Year: 2012

Tabletop Items from A Link to the Past

I don’t know about you, but I really enjoyed my post from a couple weeks back about adapting the magic systems from Final Fantasy games to work in tabletop. As you may have noticed, I’ve been giving a lot of my attention to video games for the past few weeks. And while this is strictly a tabletop blog, it’s always more fun to write when I can write about something which is already on my mind, as opposed to trying to force myself to write about something I’m not really interested in at the moment. When I try to force it like that, I just end up doing a half-assed job. Besides: combining tho relatively unrelated things is always a great way to come up with some creative ideas.

I’ve always been a fan of the Zelda games published by Nintendo. And while I lost interest in new titles after literally falling asleep during the endless sailing of Wind Waker, I still regularly go back to re-play the games published before that. And the best among those, as well as my personal favorite game of all time, the The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. I could go on for pages about why this game is so good (and I’m pretty sure I have) but that’s all beside the point. Like most Zelda games, A Link to the Past contains a multitude of items which the player must collect in order to complete their quest. Some are pretty standard fare, while others are so unusual that they never really showed up again in later Zelda games.

I’ve always wanted to play a Zelda themed tabletop game, but never really encountered a group that would be right for it, or a system which would fit it well. (Though I am aware of the D20 Zelda system). None the less, there’s no reason elements from the games can’t find their way into your Pathfinder or D&D campaign!

The bow and arrow are kind of a weak start to this post, since they’re already pretty standard fare in fantasy adventure games. However, in LttP, the player must eventually acquire silver arrows. These are significantly more powerful (equivalent to about two or three times the damage of normal arrows, if I recall) and are required if you wish to defeat the game’s final boss. The idea of a creature which is immune to anything but a certain kind of arrow is interesting. But, I’ll grant you, not particularly special.

Now this is a little more interesting. Boomerangs are a fascinating and exotic weapon which I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a tabletop game before. And while its real-world use is far less impressive than the fantastical variations found in anime and video games, the mundane item is none the less worth thinking about on its own. With regards to the boomerangs specifically show in A Link to the Past, however, they were primarily used for two things. First, when they struck one of the game’s bad guys, the character would normally freeze in place for a few moments, unless it was particularly powerful. Secondly, the boomerang could be used to retrieve items which were out of reach.

That second use might be a little too video-game-y for a tabletop game, but a “Boomerang of Freezing” or “Boomerang of Time Stop” could be a really fun item to give to your PCs. It would allow them to dispose of enemies in a much stealthier manner if they can be quick about it, or could provide an important edge during a large combat. The only thing I would change is that, like a real boomerang, this one shouldn’t return to the wielder if it hits something.

This is probably the single most peculiar item which appears in LttP. None the less it has gone on to become one of the most iconic tools in Link’s inventory throughout the series: the hookshot. In its function its pretty simple; you hold onto the handle with one hand, and can fire a heavy-duty spearhead attached to a chain from one end. The spearhead lodges itself in wood, and some other surfaces, and the chain then retracts, pulling you towards whatever object you hooked on to. It was a lot of fun to use in the game, and was probably the only fantastical item which was mechanical, rather than magical.

In a tabletop game, I don’t think this has quite as much potential. Firstly, the nature of a tabletop game doesn’t really allow for Zelda-style puzzle solving, which is largely what the hookshot was used for. Secondly, while it could certainly still be used as a climbing implement, I think players would probably have some questions about how it works. If the spearhead is buried deep enough into a surface that it can support a character’s weight, then how is the character ever able to remove it?

Maybe that problem could be solved by replacing the spearhead with a magical adhesive which comes un-stuck with a command word? If that was the case, then this could be a game-changing item for low level characters. It’s almost as potent as a fly spell for avoiding obstacles. They could use it to scale walls, cover gaps, easily hide on ceilings, and so much more! Though perhaps a ‘grip’ mechanic would be in order. Something like they can only hold on to it for a number of minutes equal to their strength modifier?

I’m funny when it comes to gunpowder in my campaigns. For the most part, I prefer to avoid guns. I’m sure it can be done very well, but it takes away from my preferred flavor of gameplay. Despite that, I have no problem with cannons, or explosive devices like bombs. I like the idea that a major city might have one or two people in it who make explosive devices, and sell them at a high price. Players would have a difficult time carrying more than a few at a time, but if they could get them into a strategic location, they could blast their way through a dungeon wall, or obliterate a powerful monster.

The magic dust was a bizarre little item. Functionally, it was really only needed once in the entire game, as part of a little side-quest to halve the amount of magic each of your spells consumed. But it also transformed some of your enemies into different kinds of creatures, making them much less dangerous, or even helpful! And that sounds like a blast to me. The players find a small leather pouch which appears to be filled with glitter. Anytime a handful is sprinkled on something, the GM comes up with a random, wacky effect. And after a few handfuls, the pouch is empty, preventing it from becoming over-used.

A rod which shoots fire from it is just about the most mundane magical item I can imagine. But when I think about the Rod of Fire in LttP, I realize that its primary function wasn’t in combat. More than anything else, it was used to light torches, and that I find interesting. What if a fantasy adventure game had a Rod of Fire which was able to shoot a ball of non-magical fire up to a great distance. Maybe 60 feet. If this fire struck an enemy, the damage it dealt would probably be minimal. The primary use of such a rod would be lighting something flammable, like a pool of oil, or a thatched roof cottage. Because of its limited function, it could have more uses than we’d normally allow with a similar item. Perhaps 10 uses per day, or 20, or even an unlimited number.

The ice rod in A Link to the Past is (obviously) very similar to the fire rod. So I see no reason why it shouldn’t be converted in the same way. It shoots a blast of freezing air up to 60ft, and covers anything it touches with a layer of ice. The trick with this is that it might be far more useful, or far less useful, than the fire rod, depending on what the GM wants ‘a layer of ice’ to mean. If it can actually freeze an enemy solid, then it should probably have more limited usage than the rod of fire. If its not powerful enough for that, but could instead be used to trip an enemy on a ice-slicked floor, then it could have unlimited uses as with the above.

Um…I’m not really sure what to do with this one. Or with any of the medallions, actually. They cause some extremely powerful magical effects. In the game, the Bombos medallion causes a pillar of fire to spiral outwards from your character, followed by dozens of explosions which kill absolutely everything on the screen. If I were to include these three medallions in a game, I think the only way to do it would be to boost their power way up, but make them extremely difficult to use–and probably more likely to be in the hands of a villain. The Bombos Medallion, for example, can only be used during a lunar eclipse. It causes a pillar of fire to descend from the sky, and spiral outwards from the location of the caster until the end of the eclipse. Its destructive force could easily level a city. This is the hydrogen bomb of a fantasy world.

Interestingly, the Bombos medallion is the only one which actually has a powerful effect. The other two medallions have impressive animations, but are functionally single-use items, which are needed to enter certain dungeons in the game. When you use the Ether medallion, lightning comes down from the sky to strike your sword, and a dozen orbs of light start to spin around your character. In the game, all this does is allow you to is illuminate invisible walkways. It also opens the entrance to Misery Mire, but that’s not very easy to translate.

In a tabletop game, the Ether medallion can only be used during a solar eclipse. It creates 12 balls of light which can be moved only by someone holding the Ether medallion. These balls of light are permanent creations, and can never be unmade. The light they emit functions as a True Seeing spell, destroying any illusions or invisibility spells which may exist in the area.

In the game, this is even less useful than the Ether Medallion. It literally has only one function: opening the entrance to the Turtle Rock dungeon. Given the fact that it not only causes a massive earthquake, but also creates lightning which arcs across the ground, I am not sure why this item doesn’t harm enemies. Well fuck that, we’re changing it.

The Quake Medallion can only be used when all of the planets are aligned. When this happens, the wielder can create a titanic earthquake which will devastate the landscape, and cause one major geological shift. By exerting a great force of will, the wielder can attempt to control what form this geological shift will take. Perhaps a towering mountain range will rise from the earth, or a dizzying crevasse will open at the wielder’s feet. Truly powerful wielders could even use it to create a permanent intersection with the elemental plane of earth.

Truth be told, in the game, the only use for the ‘magic’ hammer is to pound in giant pegs which block your path. I guess they must be ‘magic’ pegs, which nobody can climb over. I can’t think of a good way to convert this to a tabletop gaming system, but there’s no reason to ignore the idea of a magic hammer. It’s a cool idea. Just use it to smash walls, or giant rocks, rather than pegs.

While the Ocarina would come to play a central role in the Nintendo 64 Zelda games, in A Link to the Past, it was a pretty minor item. After the player completed a relatively simple side quest, the flute could be used to summon a miraculously strong duck which could whisk Link to a number of set locations on the world map. While that, again, is pretty video-game-y, I think the idea of a musical instrument which summons animal companions has a lot of potential. Not only is it flavorful, but it has the potential to grow more useful over time. Lets say that the flute has a simple song inscribed on it, which will summon a horse for the character to ride. But if the character decides to invest more time in the instrument, he can discover other songs which summon other types of animals to come to his or her aide.

The hammer is an ostensibly magical item which turns out to be pretty mundane in function. The opposite is true of the bug catching net. Supposedly it’s just a mundane net, owned by a kid who likes to study insects. But clearly it’s quite a bit more than that, since it can be used to deflect balls of magical death fired at you from sorcerers.

No, seriously.

While I don’t see that being really useful in a tabletop game, one of its other uses in LttP was catching faeries. In the game these are used as an ‘extra life,’ but in a tabletop game their use could be more grounded. Perhaps faeries are required to cast a single spell for anyone who captures them? Could be a fun alternative to always telling your players that they need to find a wizard.

I’ve already written absofuckinglutely extensively about language, so I won’t return to that concept here. The Book of Mudora allows Link to read tablets written in ancient Hylian, which often causes a big effect. Since it apparently magically allows him to read a different language, what about a book which does that same thing? Either the book allows the wielder to read one specific language, or all languages. It functions by touching the book to a sample of writing which you would like to read, then opening the book. Whatever page you open to will have that same writing on it, but you will magically be able to read it.

While the Hookshot is definitely the most peculiar item to appear in A Link to the Past, I think The Cane of Somoria is probably the most interesting. At least in terms of its potential tabletop applications. Using the cane creates a block, very much like a standard stone block which might be found in numerous locations throughout the game. The block can be pushed around, or even picked up and thrown. Only one block can be created at a time, but if the cane is used while a block is already created, the block is destroyed, sending blasts of energy in four directions.

Now, a tabletop game is never going to be able to support puzzles the way a zelda game can. Putting blocks on top of buttons, or pushing blocks around so you can use them to climb, is simply not interesting in a tabletop game. But that doesn’t matter, because the ability to create a block out of nothing is both strange, and useful. Players could find a multitude of applications for it, even if you were to remove the ability to cause the block to explode. Though, regarding that, I think perhaps instead of beams of energy, the exploding block should simply send shrapnel 10ft in all directions.

The Cane of Byrna is, unfortunately, not as interesting as its red counterpart. At the cost of rapidly draining your magical energy, it makes you invulnerable to any kind of damage. I suppose the best way to adapt this for tabletop would be to make it usable only by casters. Upon using it, they become invulnerable to any kind of damage for 1 minute, at the cost of the top half of their remaining spellcasting ability for the day. As an example, if a Wizard has three 1st level spells and one 2nd level spell remaining for the day, they lose their second level spell, and one 1st level spell of the GM’s choosing.

If I had to give A Link to the Past one criticism, it would be that some of the items should have been more useful, and had less overlap. Functionally, the Magic Cape is identical to the Cane of Byrna. It drains magic extremely quickly, and in turn makes you invulnerable. The only difference is that it also makes you invisible, and allows you to pass through a certain kind of in-game hazard called a ‘bumper.’

Capes of invisibility, or capes which allow you to pass through walls, are hardly ideas foreign to fantasy adventure games. I have nothing of value to add.

The Magic Mirror was part of the game’s central mechanic. In order to work properly in a tabletop game, the entire campaign would need to be designed around it. (Or, at least, the entire adventure where the mirror was featured). Essentially, A Link to the Past had two similar world maps: the ‘Light World’ which was the game’s primary setting, and the ‘Dark World’ which had been corrupted by the villain. Many of the game’s puzzles involved strategically traveling between the two worlds, which the mirror allowed the player to do–though only in one direction, from the dark world to the light one.

I think it would be really fun to build an entire campaign around the concept. Have an alternate universe where everything is much worse. For example, in the game’s main world, a dragon is attempting to destroy the kingdom. The same is happening in the dark world, but on top of it, the king is a tyrant. The players could find a way to gain audience with the goodly king, then use the mirror in his throne room to change realms, and take the tyrant by surprise!

Again, tabletop games are not well suited to Zelda style puzzles. So you can’t have a ton of rooms in your dungeon where the players must use their shields to reflect a beam of light onto the right spot. However, in LttP, the mirror shield is largely used to deflect lasers, which got me thinking: what about a shield which can ‘bounce’ a spell back at the caster?

It couldn’t work 100% of the time, of course. The wielder would need to identify that a spell was being cast, and they’d need to get between the caster and the target for it to work. And perhaps the shield would only work 1-5 times per day. But it could be a very interesting magical item for a party to have. Fighting an evoker? No problem, bounce those fireballs right back. Doing battle with a necromancer? Bang, she just finger-of-death’d herself.

The Pegasus boots allow link to charge up, and dash quickly in a straight line, which is a little more interesting than boots which simply make you move more quickly. Perhaps these boots could double the effectiveness of a character’s charging maneuvers?

Note that the power glove (lol, obscure product placement?) doesn’t necessarily increase Link’s carrying capacity, only what he can lift. I find that much more interesting. Sure, with enough bags of holding, encumbrance stops being a problem for players. But they can still only lift so much weight. But with these amazing gloves, they could lift boulders equal to four times their weight! That would be pretty cool.

This post ended up going on for far longer than I intended, so I’ll wrap it up quickly here. I will note that there are a handful of items I skipped because I honestly can’t think of anything to say about them. I mean…the lantern? Whoop-de-doo. It’s a lantern. They cost 2 silver pieces and are part of most adventurer’s starting gear. But if you can come up with a neat way to adapt the lantern, or the jars, or the flippers, etc. to a tabletop game, leave it in the comments! Or if you’ve got a better idea of how to adapt one of the items listed above, leave that too!

EDIT: Oh, holy shit, this is my 200th post. Go me!

Product Review: AD&D First Edition Reprints

EDIT 1/22/13: I normally prefer not to edit a post once it has gone live. Particularly not such an old post as this. However, I still see a lot of people sharing this post and using it to help make the decision of whether or not they’d like to spend money on these books. As such, I think it’s important that I include some new information which I’ve become aware of.

Much of the iconic art in these books was not well preserved in the reprints. Almost all of it has been significantly darkened, often obscuring details. Some of it even has strange artifacts which were not present at all in the original prints.

You can view art comparisons in this Imgur album. The degradation of the art’s quality is clear, and I have confirmed it by looking through my original and reprinted copies of the DMG.

(I would love to host those images here, but unfortunately I cannot find a means to contact the original uploader, and I’ve not intention of stealing his or her content. If anyone who knows the mysterious ways of Imgur would like to help me contact them, I would be appreciative.)

They’re finally here, the reprints of Gygax’s three original AD&D books. I received the email from my friendly local game store on Thursday, and drove up there yesterday to pick them up. And let me tell you: these books are nice. The covers look fantastic, with each looking unique and incorporating the original art, while still maintaining a thematic look between them. The covers are textured as well, with indentations on both the front and the back, corresponding to the darker patterns in the image above. I particularly like how the books have no bar codes or ISBD numbers on the exterior. Aside from a re-printing of the dark pattern on the front, there isn’t even anything printed on the backs. Very classy looking.

Each of the books came wrapped in plastic, and bound by a piece of paper with a faux-wax seal for the Gygax Memorial printed on them. As I’m sure most people are aware, a percentage of the profits from each book purchased will go to support the Gygax Memorial Fund, which seeks to build a statue of Gary in his hometown of Lake Geneva Wisconsin. These pieces of paper are also where the ISBN number and bar code can be found, on the back side. Again, very nice. They also use this area to list the books original publication date, and notes whether the book was originally published first, second, or third out of the three.

The spine of these books looks fantastic as well. I’m curious to know if the symbols used here have any meaning which I’m not aware of. Or maybe they’re just meant to look cool, I don’t know. The actual binding of the book is similar to more modern books, with the page glued together in small bunches. It would have been cool if they’d used the same super-sturdy binding methods used in the original 1970s books, but I’d be kind of surprised if there were even any printing houses left which offered that.

[EDIT: It looks as though I was wrong on this point. Brendan of Untimately has corrected me:]

The bindings on the reprints are section sewn, which is probably about the highest quality book binding available (though it depends how the sections are attached to the spine, and I can’t see that). If you flip to the center of the sections, you can see the stitches. The new books probably have better bindings than the first original printings, despite how well the originals have held up.

Now this is kind of cool, because it’s honestly pretty uncommon: gilded edges. I think the only other books I own with gilded edges on the pages are my copy of the christian bible, and my copy of Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s a little ostentatious, but I think it’s warranted given how historically important these books are, and how much love the community has for the man who wrote them.

I put a little too much light into this pictures, so you you could see the edges glisten.

And, of course, as with most books that have gilded edges, these books each have ribbon bookmarks. Curiously, though, each book’s ribbon has a different width. I’m not sure how to explain that, except to point out that the width of the ribbon seems to correspond with the thickness of the book.

I thought it would be nice to compare the reprints to the original editions, but unfortunately I only have the 1979 Dungeon Master’s Guide, and have not yet gotten my hands on the original Player’s Handbook or Monster Manual. Still, one works with what one has, so here are the two DMGs, side by side. It’s at this point that I would like to give Wizards of the Coast my most profound thanks for not placing their logo anywhere on the outside of the reprinted books. They could have done so, and honestly I don’t think anyone could blame them if they did. They invested money in producing this product, and have every right to but their trademark on it. But they didn’t, and that demonstrates a respect which I find commendable.

Here’s the iconic title page of the DMG, with the original on the left and the reprint on the right. The newer book uses higher quality paper and printing, which is nice. Darlene Pekul’s Unicorn is rendered a little more darkly than in the original book, but it also appears more crisp on the page. I also notice that the original copyright information has been removed, and the legal information at the bottom has been expanded. Which, of course, makes logical sense.What doesn’t make  sense to me is that on the following page, the foreword, they removed the caption at the bottom which explained the cover. Originally it read:

“Cover: The book cover painting shows an encounter between three adventurers and an efreet on the Elemental Plane of Fire. The fabled City of Brass can be seen floating over a flame-swept sea of oil.”

I suppose the thinking may have been that since the cover art was different, it was no longer appropriate to reference adventurers who were not depicted. But since the efreet was still there, it seems some mention is in order.

I wonder if, perhaps, the text for this book was taken from the original 1983 reprint. The one with different cover art, which Gygax ostensibly preferred.

On the Contents page, I notice that the printing seems to be a little more dense than in my original copy. The last entry on page 3 in my copy is “Aerial Travel,” while the reprint has two more lines after that, ending on “Waterborne Adventures.” You’ll probably need to open this image in a new tab if you want to read the text.

I flipped to the final pages to see if they matched up, and they’re actually quite different! I’m not terribly surprised that the Gencon advertisement was removed, but the information the two books end on is completely different! While the original ends with an Index page, the reprint ends with an appendix which appears to deal with henchmen and hirelings. I also notice that while my original copy ends on page 232, this reprint ends on page 240! Where did they add an extra eight pages?

I did some looking, and it appears there are two additional appendices listed on the Contents page: APPENDIX O: ENCUMBRANCE OF STANDARD ITEMS, and APPENDIX P: CREATING A PARTY ON THE SPUR OF THE MOMENT. Neither of these is included in my original copy of the book, but at this point I’m going to assume that they were added by Gygax himself to later printings. I don’t see why Wizards would add this stuff. However, those two sections don’t take up much room, and end on page 227. Following them are the glossary, afterword, and index, printed pretty much the same as they are in my original text.

But while the 1979 print of the book ends after the Index, Wizards has a splash-page notice about the Gygax memorial, followed by four pages of additional tables. I’m really kinda confused about their placement, here. If they were added in previous reprints of the book, then why did Wizards place their splash page 4 page before the end of the book? If they were NOT in previous printings of the book, then why did Wizards add them?

That weirdness aside, there’s a very nice touch at the end of the index where Wizards kindly printed the old TSR wizard logo.

All in all, these are easily worth the $100 I dropped on them, and I recommend that everyone who doesn’t own a copy of these books go out and do the same. Show your support for the Gygax memorial, and show Wizards of the Coast that there’s a market for a more traditional style of role playing game.

And now that I finally own a complete set of AD&D books, I suspect I’ll find excuses to use them. Hee hee hee…

A Post Without Value: My First Attempt to GM

WWL

The vast majority of the time, I like to think that my posts have a point. That I’m communicating ideas which might be useful to someone else. I endeavor to avoid anything which seems overtly self indulgent. And I always work to write posts of quality. Posts which do credit to my dubious claim of being a writer. But, life is not always so kind. One too many distractions have emptied my backlog of posts, and I’ve only got a short amount of time before my self-imposed posting deadline. So today, I’m afraid, you don’t get something even slightly well considered. All I have for you is a shitty story about my first serious attempt at being a game master.

It was not a great first attempt.

Here’s an excerpt from some of the notes I still have. I believe this is from our second game, after the players discovered that their first quest giver was evil.

“Four months have passed since you left the service of the dark lord Grome-Lah to join the goodly king of Taladore, Vladamier. The king’s daughter, Reina, has become quite fond of her father’s new bodyguard, the powerful samurai, and of the playful gnomish bard with his stories. All in all you, and the people of the city along with you, enjoy a new age of prosperity.

However, this peace is fated to be short lived, for you soon begin to hear rumors. Corpses walking in the night. At first it is passed off as a mere old wives tale. It is not too long, though, until the rumors persist enough that king Taladore sends you to investigate the ever growing belief that the dead are walking”

Aside from the lengthy writing of a kid who is far too impressed with himself, this isn’t a terrible start to the game. I had a bad habit in those days of using the names of Star Wars characters in my games (Grome-Lah was my clever adaptation of Nom Anor and Tsavong Lah), but so long as the players didn’t recognize them, there was really no harm. And even though I wince now at my clumsy attempts to get the players to care about the NPCs, I don’t think it affected the game drastically.

What did affect the game negatively was my poor understanding of the rules. Though I’m pretty sure every GM could say that about their first game. I’m curious to know: if D&D 3.5 was your first system, how long did it take you to understand when you should ask for a Spot check, and when you should ask for a Search check? Because I pretty much used them interchangeably in this game. I also allowed my players to do pretty much anything with their characters that they wanted. Which, truth be told, is still how I do things. But now I make my players work for the things they want. The next time I have a druid player who wants their animal companion in a forested setting to be a camel, they’ll need to travel to a desert first.

And speaking of letting my players get away with anything, I also didn’t know how to let them fail. When their tactics were bad, I would reduce the number of enemies in the room. When they failed to make any attempt at diplomacy, kings and emperors would go out of their way to be extra friendly just so the half-baked plot could be moved along. I even changed a few DCs just so they wouldn’t feel too bad about making poor rolls. I’ll never forget how dirty I felt when the bard attempted to scare some orcs with his bagpipe music, and I fudged the DC because I didn’t want him to feel underpowered.

But that’s all small potatoes. Everybody makes these mistakes the first time they sit behind the GM screen. Everyone thinks they’ve got a great story to tell, or believes their friends might get upset if things don’t go their way. As a person runs more games, they will grow into the role of GM. But these common failings are not my greatest sins.

For, you see: I had a DMPC.

His name was Zerek Mexiel. He was a Tiefling Lich, and a 20th level Wizard, and I thought he was such a cool addition to my game. Ostensibly, his purpose was to observe humans for research purposes. I made clear to my players from the start that the Lich did not care if they died. In fact, the effects of their deaths was a subject of great interest to Zerek, and he wished to study it. So, if anything, he would be happy to see one of them die.

Which might have been kinda cool if I hadn’t used him to repeatedly intervene on the party’s behalf.

Here’s a particularly poorly written bit from my notes:

“The corpse falls to the ground and lays still, finally at rest. As it strikes the ground, however, a welt on its neck is revealed. The red glowing eyes of your lich companion go wide. For the first time since you met him, he speaks: a grating sound, like a master smith’s saw against steel. [ed. WHAT?]

“That mark on the creatures neck, it is the trademark of a former student of mine! One who I banished from me over 30 years ago. If you wish to find him, you must involve the king’s powers.” And with that vital piece of information, the creature again falls silent, fading slowly from sight.”

Yeah, that’s not good.

I’ve reached the point where I don’t hate all of my old writing. Pretty much anything I’ve produced from 2009 onwards is decent. This garbage was written many, many years before that point, and I’m mortified that it came from my pen.

Are you not entertained? Does my humiliation not please you?

I Love Creative Players

When you’re GMing a game, what really makes you smile? What is it that your players do which makes you feel like as though the game is going perfectly? For myself, I love it when my players approach a problem from a direction I never considered. Or, even better, when they decide to tackle a problem I haven’t considered at all. I’m of the opinion that if they’re thinking that creatively, then it is because I was able to foster an environment where they felt like thinking creatively was beneficial. They recognize that the world around them has a certain kind of logic to it, and that logic is consistent enough that they’re able to think about problems diegetically.

I’d like to share three stories which I think encapsulate this idea really well.

Skeleton Feet: Different areas of my game world are keyed to different encounter tables. Everything which can be rolled on those tables has been carefully selected for that area. For unintelligent creatures, my reason for putting them there might be as simple as ‘this is where they live.’ For more intelligent beings, there will often be a small backstory, perhaps a couple sentences in length. If the players encounter 1d4 orcs, it might be because there’s a hidden orc village in the area, which was founded when a group of orcs was driven from the northern mountains by humans. Simple as it may be, it already solves a lot of problems. The orcs will react violently to humans, there is a village nearby for the players to find if they want to find out where the orcs came from, and I’ve added to the history of my world by saying orcs used to live in the mountains to the North, even if my players don’t find that out.

In my game world, 3 or 4 adjacent ‘zones’ all share a small possibility that the players will encounter a handful of goblin skeletons. The backstory on these skeletons is that many many decades ago, a necromancer passed through the area. He was still relatively inexperienced, and he experimented with his necromatic powers by raising a lot of dead goblins from a mass grave he found. The necromancer has since moved on, and is now a powerful lich in a tower in the far south. Given that you can’t really interrogate skeletons, I figured that if my players encountered them, they’d wonder why they were there, but not pursue the idea too far. To be honest, when I wrote that, I was really just looking for a way to make the encounter table more varied in those areas.

It took my players a few sessions of adventuring before they encountered the skeletons. They managed to defeat them handily. Here’s what happened, (roughly transcribed from a recording I made of the game):

Phoenix The Sorceress: Do any of our characters know about undead? What can we learn about these?
Me: Knowledge(Religion) is used for undead. Gibbous?
Gibbous The Cleric: Sweet, I’m useful! *roll* I got a 17.
Me: Alright! You’re able to notice two things about these goblin skeletons. First, they seem to have been animated for a very long time, and second, it doesn’t seem like they were being guided by any set of instructions.
Gibbous: [Sarcastic] That is super helpful.

At this point, the party very nearly moved on, figuring that there was nothing interesting about the encounter. But after a bit of chatter, some of the other players started to get curious.

Rosco the Ranger: Maybe they came from a nearby crypt?
Poker the Rogue: How old are the swords they were using? Can we tell?
Pumofe the Barbarian: I just woke up from a 200 year sleep. Do their swords look like something I would recognize from when I was around.
Me: Interesting! No, they don’t conform to any style you would have been familiar with 200 years ago. They are probably of more recent stock.
Pumofe: Can we see on the bottom of their feet how much bone is worn away?
Poker: [Joking] Check how worn their teeth are, check them for parasites…
Me: Wow. Um…well, you’re not CSI, but the feet seem to be worn down pretty thin. They’ve been walking around for maybe twenty to fifty years.
Pumofe: Do they have anything stuck to them which might tell us where they’ve been?
Me: Lots of little tree branches, leaves. A few tiny scraps of cloth, but its so deteriorated that it’s impossible to identify.
Gibbous: Is there someone we could ask about this maybe? Someone who would know the history of the area? I have Knowledge(History).
Me: Well, knowing anything about this would probably be too specific for your character to know about, since you’re not from around here. But make the check, and we’ll see if you know of anyone more familiar with the area’s history than you are.
Gibbous: I rolled a 16, so that comes up to 20!
Me: That’s plenty. Do you remember the town down South between the two rivers? The high priest of Obad-Hai is elderly and learned. He would know a great deal of the area’s history.
Pumofe: Is that on the way?
Poker: Yeah, we need to follow the rivers to get back to the Wizard’s tower anyway.
Gibbous: And we can still kill orcs along the way!

From there the players continued on to the town of Overton, spoke with the high priest, and learned of the necromancer who had passed through the area some 30 years prior on his way south. They added the Lich to their “list of things to take care of,” about 10 levels before I had planned on them doing so.

I love this story in particular because it demonstrates that my players don’t view the world as random anymore. I honestly don’t think I would have considered how worn down the skeletons feet were if I was a player.

Razorgrass: This incident occurred in my most recent game, actually. The players traveled to the Abyss to hunt for demon’s blood. Given their low level, I decided to send them to a rather innocuous corner of the Abyss. Instead of facing hordes of demons, I designed an area where the environment itself was hostile. One where divine (i.e. healing) magic would summon demons to attack them.

The players had only been there a short time when they encountered a large field of grass, which they quickly determined was razor sharp. Fortunately, most of the group is heavily armored, and those who aren’t only took a small amount of damage. None the less, the players didn’t want to squander their hit points in a place this dangerous. So Phoenix used her Gem of Fire Ray to burn a 60ft path through the field.

Shortly before this, the players had hast healing magics, and I had been tracking a band of demons as they approached the party’s location. They had only just begun walking down the path when the demons burst from the trees behind them. I described the demons as “About 5ft tall, corpulent, and naked. With a jaundiced-yellow color to them, and wicked claws on each hand.”

The barbarian wasted no time in shouting to the others: “Run into the grass!” The demons were some of the least intelligent of the Abyss, and were excited by the prospect of devouring mortal flesh on their home plane. They charged into the grass after the players, and promptly had their HP reduced by almost half as each step through the razorgrass dealt 1d4 damage to their naked bodies. The players were easily able to wipe the floor with the weakened demons.

Though they did pay a price: there was much less blood in each demon after the battle for them to harvest.

Zalekios and the Buildings: In this story, I actually wasn’t GMing. I was playing my chaotic evil Warlock/Rogue, Zalekios Gromar. None the less, this story marked a turning point for me as a GM. I felt such a sense of accomplishment and freedom after this encounter, that I decided this was the kind of feeling I wanted to enable my own players to experience.

Zalekios Gromar is, in a word, overpowered. And the GM who kindly runs games for me has often been frustrated by the difficulty of crafting encounters to challenge me. Zalekios himself is supposed to be an intelligent, but extremely overconfident character. He once leaped from the 4th floor of a tower simply because he was bored by attacking his enemy from range. And after being overpowered for so long, I the player had become pretty overconfident myself. Nothing seemed to be able to stop me. So when a Paladin appeared in a town I was resting in, and demanded I surrender myself, I charged him with eldritch blasts blazing. We battled for several rounds, each dealing a lot of damage to the other. But I quickly noticed that my HP was getting dangerously low. Zalekios was in very real danger of dying.

I was kicking myself for being so foolish as to charge a paladin head on, and frantically tried to come up with something I could do to get out of this alive. The paladin had already told me he’d tracked me for weeks, so running would only be a temporary reprieve. And since he could magically heal himself and I could not, that seemed like a bad plan. Desperate for some tactical advantage, I asked the GM what buildings were nearby. We were, after all, in a town. He said that the encounter was taking place in a largely undeveloped area of the town, but drew three houses on the map none the less. They were small, just one story high, made of cheap wood and clay.

That was all Zalekios needed.

He cast a special type of Dimensional Door which left a silent image behind, and ported up to the roof of the nearest house–just barely within his range. I attacked from range while the Paladin was distracted, and then again while he charged the house. Instead of climbing it as I suspected he would, the Paladin simply bowled himself into the supporting frames for the house, causing it to collapse just as I ported away. I tried to point out that the paladin should lose his powers for destroying someone’s home, but my GM replied that all three houses were abandoned, and that this part of town was sparse because all the buildings here were being taken down so nicer ones could be built. The pally did, however, take damage from a building falling on him.

I bounced between the remaining two houses that were within range of my Dimensional Door, trying to keep the paladin at range. He inexorably began to limit my escape options until he had me completely cornered. I was at 3 hit points, and had to make a choice. Either I could attack and be killed immediately afterwords, or I could run and be killed immediately afterwords. I decided that if this was Zalekios’ time, I’d rather see him go out with some fight left in him. I charged up an Eldritch Blast–

–and never, in all my years of gaming, have I been so ecstatic to see a natural twenty. The paladin was blasted, and Zalekios strapped the body to his horse just so he could resurrect and torture it.

The GM later admitted to me that the paladin had been specifically designed to beat me. He was a gestalt Paladin/Barbarian (which I pointed out should have been impossible) who was a good four levels higher than Zalekios himself was. The GMs plan had been to capture me and take me to trial or something. But my tactics had defied his expectations, and allowed a little bit of luck to make the difference between life and death.

That’s one of the best feelings I’ve ever had while playing a tabletop game. I was supposed to lose, the game was stacked against me. But because I made superior use of my environment and the choices available to me, I won the game.

I want my players to feel like that as often as possible.

Dragons & Warriors

Not too long ago I thumbed through my library of video games and pulled out an old favorite from 1986: Dragon Warrior. The first one. Not a remake of it, or a port of it, or even an emulated version of it on a computer. I’ve got a square gray cartridge and a boxy Nintendo Entertainment System; both of which I repaired and cleaned myself. The cartridge’s battery didn’t even need to be replaced after 25 years. In this era of red rings, it’s hard to believe a video game product was ever intended to last that long.

Objectively speaking, the game is terrible by today’s standards. Not just because of improvements in technology, but because of improvements in philosophy. If you didn’t grow up with the game, then needing to select “stairs” from a menu is going to drive you nuts. In its day this game literally revolutionized the way developers looked at creating console RPGs, but the 25 years since then have seen a lot of improvements to the formula. None the less, I’ve made it about 80% of the way through the game as of this writing, and this will be the second time I’ve replayed the game since 2009.

There’s something about the game which connects to the heart of what an RPG should be. Not just video game RPGs, but tabletop RPGs as well. When the game starts, you’re given no directions. Maybe there was some help in the manual–even as a child I didn’t have that–but in the game itself you’re just given a request from the king to save his daughter. He doesn’t know where she is, or what challenges you’ll have to face, but that’s what he wants from you.

After that, the world is completely open to you. You can go literally anywhere, and the only barriers stopping you are monsters who become more ferocious the further you travel from Tantegel castle. Combat is simple; painfully so. But combat isn’t really the game’s challenge, it’s just a function of how far you leveled and what equipment you have on you. The game’s real challenge is exploration and problem solving.

A perfect example of this is the Golem. Near the end of the game’s “plot,” the player is likely to come upon the town of Cantlin. The town is difficult to reach, with a veritable maze of impassable mountains surrounding it, and a slew of extremely tough monsters blocking the path. It’s all worth it, though, because Cantlin is the highest level settlement in the game. Aside from townspeople who give you vital clues as to how you can defeat the Dragon Lord, the best purchasable items in the game can be found there. Unfortunately, any time you attempt to enter the town, you are attacked by the city’s protector, the Golem.

The Golem can be defeated by conventional means if the player is very high level, but it’s unlikely that the player will reach that level before they want to visit Cantlin. The solution is found on the other side of the world, in a town which the player should have found and explored much earlier in the game. A villager there has heard stories about the Golem, and relates to the PC that the flute is said to soothe the Golem. If the player has found the flute, they can play it, put the Golem to sleep, and defeat it while it is incapacitated.

This is the kind of puzzle solving which oldschool console RPGs were known for, and some might call it Pixel Bitching. That is, a problem with only one solution which cannot be logically deduced. However, I would disagree. This kind of problem solving is translated directly from tabletop games. Players are given ultimate freedom to explore and learn about the world. That should be their goal. They can then apply what they learn about the world towards accomplishing goals, such as defeating monsters. It’s a method of gameplay which gives the player a sense of empowerment and accomplishment. They were not presented with a challenge for the purpose of having them overcome that challenge. They encounter challenges which they are able to overcome because they played the game well.

The necessity of imagination is another element of Dragon Warrior which connects to me as a tabletop gamer. The game has a distinct and interesting visual style. However, by the time the player has hit 3rd level, they’ve seen pretty much all of the visuals the game has to offer. In fact, the most impressive visual in the entire game is when everything flashes different colors for a moment as you summon the Rainbow Bridge. And it doesn’t even end up looking any different from normal bridges! My point is that the game didn’t need to feed players an elaborate story with impressive visuals to keep them engaged. Rather, it gave them a vessel for their imagination in the same way tabletop RPGs always have. The limited scope of the game’s visuals and plot allowed players to fill in the blanks. True the world didn’t react to our imaginations the way it would in a tabletop game, but that’s besides the point.

Dragon Warrior is also the first game I played where I truly needed to make a map in order to succeed. I had played games like The Legend of Zelda before I played Dragon Warrior, and I’m told a lot of people did make maps for that game, but I never needed to. In Dragon Warrior, though, the game is truly impossible without a pencil and some graph paper, and sketching those maps was an experience which honestly changed the way I look at games. Always before I had viewed hand-made maps as a sign of poor game design. I believed a player should never need to use tools outside of the game in order to complete the game. But I was wrong. Making my own maps so I could explore the pitch-black caves of Alefgarde gave me a sense of investment I’d never felt before. And that’s something I want to give my players when I run a tabletop game.

That’s all I really have to say. I know this post wasn’t strictly ‘on topic,’ in relation to tabletop RPGs, and if you didn’t like it because of that I apologize. What it all boils down to is this: every time I sit down with the original Dragon Warrior, I feel as though I’m connecting to something basic. Something which touches the heart of what a role playing game is. I’m not sure why I feel that way–perhaps it’s just because of nostalgia. I don’t know. Regardless, I wanted to try to express this sentiment to you.

My standard tabletop ramblings will now resume.

Paizocon Con Report Ort

Paizocon 2012 was the first convention I ever got around to attending. As such, I may not be entirely aware of the proper etiquette involved. However, my understanding is that I am now expected to write a ‘Con Report,’ detailing my activities during the event, along with any thoughts I have regarding the quality of the con.

So be it.

I currently reside in a little town called Auburn, Washington. There is little of value to be found here, which makes the town’s motto of “More Than You Imagined” depressingly ironic. The best thing I can say about Auburn is that it isn’t too far away from the really cool parts of my home state. Ya know…like Seattle. Paizocon was held a little further North than that, but still within easy driving distance. As such, the cost of attending the con ended at the price of the ticket for me. No airfare, no hotel room. That was really nice.

The night before, my ladyfriend and I printed out all of the events we were interested in attending, and put them onto a schedule. We then cut a few based on conflicts, or because there was no way we were going to wait around for 4 hours for something we were only mildly interested in. We discovered that there was really nothing we wanted to do on Sunday, so we decided to limit our attendance to Friday and Saturday.

We arrived quite early on Friday, and were given some toys by the convention staff. Posters, a map pack, a novel, and even a miniature! I’ve been told that this is a custom called ‘swag.’ I found it rather odd that I paid $40 to gain entry to the convention, only to immediately be handed perhaps $20-$40 worth of merchandise. But I have no complaints! I can only hope this entry in the Pathfinder Tales series of novels is a significant improvement over the others I’ve read.

We still had a great deal of time before our first seminar, so we wandered into the dealer’s room. Here I gleefully filled in the gaps in my Order of the Stick book collection by picking up On the Origin of PCs, No Cure for the Paladin Blues, and War & XPs. I also had a brief conversation about skills with a representative from Louis Porter Jr. Design, which I briefly discussed in an earlier post. I can’t say I was too impressed with the Neoexodus setting he was hyping (it sounded like a very generic attempt at ‘non generic fantasy.’) but I was intrigued by two of the other sourcebooks he had available, “Dangers & Discoveries” and “Debatable Actions,” both of which I purchased. Long time readers may recall that I am in search of an improved social resolution mechanic, and hope to perhaps glean some ideas from the latter of the two books.

Following this I briefly attended a sort of round-robin discussion group titled “Game Mastering 101.” It was focused on Pathfinder Society play, and I left after the second discussion group failed to offer anything of interest. Instead I sat in a hallway making notes for upcoming posts until it was time for the first workshop Morrie and I really wanted to attend: “Gaming Terrain: Working with Styrofoam. “

This is a hobby I’ve been interested in for a long while. Despite the fact that I’ve always felt reservations about the use of miniature figures, the prospect of crafting landscapes and environments is enthralling to me for some reason. Recently my ladyfriend learned about this craft, and became pretty excited herself! She spent the last month buying tools and materials, setting up a crafting table, and working on her first few tentative projects. Like this one pictured to the  left.

Sean K. Reynolds (one of Pathfinder’s developers) ran the seminar, and we probably learned more from him in an hour than we had learned from the several dozens YouTube videos we’ve been watching. I was particularly happy to learn about hot wire foam cutting tools, which we were able to try out ourselves. I also didn’t know that nailpolish remover melts a crater into the foam, though I don’t know how much of an application that has.

After the foam workshop was over, we were allowed to sit in on a second terrain workshop. This one focused on plaster. I’d never actually heard of this before, and it was fascinating to watch. It seems as though the molds are not difficult to acquire, and the results looked fantastic. I have no doubt I’ll be looking into this, and posting about it, more in the future.

Following this there was a seminar on freelancing which I wanted to attend, but during the two terrain crafting workshops we had made friends with another couple in attendance. We instead opted to have a nice lunch with them, wherein we discussed gaming groups, RPG mechanics, and stories of heroism (or lack thereof).

Once we had finished eating and parted ways, I was able to sneak into the last 45 minutes of ‘Everything You Didn’t Need to Know about the RPG Industry,’ which I must say I’m still somewhat confused by. This was the description of the seminar online:

“What was the dress code at TSR? What was playtesting like for 2E? Why did Gary make that table? All this & less will be revealed at our sekrit panel seminar! Expect nothing & be pleasantly surprised.”

I suppose I broke the rules by expecting something. But based on the description, I thought it would be a lighthearted bit of goofiness where some experienced industry professionals told amusing stories. And maybe I missed something in the first 15 minutes, but really the whole thing was just about maps. How much they can affect a game world, and how important it is for freelancers to include nice maps with their modules. And based on the large number of map samples they had on hand, it was obviously something they had planned to talk about.

On Saturday we again arrived early in the day, this time with the intent of finding a place to eat breakfast, since we had been unable to eat at home. To our delight, we found that there was a huge farmer’s market being run only a few yards from the buildings the convention was being held in. Thanks to this, all of our meals on Saturday were absolutely delicious treats prepared masterfully by some very talented cooks. Being the fat nerd that I am, I particularly liked the fresh banquettes which were stuffed with Italian sausage and bell peppers.

A few more vendors had set up since early Friday morning, so we again visited the dealers room. I picked up copies of The Complete Kobold Guide to Game Design, as well as The Complete Kobold Guide to Board Game Design, both of which have been on my list of things to purchase for a long while now. They gave me a free set of dice with my purchase, and I was able to spend several minutes talking to the Kobold Quarterly staff about their submission policies.

I also snagged “Zombiepocalypse Now” and “Thrusts of Justice,” two choose your own adventure books aimed at adults, both written by Matt Youngmark. I haven’t had a chance to dive into these myself yet, but I’m curious to see if it was handled well.

At 10am I made my way to the first seminar I was attending that day, which focused on how to create a homebrewed game world. Amusingly the panel was largely made up of Kobold Quarterly staff, one of whom I had been chatting with only a few minutes before. There was some very solid information presented here, particularly with regards to how magic items and religion can be used in a home brew game world.

Immediately after that was a panel on the art of Pathfinder. Not being an artist myself, I don’t really have a lot to say about this. It was very interesting, but we largely attended for Morrie’s sake, as art is a hobby of hers. Unfortunately much of the discussion focused on art as a profession, which didn’t really help either of us out. Though I did find it extremely amusing that one of the artists on the panel said they were a biologist by training, artist by trade. My ladyfriend is currently training in a lot of biology classes, but insists art will never be anything but a hobby. I prodded her in the ribs a few times when he said that.

Reaper Miniatures had a table set up out in the hallway where anyone could come up and paint their own miniature for free. This is something I’ve been wanting to attempt for awhile now, but I’ve always been a little bit nervous about ruining my nice pewter minis. I’m thankful I was able to make my first attempt with a free, plastic miniature. I’m sure my second attempt won’t be much better, but at least I know it won’t completely ruin the figure at this point. Personally, i think Morrie’s knight turned out a great deal better than my dwarf did.

After breaking for lunch (fresh pizza baked in a wood stove!) I attended a seminar on rules design by myself. Unfortunately I can’t discuss that seminar, but once it was over I attended my final seminar of the convention: Secrets of TSR.

As best I can determine, this is a bit of a Paizocon tradition. They get 4-6 fellows from TSR to just…sit around and talk about the old days. I actually had a little bit of small talk with the group of them before the panel started, not realizing who they were.

Once the panel began, I managed to score a seat in the front row, and get my voice recorder up on the podium so I could have the talk for posterity. It didn’t turn out very well, but that’s okay, because someone very kindly uploaded the entire thing to YouTube!

[EDIT January 27, 2019: This video seems to have been removed. Very sad.]

I’m pretty sure you can hear my laugh more than once. I’m often made fun of for the volume of my laughter.

So that was Paizocon. Conclusions? It was a lot of fun, even though it caused me to question my place in the Pathfinder community. It was educational as well. I do feel as though most of the content was geared towards someone who thinks about tabletop games far less than I do, but that’s not exactly surprising. And it’s not as though anything was ‘beneath me.’ I learned a lot about a number of subjects I’d never really thought about. All in all it was a good time, where I learned some useful skills, and had some great (though unrelated) food.

Lively Locals 5: Three Religious Sites

While at Paizocon, I attended a seminar on homebrew game worlds. It was one of the more thought provoking seminars I attended, and in particular one of the panelists really got me thinking about religion. I’ve never had a problem with religion in my game worlds, and you could even call me a pretty huge fan of Vecna, a god from D&D. But I’ve never spent much time thinking about the wider impact of religion on my worlds, which I now recognize as a pretty huge failing on my part. So, as a bit of fun, I decided to make this Friday’s post about something with religious significance. Nothing which deserved a really large backstory came to mind, so I settled on breaking this post up into three parts.

The Stake of Ereon

Long ago, in a small village, the Church of Arethae overstepped its bounds. Arethae was a god of contemplation and philosophy, but over time her followers in this village involved themselves more and more in the petty politics of governance. As the village grew, the clerics of Arethae became powerful and corrupt, encouraging their followers to ostracize any who did not submit themselves to the teachings of Arethae. Teachings which were often interpreted by the clerics to match their own selfish whims.

Arethae was saddened to hear her name spoken as a tool of oppression. Spurned to action, she communed with a lowly priest named Ereon, who lived in a city far from the village. She bestowed upon him her seal, and commanded that he travel to the village. There, Ereon was to meet with the church leadership, and prove his divine authority by presenting the seal. None who touched the it, she said, could have any doubt who had sent him. Ereon did not believe himself worthy of the task, but he submitted himself to his goddesses command, and left the comfort of his monastery home that very day.

It took four months for Ereon to travel the many leagues between his home and the corrupt village, but as he walked the seal infused him with his goddesses wisdom and strength. Through the challenges he faced on the road, it brought forth his inner courage and taught him how to lead those who had gone astray back to the truth of Arethae. When he arrived, he presented himself to the church leaders with the might of his goddesses’ conviction in his heart. The town’s clergy examined the seal, and knew it to be genuine. They were saddened to learn of their goddesses’ disapproval. When Ereon commanded that they submit to his guidance, however, they made a decision:

They did not need their goddesses’ approval.

They declared Ereon to be a heretic, and announced his execution to the townspeople with much pomp and circumstance. A stake was erected in the village square, and the clergy made a great show of binding Ereon to it. Ereon made no objection as they lit the fire beneath his feet. As he began to burn, he serenely chanting prayers to Arethae, until the smoke made it too difficult to speak.

The moment Ereon’s final breath left his body, every priest and priestess within the village began to choke and cough, as though they too were trying to breathe through smoke. The entire populace watched as their leaders–dozens of men and women–slowly suffocated for no apparent reason. The village was abandoned shortly after, and the buildings have long since been destroyed by the elements. But the stake remains, a charred black log standing alone in a field of grass. Even now, any character of evil alignment who steps within 100 yards of the stake is suddenly overcome by a fit of coughing, which will not end until they retreat.

Bloodstain of Vecna

Millenia ago the great warlord lich Vecna was betrayed by his lieutenant, Kas. The two fought a long battle, and at its conclusion Vecna’s tower mysteriously collapsed, presumably destroying both Vecna and Kas. No one knows what the outcome of that battle was, for the only remains ever found were Kas’s mighty sword, and Vecna’s hand and eye. Regardless of the battle’s outcome, it was soon revealed that Vecna had risen as a demigod. Much later, it was revealed that Kas had been raised as a vampire, and was a prisoner within Vecna’s Citadel Cavitius. But that is another tale.

When Vecna’s tower collapsed, so did its foundations, which extended deep into the earth. A veritable mountain of stone came crashing down through level after level. Through the eons which have passed since that fateful day, the site of Vecna’s tower has become obscured. But deep beneath the surface, in the bowels of the underdark, is a stone. Once, this stone served as part of the floor of Vecna’s audience chamber, and now it serves that same function in one of the numerous labyrinthine passages of the underdark.

During his battle with Kas, Vecna was wounded and a few droplets of blood were flung from his undead veins. They splattered on this stone, and there they remain. A dark brown stain, appearing to be perhaps a few days old at most. Not that anyone can see it in the pitch blackness of the underdark. None have ever discovered this stone, and even Vecna himself does not know of its existence. However, if anyone were ever to set foot upon it, they would immediately be granted knowledge of the locations of both Vecna’s hand, and eye.

St. Baria’s Rest

A blind prophet once came to the court of Kerrogon seeking food and shelter. Gustaf Teranar, the Primarch of Kerrogon, was not a kind man. His people suffered greatly under his tyrannical rule,and he found their suffering offensive. When the disheveled old prophet entered, Gustaf nearly had him killed on the spot for daring to present himself before the Primarch. But his advisers intervened, for they recognized the man, and knew of his gift. Intrigued, Kerrogon offered him food and shelter, in exchange for an insight into the future.

The man gladly accepted the food and shelter offered him, and on the morrow he met with the court once more to reveal Gustaf’s future: that even now, a child lived within his kingdom which would someday rise up, and slay him. The Primarch was enraged, and had the old prophet cast out of the court. He would have killed him, but he feared the consequences of slaying one who had been gifted by the gods.

Gustaf rallied his soldiers in the early morning, and ordered that every child in the kingdom–all those below the adult age–were to be killed. Ruthlessly, the soldiers went from home to home. Bodies were left in the streets, and the gutters ran with blood. The grieving wails of parents filled the air, becoming indistinguishable from one another. A righteous woman named Baria gathered together as many children as she could, and tried to flee the city. She managed to gather forty of them before she led them into the wilderness. As she entered a narrow pass, however, she heard the sound of hoof beats behind her, and the clatter of Kerrogonian Armor. Thinking quickly, she noticed a cave and bade the children to hide within. Only too late did she realize that the cave was shallow, with barely enough room for all of the children to fit, let alone hide.

Baria looked frantically for another option, but it was too late. She could see the soldiers outside as they examined the tracks the children had left. She was sure she was doomed, and it was all she and the children could do to keep quiet and still. The soldiers dismounted and walked around for a long while, puzzling over the tracks, appearing not to see the woman and the children she was trying to protect. The two even followed the tracks right to the mouth of the cave, and stared directly at the group for long minutes, before returning to their horses and riding off.

Baria was mystified, and thanked the gods for whatever miracle they had performed to save her and her wards. They continued to flee, and successfully escaped the slaughter. They settled in a faraway city, and indeed, one of the children eventually returned to slay the tyrant king who had killed so many others. And to this day, none with evil intent are able to see the entrance of St. Baria’s Cave, even with powerful spells and divinations, it appears to be naught but solid stone.

Tabletop Magic from Final Fantasy

For the past few weeks, my mind has been wandering. Other projects and hobbies have been pulling at my attention, and I’ve devoted much less of my time to tabletop than I normally do. Aside from installing new shelving and reorganizing my apartment, I’ve enjoyed several evening spent playing Cthulhu Saves the World. It’s a game created in the style of classic 16-bit RPGs like Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, and of course, the Final Fantasies 4 through 6. It celebrates their artistic style and gameplay, while incorporating new ideas to improve upon the failings of those older games. The whole thing is very ‘Old-School Renaissance’ in its style.

Playing this game over the past week or so has got me thinking about the games I wasted my youth on, and the Final Fantasy series in particular. I know it’s the hip thing to pretend we all hate the Final Fantasy series for one reason or another. But I’ve never been very hip. Partially because I still use terms like ‘hip.’ The Final Fantasy series has always fascinated me, particularly the way that each game starts largely from scratch. The series does have a formula, and a number of traditional elements which show up in each game, but each installment in the series always tries something new. The magic system for each game is an area where this is particularly evident.

Magic systems in tabletop games also fascinate me. Perhaps because magic has no real-world analog, it’s much easier to be creative about how magic is accessed by characters in a game world. So while my mind is adrift, I thought I’d use this post to examine the magic systems in the first 10 Final Fantasy games. Specifically with regards to how adaptable they might be to a tabletop gaming system. Let me be perfectly clear: most of these will probably not translate well to a tabletop system. This is intended primarily as a thought experiment, and not as a serious attempt at game design.

Final Fantasy: In the first game of the Final Fantasy series, players must choose four classes to make up their party. Among the available classes are a few different types of mages, which can each learn a different array of spells. Most towns in this game’s world have a white (healing/protection) and black (offensive) magic shop, where spells can be purchased and taught to members of the appropriate mage class.

This idea would adapt easily to a tabletop game, you wouldn’t even need to change anything about it. All you need to do is come up with prices for spells, and roll some random inventories for shops. The only potential problem I see with allowing players to access magic this way is that PCs often become ludicrously wealthy, and might be able to purchase all the spells they want. But that could be easily handled by restricting what spells are available, and pricing spells so as to drain your player’s coin purses.

I could honestly see myself using a system like this.

Final Fantasy II: Spells in Final Fantasy II were purchased in much the same way they were in the original game. However, they could be taught to any character in the party, as opposed to only those who were mages. Most games in the series would follow suit, allowing any character to learn spells. Additionally, only basic spells were available for purchase, and the spells ‘leveled up’ separately from the character, based on how frequently they were used.

This is not as simple to convert to a tabletop format. Tracking the level of multiple spells implies a lot of bookkeeping on the player’s part. More bookkeeping than I think most players would enjoy. Though, perhaps, a system could be set up where all of a magic user’s spells start at a basic level. Each time the character levels up, they can select a certain number of spells in their repertoire (perhaps equal to their relevant spellcasting ability modifier) to ‘level up’ with them. Assuming this number remains relatively static, the player is given an interesting choice: would they like to have only a few very powerful spells, or a larger number of moderately powerful spells?

Final Fantasy III: I must be honest, I did not play this game past the opening, and thus don’t have any personal experience with the magic system. My understanding is that spells were learned by characters of magic-using classes as they leveled up. I believe characters were able to change their class, but aside from that, this isn’t particularly unusual. So I won’t expound on it further.

Final Fantasy IV: Unlike Final Fantasy III, this game stands as one of my favorites in the entire series. I’ve played through it several times, and every time I cheer when Cecil becomes a paladin, and get teary eyed when Edward crawls from his sickbed to save his friends. I even adapted the game’s Dwarven Tanks for use in Pathfinder. However, the magic system is very dry. Characters who can cast spells learn them at per-determined levels (or, occasionally, during story events). It works well enough in a video game, but in a tabletop game it would just be boring.

That being said, one of these days I will grant a character the ‘Meteo’ spell during a dramatic moment, just for kicks.

Final Fantasy V: The fifth game in the series was focused on multiclassing, and it was pretty complicated. So complicated, in fact, that it was intentionally never released in North America because it was assumed American gamers would not be smart enough to understand it. There were a large number of classes to choose from, and characters could switch between them easily. Anytime a character’s class was changed, the player could select one ability from another class which they could continue to use. So if, for example, you chose to level a character in the Black Mage and White Mage classes, then when the character was a Black Mage, you could give them the ‘White Magic’ ability. The game had a vast array of different magic using classes, which might be compared to the different magical schools of a game like Pathfinder. Often these different casting classes learned their spells in different ways, and those spells had vastly different effects.

Consider Pathfinder’s various magical schools. Abjuration, Conjuration, Evocation, Necromancy, etc. What if a system forced you to specialize in one of these schools, and when specialized, you could only cast spells from that school? However, once you attained a certain level of mastery in that school (lets say, Necromancy), you could begin studying a secondary school (lets say, Enchantment). While studying the Enchantment school, you would still be able to cast Necromancy spells. However, the maximum level of spell you could cast would be reduced by half.

So a Necromancer able to cast 8th level Necromancy spells could then begin to study Enchantment, and learn to cast 1st level Enchantment spells, but he could not cast any Necromancy spell above 4th level. I suppose the character could go on learning as many new schools as the player wanted, but they would only ever be able to cast from two schools at a time: the school they were currently learning, and one other school they already know, reduced by half. As a flavor explanation, perhaps the caster needs to carry a gem of a certain type in order to access each school, and the gems interfere with each other when in close proximity.

Having written that out, I don’t know how interested I would be in playing such a system, but it’s an interesting idea none the less. Maybe if the exact numbers were played with a bit, it could be made more serviceable for a tabletop environment.

Final Fantasy VI: This game is, in my opinion, the best in the series, and its magic system represents that. The world of FFVI is one of technology, but early in the game the characters are introduced to Espers. Espers are magical beings from another world, many of whom have been killed by the villains of the character’s world. By equipping ‘Magicite,’ which are stones left behind when an Esper dies, the characters can gradually learn spells associated with that Esper as they defeat monsters and gain exp, and retains these spells even when a different magicite is equipped. Additionally, characters can summon the spirits of their deceased Esper to aid them in battle occasionally. Though, unlike spells, this ability does not stay when the character switches to a different magicite.

Despite the apparent complexity of the system, I think it would translate easily to a tabletop environment. Every magic user would have a necklace, or a ring, or some other device where they could mount a magical stone. These stones would be the remains of powerful magical beings that introduced magic to the world. Each magic user would start with one, but after that they would need to obtain them through adventuring. Only one stone can be used at a time, and the stone which is being used grants the magic user access to a magical ability.

Each time the magic user levels, they gain spells (and other abilities, perhaps) based on the stone they currently have equipped. But each stone only has enough magic in it to support perhaps one or two levels of advancement. So it is important for magic users to seek out new stones, so they can continue to advance in power.

The cool thing about this system is that it is not only flavorful, but could have interesting game effects. Magic users would be desperate to never advance a level without possessing a stone they could learn from. If the GM chose to make such stones scarce, the search for them would drive every magic user to take risks in the pursuit of them. The system could certainly use a lot of polish, but I think this could be fun to use.

Final Fantasy VII: Seven attempted to give magic a bit of a scientific twist with its Materia system. Materia are gems formed within the earth which allow characters to access unusual abilities, such as summoning blasts of fire, healing wounds, etc. Each materia starts out weak, but gains its own kind of experience over time. Materia slowly level up, and can give characters access to more powerful effects. What is interesting about this system is that materia can always be traded between characters. So if a character starts with a “fire” materia which can barely conjure a spark, but levels it up until it can summon a conflagration, they can easily hand that materia over to someone else and allow that character to summon a conflagration.

Essentially, this is a system with no magic users. Everything is handled by naturally formed magic items, which level up over time. If you wanted to run this, you could just adapt Paul’s magic item leveling rules and run with it. Surprisingly simple.

Final Fantasy VIII: This was the pinnacle of the series’ complexity, and for the record, I loved it. Each character was able to use a turn during battle to ‘draw’ spells from the enemy creatures, and spells were treated as a shared resource between everyone in the group, with a max number of 100 per each type of spell. The spells could then be ‘junctioned’ to an individual character’s various statistics, giving that statistic some property of the spell it was juncitoned to, with an effect proportional to the number of spells of that type. So if you junctioned 10 “fire” spells to your attack, then your attacks would deal a small amount of elemental damage. Whereas if you junctioned 100 fire spells, your attacks would be entirely elemental in nature.

I honestly don’t think this system has any chance of being adapted for tabletop. Not unless everyone at your table is much better at doing mathematical caluclations than I am.

Final Fantasy IX: While I did play Final Fantasy IX a great deal, I find it very difficult to remember how the game’s magic system worked. From what I’ve read online, it seems as though it was very similar to the Esper system of FFVI, where players learn spells by equipping an item. The primary difference being that abilities are learned from items such armor and weapons, rather than the remains of magical creatures.

Like Final Fantasy VII’s system, I think this would work best in a game with no magic users. Where every character has the potential to learn spells as they level up. Finding a magic suit of armor would offer characters more than just additional protection. If they found it and wore it until they leveled up, then they could permanently learn a spell such as Cure or Magic Shield.

Final Fantasy X: The sphere grid. This was a huge deviation from leveling systems we’d seen before in the series. Truth be told, I’ve never seen anything quite like it, before or since.

Every character starts at a predetermined location on a massive, interconnected grid. Characters gain levels very quickly, and each time a character levels, they can spend that level to move themselves one ‘space’ along the grid’s paths. Each space has a single ability or attribute bonus on it which the character can learn.

The interesting thing about the system is that it simultaneously established characters as certain Archetypes (Lulu, pictured left, is a Black Mage) but at the same time allowed each character to develop in any way the player desired. As an example, Lulu’s starting location on the grid is surrounded by Black Mage abilities; spells, extra magic power, and so on. But if the player so chooses, they can gradually move Lulu out of the Black Mage area of the grid, and into the White Mage, or Warrior areas.

If we were adapting this for a tabletop game, I think the first step would be to drop everything but spells from the grid. Using a system like this for for general character advancement would be both too complicated, and too limiting for a tabletop RPG. But if the entire grid is nothing but spells, it could be a very interesting way of representing a magic user’s advancement and specialization. Instead of different areas of the grid representing different classes, they could represent different schools of magic. Players would need to select a starting spot in one of the enchantments, and spend their first few levels learning spells from that school. But as they moved through the sphere grid, they could guide their progress towards secondary, and tertiary schools.

The only downside I can see is that it would be next to impossible to model the system at the table. In order to track a character’s progress along the grid, it needs to be small enough for each player to have a copy, which means it would need to fit on an 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of paper, or thereabouts. Perhaps each space on the grid could be three spells, instead of only one?

Final Fantasy X+: When it was announced that Final Fantasy XI would be an MMO, I lost interest in the series. The god-awful failure that was Final Fantasy X-2 only solidified that feeling for me. I haven’t played any of the games since X, and cannot make an honest attempt to adapt magic systems I don’t know.

Let me know if you have any thoughts. This is just random brainstorming for me, so input would be fun.

What It is that I'm Doing Here

I recently had the good fortune to attend Paizocon, held here in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve always wanted to attend a gaming convention, but until now never made time to do so. Which is insane, because there are half a dozen awesome conventions in Seattle every year. For its part, Paizocon is small. I think there were five rooms being used by the con. But there was still a lot of cool stuff to see and do, which I’m sure I’ll be mentioning in at least a couple upcoming posts. But first I’d like to talk about something a little more personal.

My outlook on tabletop gaming has changed a lot in the last year, largely influenced by blogs such as Hack & Slash and Untimately. I’ve started to see the many ways in which my fundamental assumptions about RPGs have been wrong. It wasn’t so long ago when I fully embraced everything Pathfinder had to offer, but as I’ve experimented and learned, I’ve become much more critical. Among other things, I’ve dropped half of the skills from my games, and even concluded that the entire skills system is too fundamentally flawed to be salvaged.  I’ve have always maintained, and continue to hold, a great deal of respect for Paizo as a company. I think they’ve made a lot of good decisions in how they’ve chosen to handle the 3.5 property. But I knew even before I left for the convention that I didn’t fit into the Paizo community as well as I would have when I first bought the tickets.

There were times when I felt as though I was visiting an alien culture. I spent several minutes talking with a representative of Louis Porter Jr. Design. A very friendly fellow who was absolutely flabbergasted by my aversion to using skill rolls unnecessarily. I was likewise baffled by my inability to express the benefits to him–though I like to think that if we’d had a longer time to talk we might have come to an understanding. Unfortunately his booth was rather busy. I did end up purchasing his supplements “Dangers and Discoveries,” and “Debatable Actions: The Non-Combat Resolution Sourcebook.” Both of which I hope to learn from.

This was typical of many of my interactions at the con. I briefly sat in on a few smaller workshops while waiting for things I was more interested in to start, and was often frustrated by the assumptions made there. Obviously the official rules were used, as one would expect at an official function. But, as an example, one speaker made an off hand comment about how it is highly undesirable to run a game where the players are using characters of vastly different levels. I wanted to point out that some of my best games have been run with characters that have large level gaps between them. Though I didn’t, because it would have been rude to interrupt a lecture.

I don’t want to paint a terrible picture of Paizocon. I did very much enjoy my time there. Some of the seminars I attended were incredibly informative. In particular the two I attended dealing with terrain building. Sean Reynolds taught me more in two hours than I think I could have learned in two months of watching YouTube videos. I even met a number of other attendees with whom I had some very pleasant conversations about Pathfinder’s mechanics, their failings, and alternative choices. None the less, the whole experience has left me wondering where I fit within the Pathfinder community.

This has never been a question which really bothered me before. I do my own thing, and I do it my own way, and that’s what keeps me passionate about my work. I don’t have any intention of changing that outlook, but I wonder if I should change how I describe myself. In particular the fact that Papers & Pencils is often billed as a Pathfinder blog. It’s true, I play Pathfinder, it’s the system I’m most familiar with, and many of my views are informed by years of playing it and D&D 3.5. But I’ve never bothered to read up on Golarion, or participate in the Pathfinder Society. I think I have a grand total of 3 posts on the Paizo.com forums. I don’t think I even have a very wide readership amongst Pathfinder players. Most of the websites which link to me are, amusingly, OSR blogs. As are most of my biggest influences.

So where, exactly, does that put me? I play Pathfinder, and love the game for all the things it does well. But, I approach gaming the same way I approach everything else: with a critical eye. I believe that if it’s worth my attention, then it’s worth my criticism as well. I’ve been heavily influenced by people who reject the new-school ideologies of the game that I play, and other Pathfinder players feel cut off from my writing because of that. So when a person asks me what my website is about, what can I honestly tell them? What is an apt description of this blog?

This is Papers and Pencils. I like games, and I write about them. You probably won’t agree with what I write, and that’s okay with me.

Dungeons & Dragons, Small Towns & Zealots

Tabletop gamers of my generation never had to deal with the mass hysteria surrounding role playing games in the 80s. Some of us, including myself, did have people in our lives who believed RPGs were evil. I still have strong feelings about my experiences, and I’m sure others with similar stories do as well. But what we experienced was an aftershock of a much more widespread phenomenon. Most people I’ve spoken with view tabletop games as an interesting past time. Occasionally they deride it as childish, or ‘nerdy,’ but it’s not very common these days to come across someone who honestly believes it is evil. None the less there was a time when role playing games were the target of religious zealots all across North America.

I bring this up because I was recently sent a link to a series of forum posts and images, uploaded by a fellow called Walkerp. When he was young, his hometown was swept up in this ‘controversy.’ His mother (who is clearly the coolest mother ever) saved a lot of local newspaper clippings on the subject, and eventually presented them to him as a gift. He was kind enough to scan and share them, and I’ve reproduced them below. Some of them are a little blurry near the edges, but I was able to decipher everything just fine. Reading these clippings was enlightening for me. It’s one thing to know a controversy existed, to read about it, and even encounter an odd individual or so who still believes D&D is evil. It’s quite another to see these issues seriously discussed in a newspaper.

You’ll note that in many of the clippings, a man named Clifford Olson is referenced. The anti-D&D crusaders repeatedly say they fear the children are being influenced by the game, and that they don’t want a repeat of the Clifford Olson incident. I had never heard of Clifford Olson before, but I assumed he was somehow involved in role playing games. Perhaps he was the kid who committed suicide over it which I’ve heard so much about. Curious, I decided to look into who he was. As it turns out he was not even slightly related to D&D or role playing games of any kind. He was simply a pedophile who raped and murdered young girls.

I am honestly floored by that casual and despicable accusation. How can any adult seriously claim a group of young teenagers are going to become monsters? It’s hard to believe a newspaper would print that kind of vile attack against children, much less that anyone would ever take it seriously. I understand that fear can be powerful, and that emotions run high after a tragedy, but there is no excuse for that kind of depraved behavior.

As I read this, I repeatedly thought of the men and women who worked on D&D in those days, Gary Gygax in particular. He (and no doubt many others at TSR) was a devout Christian. I can’t imagine what it is like to have your life’s work literally demonized by your own religious community. He probably found great comfort in his religious beliefs, but petty fools chose to take his source of comfort and use it as a weapon against him. Even decades after this nonsense had mostly blown over, after Gary died, a donation in his name was refused by his favorite Christian charity. I can’t even comment on that, it’s simply depressing.

Cicero said: “Not to know what happened before we were born is to remain perpetually a child.” So without further comment, here is what happened in our hobby before many of us were born.