Year: 2013

Picture Thursday 31: "Mage" by 88grzes

According to the artist of this piece, it took about an hour. Try not to feel as jealous as I do about that.

I normally don’t go in for character portrait type pictures, but I always love this kind of messy, speed painting style. And I love the red beneath the eyes. It’s such an interesting detail on an otherwise very stereotypical looking wizard. Is it blood from catching a glimpse of fundamental threads of reality, or is it the warpaint of a bush wizard preparing to slaughter the enemies of his people?

A Look at "On the Non-Player Character – Solving the Social Trap" by Courtney Campbell

I’m a little late mentioning it, but fellow Blogger Courtney of Hack & Slash recently released a book titled “On the Non-Player Character – Solving the Social Trap,” available both in print and pdf form. I’m going to try to convince you to buy it, because I think it’s more than worth the money it costs. However, in the interests of full disclosure, Courtney is both a friend of mine, and someone I admire as a game designer of superior skill. I don’t expect you to take me at my word that you should buy this book. So in order to convince you, I want to show you something.

This is a photograph of the game shelf above my desk. I keep these books within arms reach of the place where I do 90% of my work. It’s a bit of a mixed bag up there. A few of these books are up there because I want to get around to reading them soon. Most of them, though, are books which I’ve read, liked, and continue to use. But I don’t really need any of them. My game mastering skills are in my head, and my campaigns are in my notes. These books are helpful, but if you took them away from me, I don’t think my players would really notice a degradation in the quality of my games.

This photograph, aside from exposing what a cluttered junk heap my home is, shows the game shelves in my back room. There’s some miscellaneous fiction in there, but you can see binders containing notes and printed blog posts, various sourcebooks, more D&D 3.x material than I think I could even lift all at once, and several large boxes of Dungeon and Dragon magazines stacked on the floor. These are books I’ve gone through and used in the past. Some of them are not great, but there’s some real gems in there! Books which have inspired me, articles which have given me house rules to work from. These books hold a lot of meaning for me, and I still return to them from time to time to search for new ideas. But again, if you took them away my games probably wouldn’t suffer.

This last picture is of all the books which humble me. The books which never caused me to think “I could have written that better.” Which isn’t a disparagement on those books I did think I could write better. We all have that arrogant little voice inside of us which thinks we’re better than successful people. It’s that little arrogance which emboldens us to try to be successful ourselves. But these books are are so good they make me question whether I’ll ever produce anything good enough to sit next to them on a shelf.

“On the Non-Player Character” is divided roughly between methods for interacting with NPCs, and methods for creating NPCs.

The NPC interaction system is, as I described it to a friend, “such a huge leap forward that I feel as though every other crude attempt I’ve seen at NPC interaction doesn’t even count anymore. Skill checks for Diplomacy/Intimidate/Bluff/Sense Motive seem archaic by comparison.” Described simply, Courtney created a short list of <20 possible interactions with an NPC, which nearly any interaction can fit into. When the players say or do something to an NPC, the GM merely needs to determine which category of interaction it best fits into, make some simple rolls, and produce an impartial, interesting result. (There’s a lot more to it than that, but that’s what I would call the core mechanic.)

The NPC creation system, while nowhere near as revolutionary, is none the less a big step forward from anything I’ve encountered before. It focuses on being a tool for the GM’s own imagination, rather than being a tool for creating something mechanical and then relying on the GM’s imagination to give it life. I don’t know about other GMs, but I consider myself quite good at improvisation, and my imagination has limits to the number of unique characters I can come up with on my own!

I feel as though there’s no way to read my fawning praise of this book without believing it is hyperbole. But I mean what I say. And while it’s almost a certainty that some blogger or obscure game supplement has produced a really great system for handling NPCs–one which is better than any I’d heard of before I read this book–I honestly don’t think anything quite this good exists anywhere else. Because if it did, by rights, it would be on every GM’s must-own list. As this book should be.

If I were to offer one criticism of this book, it would be one which Courtney has pointed out himself. His writing is not always the most clear, because he tends to pack information very densely. I had to read page 24 no less than three times before I understood what it was about. And once I understood it, I realized I probably would have used 3-4 pages to explain the same concept. Personally I prefer my way of doing things, but stylistic differences are really just a nitpick on a nearly perfect game tool.

Page 24 has some really cool ideas on it, actually. You should check it out when you buy the book.

The Return of the Blogger

Hey guys! Its been awhile. I’ve missed you, and I know this is never fun to hear, but we need to talk about our relationship. Because I’m a melodramatic blogger who takes his electronic word page far too seriously. There’s a TL;DR at the bottom if you need it.

When I started my little break, I ostensibly did so because I wanted to improve my life by looking for a less miserable job in a much better city. Then I got the news that my grandfather’s health was failing, which sucked. Then I had a fun little adventure in dentistry, which also sucked. Stuff sucked and I figured it was as good a time as any to take a break from P&P. Truthfully, I’d wanted to take a break for a long while, and bad stuff happening was a convenient excuse. Not to pacify you, good reader, but to convince myself I wasn’t just being lazy.

My writing here has always been more important to me than it probably ought to be. I do that; I take things too seriously. Failure to meet my self-imposed update deadlines would ruin my whole week. It’s an unhealthy way to view a project like this one, I know. But Papers & Pencils made me feel as though my life had some forward momentum when I was severely depressed from lack thereof. But it was stressing me out, and draining my creativity, and the moment I gave myself permission to be more lax about updating, I stopped updating completely.

In case I haven’t made it painfully obvious with my whining, I’m not fond of my current life situation. Things took a wrong turn for me at some point a long time ago, and I’ve felt lost and out of control for years now. I want to make a better life for myself as a working writer and game designer. It’s not a profitable life goal, but it’s a life I think I can be happy with. Papers & Pencils has been an expression of that goal. My attempt to discipline myself as a writer, to teach myself about tabletop games, and to practice my craft day after day. In these goals I think I have been relatively successful, but I passed the point of diminishing returns some time ago and I failed to notice. I need to push myself in different ways if I want to continue to improve.

What needs to come next for me, I think, is focusing on and completing larger projects. The Hidden Tomb of Slaggoth is a step in the right direction, and I want to keep that momentum going. I’m already working on a new tabletop project, which I’ll discuss in an upcoming post. And when that’s done I want to do another. A module, or a gaming supplement, or a collection of short stories, or a novel, or a complete sourcebook. Some of them will be free, (like Slaggoth), others will be for monies because at some point I have to gather up my balls and proclaim to the world that I think I’ve made something which I deserve to be compensated for.

So what does all of this livejournal nonsense mean for Papers & Pencils? Hopefully it pleases you to know that Papers & Pencils isn’t going away. But up to now, I’ve treated P&P like the most important thing in my life*. This will no longer be the case. Whatever major project(s) I’m working on will take on that role. So while I am aiming to maintain a rough M/T/Th/F update schedule here, I’m resolving not to stress about it if I miss a day.

*Yes. This is the best I could do with something I thought was that important to me. I’ve got a real future as a writer, amirite?

I’m also aiming to write shorter posts in general. I’ve always aimed for a sort of “informal essay” style while writing for this site, but that’s hard to keep up with day after day. So while an informal essay will still pop up if I’ve got a topic I really want to dig into, I suspect things will get quite a bit more “blog-ish” around here. Not to say that’s a bad thing, just a different thing than I’ve been doing.

I like Papers and Pencils. I like sharing what’s on my mind, I like the great friends I’ve made, and I like YOU. I’ve received more emails from readers in the last month and a half than I think I received in the year prior to that. It has been so encouraging to chat with the people who enjoy reading what I think, and to hear what they think. I hope I can continue to entertain you with my scribblings.

TL;DR I’m gonna spend more time working on books. P&P will get less attention, but it’s not going away. I still love you. Hope you still love me. XOXOXXXOOO

Free Module: The Hidden Tomb of Slagoth the Necromancer

Click here to download “The Hidden Tomb of Slaggoth the Necromancer,” by Adrian Stone and LS

So, I wrote a small dungeon adventure module.

It started early this year when I stumbled on to the website of fellow D&D blogger, Stonewerks. Stonewerks primarily makes maps, and his work has heavily influenced the way I’ve drawn the Deadly Dungeons maps over the last few months. At the time, his newest post was “The Hidden Tomb of Slaggoth the Necromancer,” a map which caught my eye, both for its lovely design, and compelling description:

“The long lost Tomb of the evil necromancer Slaggoth, is buried deep with in a cavern complex. The caves have become the home of a trio of ogres and their band of goblin henchmen. The goblins guard the entrance by watching through a small crack in the rock above the entrance, alerting the other goblins when anyone approaches the entrance. The goblins will then unleash a small pack of wolves that they have chained in the front caves against the intruders. If the wolves are not enough to repel the intruders, the goblins will send a runner across the wooden rope bridge to the ogre lair to warn their masters and will use ambush and retreat tactics to slow down the intruders. In the ogre cave is a massive steel door that leads to the hidden tome of the evil Necromancer Slaggoth. They have never been able to breach the door, so the tomb has remained untouched. Rumors of a key to the steel door is hidden somewhere in the caves, but has yet to be found. What horrers lie within Slaggoth’s tomb? Who is brave enough or foolhardy enough to find out?” -Stonewerks

Stonewerks and I got to talking in the comments, and then via email. What started as me filling a lazy evening by keying an empty dungeon turned into a full-fledged attempt to write my first module based on Stonewerks’ seed idea. I dragged several people through playtests and proof readings, and even got cbMorrie and Jacob Rain (both of whom have been featured on P&P before) to provide some free art for it.

The module proper has actually been done for several months now. The work of getting everything written, tested, re-written, and edited only took a few weeks. The art took a few weeks more than that. The hard part, as it turns out, was making a PDF. It’s not something I’d done before, and I found it a frustrating process to start with. One which I procrastinated over and over again. I’ve got a pretty fair handle on how to do it now, though, so hopefully future attempts won’t take quite so ridiculously long!

So please, download it! Let me know what you like or what you hate. Run it for your group if you are so inclined, and if you do, let me know how it goes! This is an experiment for me. One which will hopefully pave the way to future products.

Reviews:

“I think it succeeds much more than most adventure supplements, and I’d be happy if this adventure represented the quality baseline of OSR fantasy.” -Bryce Lynch

 “a very fun adventure that could be great for one shots or a couple of evenings of play to introduce new players to old school games.” -Teh Badger

“Clever and weird adventures with a clearly pulp asthetic that can be used straight across ANY edition are rare, but being free and of such quality is a very rare combination indeed. Grab and download this one folks. You won’t be sorry.” -Needles

“a real nice 1st effort that is far better than my first couple years of adventure writing for sure.” -The Frugal GM

“This led the party to the crypt room with Slaggoth’s corpse. Her sarcophagus rested on a raised dais at the back of the crypt. Six pillars running through the room had statues of skeletons carved into them. Slaughto had the bright idea to tie ropes around each of the statues legs just in case the statutes became animated. (Spoiler alert: Very good decision!)

Kharl tried sliding the lid off the sarcophagus. This caused the six stone skeleton golems to animate, just as Slaughto fears. The golems all toppled over due to the ropes.” – A full play report from Buttmonkey on the Troll Lord Games forums.

“I’ve run Slaggoth’s a few times for people as an intro to OSR. I put it up there (with minor alterations) with Finch’s Tomb of the Iron God and Raggi’s Tower of the Star Gazer as awesome starting adventures.” -LBriar of Reddit, sent to me in a private message.

Picture Thursday 30: "Orpheus and Eurydice" G.F. Watts

You may have noticed posting has dropped off rather suddenly here. Some large issues, and larger questions, have popped up in my personal life. Resolving them may require most of my free time for a little while. I considered putting the blog on a month-long hiatus, and I haven’t discounted that option entirely yet, but for now I think I’ll stick to a “post when I have a moment” schedule. Hopefully I can get back to games soon!

SO, this image.

Resurrection is a tricky concept in games. If a character can be brought back to life, then what is the danger of death? It’s a question as old as gaming, and one with a lot of potential answers. The question, and the various answers to it, are all very interesting. I’ll write about them another time.

For now, look at this picture of Orpheus bringing his dead wife Eurydice back from the underworld. The image is terrifying to behold. The juxtaposed affection and lifelessness depicted here are disturbing. And while “you must charm the god of death with your music” is perhaps too high a bar for character resurrection in a game, this painting expresses something I like to see in character resurrection.

It is a herculean task to accomplish, and even when it is done, the resurrected person is never quite the same.

Vendor Saving Throw

The question of “what can my players buy in this town?” is an important one. The availability of equipment creates limits on the player which can force them to make more interesting choices. It can also spur them into traveling abroad, exploring the wider world in search of some place where they can find the things they need.

I’ve used a variety of methods to determine what can and what cannot be found in a given town. And I’ve read many more methods than I have tried using. I’ve never really found anything which worked well for me.

Often times, when my players have discovered a new town, I just wing it. I figure out roughly what kind of town it is, and how big it is, and from there it’s normally pretty obvious what can be bought and what cannot. In a farming village, of course you can find a pitchfork to buy. Sure, there’s probably someone with a sword who wouldn’t mind selling it. No, nobody here can cast healing magic for you.

I can think of no reason why this casual method of determining what is available for sale should not be formally adopted as my “official” method. The only hole are the few items which straddle the line between “obviously,” and “obviously not.” For example, a suit of chainmail armor. It’s possible one of the villagers has a set they’d be willing to part with, but it’s also possible none of them do. The logical thing to do is to roll to see if there’s a such a suit of armor available.

Here is what I propose: every town has a saving throw which is rolled when it’s not clear to the GM whether an item would be available or not. For 80% of what the players might ask for, the answer should be obvious based on the size, wealth, and function of the community. For anything else, 1d20 is rolled against the town’s saving throw. A roll equal to or higher than the target number means the item is available, less than the target number means none are.

The target number would get smaller, the larger a town becomes. An outpost or camp with 5-15 people in it would have a target number of 20. A small farming village where everyone knows everybody else might be 17. A town with a thousand or so people in it might be as low as 14. A major metropolis could get down to 9 or 10.

I’m going to start using this method in one of my campaigns, and see how it works out.

Deadly Dungeons 22: The Slide Room

This room is exceptionally simple in function, but can prove quite confusing to players. Particularly if they need to flee quickly!

The room itself (shown here in red) is actually just a small chamber which rests inside of a much larger one. It is mounted to the walls, floor, and ceiling of the larger chamber by a set of expertly crafted rails, which have been treated with a magical oil which does not degrade over time. So perfect are the mechanisms which move this room, that it does not produce the normal rumbling vibrations which would normally be a dead giveaway that something was amiss. Those who are particularly in tune with the ground (such as dwarfs) should be given a chance to notice the movement, but only when they are inside of the moving room itself. And even then, their ability to detect the movement is not certain.

Every corridor which can be used to approach this room is strewn with pressure plates. When activated, these plates will cause the room to move into position to receive the approaching characters. The pressure plates are specifically placed far enough away from the sliding room that it will have ample time to be in position before anyone is within eyesight of its doors. If these pressure plates are detected and avoided, there is a 4-in-6 chance that the room will not be in position when the players arrive, and they will instead find themselves looking into a long featureless room. If the players choose to enter this room, roll a check every few turn to determine if the sliding room moves to crush them.

The inside of the sliding room itself is almost entirely featureless and boring. It must be, or else the extremely sensitive weight detection mechanism would be too difficult to calibrate! So long as any character is inside of it, the room will move to a new position any time one of its doors is closed. If it is at the south-most position, it will move north, if it is in the north-most position, it will move south. If it is in one of the two central positions, randomly determine whether it will move north or south.

So, for example, if the red room is in the position shown above, and the players approached it from the curving corridor on the southern side of the map, then it would glide to the south-most part of the larger chamber before they arrive. If they see the room, and all enter it, then close the door behind them, the room will glide back to the position shown on the map. If they then exit it, and close the door behind them, it will not move, because there is no weight inside of it (unless they left equipment weighing at least 30lb behind). If the party’s halfling then enters the room, and closes the door leaving the others outside, they will see the room slide away with their halfling inside of it.

The 1 Hour Dungeon

Remember when you told your mom that you were leaving food out “as an experiment?” but really you just didn’t want to clean it up? No? That was just me? Well that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing with my GMing lately. I’ve been shamefully avoiding preparation, and justifying my laziness by calling it an experiment in improvisation. But unlike my childhood self, I’m legitimately interested in how the experiment will turn out. So after working on being a better improvisor for the last few weeks, I thought it would be an interesting change of pace to sit down and give myself a single hour to create an entire dungeon adventure. The idea is to simulate the time crunch I experience while improvising a dungeon for my players, while still actually preparing something in advance of the game.

This is what I came up with, all within 60 minutes, which includes the map. I have cleaned up the text a bit, though. I don’t want to ask anyone to understand my sketchy shorthand.

Note that my thought is that this would be used with a game system similar to the one I wrote about last Wednesday. The idea is that the players begin with no classes at all, similar to The Funnel of DCC RPG. As they play through this dungeon, they will seek to define their character.

General Info:

Old man Herst recently pulled down a bunch of trees at the end of his property. His onions were profitable last year, and he’d like to increase his crop this year. While tilling the soil, though, he discovered the most peculiar thing: a stone stairway! Leading right down into the earth! It was the damndest sight he ever done seen, and when he was telling the tale down at the pub that evening, you overheard him.

It’s perhaps 2 in the morning now, and you and your friends have gathered around the stairs. You’ve heard it said that treasures can sometimes be found beneath the earth–treasure enough that a bunch of farm hands like yourselves could buy a better life for yourselves.

Room 1: The walls and floor are a moss-covered flagstone. Stones are missing here and there, exposing the earth. The ceiling is almost entirely exposed earth, supported by stone arches which criss-cross the ceiling. Roots poke through here and there, and it looks as though it wouldn’t take much for the dirt to collapse into the room. These conditions persist throughout the dungeon, unless otherwise indicated.

There’s also a good deal of timber in this room, stacked in piles against the east and western walls. It is clearly old and rotten, perhaps part of the structure which originally stood over these stairs.

Exits to the North and South are visible upon entering the room. The secret exit to the West can be revealed by moving the timber aside.

There are 6 mouse-folk here, huddled in the corner and clutching their clubs. Their fur is mottled, and they appear to be malnourished.

Room 2: The walls have corpse shelves here, though most of these are empty. There are 12 shelves in all, but only three bodies remain. Close examination of any of the empty shelves will reveal a small pressure plate in roughly the same spot on each shelf. Pressing the plate does nothing. Close examination of the wall across from any shelf will reveal a small hole, the purpose of which is unclear.

Moving any of the three bodies which remain releases the pressure plate under their heads, and a crossbow bolt is fired at the player’s back from across the room. Also under each of these bodies, roughly where the small of the back would be, is a small ovoid piece of amber. Each is worth 10gp.

Room 3: Some of the floor stones here have been pulled free, and water from above has formed into a pond which is 2ft deep at its deepest point. There are six mouse people here, drinking the water. Two more stand guard.

Aside from the water, there are three shelves in the room which were once filled with books. The shelves have now been knocked over, and the books scattered about the floor. Most are torn to pieces, and nearly all of them are covered in black mildew and small mushrooms. Thoroughly searching through the books will reveal only one book which is still in good condition. It is written in an odd script, but anyone who makes a successful intelligence check will strangely be able to read it.

Studying the book from cover-to-cover takes 8 hours. Once completed, the reader’s mind will be awakened to magical power. The player may immediately become a 1st level wizard, and may use this book to prepare a 5lb Mage Hand spell.

Once someone has been awakened in this manner, the book must rest for 100 years before it can awaken another.

Room 4: Most of the stones from the walls and ceiling have been piled in the center of the room in a 4ft high mass. Mouse folk have burrowed small nests in the dirt here. There are 14 adult mouse people here, and 26 young.

Beneath the pile of stone is a small chest containing the treasures of the mouse people: 16 gp, 42 sp, 317 cp, and 1 ruby worth 25gp.

The secret door in this room is opened by pushing on a hidden stone, and can only be discovered by performing a search check on the appropriate wall.

Room 5: In the center of this room is a wooden chair with skulls piled up around the base of it. Several skulls are nailed to the sides and legs of the chair as well. A young man in black robes with skulls haphazardly sewn onto the shoulders is nervously pacing here. He is Hezaphezus the Malevolent Bringer of Doom and Unlife. An inept necromancer of 18 years. He already cast all of his spells for the day, but carries a dagger and a Wand of Cold, which deals 1d6 damage and has 1d10 charges. Also on his person are 30 gp.

Room 6: Eight shambling corpses are here, banging on the door which leads to room 5. If zombies can show emotion, these zombies are angry. They’re so intent on getting through the door that they will not pay attention to the players unless they are attacked.

The flagstones on the floor of this room make a spiral pattern which twists towards the center of the room. At the center of the floor is a glass lens, about 1ft in diameter. If you look through it, you will see the plane which your soul would be bound for if you died today.

Room 7: This is the lair of the Spidersnake. The room has no obvious features upon entering. However, it is bisected by the web of the spidersnake, and anyone attempting to move from one door to the other will become tangled.

The spidersnake itself rests in a web funnel it made in the ceiling of the room. Among the bodies in this funnel the players can find 40 sp, 8gp, and a sword whose blade always seems to be covered in a thin layer of green slime. This is a Sword of Rotbane, which sets fire to any undead it successfully strikes.

Room 8: A statue on the Western wall stretches an arm straight out, pointing at a spot on the floor. The statue wears a crown. If the base of the statue is inspected, the players will find writing which reads only “The Pretender.”

Any player who kneels before the statue will cause a crossbow bolt to fire from the tip of the pointing finger.

Stairs: The dungeon descends further down…though to what I have not yet determined.

Deadly Dungeons 21: Firebelly Statue

Built into the wall is a huge iron statue of a man’s torso. The man’s pot-belly starts at the floor, and the man’s head meets the ceiling at eye level. His massive hands grip tightly to the floor, which is indented and twisted to fit around his clasping fingers.

There is a large opening in the belly of the statue, with a fireplace inside of it. Preferably this statue would be used in an inhabited area, so that the players can first encounter it with a fire blazing. This isn’t necessary, however the puzzle will probably be more difficult to figure out if there’s not an active fire.

At the base of the iron statue is an engraving, apparently an epitaph for whomever the statue depicts.

May the world never forget the name of Elric Warmaker. So skilled in war that he came to be called the man of the iron skin, for no wound would scar his body. He fought with a fire in his belly, and united all the peoples of the Uklik.
The gods had given him more than a warriors gifts, for in peace he spoke with a silver tongue. He won twice as many wars with his words as he ever did with stone and steel.

Though the mouth of the statue does not appear unusual upon viewing, it in fact is on very discrete hinges. Having been undisturbed for centuries, though, these hinges are quite stuck. The only way to open the mouth would be with a crowbar, or other lever instrument. Within the mouth is a silver tongue the size of a grown man’s torso. The value is not high as a piece of art, but such a large amount of silver is worth plenty on its own!

Lifting it might be difficult though.