Looking Back at “The Standing Stone” by John D. Rateliff

The early 2000s were not a great time for D&D adventure modules. Not many were even published compared to the volume of splatty rule supplements WotC was pumping out every month. Only a few left any kind of lasting impression on me. Of those which did, this is by far the most notable.

That’s not to say The Standing Stone isn’t a product of its era. It is. There is boxed text. There is terrible information design. Most of the book is embarrassingly divided into “scenes.” The implied setting is blandly kitchen-sink. There are sections which bloviate on about nothing at all. There are names like “Ashardalon,” and “Saithnar.” Underneath all that malarkey, though, is a fairly robust location-based adventure that I’d be happy to run even today.

The remote thorp of Ossington is built within a circle of Stonehenge-style standing stones. The people of the town are nearly dead from starvation because the elves of the nearby forest have turned murderous. The poor villagers are being picked off with arrows from a distance. They cannot defend themselves. To make matters worse: a ghostly knight appears to attack anyone caught outside the circle of stones. Ossington can’t go for help, or even plant their fields. The town is about to go extinct from famine.

If the players dig deeper, they may discover that the original townsfolk have actually been murdered and replaced. The starving peasants are minions to an evil wizard (named Dyson, of all things). The elves refuse to parley only because the wizard has already perpetrated a massacre against them under flag of truce. The ghost knight is actually a paladin who died trying to prevent that massacre, and notably only attacks the wizard’s minions, or those who aid them.

It’s a good premise, with some sincerely memorable characters, twists, and locales to back it up. For example, there’s the self-effacing bard who is actually a Vrock in disguise; and I love how the replacement villagers are all animals who’ve been given human form by magic. They still exhibit little animal characteristics, and seem to obey the wizard only because they don’t want to be turned back into woodland creatures.

Rateliff also includes a lot of great little details to establish the setting. There’s a skeleton slumped over a plow in a fallow field which the players pass on their way into town. That’s an image that sticks in my head. There’s also the various eerie items the townsfolk hide or burn when they discover strangers are approaching.

Perhaps the greatest appeal to me is how down to earth the module feels. It’s an adventure for 7th level characters using 3rd edition rules, but the most fantastical elements are the remnants of forgotten history. A red horse carved into a hill, a great barrow to the north, the titular standing stones. These are all the sorts of things that have existed in the real world, and been given mystical importance by locals who’ve forgotten how they got there.

If you took out the casual mentions of dragons and halflings–none of which are integral to the adventure–you could easily believe this module was published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Heck, even the wizard’s tower is a modest 3 story shack.

Despite the whole thing being described as a series of “scenes,” the challenges in Standing Stone are open ended enough for the players to approach and resolve them a dozen different ways. For example, that ghost knight who attacks people? The referee is provided with the basic rules that govern his behavior, and specifically instructed in how to telegraph those rules to players. He’s less a character than he is a force of nature, but it’s made clear that players are just as free to become his allies as they are to destroy him or run from him. Moreover, the area is seeded with clues that may eventually lead players to discovering his corpse, which could be used to destroy him, put him to rest, or ignored to keep him bound to his ghostly quest. No matter what your players do about the ghostly horseman, the adventure works just as well.

In fact there are no forced combat encounters in the module. There are combats which will be very difficult to avoid, but clear reasons are always given for why that is. For example, as mentioned above, the elves have already suffered one massacre while treating beneath a white flag. The referee is frequently reminded that the elves are unwilling to parley because of this, but also makes a point of outlining some stuff the party could do to change their mind.

I think my favorite non-combat encounter is within the great barrow, which is a trap-filled, wight-infested maze. The party will eventually encounter the long-dead warlord for whom the barrow was raised. Despite being an undead monstrosity, the book actually includes more advice for how to run him as a social encounter than as a combat encounter.

The Standing Stone’s greatest flaw isn’t so much a matter of what is written, as it is the way it is written. If you replaced the cumbersome “scene” structure with a simple timeline of events; nixed all the boxed text and the tired bits of fantasy faff; and tightened up some of the less focused writing, I’d go so far as to call it a great adventure.

If the book wasn’t owned by Hasbro, I’d be tempted to contact Mr. Rateliff and ask permission to rewrite and refine it for the OSR. I betcha I could even con Dyson into doing some pro bono cartography since he gets name dropped as an evil wizard. Alas, the machinations of capitalism make that possibility unlikely in the extreme. None the less, I’d recommend checking it out if you’ve got a folder full of pirated 3rd edition PDFs sitting on your hard drive somewhere.

The post is over now, but I have a bit of bookkeeping I want to communicate to regular readers. I’m currently going into the busy season at my day job, which often means working between 50-60 hours a week. It tends to kick my ass pretty hard, and leave me too exhausted to do much of anything at all.

In the past, I’ve pushed myself to make sure Papers & Pencils continued to be awesome every week no matter what. However, this year I have quite a bit fewer posts in my buffer than normal. Add to that the fact that I no longer have any obligation to my Patreon supporters, and the fact that this season is shaping up to be more difficult even than normal, and, well…I’m just not going to kill myself for this blog.

As it stands right now, I fully intend to keep up the weekly update schedule, but I’m significantly lowering my standards for what constitutes a worthy post. Don’t be surprised if you see a few 300-word posts in the coming months. Worst case scenario, I’m not going to be too upset at myself if I miss a week here or there. Worse things have happened.

That’s it for now. My busy season ends in November, so things should hopefully move back to normal around then. Thank you all for reading. <3

The Grizzled

I want to write about board and card games more frequently than I have in the past. So I’m going to.

“Grizzled” is a game I’d never heard of before I opened it up on Christmas morning. It’s an unassuming looking thing. A small box with a stack of cards, a handful of tokens, and a rule book. My ladyfriend tells me it was an impulse buy. Something she saw in the bargain bin. A way to fill out the space beneath our tree. Neither of us expected much from it, and were pleasantly surprised when playing it become one of the highlights of a delightful evening.

The game makes a strong first impression with its art. I confess, the art is not to my particular taste, but it suits the game well. It has a distinct style. There’s an economy of lines that is evocative of the period the game depicts. A time before digital tools allowed every piece of pop art to look pristinely slick and polished. And the palette is at once colorful, but also muted enough to mesh with the game’s theme.

The theme, by the by, is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Specifically, as suffered by French soldiers in the trenches of The Great War.

My first impression, while reading the rulebook, was that the game was pretentious. It seems to take itself so seriously, opening as it does with a plea for the reader to approach the game as a work of art. A contemplation on the horrors of war as valid as any film, book, or painting. The rulebook as a whole is pretty bad, actually. It’s just not very efficient at communicating game rules. (A flaw shared by too many board games really). There was at least one rule we had to make up ourselves, because we couldn’t find it anywhere in the text.

(Does anyone know what enables you to make speeches? We just ruled that speeches were a shared resource that could be used at any time, but some of the game’s cards seem to imply that the leader is meant to distribute who can make speeches or something like that.)

After playing a few rounds of the game, though, I changed my mind. It’s a game about war, but the challenge isn’t enemy soldiers. The challenge is your character’s own fears. As the game goes on your character will gradually become a more broken person. Even a more reprehensible person. It’s a cooperative game, so we were all trying to help one another come back from the brink. But in the end there’s just not enough support to go around. The best you can do is beat back entropy for another turn, and hope the war is over before you reach the turn when you can’t anymore.

So as pretentiously as the game presents itself, it actually does do an admirable job of discussing war trauma not just through its theme, but through its gameplay as well. It lives up to its pretensions.

Of course as poignant and as sad as the game is, I said above that it was the highlight of an enjoyable evening. And it was! The gameplay is pretty simple: everybody has a hand of cards, and each card has some number of things that might terrify a person on the battlefield. The players take turns laying down cards, trying to minimize the number of times any given terrifying thing is represented. If any single thing is on the table 3 or more times, the round ends. At the end of the round you tally up the number of cards that are still in everybody’s hands, and you add that number of fresh cards to the draw stack. Pushing the bottom of the stack–and the end of the war–further out of reach.

The core mechanic is solid, and of course there are a number of additional elements to give players a range of tactical choices. For example, sometimes the cards in your hand aren’t terrifying things. Instead, they’re character flaws for you to attach to yourself that make you a greater and greater burden on the other players. “Mute” is my favorite, forbidding that player from communicating with the rest of the group “in any way.” Other character flaws are less funny, and more devastating, like the one that forces players to play a random card from the deck as they retreat.

The game has just the right number of options, I think. The rounds move fast, and there’s a lot of excited chatter between players as they try to figure out how to stay in the game just a little longer. Get just one more card out of their hand before they have to retreat.

On the negative side, I don’t love the way they handled the support mechanic. Players have tiles indicating one or two seats to their left or right. As each player withdraws from the battle, they select one of their tiles and place it face down in front of them. When the battle ends, everyone reveals who they offered support to, and the tiles are passed to the players indicated. Whoever receives the most support in a round gets a bit of relief from the mounting stresses of war. If two players receive equal support, then nobody gets any relief.

It’s a workable mechanic. But there’s always a niggling question of why this works within the game’s theme. Why does a player who receives two support tokens not get any relief just because another player got 3? And why does nobody get any support if two people get equal support? I suppose it could be interpreted as an abstraction of the idea that nobody gets as much support as they ought to, but it feels awkward and a little unfair. And not a good kind of unfair. An annoying kind of unfair. If the player on my right clearly needs the most help, why should I be unable to support them just because I only have “left” tiles? And if me being forced to use that left tile causes the player on my right to be tied for support with the player on my left, then nobody gets any support at all. And that’s the kind of thing that can cost you the game. I don’t think the support system is bad enough that it ruins the game or anything, I just feel like it could probably be done a little bit better.

As cooperative games go, it’s difficult to win. My group lost both of the two rounds we played, but I don’t think I’ve ever had quite so much fun losing a cooperative game. I’ve got no problem losing a competitive game, because that just means someone else was the winner. But it always bothers me when there’s no winner. I suspect the short play time helps here. With a game like Pandemic or Castle Panic, a loss comes after an hour or even two. Putting in that much effort makes losing a bitter pill. But Grizzled just takes 30 minutes. And, really, losing almost feels more appropriate than winning does.

The Grizzled is an interesting game. The individual turns and the overall play time are quick, but as a player you’ve always got enough options that it feels strategic. The experience is fun, but it leaves you with a little something to think about once all the pieces are back in the box. I’m looking forward to playing it again. Maybe getting everyone home safe next time.

A look at Wonder & Wickedness by Brendan S.

Yesterday, Brendan of Necropraxis published “Wonder and Wickedness.” And I did something which I’ve never done before: I read an entire RPG book front to back on the same day it was released. This puts me in the fairly unusual position of being able to share my thoughts while they’re still relevant.

Full disclosure: Brendan and I are buds. This post isn’t a ‘review,’ so much as it is an account of why I like this book.

Wonder & Wickedness details a surprisingly modular magic system. It could entirely replace the more common magic user’s system without any tinkering in most games. And if entirely replacing the MU’s spell system doesn’t interest you, it would be a simple matter to cherry pick the magic dueling system, maleficence rules, spell mishaps, magic items, or just the spells themselves. Any of these elements could be plopped down into any D&D game without trouble.

The basic idea that drives the new magic system is dropping spell levels entirely from the game. Instead, the book is filled with spells which can be cast by an MU of any level. Spells scale with the MU’s level, keeping them relevant even in higher levels of play.

The spells themselves are evocative and interesting. Brendan’s well-documented love of Necromancy is evident. His rehabilitation of that often-overlooked school of magic rivals Gavin Norman’s also excellent “Theorums and Thamaturgy.” Other spell schools have been entirely reinvented with a less-than-wholesome bent. The implied setting is one where Magic Users are shunned by decent folk. And for good reason.

The spells themselves are inventive. I’m rarely surprised by something truly new when reading a new spell. They’re either more evocative versions of currently existing spells, or they’re extremely situational to the point of near-uselessness, or they fill some obvious kind of gap (Low level fireball, high level fireball, etc.) There’s nothing wrong with any of that, and some of it certainly shows up in Wonder and Wickedness. But I was surprised by several spells which truly break the mold and offer something entirely new, useful, and not overpowered.

In particular, there are a number of spells in the Translocation school which I can’t believe aren’t commonplace in every D&D game. “Recall” and “Revisitation” seem so quintessentially perfect for basic D&D play. And in the Psychomancy school, “Fascinating Gaze” is just fucking perfect. On the one hand, it’s a fairly weak spell in most situations. But, if applied with some skill, it’s exactly the kind of spell that makes Conan afraid of magic users.

The book’s 84 spell mishaps are curious. In most cases, the effects are far more devastating than any of the actual spells. And, while most of them are certainly a detriment to the caster, they’re also a detriment to everyone around the caster. Plus, there are a number of spell mishaps which actually empower the caster into an even more terrifying and unwholesome force. It creates a sense that whether you’re the caster’s friend or foe, you probably don’t want to interrupt their casting once it starts.

The magic items have a good mix of risk and reward. They foster the idea that, even for PCs, magic is something to be treated with caution. But none (save the Crown of Extinction, wtf man) are outright cursed. I like that several are creatively finite. There’s nothing so crude as “this magic item has 10 charges,” but there are several options for items you can give players without worrying about their long-term effects on your campaign.

The Bridging Arrow is my new favorite thing. Hot damn I can’t wait to see what my players do with it.

I can’t talk about Wonder & Wickedness without mentioning that the book’s interior was illustrated by no less than Russ Nicholson. Who, among many other RPG publications, also made art for the original Fiend Folio. And he didn’t slack off just because this is a small indie publication–his work is as beautiful here as it was in the FF. There are several full-page illustrations. The kind you can stare at for several minutes, picking up nuances of character expression and item detail.

I also want to give props to Brendan and Paolo Greco (Who did layout) for how easy W&W is to read on a Kindle. I’ve always hated reading on a computer screen, and since the majority of indie RPG publishing is done on PDF, I bought a Kindle earlier this year to help myself deal with that. But the majority of PDFs I’ve read seem to be optimized for print, or for larger screens than the basic Kindle has. The print in W&W is nice and big, and required no squinting–or worse–magnifying the page, and scrolling around on it.

Wonder & Wickedness is absolutely worth your time. You should go buy it now. Not just because it’s great, but because The Lost Pages shop is shutting down at the end of 2014 due to legal issues. It’s a god damned shame. Hopefully the issue can be resolved, but it doesn’t look like it will be resolved quickly. So buy all your PDFs while you can!

I want to close on this note: I came up with the cover for Merciless Monsters before Brendan came up with the cover for Wonder & Wickedness. So nobody gets to call me a copycat when my book comes out. Seriously.

Adventure Module Review: "Fuck For Satan" by James Raggi

“Better Than Any Man” is better than the best adventure module I’ve ever read. It transcends that paltry distinction, because when I was done reading it I had gained more than knowledge of a cool adventure. My views on tabletop games had shifted. The bar for monsters, and art, and adventures was set higher. I knew, before placing my big ol’ Lamentations of the Flame Princess order, that nothing I read would top it.

“Fuck for Satan” isn’t “Better Than Any Man.” In fact, if I’d read FFS first, rather than BTAM, I probably would have stopped reading halfway through and given up on Lamentations of the Flame Princess altogether. In Raggi’s own words, this is a “screw-you dungeon.” There are numerous occasions when even I–having read the adventure in full–have no idea how I would survive if I were a player. I’m all in favor of punishingly difficult, but FFS is sadistic. I can only imagine there are players out there who are either significantly more skilled, or significantly more amused by cheap deaths, than I am.

That being said, the book is hardly without value. In fact, it’s chock full of amazing ideas. “The Twinkling Star” in particular is so fucking phenomenal that I literally called my buddy on the phone so I could read that section of the book to him. And when my girlfriend got home, I read it to her. I had never given serious consideration before to the positive potential of meta gaming. The idea that the players have leverage over the GM is gods damned delightful. You can be sure my players will encounter something similar to Twinkly sometime soon.

Come to think of it, anything surrounding the dungeon is fantastic. The generic setup leading to a humorously unrewarding payoff; the hilarious, and needlessly long old man rant which you’ll never actually use in the game; Twinkly; the titular fucking in the name of Satan, performed by well meaning, brain-addled twits; and the giant walking penis creature who just wants to go home. These elements make me want to run the adventure. But these elements make up less than half of the module.

The bulk of the module is a dungeon which I do not think I could survive. If I was being careful to the point of draining all of the fun from the game, I think I’d still die. If the GM let me read the adventure before running the dungeon, I think there’s still a pretty fair chance I would die.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t good stuff in the dungeon too, though. There’s a monster living inside of a book called the Half-Realized Poorly Conceived Terror which I’ll definitely use at some point. And “The Eye and the Basin” is super cool–though perhaps a little harsh. Part of me thinks it would work fine if players were only required to cut off a finger to solve the puzzle. But another part of me really likes how it’s written, with players needing to kill and gut a hireling (or fellow PC) and sacrifice their heart. The Luck Sucker is also ballin’.

Final verdict: read Better than Any Man. If you like that, then maybe consider Fuck for Satan. There’s a lot to like here, and even if you never run it, you’ll enjoy reading it. Whatever other flaws it might have, I couldn’t put it down until I had read it all the way through.

Oh, and P.S., Jri-Khan is a cool dude. I might make him a recurring NPC in one of my game worlds.

Lamentations of the Flame Princess

So with Pathfinder and I no longer an ‘item,’ I’m on the market again. I don’t think I’ll ever make the same kind of commitment to another system. But then, nobody ever anticipates the day that special game comes along, do they? And as it happens, I’ve had my eye on Lamentations of the Flame Princess for awhile.

I actually don’t recall when LotFP first came on my radar, but my first distinct memory of the game is the fear in my fellow adventurer’s eyes when our GM announced that we was running “A Raggi module.” (as in a module written by James Raggi, creator of LotFP). It took me a few months to get around to purchasing the game, and when I got it in hand I was immediately impressed with it, before even reading a word. Multiple books, printed character sheets, and a full set of dice were included in my $35 Grindhouse edition of the game. What’s more, the art is gloriously imaginative, provocative, and NSFW. I don’t think I ever realized how much the tame-ness of most RPG sourcebooks bothered me until I found this book which was actually willing to engage with me as an adult. To depict all of the violence I so gleefully describe to my players.

Upon reading the books, I was profoundly disappointed. Not because the books were bad, but because I saw many of my own ostensibly unique ideas had already been published by someone who managed to come up with them before I did. I thought I was going to be so very clever someday when I released a game system, and the GM’s Guide was largely just a collection of essays on GMing, rather than a collection of charts and numbers of limited usefulness. I thought my system would be so much easier to understand with expansive examples of play–though even I wouldn’t have been so bold as to fill an entire book with them!

I don’t love everything about LotFP, of course. The magic research / magic item creation systems seem to be more trouble than they’re worth. Some spells are so dangerous to use that I don’t know if I’d ever be willing to cast them. The idea that only fighter’s advance in combat ability has a certain appeal, but I worry about how it will affect play as adventurers start to reach mid level. And call it a nitpick, but I’ve never liked games which measure movement in feet. My ability to perceive distance is not good, so saying a character has a movement of 120′ means nothing to me.

But for every con, I could list a half dozen pros. And two pros in particular make this game worth it all on their own. First, the rules work. And second, these are among the most lightweight rules I’ve ever seen. More lightweight than any of the other old school games I’ve encountered. And that’s good, because it gives me so much more room to tinker and expand on my own, which is what I love to do anyway.

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.

Book Review: "At the Queen's Command," by Michael A. Stackpole

Book cover of “At the Queen’s Command” by Michael A. Stackpole.

Full disclosure: Mike Stackpole is a personal hero of mine. As a writer, as an independent thinker, and as a righteous dude. I’ve read and loved his books since I was a young child, so I’ll readily confess that I’m more than a little biased in assessing the quality of his work. None the less, I think this book might be of interest to my readership, so I wanted to share my thoughts with you.

I first picked “At the Queen’s Command” quite some time ago, back when Boarders was going out of business and selling off old stock for a fraction of its value. Its taken me this long to pick it up because I’m disinclined towards early colonial history. Ball and powder muskets bore me, and the rules used to engage in combat turned actual war into “combat as sport.” Not to mention the uncomfortable reality that the slaughter of native peoples and the slave trade are intrinsically linked to many of the ‘heroes’ of that period.

However, this world is entirely fictional. Though obviously based on the history surrounding the American revolutionary war, the names and circumstances have been altered. “Mystria” stands in for America, “Norisle” for England, “Tharyngia” for France, and “Altashee” for native peoples. This approach allows the book to go beyond the constraints of typical historical fiction or alternative history, into complete historical fantasy. A history where proto-draconic wurms are the pets of nobility and the mounts of the most prestigious cavalry. In this world magic is commonplace, but weak and of extremely limited use, requiring technology (such as the “firestones” in guns) to make it effective. It also allows for the oppression of the natives to be approached without historical baggage, and for slavery to be omitted entirely. The relationship Stackpole’s world has to the real one isn’t so different from the relationship Middle Earth or Westros has to medieval England. The parallels are just a little stronger in this instance.

In keeping with the low-magical tone of the setting, the real life wonders of the new world often dwarf those elements of the story which are actually fantastic. When wurms are introduced, they are treated as commonplace. The characters not only know they exist, but also have experience being around and handling them. Then there’s this passage, which is among my favorite in the book:

“There, thirty yards away, a massive beast on long legs emerged from the brush and onto a small sandbar jutting into the river. Brown in color save for its long, buff muzzle, its head was crowned with a huge rack of thick antlers. Its stubby tail and brown ears flicked about. The creature surveyeed the riverside, then cropped some of the grasses growing at the river’s edge.
“Owen lowered the pistol and released the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. At that range he couldn’t have hit the beast. No matter. Such was its size that a single lead ball wouldn’t bring it down. Even a jeopard might think twice.
“The monster looked in his direction for a moment, then ambled back into the river and swam across the deep center channel. Once it had its feet under it again, the creature strolled toward the far shore, nibbling as it went. It never cast a glance back.”

Later, Owen is informed that what he saw was a moose.

But while a good setting (which this is) is important for a fantasy piece, the characters and narrative are what make a book worth reading. Here is where “At the Queen’s Command” really excels. The author gives us characters we can easily fall in love with; a duty-bound soldier who wants to do the right thing, an excitable and passionate natural philosopher, a skilled frontiersman who doesn’t have much use for society, and a native who cares for his friends, but is wary of the danger their people pose to his. He also gives us characters which twisted my gut with fear or tightened my teeth with hatred. I normally have trouble remembering character’s names, but the people inhabiting this world were so real to me that I don’t think there’s a name I’ve forgotten. Even the farmer in Hattesburg who shows up all of three times; his name was Seth.

The book’s narrative is often slow, but never plodding. It does not rush towards action and adventure, but rather takes its time to luxuriously peruse the locals and characters you encounter. Stackpole takes his time, without ever allowing a scene to feel excessive. And when action does occur, I found it that much more exciting. There were times when I was moving my eyes across words as fast as I possibly could because I was frantic to discover what happened next. That’s a very special level of engagement which I wish I experienced more often!

“Compelling” would be the TL;DR version of my thoughts. If you’d go so far as to grant me another word, I think I would go with “Fucking Compelling.“

I’m currently reading the book’s sequel, “Of Limited Loyalty,” and it’s no less impressive. It is tragic that the series’ third installment is in jeopardy due to issues with the publisher.

Buy this book. For serious.

X-Wing Miniatures Game

The other day, a friend I don’t get to see very often brought me a Christmas gift: the X-Wing Miniatures game published last year by Fantasy Flight. It’s a pretty perfect gift, because I’ve been eying that game for months now, and I’ve got a little, tiny, almost insignificant, lifelong passion for the Star Wars. Plus, as my friend noted, the game has a lot of similarities to a board game that I’ve been developing in my spare time. He thought it would be useful for me to see how another designer handled a similar concept.

Before anything else, let me say that the miniatures used for this game are beautiful. Seriously, click that picture! The rest of the pieces are are alright, with some high quality artwork for the pilot cards. But the miniatures? The miniatures for this game are of fucking stellar quality. When I first saw them I thought perhaps they re-used the old Micro Machine molds (which are some of the coolest toys ever). But! I pulled out my old micro-machines box to compare the two, and the models included with the miniatures game are even more detailed! I’m tempted to just keep these things on my desk rather than putting them back in the box. (And if the TIE fighters are as fragile as the old Micro Machine TIEs were, that may not be a bad idea).

The actual play of the game is surprisingly simple. The players agree on the number of “points” which will be used in the skirmish. They then use those points to add ships, pilots, and upgrades to their forces. Once play begins, the players use small dials to secretly choose which maneuver each of their ships will perform, then place the dial next to the relevant ship. Once everyone has selected their maneuvers, the dials are revealed, and the players use included cardboard guides to move their ships around the countertop, or table. And once everybody has finished moving, the ships with an enemy in their firing arc get a chance to attack.

Here’s some photos demonstrating the basic gameplay as I just described it:

The gameplay is fast, and it’s a whole lot of fun.

I do have one complaint about the game though, and it’s a big one. This game is designed around expansions. The basic game comes with 2 TIE Fighters and an X-Wing, which I’ve had a lot of fun with. But you’re not really getting the “full experience” until you start shelling out more money for extra ships. Which are expensive at $15 for a single fighter craft, up to ~$30 for larger ships like the Millennium Falcon or Slave I.

I’ve enjoyed the game enough that I’m okay spending some additional money to be able to have larger battles. But not everybody will be. I’d even go so far as to say it feels a bit slimy. Many board games have expansions, but those expansions are usually produced after the game is already a success and the developers believe they can produce more content for it. This game was released simultaneously with its expansions. And while the basic game can stand on its own, it also feels incomplete.

In defense of the game, the miniatures are of very high quality. The productions costs of each ship doubtless contributed to Fantasy Flight’s decision to use this expansion-based distribution model. None the less, I think it would have been better if the basic game included a few more ships. The bump in price would be worth having a more complete-feeling game. They don’t even include enough dice in the basic set! But you can bet there’s a fucking dice pack!

TL;DR: The X-Wing Miniatures Game is fun, and awesome, and I really like it. But if you don’t want to buy the expansions, it is not worth your money.

Reading "The Steading Of The Hill Giant Chief" as a Modern Gamer

As I mentioned yesterday, I recently took advantage of Wizards of the Coast making a lot of old TSR content available for purchase as PDFs. I bought all seven of the GDQ series modules, which I’ve been wanting to read for years now. The set have the distinction of being voted “the single greatest adventure of all time” by Dungeon magazine back in 2004, and the arguably more awesome distinction of being listed among Stephen Colbert’s favorite memories.

I’m generally a pretty slow reader, but I’ve been using every spare moment for the last day racing through these glorious tomes. I don’t have a ton of experience with oldschool modules, but I’ve certainly found them a lot more engaging than many modern modules I’ve read. And I’m really, immensely disappointed that I don’t have any players who are anywhere near ready to run through them. My D&D&LB players are just starting to reach level 2 (lowest recommended level for these is 8). My ToKiMo players–while closer to the appropriate level–have not been playing with the level of high-mortality that these modules demand.

Surprisingly though, my player’s level of experience is my only real concern with running these modules for a Pathfinder group. The work of modifying the adventures for a modern game is really no work at all. I had once thought, based on my experience with modules for rules heavy systems like D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder, that converting a module to a new system would be difficult. But in these adventures there are so few rules or stat blocks that there’s hardly anything to change.

Take, for example, the first of the seven modules: Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, which I purchased as part of the compilation “Against the Giants.” Along with two maps (one of the interior of the Hill Giant Stead, and one of the dungeon below it), there are 7 pages of adventure information and room descriptions, broken up by art. Based on my experience running oldschool style dungeon-crawls in Pathfinder, the content in these 7 measly pages could last for at least 2 game sessions, if not 3 or 4.

Only occasionally are game rules even mentioned, and in those instances it would be the work of mere moments to update them appropriately. For example, in room 17A of the dungeon level, part of the description includes this passage:

Behind this altar is a flight of low, uneven steps which lead to an alcove with a concave back wall of purplish-black, glassy appearing substance. If any creature stands before this wall and gazes upon it for one round, a writhing amorphous form of sickly mauves and violets will be seen stretching its formless members towards the viewer. The sight causes the creature seeing it to have a 50% chance of becoming insane.”

Now, if you want, you could just play that as written. The mechanics are explained in their entirety right there on the page: a 50% chance. If you’d rather make the module consistent with Pathfinder, though, it only takes a second. 50% chance is pretty damned high, so I’d say Will Save, DC: 18.

There are no NPC stat blocks in this module, so no real work to do there. Although there are two captive NPCs in the dungeon (an elf and a dwarf) who may join the party if rescued. But since no character sheets for those characters are included anyway, it seems that even the DMs of 1978 were expected to make their own character sheets for these characters. Surely we can take a moment to do the same, right?

All of the monsters in the module are standard. At the time players were meant to look them up in the AD&D Monster Manual, and as luck would have it, all of the monsters are still around in the Pathfinder Bestiary. Watch, I’ll even do all the work for you, in order of introduction:

Orc, Page 222
Hill Giant, Page 150
Ogre, Page 220
Cloud Giant, Page 147
Stone Giant, Page 151
Cave Bear, Page 31
Dire Wolf, Page 278
Bugbear, Page 38
Trogdolyte, Page 267
Giant Lizard, Page 194
Carrion Crawler…okay this one isn’t in there. Most likely copyrighted by Wizards. But if you play Pathfinder, you’ve probably got a 3.5 Monster Manual handy. It’s on Page 30 of that book.
Manticore, Page 199

Bam. I just updated the module for you.

Of course, there are a lot of AD&D anachronisms which you’ll need to deal with. Instead of “2d6 damage,” you’ll see things like “2-12 damage.” But that’s not difficult to figure out. There are also a few instances when one monster fights “as another monster,” but that’s not difficult either. When the module says that Hill Giants fight “as ogres,” it just means that you should use the Ogre stat block for these Hill Giants, because they’re not big badasses yet. Easy peasy.

I highly recommend these modules to Pathfinder players who enjoy dungeon crawling. They’re cheap, solidly designed, and will be a very different experience from the Pathfinder modules you may be used to.

Appendix N: The Zombie Survival Guide

Depictions of the macabre have always held a special place in my heart. Even in my early childhood, all of my doodles were of horrible monsters and demons. I remember it being a major concern to my parents, and I even frightened a few other children with what I came up with. This was not intentional. I’ve rarely ‘played up’ my love for disturbing images just to make people uncomfortable. (Though, I confess, as I’ve grown older this has become something of a guilty pleasure). I merely have a natural passion for the darker imaginings of the human psyche. And at the center of this passion are creatures possessed of unnatural life beyond death. Ghouls, vampires, and of course, zombies.

You might say that I was into zombies “before they were cool,” but then I would have kick you in the stomach for making me sound like a hipster douche. All the same, even I have long since tired of the ‘zombie craze.’ That’s hardly an original sentiment, but that doesn’t make it any less valid. It is past time for zombies to shamble out of the spotlight. The overproduction of zombie-themed books, movies, television programs and (especially) games is more than frustrating. The books which arguably started that craze, however, are still some of the best I’ve ever read.

Max Brooks’ two zombie classics, “The Zombie Survival Guide,” and “World War Z” are original, and inspired works of modern literature. They cannot even be counted as pulp, despite being predicated on a pulp icon like zombies. Both books explore some interesting questions about the human condition, and they do it from unique perspectives. The level of thought which Brooks put into his work is honestly remarkable, and he deserves no end of accolades for what he accomplished.

Personally, I think World War Z is the far better book. If you haven’t read it, you ought to. The episodic style of the story means you can read it in small segments and feel satisfied that you’ve experienced an entire story at the end of each one. But the episodes are not so completely disconnected that the book doesn’t have an overall narrative. One which, I think, is the definitive account of a zombie apocalypse.

Despite WWZ’s objective superiority, however, I think The Zombie Survival Guide is a much more valuable tome for game masters. It’s valuable even if you never have, and never intend, to run a zombie survival game. The ZSG is useful for all GMs, of all games, in all settings, because in that book Max Brooks does what a good GM should do: he creates a fantastic world, complete with rules for the fantastic elements, then takes that world completely seriously.

If you are unfamiliar with the Zombie Survival guide, the premise of the book is very simple. Zombies are real. There have been numerous minor outbreaks recorded in the past, dating back to as early as 60,000 B.C.. And while past outbreaks have been contained, there is still a real threat of a pandemic of zombieism which would consume the world. When and if that happens, the book aims to prepare the reader to survive in any eventuality. It exhaustively covers its subject matter–to the point that in some spots it almost becomes a general-purpose survival guide. Though it never stops being entertaining.

The complete seriousness of this book with regards to its own fantastic content is a perspective-altering tool for game masters. As I mentioned, this is precisely what I think we ought to be doing. We create, or inherit, fictional realities. Those realities often have fantastic elements, such as magic, or high technology, or even something as simple as slightly altered history from that of the real world. But whatever the particular oddities of our worlds may be, once we’ve determined what those oddities are, we should try to understand how the world would function realistically. If we can accomplish that, then we’ve taken one of the most important and most difficult steps to help our players take the world seriously.

For example, consider a world of medieval fantasy. The only way it differs from real-life medieval Europe is the presence of magic. Okay, now it’s time to figure out how it functions realistically: how does magic work? Is it an innate power granted to a few, or is it a studied art? How powerful can magic be, and why haven’t magic users taken over the world by now? Medieval Europe was strictly religious, how does the pope respond to magic? Does he claim it for the church as a gift from god, or does he decry magic users as servants of evil? If he decries it as evil, is it outlawed universally, or does his opposition to it cause a schism from the church? Or, perhaps, does the obvious power of magic cause the political power of the pope to disappear entirely? Does magic affect the day-to-day life of the peasantry, or are its gifts enjoyed primarily by the ruling classes?

These are important questions to consider if we want our players to find our worlds believable. And it’s the type of thinking for which The Zombie Survival Guide serves as a perfect example. In some ways, I think the ZCG is the most well developed campaign setting I’ve ever seen. Because while many campaign settings focus their attention on detailing nations and races and politics, this book can skip all of that since it can be found in any world atlas. Instead, it focuses all of its 250-some pages on exploring the single way in which its world differs from our own.

It seems more than a little strange to write a recommendation for a best selling book which has been on the shelves for almost a decade. But I don’t simply recommend it as a good read. (After all: World War Z is better!) I recommend it as a valuable source of education for game masters.