of 4
Gain a new Focus
Gain a new Talent
Improve a Supporting Character in a similar way
Improve one of the Ship’s Systems at the expense of another System
Improve one of the Ship’s Departments at the expense of another one
Swap a Ship’s Talent

Now, finally, if you can link the use of that Value to the Milestone you achieved previously? Paydirt. You have yourself a Character Arc. And if you can do that, you can improve even more:

Improve an Attribute by 1 point to a maximum of 12
Improve a Department by 1 point to a max of 5
Gain a new Value
Improve one of the Ship’s Systems
Improve one of the Ship’s Departments
Add a new Ship’s Talent

Every time to you complete a character arc, the next one must involve an additional Milestone, so, that means, another adventure too. I like that this represents the concept of becoming stuck in your ways.

I think this system is a little cumbersome, if I’m honest. At least on paper, it involves a lot of admin from the players in linking their Values and Milestones, not to mention remembering all of this in play. But I love the idea of this guided change in characters’ personalities and Values bringing about significant mechanical changes. This is what I was trying to convey in the summary of Sisko’s arcs above.

Repututation

This is an entirely separate advancement track for your Star Trek Adventures character. It can lead to promotion or demotion, awards or reprimands and it adds another layer to how you might play when you know your PC’s reputation might be on the line.

Your Main Character in Star Trek Adventures starts off with a Reputation score of 3. This represents the score of a reliable Star Fleet officer. Someone their superiors can count on. But you are barely distinguished from the rest of the crew. Of course, reputations change. They can be made or broken by your own actions and how they’re perceived.

To determine how your Reputation might be affected by your actions and words during the course of an adventure you have to make a roll. The Reputation Roll is much like any other task roll except that the target number is your current Reputation score + 7, and the size of your dice pool and the Difficulty of the task are determined by how you answered a series of questions about the adventure you just finished. These questions can be tailored for the specific adventure but the Core Book provides a set of standard ones:

POSITIVE INFLUENCES
Answering yes to the following questions are considered positive influences:

Was your mission successful?
Did you positively use one or more of the mission’s Directives? Did you obey the orders given to you by your superiors? Did you prevent combat from occurring, or avoid escalating hostilities? Did you establish common ground or peaceful cooperation with those who were newly encountered or who were previously hostile to you?
Did you directly contribute to saving the lives of innocent people or your fellow crew?
Did you take all reasonable action to render aid to those in urgent need or distress?

NEGATIVE INFLUENCES
Answering yes to the following questions is considered negative influence on the character’s Reputation:

Was your mission a failure?
Did you challenge one of the mission’s Directives?
Were you disobedient to your superiors?
Were personnel under your command killed during the mission?
Did you employ force to any ends other than the defense of self, ship, crew, or innocent life?
Did you employ lethal force during the mission?
Did you take any unnecessary risks during the mission?
Did you cause, or allow through inaction, innocent lives to be lost during the mission?
Did you lie, cheat, threaten, or coerce others to achieve objectives during the mission?
Did you permit a colleague or subordinate to act unethically or illegally during the performance of their duties?

The number of Positive Influence questions you can truthfully answer “yes” to, is the number of d20s you roll for the Reputation Roll. The number of Negative Influence questions you truthfully answer “yes” is your Difficulty for the Reputation Roll.

After our first adventure we ran through all of these questions. Most of the answers were straight-forward but some elicited lively debates on what might be considered “unethical” or what is meant by “coercion.” In the end, the players enjoyed a pretty high number of successes as they had Difficulty ratings of no more than 1 or 2 but were rolling 6 or 7 dice! For each success above the Difficulty, they gained a point of Acclaim. It is possible to roll lower than the Difficulty. In this case, you get Reprimand points instead.

You can use Acclaim for the following:

Awards – claim Awards like the “Christopher Pike Medal of Valor” or the “Star Cross.” Each Award comes with a beneficial mechanical effect
Commend Another – add dice to a colleague’s Reputation Roll
Elevation – boost a non-commissioned officer to officer status
Gain Favour – Ask an NPC for a favour
Increase Reputation – Spend Acclaim equal to the new Reputation to get an increase
Promotion – Go up one rank unless the commanding officer refuses
Status – gain a new trait for your PC that reflects the experiences they have lived through

On the other hand, Reprimands can lead to detention, being stripped of an award, demotion or even Court Martial! So, best to try and avoid those unless you want a bit of drama.

Conclusion

I think the Reputation system is a fun way to facilitate a very different type of advancement for a Star Trek Adventures character. The Milestone system linked to Values is very personality focused and linked to the PC’s own personal narrative, but Reputation is more like career development and the benefits from that are too. It is, perhaps a little over-designed, in my opinion. Do we really need to have both Reputation Points and Acclaim Points? Couldn’t we find a way to achieve the same ends with one or the other?

But, as I said at the top of this blog post, I think I need to reserve full judgement until we have had a few more Star Trek Adventures. In the meantime, dear reader, live long and prosper!

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!

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

The Editioning, AD&D 2nd Edition, Part 3

It’s thedicepool.com’s second birthday today! Two years ago I decided it was time to stop keeping all my thoughts on RPGs to myself and start writing them down for other people to read.

Anniversary Post

It’s thedicepool.com’s second birthday today! Two years ago I decided it was time to stop keeping all my thoughts on RPGs to myself and start writing them down for other people to read. Why? Well, at the time, dear reader, it was not for the edification or entertainment of others. I was just looking for a creative outlet other than RPGs themselves. Blogging is good for that! It makes you organise and record your thoughts, it can promote interesting discussion, and in writing about a topic, you invariably unearth opinions and insights you might not otherwise have realised you even possessed. It’s a cool pastime. You should try it.

Anyway, this is my second anniversary and my 213th post. In some ways I am returning to a topic that I first brought up waaay back on July 24th 2024: returning to Ad&D 2nd Edition. That post was more Dark Sun focused, but it asked the questions that I’m answering now, during the Editioning, our challenge to play every version of D&D, from OD&D to 5.5E. The main question was, why? Why play this mouldering old edition that is, arguably, overly complicated, over-written and under-nuanced compared to more modern RPGs? Why play a game that I have played, without fear of hyperbole, a shit-tonne of already? Why not play something new instead?

Back in that original post, I admitted to a

morbid curiosity to try it out. More as a historical research project than anything else. How would it compare to more modern systems like 5E or the Year Zero engine or even actual OSR systems?

That sentence, right there, that I wrote two years ago, was the seed that grew into the Editioning. Come to think of it, I may have initiated the Editioning purely so that I had an excuse to play AD&D 2nd Edition again. And, so far, I’m not regretting it.

Back to the Eternal Boundary

The investigation progresses well. It has become very clear to the members of the party that there is something very strange afoot. If you need a recap, feel free to have a look at my last AD&D 2nd Ed post.

Page from the Player's Guide to the Planes from the original Planescape boxed Set. It describes the Dustmen. The illustration is of a Curehead in a long dark robe. — The Dustmen

Aurora ended the last session on her way to the Mortuary, headquarters of her own faction, the Dead, aka the Dustmen. Here she encountered Toranna the Grey, another Dustman, whose job was to send unclaimed bodies to the Elemental Plane of Fire using one of the many interplanar portals located in the building. She consulted her records to discover that the barmy, Eliath, was sent to his ever-lasting reward through that portal just last week. His possessions, likewise, were gone, having been distributed to other Dustmen.

Disappointed, Aurora went to await the arrival of the rest of the party. This dead-end (pun intended) left them at a loose end. They decided to go and visit one of the other locations on the point-crawl style map of the Hive Ward, presented in the adventure, the Blood Pit. This is the most famous pit-fighting arena in the city. It is a centre of gambling and considered neutral ground for the factions.

On the way, however, they decided to revisit the alley where Aurora had seen the corpse of the Dancing Man. It was no longer there. Instead, as the thief and the necromancer argued about what to do next, the ever quiet paladin noticed that they were quickly becoming surrounded by Chaosmen. The Chaosmen, or Xaositects, are another Faction that makes there home in the Hive. They believe in the primacy of chaos in the multiverse and they like the barmies, who they see as inherently chaotic. Chaosmen also have a mixed up, garbled way of speaking that was fun to role-play with. It took a moment before speaking each sentence aloud to just throw all the words into a mental hat and then pick them out at random. This particular group of Xaositects made the assumption that the PCs were responsible for the murder of the barmies on their turf so they showed up and demanded the party’s surrender. Unsurprisingly, they refused and our first combat ensued!

Fight!

Page from the Player's Guide to the Planes from the original Planescape boxed Set. It describes the faction, the Xaositects. The illustration is of a githzerai with a sword — Xaositects

I gave the PCs a chance to surprise their opponents here, as our tiefling thief, Trance, had an idea to drop a sphere of Darkness over the battle-ground right off the bat. I had to double-check both the surprise and initiative rules since they have changed from earlier editions. In order to gain surprise on an opponent, the opponent rolls a d10. If they roll a 1 or a 2 (a variety of adjustments can be made to this roll), they’re surprised. Since I rolled a 9, we went straight to initiative, instead. Initiative in 2nd Ed is also rolled with a d10. Each side rolls, just once, rather than once per round. The side that rolls lower gets to go first. There is a weapon speed modifier to initiative, technically, but I decided not to use it as it’s very fiddly. The Chaosmen won initiative and attacked when they saw their opponents not dropping their weapons. They had a priest with them, who Blessed the others. A big fighter named Mordrigaarz Antill, led them into battle and immediately went to focus on Glaermond, the paladin. The other combatants, all mercs ran into attack everyone else. Fighter and paladin spent the fight smashing each other in the plate armour to no effect but the mercs had more success, landing several significant blows in the first round. When it came to the PCs turn, Aurora sent her familiar, a goat to charge at the priest and did a frankly disgusting 15 damage, leaving the poor bastard with a single hit point. Trance dropped the Darkness and then crept through it to finish off the priest with a backstab. Devansh, our priest of Varuna, decided enough was enough and cast Command on Mordrigaarz, ordering him to surrender. He failed his save and dropped his weapon. The mercs followed suit and that was the end of that. After demanding they hand over their valuables, they had a chat with Mordrigaaarz, who told them they wanted to stop the murders of the barmies in the Hive and that they thought the PCs must have been responsible. Satisfied that they weren’t to blame, he left with the remainder of his group and let the PCs go on to the Blood Pit.

The Blood Pit

Page from the Player's Guide to the Planes from the original Planescape boxed Set. It describes the Faction, the Fraternity of Order. The illustration is of a human man with a headress and a white mustache, sitting in a chair holding a book. — The Guvners

At the Blood Pit, they got to talk to the ale-tap tender, a high-pitched gnome named Felgar. Regular told them a tall-tale about a Guvnor (a nick-name for the Fraternity of Order, another Faction of Sigil. They serve as judges and lawyers for the city.) This Guvnor allegedly discovered a way to transform into a demon to devour the souls of the Hive’s barmies and bubbers. Apparently this was to gather enough power to challenge the Lady of Pain, herself, for supremacy in the city. Aurora did not want to pass up the opportunity to have a little flutter on the fights while they were there. I made this mini-game up on the spot. I told them the next fight to occur in the cage in the centre of this dilapidated warehouse on the outskirts of the Hive, was between a nimble, leather-clad human rogue and a muscle-bound, scarred ogre. Then I got two of the other players to roll for each side. There was a roll off for each of three rounds of the bout. The first round went to the human rogue as he flitted around his opponent. The second was taken by the ogre who smacked the rogue a good one with his windmilling tree-trunk-like arms. The third round, was a tie so they died together as the human stabbed the ogre in the neck as he was crushed by a bear-hug. Aurora got her money back and counted herself lucky.

Page from the Player's Guide to the Planes from the original Planescape boxed Set. It describes the faction, the Doomguard. The illustration is of a dark haired humanoid woman holding a knife. — The Doomguard

While in the Blood Pit, Trance was again approached by the messenger urchin from the start of the adventure. They were summoned to Bendon Mawl. They had a rest that night and went to see their patron the next morning. He told them that Eliath, the very barmy they’d been looking for, the man who Toranna the Grey had said was so much ash in the Elemental Plane of Fire, had been seen in a pub in the Lower Ward. Not only that but he didn’t look too barmy anymore and he seemed to have joined the Doomguard (yet another Faction, who believes in the inevitability of entropy.) Off they went to investigate this new lead. Eliath had been seen with a group of Doomguard in the Black Sail, a tavern near the Doomguard’s HQ, the Armoury. The building itself is the prow of a galleon sticking out from between two more mundane frontages. Its sail hangs low and is stained coal black from years of exposure to the smokes billowing from the Armoury. They got a room and set themselves up for a stake-out.

Conclusion

Page from the Player's Guide to the Planes from the original Planescape boxed Set. It describes the faction, the Society of Sensation. The illustration is of a human wiman kneeling and holding a sceptre. — The Sensates

We have such a wonderfully diverse and interesting selection of characters in the party that it has promoted some genuinely engrossing philosophical arguments. There are three different factions represented, to lawful characters and two chaotic. Our priest is a Guvnor, so has to continually justify the party’s less than law-abiding actions, or, simply try to ignore them. He could not gamble at the Blood Pit but did consider just leaving some of his gold out on counter for Aurora to gamble with for him. Our Dustman and our Sensate, despite both being Chaotic, are furthest apart, philosophically, however, and this has encouraged some truly fascinating discussions, with the Sensate thinking that the Dead are, perhaps, responsible for what is happening in the Hive. Meanwhile, our paladin, somewhat deficient in smarts, is content to simply be led around by the nose to do whatever. This could come back to bite him in the arse at some stage, given how unforgiving the gods can be when it comes to paladins committing what they may deem evil acts.

Our first combat was quite successful! I had to check a couple of rules on the fly and I was caught flat footed by movement speeds, but otherwise, I think we all enjoyed it. It certainly helped that it was brought to a swift end, rather than turning into a war of attrition. Also, I am vindicated in starting our PCs off at 3rd level. It gave them a wider choice of abilities and spells to choose from and made the fight a lot more interesting.

OK, I’m off to my second birthday party. Gonna sit in my high-chair and plaster myself in cake and banana.

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.

UVG x Troika

Vibes

It’s easy to categorise RPGs by genre. Traveller is sci fi, D&D is fantasy, Cyberpunk Red is, well, cyberpunk, Call of Cthulhu is horror. There’s no real question about that. But, when you want to do an RPG medley, you’ve got to consider rulesets and vibes. D&D and Gamma World are basically the same ruleset, which makes it handy to mash ‘em up. But more importantly, their vibes are vibing on the same frequency. This has a lot to do with the art style in the books and the ways in which the games themselves are presented as well as the settings. I’m sure I’m not the only one to take their Gamma World players through a portal to a D&D fantasy world where they could blast dragons with their enormous radiation guns. It just made sense because of the vibes.

We finished a Mörk Borg campaign earlier this year. Got all the way to the end of the world, believe it or not. Cleverly, our GM, Isaac, ended that world and then woke us up from the the virtual reality game our Cy-Borg characters had all been immersed in. Someday, we’ll return to this game that’s also a new game. Now the vibes of these to are so obviously similar because they were both made by the Stockholm Kartell and designed by Johan Nohr. The art style is brash and neon and loud for both so you feel like they vibe together naturally.

Today I want to discuss a couple of games that you might not automatically mention in the same breath, Ultraviolet Grasslands, Luka Rejec’s psychedelic, prog-rock fuelled old school trading simulator, and Troika, Daniel Sell’s Science Fantasy Moorcock/Wolfe mashup using the rules for Fighting Fantasy and the surreal art stylings of Shuyi Zhang and Andrew Walter among others. OK, you might mention them in the same breath, actually. They both tickle a very particular armpit, in between the arm of sci-fi and the torso of fantasy, and, to me, their vibes intersect perfectly. So much so that I decided to employ a Troika adventure in UVG.

The Adventure So Far

The PCs have been on the road for more than six weeks. From the Violet City on the shores of the Circle Sea they have traveled west through the Ultraviolet Grasslands. They’ve encountered Lime Nomads, giant mushroom-tending armadillos, cyborg-like bio-tech lifeforms called vomes, and even a furniture trader named Jonky Bonko so far. And at every point along the way they have gathered resources and items to trade, hopefully for a profit. This has been their over-riding motivation thus far in the campaign. The players are utterly invested in the success of their joint business venture, which they have named Isosceles Inc. Watching their Cash numbers go up has definitely been exciting for them, especially when they make a really good market research roll, or haggle their way into a selling price three times higher than their buying price. But I have been wanting a bit more old-school in it too. To that end, I’ve been seeding something in the otherwise completely randomly generated adventures. It originated in a random encounter, but I kept it running through a couple of other random encounters.

They rescued the daughter of a Lime Nomad clan chief and returned her to her mother. The mother, grateful and impressed, entrusted them with a message in the form of an item known as a portable illusion. She asked them to take it to her sponsor, a Porcelain Prince called Black Pot 5-Body at the Porcelain Citadel. Almost immediately, they rolled up another random encounter with a Porcelain Prince out on the road. A Porcelain Prince is an intelligence that’s distributed across a number of humanoid bodies that wear matching porcelain masks. The PCs, wary and out-numbered mentioned that they were on the way to see Black Pot 5-Body in the Porcelain Citadel in the hope that it would encourage this Prince to treat them favourably. On the contrary, the mention of Black Pot seemed to cause something of a stir. The Prince promptly sent a messenger off in the direction of the city. The PCs promptly killed the messenger in the grasslands and buried him in a shallow grave.

Later, at the Low Road and the High trading post, they heard a rumour that an ultra-conservative Porcelain Prince, Meissen 13-Unity had dedicated themself to restoring the Citadel to the unity of thought not exemplified since the end of the Properly Recorded Period. Not only that but that Sunfire 3-body, who they had met on the road, was an adherent of theirs. At this stage, the PCs were not able to put things together. But once they pushed on towards the Citadel they ran into a random encounter, the caravan of another Porcelain Prince, this time, an ally of Black Pot 5-body. This time, the Prince sold them a pass to get them into the Upper Citadel, where they could do business and find the Prince they were looking for.

Finally, they reached the Porcelain Citadel, the great hand-shaped edifice towering over the grasslands doing devil’s horns. They had been eager to do some carousing here. The PCs had a taste of it in the Violet City at the start of the campaign and gained a lot of XP from it so they saw it as a short-cut. This time, one of their number got completely fucked up on drugs and managed to lose most of their Cash as a consequence of a particularly poor Carousing roll. So they needed to make some money quick. The next day they went to visit Black Pot 5-Body in their workshop. There they presented the eccentric Prince with the Portable Illusion. They activated it and they all witnessed a Porcelain Prince being abducted from a camp by an enormous winged creature with a hand where its head should have been. They were dumped in an enormous nest at the top of a massive index finger stretched up into the sky, as high as a mountaintop. From there the view within the illusion changed and they saw the Prince negotiating with a wizard in a black tower atop another digit of this huge hand. He exchanged a copy of a book for the wizard to help him escape back to the Grasslands. And then the illusion ended. Black Pot was very excited. This was their chance! They had finally found the evidence they had needed for so long. The original book that would prove that the laughable philosophy of their political rival, Meissen 13-Unity was based on nothing more than a work of fiction designed to satirise the exact sort of overtly conservative views they thought were espoused by it.

That’s a lot of backstory. Suffice it to say, Black Pot employed the PCs to get abducted from their dreams by the bird-with-a-hand-for-its-head so they could be taken to the mountainous hand and retrieve that book. They went into the grasslands and did just that. They woke up in the nest, just like in the Illusion. After avoiding the gaze of THOG, the bird-thing, they killed some worms escaped the nest and found themselves on the tip of that cyclopean index finger looking out on a wide green land and a cerulean blue sky. They knew immediately that they weren’t in Kansas anymore.

I loved this moment. At this point, the players did not know they had just transitioned from UVG-proper to the Troika adventure, The Hand of God, so they had no reason to suspect anything. Also, there have been hints of portals and other worlds dotted around the plains in our campaign so far, so they had no reason to think this was anything but more UVG weirdness. I kept up the pretence as long as I could. But, eventually I shared one of the illustrations from the adventure in our chat and Isaac was quickly able to identify the distinctive style of Andre Walter, so well known for his Troika work. He asked me if this was a Troika adventure and I answered honestly as is the law.

But that was ok! It helped me in fact. The players understood that I would have a little work to do to translate from one ruleset to the other when I had to spring things on them so they have been quite forgiving.

Conversion

For the first session in the Hand of God, I didn’t even do any preparation of encounters in UVG terms. I winged it completely and that was fine. It would absolutely have been better if I had prepped, but it was ok. The nice thing about both rulesets is that they are light. A UVG creature’s strength is based largely on levels/hit dice, in a very D&D-esque way. So I was able to use the following table to work things out approximately while my players waited patiently.

But the fact was, the only combat encounter they had was with a couple of weak and lowly Prayer Worms. In Troika terms, they had low Skill and medium Stamina and their only special was screaming when they died so it was was easy to look at that table and decide to make them level 0.

I rolled up another random encounter as two of the three PCs made their way down through the index finger’s stony interior. There, on the stair, they found a poor undead whose body had been crushed by a fallen boulder. She told them she would reward them if they would bring her to the undead village of Jigigji over on the Little Finger. So they re-reanimated her decimated body and brought her along with them. Meanwhile, the third member of Isosceles glided across the span to the next finger on his handy glider. He landed on the opposite side of the bridge long before the other two made it there. At this point I knew they would be running into a lot of potentially tricky encounters that I thought I should prepare better. So we left that till the next session. In between, I converted all the stats for all the potential encounters, whether random or planned. The conversion did not always fit neatly into the rows of the table above. Sometimes I would add more hit dice if they had more Stamina than Skill, and I would always look at the potential damage on the Troika damage tables to decide the dice and bonuses to give them in the UVG context. None of this was particularly taxing, although I’m sure some GMs would do the conversion differently to me, if they wanted something more or less balanced.

The next session they dealt with a bridge troll and his gremlin minions, but realised they were in for a tough time on this adventure quite quickly. Once they got across the bridge, they soon reached the black tower of the wizard as shown to them by the Portable Illusion. In the adventure, this is known as Rezkin’s Folly. All they would have to do is get into this powerful wizard’s abode, avoiding the fireballs being flung by the magical orb security system and all the weird shit inside, and they would get the chance to maybe retrieve that book!

The Folly is presented as a mini dungeon within the context of the overall adventure. It has fourteen rooms and its spread over a mere eight pages. It is very easy to read and absorb and most of it is usable in any system, with only the creature stats requiring conversion.

There are some Wizard spells referenced in the adventure that are taken directly from the Troika core book. I had to spend a bit of time looking up UVG spells that worked as alternatives to their Troika counterparts. None of these were really done on a one-to-one basis. Troika spells are generally fairly D&Dish, but UVG spells might really do anything, conceivably. I used both the UVG core-book and the forthcoming Wastelands Guidebook to help with this.

Conclusion

Well, we haven’t concluded this adventure by any means. Isosceles Inc have only made it into the tower’s lowest floor. They have encountered a gossamer assassin creature and survived, but still have to make it to the treasure room and out again. They also need to bring their undead companion back to Jgigji and then escape this potential dreamworld to get back to the Grasslands!

So far, I am loving how well the Troika adventure vibes with UVG. There are some anachronisms, like trolls and gremlins, which seem a little too generic-fantasy for the weirdness of UVG, but, on the other hand (if you’ll excuse the pun) they’re on a ginormous hand and they were sent there by a weirdo who lives in a giant hand. This was obviously the thing that linked UVG and the Hand of God in my head. Somehow, this dreamworld leaked into the “real world” of UVG and led the Porcelain Princes to build their Citadel. And, perhaps, the item that same their citadel from repression is contained in it.

Anyway, this adventure will continue soon, hopefully. Our gaming has been dominated by the Editioning recently, but, hopefully, we’ll get some more UVG x Troika in soon!

The Editioning Week Four, OD&D

The Woes of Sorrowfield, Session Three

The hex-crawl continues through the Barrenwood. The PCs have been doing their best in difficult circumstances. Sorrowfield is a miserable place right now. There have been some sort of magical ballistics going off over town and country, undead and chimerae stalk the land and the bloody rain hasn’t stopped in weeks. Perhaps it was the constant and growing danger around them that prompted the adventurers to finally question the motives of the pixies they’d been following for a few hours through the forest.

The pixies, you see, had been trying to get them to the lake in the northwest part of the woods. Once they reached it, however, they could see a soft, violet glow from the waters. It matched the glow from the crystals they had discovered throughout the forest so far. The pixies hovered above the lake and asked them to dive in, claiming the source of the corruption was submerged beneath the unsettled waters. The PCs thought better of it despite the pixies’ mocking and cajoling. They wanted to circumnavigate the lake to see what sort of traps the mischievous little fae had in store for them, but that proved difficult. To the east, the river emerged from the lake’s waters, and there were no convenient trees to chop down to act as a bridge this time. To the northwest, they found a vast patch of crystalline briars. Since the briars covered the entire hex, they eventually decided to go one hex further around to the west, avoiding it entirely. This forced them into a a hex that was particularly confusing, with lots of entangling plants that tried to trip them. I asked them to roll a d6 to see if they got lost. They avoided rolling a 1 so they were able to press on in their desired direction.

All of the above; the pixies, the briars, the hex of confusion, all came from encounter table rolls. You can see that table on my last OD&D post here. They have all come together to make some interesting challenges and have forced the PCs to explore further than they might otherwise have. I’m fairly satisfied with most entries on the table. I feel like there’s a good mix of combat and non-combat encounters that require a good variety of solutions, skills and ingenuity to deal with. But there were two entries I really hoped they would roll up. Lucky me, those were their next two rolls!

The very next hex they entered, they rolled an 8, so they came across the Hermit’s Shack. They knew from rumours gathered in town, that there was a Hermit out in the woods somewhere, so it wasn’t a big surprise. They approached politely and Breandan welcomed them in, offering them tea and “biscuits.” I had a great time playing this guy. After a couple of sessions of mainly exploration and combat, it was refreshing to have some solid role-play. He was eccentric but friendly enough. He explained that he had run into the other group of adventurers who had been sent from the town of East Barrens. They had come across his shack on the way back from the ruined wizard’s tower on the coast to the west. They explained to him that they had been rebuffed in their attempts to delve into the dungeon beneath the ruins. Wave after wave of undead appeared as if by magic on the first level below. There was no way through… These adventurers had moved on after a restful visit, turning back towards the town.

Breandan also had a quest for the adventurers. He wanted them to hunt down and slay the carnivorous crystal elk that had been terrorising him of late. He wanted to travel up along the river to the north to see if he could escape this crystalline corruption, but every time he attempted the journey, the elk chased him back home. He promised the PCs a valuable reward if they would do this for them. They readily agreed and, after resting up in his cabin for a few hours, they set off to do just that.

Now, I considered just having the elk itself as the encounter in the next hex, but I decided, in the end, to stick to my own rules. I got them to roll on the encounter table again. This time they rolled a 6. The halfling heard them before she saw them, a shambling, groaning group of partly crystallised undead amongst the trees ahead. She tried moving silently through the woods to flank them and get a better look, but she failed badly, and got slammed to the floor by a zombie instead. This encounter was really over before it began, even though the zombies won the initiative roll. They couldn’t hit any of the other PCs, and then Tadhg, the cleric, now on Village Priest level (level 3) stepped in. A Village Priest can ably and automatically turn zombies, just have to roll 2d6 to figure out how many are affected. Well, Tadhg turned all four of them. But as he did so, the party got a good look at the zombies, two humans, a dwarf and a halfling, the exact make-up of the other band of adventurers. Now, this encounter on the table also involved the reward of an adventuring diary, which the PCs would have gotten if they had a chance to loot them. Since they sent them running instead, I decided to bring the elk into play. As the dwarven zombie was scarpering, the monstrous crystal antlers of the carnivorous elk emerged from between the trees, skewering him and sending him flying through the air. And suddenly, they were back in combat.

I like the “per-side” round by round initiative roll of OD&D. I like that it utilises a simple d6. I even like that, if both sides rolls are equal, then everything happens simultaneously. All of this adds a bit more randomness to the proceedings and keeps it interesting. Especially in this system where each combat round equals a full minute, you can imagine the ebb and flow of combat evolving constantly, with the momentum swinging one way for a time, and reversing quickly and unexpectedly when the enemy spots a weakness or exploits their opponents’ mistakes.

This was the strongest monster they had faced yet but I was only reminded of the primacy of action economy in D&D. It applies as much in this version as it does in 5E. One combatant against six is not an equal fight, no matter how many hit dice that one enemy has, unless they’ve also got six attacks per round. So, of course, they made relatively short work of it, and somehow, managed to avoid any further damage as well. What these two fights combined really showed, though, was the full range of combat abilities in the group. We had turning undead and healing magic, we had magic missiles and invisibility, and, as well as that we had backstabs and the Fighting Man even got in a mighty blow or two.

After they had dealt with the elk, they investigated the body of the dwarven zombie. Finding a diary on it, they were able to confirm that the corpse used to be Ferris, the son of the town’s blacksmith and stonemason. The PCs had been asked to keep an eye out for him by his mother so finding him like this was a poignant moment. His diary described his journey to the old wizard’s tower, the hidden entrance to the underground dungeon and the desperate fight with the hordes of undead in the basement. They had been forced to retreat, as Breandan had said earlier.

With that, they took the head of the elk and the body of Ferris back to Brendan’s place. They asked if he would return the body to his parents in town but he refused, conceding instead that they could bury him there on his land. They did so and held an impromptu funeral for the boy. It was a touching scene. That done, they received their reward from the hermit and rested up again that night before setting out for the wizard’s tower the next morning.

I just want to share with you the hex map as it looks now. The players, totally unbidden, have been filling it in with the things they’ve encountered on their way through the Barrenwood on the Roll20 map. I love this!

The hex map of Barrenwood. Now with added colour! — The players have been drawing on my map and I love it!

Conclusion

We had a couple more level ups following that session so some of the band are now level 4! I will be honest, I had not totally foreseen the speed they would be levelling at. Still, it was my decision to make levelling as easy as possible. For instance, I am allowing level-ups at the ends of each session, rather than the ends of adventures and I am handing out plenty of gold and treasure (1GP + 1XP in this edition), as well as bonus xp for completing quests and clever solutions to problems. So, I’m actually quite happy with the situation.

What it does mean though, is that I will have to upgrade some of the encounters I had planned for the dungeon itself. Since I don’t have the whole thing prepared yet and I’m not writing up entire stat blocks for encountered monsters anyway, it’s really no more work in prep than I was going to have anyway. I plucked that elk out of the Monsters & Treasure book’s list of monster stats at the last minute. It was a just a re-skinned unicorn. I love being able to do this quickly and easily when I don’t feel beholden to the 1000 entries in various monster books to choose from. I would often find myself in decision paralysis when presented with all the monsters available in official products for 5E, unable to find the exact right one for a given encounter, despite the sheer number of them. I don’t have that problem here at all since all the monsters are just a collection of hit dice and ACs with maybe a special feature to set them apart. It’s very easy to imagine that line of stats as representing any monster at all, or to customise them as you see fit.

Anyway, that’s it for the report on Session Three. It might be a few weeks before there’s another one, what with various IRL happenings. But I’ll be back next week, probably with a post on my current UVG exploits utilising the Troika adventure, The Hand of God. See you then, dear reader.

The Editioning: Week Three, OD&D

OD&D, The Woes of Sorrowfield, Session Two

Let me start by saying, if you’re one of my players, turn back now! Do not read! Danger! Danger!

The PCs gathered some hirelings. The town of East Barrens was not replete with adventuring types or even warriors, so I ruled that the only idiots available for hire were what OD&D refers to as “normal men.” This is a term from CHAINMAIL, I think, and means they are not fighters of any kind. Basically, they’re what later editions might call 0-level NPCs. Four of them showed up for duty. They did not all survive the session…

Hirelings are an interesting part of old D&D. You don’t really hear of a lot of 5e adventuring parties taking on a bunch of mercenaries as backup. But I remember playing AD&D particularly back in the olden days, the party would always want an extra NPC or two. They were often necessary to ensure survival. Playing OSR games like the Black Hack and Black Sword Hack, we have always employed hirelings for a variety of reasons in recent years too. Even in UVG, you probably won’t get very far without a crew of NPCs to keep your caravan running smoothly. UVG’s pretty old school in that respect. In the old games, they were pretty much just damage soaks, meat shields and extra carrying capacity. Even today, as a GM, I find I only role-play them when the players remember they exist as characters, which is not very often. In our Basic D&D game, the adventure we’re playing, Keep on the Borderlands, is designed for 6 to 9 players or something nuts like that, so we went all out of hirelings. Especially after my character got murdered by bandits in the first combat of the game. In oD&D and Basic, I think it’s easier to handle a larger number of characters, especially in combat. You don’t have to remember all those actions and complicated initiative order that you have in 5e and other more modern systems. Mostly, each character gets one actions/attack and they can move and that’s it. You roll initiative per side each round so you don’t have to keep the order in mind for a whole combat. This keeps it smooth. At least, that was our experience last week in both games.

The adventurers set off into the Barrenwood. They had to pass through it to find the source of the magical attacks the forest and the town had been coming under for weeks. It had not stopped raining and the road was a mucky morass. They trudged along the overgrown path into the dark, rotting woods and, before long encountered some trouble. A swarm of crystal infected arachnids had built a supernaturally strong web across the path in the dark, at just the height to trap unwary travellers. That’s what it did to our Fighting Man, Siward, who was leading the way. Abiss, the Halfling Thief set about cutting him free with her magical bronze sword while the others tried to scare off the spiders. Tadhg, the Cleric, made clever use of his lamp oil and torch, by blowing the oil out of his mouth at the flame to create a DIY breath weapon, incinerating a large part of the swarm and the webs as well, freeing Siward! They found some treasure on the ground below the webs, gold and some more magic items, a magic mace and a Staff of Striking.

I am running the Wilderness expedition as a hex-crawl. Here’s a picture of the hex map I drew in my “Pocket Dimension” from the Melsonian Arts Council. I bought a pack of ten of these a couple of years ago and I’m finally getting some use out of them.

A hex map in a hex-flower shape. It has letters from A to G along the top and numbers from 01 to 13 along the left hand side. There is a town in G-04 with a river flowing south and through it. a road goes from the town southeast and off the map. Another branches off into the forest that takes up the rest of the hex map. In the forest there is a lake B-05 and river winding south through the trees. — Barrenwood hexmap

Anyway, you can see the town in the north-east of the map and most of the rest of it is forest by design. I want the entire Wilderness portion of the adventure to take place in the Barrenwood. The area is not very large. I haven’t defined the exact size, but I’m thinking about an hour of travel per hex, with time added for encounters and rough terrain. Essentially, I ask the players to roll 2d6 on this encounter table each time they enter a new hex.

2	Undead animals – crystalline growths – They won’t attack unless attacked. They make terrible noises while attempting to go on as if they were alive. Stats as Skeletons.
3	Trapped merchant – stuck in a tree with strange crystalline chimeric creatures below. Stats as Zombies. Succesful attacks provoke a save vs Stone. Offers them 1000 GP to save him.
4	Swarm of glowing crystalline spiders – trap! Treasure dropped amongst the webs – Staff of Striking, Mace +1, 560 GP, 300 SP, 500 CP. The spiders can do no damage but PCs will need to make saves vs Stone.
5	Undead trees – crystalline branches. brittle and weak to fire – try to grab PCs. Treasure inside them – Total of 400 GP.
6	Crystalline undead – one has a journal explaining how to find the entrance to the dungeon
7	Pixies – frightened and angry – try to trick the pcs into swimming in the lake, diving for treasure
8	Hermit’s shack – Breandan only drinks rain-water he collects himself in casks. Wagers the adventurers that they can’t kill the carnivorous crystal elk that he says has been stalking him. He will offer them an old silver amulet with a ruby in it (3000 GP.) Can also tell them the best way to reach the coast so they don’t have to roll on the encounter table anymore. Says he encountered another adventuring party returning from the tower ruins a while ago. Apparently they were frightened off by a horde of undead on the first subterranean level.
9	Nothing but more sodden trees and undergrowth trying to trip them. Roll 1d6. On a 1, become lost. Roll 1d6 to determine the direction they go in.
10	Crystalline briar patch. It takes up the whole hex. Will require ingenuity to traverse, or they can go around. If they brave the crystal thorns they will need to make one Save vs Stone per turn for six turns. They will find treasure, however. Roll on Type A table each turn.
11	Roll on Wilderness Encounters tables in the Underworld and Wilderness Adventures page 18
12	The rain stops and the sun comes out. Crystalline shards glisten upon every bough and underfoot. A lost Acolyte finds them. Grainne Bell, CL 1, AC5, HP3, THAC0 19, Turn Undead, Crystalline ear

Barrenwood Encounter Table.
I can’t figure out how to format this so it doesn’t look like crap on the blog. Sorry!

So far, this method has worked well and has been telling a story, which is what I wanted. I have struggled to stick exactly to the letter of the old OD&D books, mostly because so much is left to the referee in play. But there is also another point. The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures random encounter mechanic just didn’t work for me and the game I’m creating with the players at the table. There is a lot in the that book about castles in the wilderness, and a set number of hexes you can travel in a day and how far away you can be from a monster and still be surprised. There are no castles in the Barrenwood. It wouldn’t make sense in the context. Surprise will occur if no-one Hears Noise from the trees because it’s a forest and not open territory. And surely hexes can be any size one chooses? For all these reasons, I decided to go with my own hex-map + encounter table combo. It’s simple and effective.

The PCs escaped the spider webs with their loot and no casualties, although one of the NPCs got bit by a spider and failed her Save vs Stone so her index finger turned into crystal. She managed to keep it together enough to continue, though. They moved on into the next hex towards the river and they encountered a pair of mischievous pixies who flew around them laughing and invisible. The Magic user, Ilaina, used her own Ring of Invisibility and I ruled that she was able to to see the diminutive fairies in that state, because I thought it was a cool idea. She was able to identify what they were up against and get a good look at them (they had thought, perhaps, that these were talking crows that they’d heard tell of in the town.) This seemed to anger the pixies but they nonetheless agreed to show them the source of the magical bursts which had polluted the waters and damaged the town.

The mischievous pixies left the PCs on one side of the raging river that passed through the forest while they flew on and laughed at them from the opposite bank. Siward and one of the hirelings, Edmund, used their axes to chop down one of the more gargantuan stress on their side and I asked for an attack roll from Siward to hit the other side with it. I did this, mainly because there is not really a mechanic to test abilities and there are no skills at all, unless you mean thief skills. I briefly considered adopting the roll-under mechanic used in Basic D&D, but felt that I would rather use the mechanics as presented for this, as much as possible. I really am just picking and choosing which rules to employ here. So, with their makeshift bridge in place, the party clambered across to a an area relatively devoid of trees. Since they had entered a new hex, I asked for another encounter table roll. Sticking close to the riverside, Abbis was able to hear a rustling and cracking coming their way through the trees, giving the adventurers a heads-up to the emergence a moment later of a half-dozen undead trees! My idea for these monsters was basically, zombie treants, brittle and rotting and falling apart. I gave them the stats of a regular zombie from the Men & Monsters book, but made them extra susceptible to fire damage, not that that came up in the fight. It was a tough combat! Our thief was lucky that she had levelled up the previous session or she would have died when she got brained by a rotting tree limb and two of the NPCs, Edmund, who I had named for my dead Basic D&D PC, and Brianna of the crystal finger, went down. The party were victorious but it had been a costly battle. Luckily, the bole of one of the undead trees was filled with treasure!

That’s where we wrapped up the session. Everyone levelled up at the end of it, what with all the treasure I’d been throwing at them.

Conclusion

This week, more than the previous one, I have become aware exactly how difficult it is to stick to the idea of playing this game as it would have been in 1976. It’s really impossible. My gaming brain has been influenced for good or for ill by so many story-games, the OSR and even later editions of D&D that its essentially impossible not to feel their effects on what we’re doing.
But, then again, I’m sure there were as many ways of playing this game at the time, as there were groups playing it. You would have had you hard-core war-gamers that used it as fantasy set-dressing, your power gamers and min-maxers who wanted to do nothing but gain XP and influence, castles and followers and power and there were probably still others who played it as a fantasy romp with real role-playing elements and deep character backstories. So, I’m quitting my hand-wringing over it. As far as this Editioning challenge goes, it has to be secondary to the enjoyment of the players, including me. Otherwise, what’s the point?