Rules – The Dice Pool

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 Trundled 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, out 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 insatead 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?

Downtime in the Dark

My First Downtime

I’m taking a break from taking a break from Wednesday posts for this one. We had Session 2 of our Blades in the Dark campaign last week, and our first downtime. I also decided to start introducing a few elements from the latest Blades sourcebook, Deep Cuts, which came out earlier this year. So, I wanted to write about our experiences.

Deep Cuts Character Options

The head and shoulders of a person in portrait. They wear a metalic mask over the top half of their face and a hooded cloak. They are an Acolyte Spirit Warden — An Acolyte Spirit Warden by John Harper

Deep Cuts really expands on the options for your new scoundrels. It doesn’t replace what’s available in Blades, it just adds depth. For instance, if your PC is Akorosi, maybe your family served among the clergy for the Church of Ecstasy. If your scoundrel had a military background, maybe they were a Rifle Scout, serving in the Deathlands and harassing “enemies with sniper attacks.” Before we got into the session proper, I offered all of the players to not only select from these new options, but also to reassign any of the Action dots they had assigned to reflect their Heritages or Backgrounds. What I discovered was most of them had already formed a pretty solid image of their characters in their heads. Even the one player who did take me up on my offer, only took the two examples I laid out above for their Hound because they fit the picture they had imagined so well.

I’m still quite fond of a lot of these new Heritage and Background options. They might have been a lot more useful if I had offered them from the start.

Downtime by the Book

In Blades in the Dark, John Harper tells us there are two main purposes to having a separate downtime phase:

The first is that the players could do with a little break after the action of the score that just went down. To be honest, this one doesn’t ring very true for me, but that’s probably because it’s been six IRL weeks since the last session and the crew’s first score. I also get the impression that, once you get the hang of this game, you’re sometimes running a score and downtime in the one session, rather than a score session followed by a downtime session. If that were the case, I can see the advantage of breaking the action up.
Second, moving into downtime is a sign to all that we are changing the mechanics that will be needed in the game. To me, this seems like the more concrete of the two purposes. Blades in the Dark has tools for you to use during a score, and only during a score, and it has tools you only pull out during downtime. We don’t need to worry about divvying up the proceeds, dealing with the heat you’ve brought down on yourself or figuring out your long-term crew goals while you’re beating in some poor Red Sash’s head. Let that wait until you’ve got time and space for it.

Luckily for me, it’s easy to follow along with the Downtime chapter of BitD. Once again, I have to praise the usefulness and usability of the book. The layout of the chapter leads you by the hand through the phase, from one step to the next. Three of my players have taken responsibility for maintaining the various crew/campaign tracker/factions sheets without my even suggesting it so that made the job even easier.

Payoff was easy enough, just a simple matter of recording the Rep the Death Knells got and dividing up the 6 Coin they garnered from the last score. They took one each, popped one in the crew stash and paid their tithe to Lyssa, the new leader of the Crows, as their patron. I ran this moment as a scene. I don’t think I would have if it wasn’t for the fact that she was pissed off with them for raiding the Red Sashes’ drug dens on the Docks, and I wanted them to know. She also gave them the option to take a job to redeem themselves. The Hive have been a bit too active in Crow’s Foot for her liking. She wanted the Death Knells to do something about it.

I mentioned Deep Cuts earlier. New mechanics appear in the sourcebook for downtime. They make it diceless, and they would also definitely up the Coin our crew made from that score if we had been using them. In BitD, you are given a range from 2 Coin for a minor job to 10+ Coin for a major score. In Deep Cuts, the Coin the crew accrues is determined like this:

Score – 1 Coin per PC, plus Coin equal to the target’s Tier x3.
Seized Assets – 4-8 Coin for a vault of cash. Stolen items can be fenced for 1-8+ Coin, but you take Heat (see next page).
Claims – Collect payment from crew claims like a Vice Den.

Like I indicated above, we used the standard downtime rules from Blade in the Dark in this session. Now that we’ve experienced that, I’ll put it to the players to see if we want to make the switch. If and when we do that, I’ll come back and examine the other downtime changes then.

It was fun calculating Heat for that score. I’ll admit, I didn’t warn them that killing people on scores really hikes up the Heat. They started off the whole thing by murdering a bouncer, of course. In fact, I didn’t really explain the concept of Heat to them beforehand at all. This meant that they went in hard, loud and chaotic. I actually think this was for the best. The game is built on building up consequences, after all, as well as narrating big, exciting action sequences. Anyway, they ended up with 6 Heat, which was fast approaching a Wanted level. That put the shits up them.

In the book, the Heat section also includes the Incarceration section, which seems logical to me, but I didn’t need to refer to it, so I’m skipping it here.

Of course, due to all that Heat, they had to roll on the worst of the three Entanglements tables. These represent all the potential impacts of contacts, acquaintances, enemies and authorities getting wind of what the crew have been up to. Entanglements range from Gang Trouble, which can be dealt with internally, to Arrest! If you get that, it’s going to cost you Coin, a crew member or the effort to escape capture. The Death Knells rolled up Interrogation so our Hound was caught on her own and dragged down to the station for some “enhanced” questioning. We played this out in a fun scene where she went out to get beer to celebrate their big score and got ambushed out behind the pub by Sergeant Klellan and his boys. She wisely Resisted the level 2 Harm and the additional Heat, without incurring a single point of stress! All the others could do when she finally turned up was wonder where their beer was…

So then, we spent a bit of time going through what’s possible during the downtime phase in our last session. This can all be a little overwhelming the first time you do it. It can also take quite a while to get through each player’s turn as you talk through the possibilities and they negotiate amongst themselves to see who will spend their activities on reducing Heat for the whole crew. Sometimes it’s obvious who should do what. If a character has some Harm, it’s probably a good idea for them to get some treatment and Recover. If another scoundrel is a bit stressed out, they should go and Indulge their Vices to help them relax, but training, long term projects and acquiring assets are all more subjective. The chances are, they’ll turn out to be useful to the whole crew in the future, but they don’t feel quite as immediate in their effect as clearing Heat.

Anyway, I was gratified to see the PCs did all of the six possible downtime activities at least once. They managed to clear practically all their Heat. The Leech did this by studying the movements of the Bluecoats around the district so they could avoid them. The Whisper took an inventive approach, by losing a bar-room brawl in the King’s Salty Knuckles tavern, thus proving that he couldn’t be part of a crew of Bravos!

Our Cutter decided to acquire an asset, an old and worn-out little boat for use on a future score, perhaps. The players ad-libbed a scene in which they ribbed him about the state of the thing. But, of course, it only needs to be used once.

A person "walks" through the air above the darkened city,seemingly on lightning bolts emanating from their feet. — “I’m walking through the air!”

We had another scene when the Whisper’s strange friend Flint turned up on his canal boat with some electroplasm. Our Whisper needed it to build himself a lightning hammer as a Long Term Project. From Flint he also learned about the Sparkrunners, a gang of rogue scientists who are out there boosting government tech. This is one of the new factions from Deep Cuts, which “sparked” my imagination.

Just before we wrapped up for the evening, our Hound decided to deal with all her stress by visiting her local Temple of the Church of Ecstasy. She prayed and prayed, she prayed to hard and too much. She over-indulged in her vice and something bad happened. The bouncer she killed on the last score decided to haunt her!

Other Actions

Of course other actions are possible during downtime too. They decided to visit the ghost who had given them such good info during their Information Gathering phase in the previous session, because he said he would help them more if they really fucked those Sashes up good. From him, they discovered that Lyssa was responsible for the death of Roric, whose leadership of the Crows she then usurped. She had been backed up by the Red Sashes who had killed out ghost friend. He told them to go to Mardin Gull in Tangletown for the skinny on what all that was about. This wasn’t a downtime activity or an entanglement or anything. It was just something they wanted to do.

The Imperial Airship, the Covenant flies bove the darkened city streets, shining searchlights down to illuminate a meeting on a bridge. — Its the Fuzz!

I also introduced a few more Deep Cuts factions in a little news segment. They learned about the Sailors being press-ganged on the Docks, The Ironworks Labour-force pushing for unionisation, the arrival of the Imperial Airship, Covenant without her sister ship and the recent adoption of the new Unity calendar and maps. Any one of these could potentially lead the crew to their next score. Except, maybe for the calendar one, I suppose.

Conclusion

I was very happy to have left a full session aside for our first downtime. It needed it. In fact, I would say, we could have used even longer. They still haven’t decided on their next score. I will say, I am quite happy with how many potential score options I managed to sneak into the various scenes in the session. I was worried that I wouldn’t give them enough opportunities, but, in the end, they came up quite organically, much like the scenes themselves. These all proved to be fun and freeform, allowing us to dow some world-building and to introduce some fun new NPCs.

I’m now looking forward to the next session, and, hopefully, the Death Knells next score, the Big One.

Kanabo

The best part of the whole How to Play section is the list of Best Practices…We have gems like, “Ask questions. Take Notes. Draw diagrams. Write in pen” and “Fight unfairly. Lay ambushes. Hit below the belt. Run away.” And familiar old favourites like “Play to find out what happens, and how it happens” and “Strive for victory, but revel in your defeats.”

Waku Waku

Dear reader, my excitement is threatening to overwhelm me. As some of you may know, I studied Japanese in university and lived and worked in Japan for about three years in total. It’s hard to put into words exactly how I feel knowing that, this weekend (probably yesterday by the time I publish this post), I’ll be going to see the Ireland vs Japan rugby match in Dublin and next weekend I’ll be finally going back to Japan for the first time in eight years! I think the right word is probably　わくわく (waku waku, loosely translated as excited.)

Anyway, as a build up to that, I thought I would look at an RPG based on a Japanese historical period.

Kanabo: Fantasy Role-Playing Adventure in Tokugawa-Era Japan

A Kanabo is a Japanese weapon, a long metal club, adorned with spikes or studs. The game, Kanabo by N Masyk, is an RPG published by Monkey’s Paw Games. It comes in the form of three neat booklets, Volume 1, Characters, Volume 2, Chroniclers and Volume 3, Adventure. It was gifted to me by friends and all round good eggs, Tom and Isaac several years ago. I can’t remember which year exactly and I don’t see a publication date on any of the booklets so I am going to guess and say it was sometime between 2020 and 2022.

These booklets truly are only wee. The longest of them is 21 pages of A5. But they pack a lot into each one.

Volume 1, Characters

This booklet, as is the case for each one, begins with the credits. N Masyk did the words and the layout, “Dead People” did the artwork and the Hexmap uses the Highland Paranormal Society Cartography Kit, by Nate Treme. Finally, consulting was done by James Mendez Hodes. I think you will notice a peculiarly Western bent to the people associated with this project, other than the Dead People who are all Japanese (by the looks of their artistic styles) but remain conspicuously unnamed.

It starts off with an intro section that explains briefly what the game is about and suggests the use of safety tools such as Lines and Veils and the X Card. The “What is this?” section tells us that this is a game set in the Tokugawa period of Japanese history. It informs us that this is the time after the Warring States Period when the country is united but many wandering Travelers are abroad, “seeking fame, fortune, justice, revenge, or simply the freedom to roam.” That’s the PCs! I like this as a time period and setting. The Tokugawa era was long, more than 250 years. It was a time when Japan was cut off from the rest of the world, guarded its coast jealously and avoided the great changes that engulfed the other regions during the same time. The role of the Samurai was slowly being eroded, nobles were forced to pilgrimage from their lands to the capital under their own expense to keep them in line, the Shogun ruled the land and Japanese culture deepened. But I also like that there is a paragraph here on historical accuracy. Masyk takes pains to explain that, despite the potential realities of the place and time, as players of a game, we must strive to be inclusive before being accurate. Japan of this time was a place of terrible inequality, Kanabo at the table does not have to be.

The introduction section is reprinted in Volume 2, Chroniclers and Volume 3, Adventure. I wonder, in a set of booklets of such limited page-count, if this was necessary. Perhaps it was felt that the Characters booklet, meant largely for the players, and the Chroniclers booklet, meant only for the Chronicler had to both have it to refer back to regularly, but I would question that, especially as the Adventure booklet is also meant for the Chronicler exclusively. Maybe its so the kid who finds one of these booklets all on its own, tucked into a box in the dark reaches of a secondhand bookshop thirty years from now, knows what it is they’ve found.

Stats

The Stats section actually introduces the entire character creation process. Stats themselves are only one part of that. You roll 2d10+20 for each stat, for a maximum of 40.

I was expecting this ruleset to be a D&D clone or maybe an Odd-like but I was surprised to discover this is a percentile system. When you want to do something you roll a d100 and hope for a result equal to or under the stat you are rolling on. You will notice that this makes it necessary to roll really rather low to succeed, but there are several ways to gain a +10 to your rolls, such as using the right piece of equipment, possessing just the right skill, spending a filled segment of your Fate Clock or, in battle, gaining Advantage. There are three specific ways to accumulate +10s in a battle. If you want to disengage from combat safely, you can expend all of them and do so.

The Stats themselves are incredibly and deliberately abstract:

Fire: confrontation, aggression, force
Water: tranquility, inquisitiveness, exploration
Earth: stoicism, calculation, discipline
Wind: intuition, reflection, grace

As such, there is a lot of potential leeway in the decision on which stat to roll in any given situation. I like this sort of thing. I imagine Blades in the Dark style negotiations occurring as to how they might work out in play. However, I struggle a little with the whimsicality of the naming convention. It has a sort of mah-jong flavour to it, I’ll admit, which is not, in itself a bad thing. But, if you were to choose particular Chinese characters from the available mah-jong tiles, there are others that really describe human traits that might work better. I am thinking of things like 力, chikara (strength,) 心, kokoro (heart) etc. The use of the four elements makes it feel a little more like Avatar than any of the sword-fighting movies that inspired this game. It is a stylistic choice, though, and I’m sure it would work just fine at the table.

There are other elements to character creation, of course. Some of them remind me, quite delightfully of making a DCC character. Others have an Into the Odd feeling which I enjoy.

You can roll for your Chinese Zodiac sign. Whatever sign you roll, you can take it and apply a +5 to a stat that you think it reflects positively on. It would have been fun to have to apply a -5 to a different stat in this step I think.

When you roll on the Birthplace table, you will get somewhere like “Fishing Village,” “Hill Fort,” or even “Haunted Ruin.” Depending on what you get here, you will start with a different piece of equipment, such as a “fishing rod,” “spear,” or “lucky charm.”

Next up you roll on the Career table, which will give you another piece of equipment. Soldiers start with a matchlock pistol but Farmers only get a straw hat!

Your birthplace and career also allow you to list two things you know about or are skilled in. These can give you +10 to rolls in certain situations.

By rolling on the Curio table you might find yourself starting with a lucky cricket, a mask or maybe some rice balls. Each curio comes with a question that might help to round out your character.

After this you have a bunch of tables that will help you describe your PC. You have Mannerisms, Clothes, Face, Names etc. There should be plenty here to give you a very clear picture of your Traveler.

How to Play

This section lays out the rules quite economically. I’ve given you the basics already and there isn’t too much more to them than that, which is great.

There is a PBTA element to the rolls. You only roll when there is some risk, of course, but if you succeed, you do so without consequence. If you fail, you can still succeed, but with consequences. In combat, this means that you trade harm.

Kanabo character sheet on the back of the Characters booklet. There are spaces for Name, stats, zodia, career, birthplace, curio, description, Knowledge & Skills, Inventory, Wounds and a Fate clock split into eight wedges. — Kanabo Character Sheet

You get a Fate Clock on your character sheet. It has eight segments, which you will be filling and erasing as you gain and spend them. You gain a segment whenever you roll doubles on a d100 roll. I choose to interpret this as 11, 22, 33 etc. You can choose to erase a segment to give yourself +10 to a roll, prevent 1 Harm, recover 1d10 wounds or survive past your 5th wound. It’s a bit like stress in Blades in the Dark, a superpower that these Travelers have that allows them to contend against terrible odds and powerful forces.

Some few paragraphs are devoted to the idea of Travel. Kanabo assumes you will be hex-crawling and lays out the rules for that in relation to time, encounters, foraging, rest & healing etc. This is presented in a way that is player friendly and does not blind anyone with science. I appreciate it.

Character Advancement gets one very short section. Characters can choose one of two options at the end of each session, “increase a stat by 1” or “write down a new skill or piece of knowledge.” It’s neat and lacks frills. No room for confusion at all.

The booklet is rounded off with sections on hiring help, common equipment and refreshments. They are presented in several short and entirely non-exhaustive lists that are merely starting points for the interested player to do some research on what stuff might have been available in Tokugawa-era Japan.

The best part of the whole How to Play section is the list of Best Practices. Many of these will be familiar to the those of you who have been reading my series on Blades in the Dark recently. We have gems like, “Ask questions. Take Notes. Draw diagrams. Write in pen” and “Fight unfairly. Lay ambushes. Hit below the belt. Run away.” And familiar old favourites like “Play to find out what happens, and how it happens” and “Strive for victory, but revel in your defeats.”

Volume 2, Chroniclers

After the repeated intro section we get straight into a section on how to run the game. Let me reproduce here the entirety of that section:

You control the world around the Travelers and the people within in, and the places they have built for themselves. Fill that world with adventure, danger and magic.
There are no further words by witch I might describe or prepare you for the journey ahead.
The contents of this tome, much like the contents of the Universe, are mostly lies.

I think this is probably one of the most uniquely unhelpful such sections I have ever read. I understand that the author is trying for poetry instead of boring old instruction, but it reads as though they want you to think there is no advice that might help a prospective Chronicler. There is something to be said for the idea that a GM/referee/judge/whatever should trust their instincts, but it is certainly not always true. Also, there is an enormous wealth of real advice out there, both in printed books and for free on the internet. I understand the author had limited room here, so, perhaps they could have directed the newbie GM to the blogosphere, or a particular publication that they thought aligned with their own design ethos.

Anyway, as soon as they have described everything in the “tome” as lies, they go on to provide guidance on how to run the game… and it’s useful! It’s practical and answers the sorts of questions that would definitely come up at the table when playing Kanabo! Things like discussing the possible consequences of rolls before making them, determining the effectiveness of successes etc. So, my main takeaway from all this is don’t believe the bit that tells you its lying to you…

There are a couple of pages here devoted to describing very Japanese-themed encounters, we have Kappa, Oni, Kitsune etc, without ever using those words. I like the pared down descriptions and the minimal stats presented, and I can see the idea of removing the Japanese names so as to allow a Chronicler to set their game of Kanabo in a non-Japanese context. Or maybe it’s done to for localisation purposes. I don’t know really, but, personally, I would prefer to use the Japanese names. It feels wrong to me to do otherwise.

Hexcrawl section from Chroniclers booklet. There are several landmark and terrain tables and the top half of a hex rose here. — Hexcrawl

I think another very interesting element to this game is that, despite its semi-PBTA roots, you are expected to run it Old School. We have Weather tables, advice on rolling for encounters, an encounter reaction table and a whole bunch of tables to help you build your once-a-session hex map. These are, honestly, great. They are extremely practical and useful with lots of tables of landmarks for a variety of terrain types from Grassland to Hamlet. There are more tables for Factions, Communities, and Adventure Sites that would allow a Chronicler to build an engaging monster-of-the-week-style adventure with little to no prep required.

But, the advice for doing all this is limited within the booklet itself. The third of the the three booklets, however, serves to illustrate how it should work!

Volume 3, Adventure

This one if incredibly short, only eight pages, two of which have the intro again. After that, we get a bunch of ten point lists, which come together to create Peach Trees Village. The list of Locals describes each one in a single line, provides a piece of their dialogue and outlines an adventure hook. Here’s the first one:

Asuka. A farmer. So forgetful; “did my apprentice bring the cattle in?” Needs someone to go check. Something’s been at the cattle.

I love this way of presenting information. It’s incredibly efficient and is just enough to spark the imagination. You get something similar from the Shops and the Rumours lists.

Next, we have The Surrounding Wilderness section. This kicks off with a hex rose, already filled in to give the Chronicler an idea of how it’s done. Each of the 19 hexes is described in a similar way to the Locals above. Here’s no. 10:

Frozen wood. Snow-blanketed trees. A dead mile where nothing grows. Strange lights at night. What is causing the lights?

Once again, it’s just enough to spark the imaginations of both Chronicler and Travelers to perhaps pursue the mystery of the lights in the woods, without bogging you down with established fiction.

A “Searching, you find…” D100 table rounds this adventure booklet out.

Conclusion

All in all, I think this little RPG punches above its weight. I question some of the choices made regarding naming conventions, use of space and GM advice but otherwise, I am quietly impressed. I would like to try running it, but it will have to wait till after my own adventure in Japan!

Stay Frosty

Obviously, a game like this is going to draw comparisons with the Alien RPG and Mothership given the subject matter but, from even a cursory look, it seems to be approaching the genre from a slightly different direction.

Not Over Yet

I had a great plan for today’s post. It was all coming together perfectly. We were due to finish of the Call of Cthulhu “one-shot,” the Derelict last night, but, due to various unforeseen circumstances, we were forced to postpone. So, the review of the scenario that I had been planning will have to wait too.

Still, I’m not short of subjects to write about.

Stay Frosty Remastered

I’m going to take this opportunity to take a look at one of the games I received recently as a Kickstarter fulfilment. Stay Frosty Remastered from the Melsonian Arts Council and written by Casey Garske is an old school RPG of sci-fi marines in situations of extreme tension where they face monsters, demons and aliens with nothing but a shotgun and a bad attitude. Think Doom crossed with Aliens. Obviously, a game like this is going to draw comparisons with the Alien RPG and Mothership given the subject matter but, from even a cursory look, it seems to be approaching the genre from a slightly different direction.

It’s worth noting that “Remastered” in the title. Casey Garske first released Stay Frosty back in 2017 so it’s been around longer than either of the two games I mentioned above. I first learned about the original before I ever backed the remaster. Co-host of the Fear of a Black Dragon podcast, Tom McGrenery used it several times as the ruleset in which he ran some rather unlikely scenarios. I never read the original, though it is still possible to get it here.

Basics

Roll a d20 greater than or equal to your attribute for a success. Otherwise fail. Sometimes you get another die for advantage or disadvantage. That’s it.

Obviously, this implies that, even though you roll your attributes up the same way as you do in D&D, lower numbers are better!

Badassery

You get to play some of the galaxy’s badest asses in Stay Frosty. Character creation seems very straight forward. You get some attributes (Brains, Brawn, Dexterity and Willpower,) and MOS (military Operations Specialty,) hit points, rank and some equipment. Then it’s “Oorah” and into the bug’s nest to rend some carapace. Character creation starts on page 5 and just about stretches to page 8. All the better to roll up a new badass when the first one bites it.

Gear

I like that the rules around gear are abstracted so far as to make theatre of the mind nice and easy. Ranges, as they apply to combat and weapons are expressed by bands:

Hand-to-hand -> Close -> Short -> Medium -> Long -> Extreme

Your weapon’s description indicates its max range of course.

Another touch I appreciate is the use of supply dice for ammo that you use in a combat situation. If you used it, roll the ammo die for it at the end of the fight, If you roll a 1 or a 2, it reduces the die size until it’s gone. There is a similar rule for other gear that can be depleted.

Combat

Space marines fighting bug aliens — Riiiiip

I described the essentials of it in the Basics section above. But there are a few idiosyncracies that I enjoy:

One of the actions you can take in a round is called Battle of Wills. If you succeed on a Willpower roll against a chosen target, they will get disadvantage on their next attack. You just scare them into fucking up because of your badassness.

If you get a critical or a fumble, you roll on the appropriate FUBAR table. Either “Fuck Yes, Natural 20” or “Oh Fuck, Natural 1.”

There are Psi-powers. These are restricted to PCs with the Psi-ops MOS. There aren’t too many powers in the book but here’s a selection:

Brain Bleed (although the book seems to be missing the actual Effect of this one)
Interface – lets you take control of machines
Mind Stab – mind stab

There’s a little more to the system than just these points, but not much.

Mostly these other rules are introduced in the chapter,

Other Crap Every Game Has

Which has the sub-sub-title,

Jesus Christ, I guess we have to spell everything out.

Danger, Frostiness and Tension

These are the mechanics that make the game what it is. You will see some similarities to the Stress and Panic mechanics in both Mothership and the Alien RPG.

Firstly, the Danger die is rolled whenever the PCs move from one area to another, whenever they are in really dodgy locations or just whenever they’re dawdling. It’s a good way to ramp up the Tension. It works much like an encounter die in other games so can lead to location-appropriate baddies turning up, environmental challenges and loss of resources, but it can also add Tension or cause it to be released explosively!

Which brings us neatly on to the Tension mechanics. So, the PCs gain Tension through the Danger die rolls I described above.

Tension can be good for you. Forget simply staying frosty, Tension will actually build your frostiness level. It starts at “Warm” when your Tension is at a 1 and goes all the way up thru “Chill” (gives the agile tag to ranged attacks) and “Frozen” (Advantage on saves) to “Ice-Cold” (extra attack) when you reach 6 Tension points. There is a danger of course, when your that tense. When the Danger die comes up 6, “Tension Explodes!” And every PC has to make a Willpower save. If they succeed, they can reduce their Tension by one but if they fail, they take their Tension score x their level in damage. If this reduces them to 0 or lower HP, they roll on the Going Apeshit table. If you get a 1 on this table you’re on Overkill, advantage on damage rolls but having to roll your ammo die every round instead of after the combat. If you roll a 6, though, you’re on Last Stand, abandoning weapons and armour to face the enemy mano-a-mano.

This is pretty close to the stress mechanics in Alien, which is also all governed by tables. I’d be incredibly surprised if it wasn’t inspired by this game.

The Rest

A parade of bad guys from winged demons to little brain aliens — If it Bleeds…

Most of the rest of the book consists of a couple of missions to send your frosty fighters on. But there are also a couple of pages of random tables to allow you to easily and quickly construct your own missions and a few basic stat blocks for bad guys like Amoeboids, Demons and Robotic Assassins.

Conclusion

Isaac ran myself and Tom through a dungeon in the Black Hack the other night. None of us had ever played it before and even Isaac had barely looked at the rules. It was so easy, though, that we had characters created, hirelings hired and a dungeon explored before you could say the unlikely word, “Prolch” (my slow-witted fighter’s unfortunate name.) Stay Frosty gives me a very similar vibe. I only just opened it for the first time to write this post and I feel like I could run it now. Maybe I will! Unsurprisingly, the Black Hack is listed in Stay Frosty’s Appendix A: Influences. Garske tells us here that his game was originally a Black Hack hack but he ended up totally rewriting it. You can still see the Black bones of it though.