Choose your difficulty

A couple months ago, I had a minor revelation about my game, and because these are dark times, this played out on Twitter.

I realized that the game needs difficulty settings, so that each player can play the game at a risk level they are comfortable with. I wrote up those rules in a couple hours. Surprisingly, they came together very quickly, and though I’m sure they’ll change a bit in time, they’ve been good to our playtest so far.

Rather than prattling on (though you know I love to prattle), I’m just going to drop the full text of the difficulty rules right here.

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Just like in a video game, different players may be looking for different levels of challenge in the game. When you start play, each player chooses which difficulty setting they’d like to use. It’s totally fine for different players to choose different difficulty levels, and no one should ever feel that they have to play at a higher setting than they are comfortable with.

Players are allowed to change their difficulty setting at any time during play.

Your difficulty setting determines how likely it is for your character to be killed in play (if at all).

Normal Difficulty: You’ll always have a chance to recover.

When you are reduced to 0 hit points, you are knocked out. You’ll wake up once someone takes a moment to give you first aid, or when you heal to above 0 HP. Suffering more damage while at 0 HP or less knocks you out again.

When you are reduced to negative hit points equal to the number of hit dice you have, you are dying. If someone doesn’t give you first aid in the next moment, your character dies. You can’t wake up until healed to above negative hit points equal to your hit dice.

Casual Difficulty: You won’t die on this journey.

When you are reduced to 0 hit points, you are knocked out. Another character can take a moment to give you first aid and wake you up. You’ll be knocked out again if you take more damage.

You can’t have negative hit points. You remain at 0 HP even if you take more damage.

If you’re knocked out and you can’t be saved by one of your allies, you will instead awaken in a nearby settlement some time later. You and the GM will work together to describe who saved you and how.

Your character can’t be killed, no matter what.

Perilous Difficulty: You will probably die on this journey.

When you are reduced to 0 hit points, you are knocked out and dying. You will die if you do not receive first aid in the next moment. If someone takes a moment to give you first aid, you stabilize and wake up, but more damage will knock you out again. If you are healed above 0 HP, you also awaken and recover.

When you are reduced to negative hit points equal to the number of hit dice you have, you die immediately.

As a consolation prize for choosing this high level of difficulty, if your character dies, and you choose to roll up a new character, your new character will start with a bonus of 100 gold coins.

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Back to prattling. The most important bit here is that players can change their difficulty at any time. ANY TIME. If Alejandro the Baker fails his save and falls into a pit and takes enough damage to be killed, his player can say, “Actually, Alejandro doesn’t go out like that. I’m switching to Casual difficulty.” This is okay. This is good.

A player shouldn’t have their character die if they’re not cool with it. We all get attached to our characters sometimes. It’s not your job as GM to try to teach people some misguided lesson about loss.

This also removes some burden from the GM. By giving the players some control over their own “danger valve”, you don’t need to worry so much about the dreaded TOTAL PARTY KILL. Design your threats and your battles in whatever way feels reasonable for the scene. Have the monsters attack whoever makes sense (rather than having them lose interest in injured characters so that it doesn’t seem like you’re picking on them). Add places to your world that are filled with awesome treasure but protected by terrible things that the player characters are definitely not ready for. Go nuts. Because your players can always say “Not this time” if a character death would feel cheap.

The only issue I have with the rules at this moment has to do with the “consolation prize” of Perilous difficulty. As written, you could decide to switch your difficulty up to Perilous from normal right when your character is going to die, to get the bonus without the risk. I’ll probably tighten up the rules to prevent this. It’s meant to just soften the loss a little if you chose to play dangerously. It’s not enough to really worry about. It’s not better than playing on Casual, because just not dying is better than a measly 100 gold.

One thing to remember is that when you make a new character, they start with nothing. Level 1 in one class and that’s it, just like at the start of the campaign. That 100 gold puts you a little closer to catching up with the other characters, but it’s not quite enough to even train up to level 2. And while starting back at 1 sounds scary or even unfair, you can drop down to Casual if you’re worried, and if you’re rolling with a group of higher level treasure hunters, you’ll quickly gain enough treasure to train up a few levels. (Also, a generous party could just donate money to a new character for training.)

I will go so far as to say that you should NEVER just give a new character a few free levels to catch up or whatever. This is a game about scarcity of resources. Almost nothing is free. And character death or retirement should matter when it happens, especially because it will never happen without the player’s consent.

Playtest Campaign Part 9: The One Where Tony Gets Bit by a Huge Spider

I took a little break for a couple weeks there for all the expected reasons: holidays, fatigue, resurgence of my usually-under-control anxiety, processing the probably-still-ongoing fascist uprising…

So we’re going to talk about the gang’s adventure exploring the academy in the abandoned Imperial town of Harzgard. They had been exploring deep into the center of Harzgard’s Military District, until they came upon a large stone building on a hill: Meritas Academy.

This served as a fairly traditional dungeon crawl, so lets just skip to the notable scenes.

The gang entered a room that looked to be a fencing gym, with seating around the room and fencing tracks painted on the floor for matches. There was equipment littering the floor: foils, masks and jackets. The foils looked intact, so Lendel approached to grab one.

The foil, and five of its friends, flew up into the air and pointed itself at Lendel (with the others seeking out different targets).

“En garde!” the foils might have said, had they been creatures with mouths and not just enchanted sporting equipment.

So the group fearlessly fought the flying foils, and that’s all the alliteration I am able to allow.

This was a clever little fight, if I can brag a bit. They weren’t in much danger, really. The swords attacked twice per moment, but dealt low damage. They were hard to hit, because of their size and speed, and because I chose to treat the guard as a piece of armor for the sword. They could parry-riposte, blocking a strike and immediately counterstriking. {To do this, the sword had to withhold one of their strikes for the moment. When attacked, the sword rolled its own attack and if it rolled better than the attacker, the attacker’s strike missed and the sword could then strike with a +5 bonus.}

Lendel is a cannonball, basically. He’s a little gnome in very heavy armor, with a hammer and shield. The flying swords’ attacks mostly bounced off of him. His hammer can break plate armor, meaning he actually smashed through one of the swords’ guards, making it easier to hit. That was a fun exchange.

Agorak and his follower Jana had a different idea. They wanted to grab the swords out of the air and hold them down. And this is something I hadn’t really thought about. I expected it to be a mostly normal fight, honestly. So I had them make unarmed strikes against the swords. When they hit, they grabbed the swords, restraining them. In the next moment, I had the swords make a Resist save to break free. If they succeeded, the sword escaped to fight again. If they failed, the character got a grip on the sword’s handle, canceling the enchantment. It was just a normal sword, then, that they could wield in battle.

So our heroes smashed four of the swords and grabbed two of them. Agorak’s clever solution netted the group a couple of cool new weapons to use or sell.

The academy overall wasn’t really a “puzzles and traps” dungeon. There were some monsters here and there and areas to explore that provided more insight into what happened to this town. The living areas were fully evacuated, while some other rooms were barricaded. In one room, they found huge spiderwebs with cocoons filled with odd objects. This put them on edge, waiting for a spider attack.

They were not ready for the spider.

When they reached the top of the academy (the headmaster’s office), they heard a man yelling. The room was covered in webs, with several cocoons laying about. The cocoons seemed to only have bones in them, except for two: A big, standing cocoon by the windows, and one on the floor where the cries came from. He kept yelling, “Please! Someone help!”

Tony approached the cocoon and cut it open, to free the man. Tony saw an old man inside the cocoon, looking back at him. The old man opened his mouth, letting his jaw hang slack, and the words kept repeating, as if broadcasting from his unmoving mouth.

Tony stepped back, and the man stood up. Long, sharp spider legs extended from his torso, ripping open the rest of the cocoon. The man cried out, and the skeletons in the other cocoons animated, standing up and wearing their cocoons like armor. Then, he transformed into an enormous spider and prepared to lunge at Tony.

Boss fight time.

The group split into two groups, one fighting the ten skeletons, and the other facing spider-headmaster.

This was a decent fight. This game is decidedly not a tactical combat game, but fights are part of the concept. Fights need to be interesting enough to justify the time they take (which is also a reason to keep combat fast). I’m definitely still learning how to make important fights exciting, without adding any rules bloat. Basic fights need to stay basic.

In this case, the skeletons were mostly a roadblock. They were there to give the group multiple threats to focus on, but they’re not too dangerous. They had a weakness to fire (the idea being that fire would burn up their cocoons, doing a bunch of extra damage to them). I assumed that once our heroes realized that, they’d exploit it to destroy the skeletons. This didn’t happen. The skeletons were a lasting nuisance to them, and though they killed a few with fire, it wasn’t a big turning point like I thought it would be.

The spider kicked Tony’s ass.

It was obviously not a normal spider. It was over ten feet wide, and it could transform into a man at will. In its human form, it was a powerful magician; and in its spider form is was strong, fast and venomous. The magic allowed it to engage the larger group, but first it bit Tony.

This put the new “difficulty” rules to the test. Each player can choose their own difficulty setting (and change it at will). This choice simply determines how easy it is for your character to be killed. Tony had chosen the easiest setting, meaning that his character could not actually die, just get knocked out.

Lucky Tony.

The spider bit the hell out of him, dealing a bunch of damage and poisoning him. Tony would likely have died on a higher difficulty.

The fight took a lot out of everybody (which is my favorite type of fight), but they eventually won.

After the fight, they cautiously checked out the large, unopened cocoon, and found that there was a stone statue of a gnome inside. Once freed, the “statue” revealed itself as an actual gnome made of rock, who introduced himself as Nasser of the Mount, a student of Eldora (an ancient ettin they met earlier). They agreed to bring him to Eldora.

Next time, we’ll talk about an aspect of the rules that I have not yet decided! Then, after that, we’ll talk about a flop of a dungeon and a new player joining the gang.

A Fight Breaks Out

It happens. Sure, the heroes are cautious. They keep quiet. They avoid suspicious boulders. They negotiate with bandits. But eventually they’ll get ambushed by a hungry spridjan or accosted by shambling skeletons.

Skeletons rarely negotiate.

So, a fight breaks out, and that’s the end of our loose-y goose-y style of play. Time to get serious and TAKE TURNS.

Not entirely. So what do we do first? If you’re like me (and you’re probably not), you’ll be very relieved to hear that the first thing you do is not roll for initiative. You never have to roll for initiative. I don’t believe in calling for dice rolls that don’t have interesting results. Dice rolls should almost always represent actual danger.

The first step of combat is exactly the same as any other scene: Set the scene, tell them what’s going on, then ask the all-important question: “What do you all want to do?”

The next step is where we have to be a little more orderly than normal. You’re going to have a bunch of players and non-player characters all trying to take action at the same time, so you need to do things in a certain order.

Without rolling for initiative.

The fact is, most combat actions should be simultaneous. If you and I are wrestling, we’re not taking turns. We’re both grappling and scrambling and moving at the same time. So we break up combat into a few logical steps, with everyone in the same step going at the same time. Everyone already declared their intentions at the start of the “moment” (what other games call a round), so now we follow through.

Here is the order that we resolve actions:

1. Ranged Attacks Outside of Melee, Non-attack actions (like spells, drinking potions, etc)

2. Movement and Melee (all movement is happening throughout these steps; we don’t worry about exact positions)

   1. Attacks in melee that Strike First (like pole weapons)

   2. Standard attacks in melee

   3. Attacks in melee that Strike Last (like big, slow weapons) and ranged attacks in melee

And honestly, that looks more complicated than it usually is. Most of the time, you’ll just need to know that ranged attacks and healing are first, close-up attacks go after. The players (or monster stat blocks) will tell you when their attack strikes first or last, if that’s a factor.

So, one thing that is a barrier to so-called “theater of the mind” combat (that is, in-game battles where you simply describe what’s going on and roll dice, rather than setting up a battlemap and miniatures) is the issue of distance and positioning. If your rules require you to know the exact distance between a character and a monster, for example, you need to either have very detailed information about that, use a gridmap and minis or just make it up as you go (which can sometimes lead to players having an image of the scene that conflicts with the GM’s, creating frustration). To avoid this issue, our rules keep the issue of distance abstract: two creatures or objects or whatever are either close or far from one another. It should always be clear whether you are close or far, especially in combat. Once a creature performs melee attacks, they are close to their target (and thus close to anything they are close to). Moving far from a close creature requires a conscious effort or special event.

A lightning spell doesn’t target “all creatures in a 15-foot cylinder”; instead, it might just affect “all creatures close to the target”.

In combat, you’ll still describe positioning narratively, and that narrative matters. If characters are locked in a small room with a ten-foot tall rock monster, we know that they are all close to the monster (and, as a result, close to each other). They can’t just say, “I want to move far from the monster” unless they have a way to escape the room. To this end, some of the party might fight the monster, while one character might try to beat down the door so that they can escape.

Here’s an example of a moment of combat:

(Agorak the pilgrim, Jana the warrior, Tony the vagabond, Lendel the magician, Forram the magician and Kisreth the pilgrim are exploring a few abandoned houses. Tony is looking at one house that has collapsed into its own basement.)

Tony: I’m going to look closer at the fallen house, but I don’t want to get too close. I’m not going to lean over the edge and fall in.

GM: Okay, Tony walks next to the intact house next to it. He sees that the fallen house collapsed in on itself, and he can see some furniture down there.

Tony: Cool…

GM: Everyone hears a scraping sound on the roof of the intact house next to Tony. Everybody needs to make a Notice save plus 5.

(Everyone grabs a twenty-sided die and rolls it, adding their Notice bonus plus 5 to it. Kisreth, Jana and Tony roll at least twenty, succeeding at the save. Everyone else rolled less than twenty, failing the save. Agorak curses.)

Agorak: I want to use my Protect prayer to succeed at my save.

GM: Sure. You feel the spirits warn you, and you look up to the rooftop. Kisreth and Tony also take notice of the rooftop, and they all see a big wildcat up there. Its coat is shimmering, camouflaging it. The cat is leaping off the roof, claws out, right at Tony! Kisreth, Tony and Agorak, what are you all doing? Everyone else is caught off-guard. They see the cat, but don’t have time to react yet.

Agorak: I’ll summon my faith shield on my arm and my fire flail in my right hand, and charge the cat.

Tony: I’m jumping back to avoid it.

Kisreth: I’ll use my Harm prayer.

GM: Okay. Kisreth’s prayer is ranged, so we’ll do that first.

Kisreth: I ask the Mother of Death for her blessing, and the cat is struck with pain. (She rolls 4D8, getting a result of 15.) 15 damage to the cat! It needs to Resist+5.

GM: (Rolls the cat’s save, succeeding.) Success. The cat is tough, so it only suffers half damage; it loses 7 HP.

GM: The cat is leaping toward Tony, claws first! Agorak, make your attack at the same time. The cat’s AC is 6. What is Tony’s AC? He’s taking cover from the attack, so he gets a -5 bonus to his AC.

Tony: -2! Pretty good, huh?

Agorak: (Makes his attack roll: rolling a D20 and adding the cat’s AC 6 to the result. His total is less than 20, so his strike misses.) Crap. Missed.

GM: (Rolls the cat’s 4 strikes against Tony.) The cat moves swiftly through the air, avoiding Agorak’s burning flail, and it lands on Tony with a THUD. Tony, you tried to dodge, and that helped, but the cat’s claws are good at tearing through hide armor, like your vest. You are hit twice. (Rolls damage for each strike that hit.) Tony, you suffer 4 damage from one claw, and 6 from the other.

Tony: Oof. I yell to Forram, “Help! I’m not feelin’ so good!”

GM: It gets worse. You are staggered backward, toward the collapsed house. Roll Avoid+10. You might fall in.

Tony: (Rolls the save.) Phew. Close one. I succeed.

GM: You hit the ground and roll, the cat landing next to you. You were pushed right next to the fallen house.

GM: Okay, Tony is on the ground next to the collapsed house, and this mean-looking wildcat with shimmering fur is next to him, hissing, prepared to strike again. Everyone has had a chance to catch their breath and react. So, what are you going to do next?

Playtest Campaign Part 8: Game of Books

That’s a Game of Death reference. You know it’s a good reference when you need to explain it.

Our heroes were still exploring the Military District of the abandoned Imperial Town of Harzgard, looking for treasure. They had called their shot: A massive stone building on a hill in the middle of the district. They knew they wanted to get there. But the streets of the district did not afford them a straight line path — rather, the streets were a series of concentric loops surrounding the building, connected by alleyways and side streets. So they wound their way closer to their target, until they reached the inner street that circled the building, and they saw it looming over them.

They also saw something else — a stone tower on the path leading up to their target. It stood out compared the houses and shops of the town, so they decided to explore it first. Their follower Kisreth — an Imperial who is increasingly sympathetic to the locals — translated the sign above the tower door: “Library of Harzgard”.

This tower was meant as a “mini-dungeon”: a small area to explore in one session or less. So let’s get one thing out of the way right off the bat: I rushed this one. It didn’t get the kind of care I normally like to put into designing these things. Limitations of time. That’s why I chose to give it a simple design.

The library tower was basically designed so that each floor had a singular, distinct threat for the characters to overcome, after which they could progress to the next higher floor. (That structure is literally the only connection between this adventure and the Bruce Lee film Game of Death.) It was straightforward and linear. That’s not the worst thing, of course, but it’s not the open-ended exploration I normally aim for.

First Floor: The gang strutted in through the front door to find one large room filled with tables and a few empty bookcases. At each table, long dead skeletons sat, as if they died while studying. There was a broken staircase leading upward.

Straight up, I just forgot to follow through on what this floor set up. I intended to have the group see skeletons at tables on every single floor, so that the final enemy could reanimate them, forcing the characters to make their way out through a crowd of walking skeletons. My notes were rushed and incomplete, and I forgot to mention the skeletons for the rest of the adventure. So Floor 1 was a bust. The gang walked over to the broken staircase and boosted one another up to the second floor.

Second Floor: This floor also lacked any immediate danger. This is because I have a general philosophy in dungeon design that the first couple rooms/areas should just be set dressing. You set up your tone and theme before dropping the monsters and traps. This room was filled with books of Imperial history, as well as some gold medals and trophies on high bookshelves. This treasure was a bit of a trap. Lendel, our gnome alchemist who wears a heavy breastplate, decided to climb the bookshelves to get them. He failed his avoid save as the shelves buckled and fell to the ground, with a load of books and whatnot falling on top of him. He took a little bit of damage. It was more funny than anything. Forram, our ettin wood troll and magician, grabbed the rested of the valuables from the high shelves. He was tall enough to grab them without climbing. They took the stairs upward.

Third floor: This room had a wooden floor with tables in the middle and bookcases full of law records around the outside. Some area of floor were weak, and when the gang poked around, a swarm of termites flew out. This was a pretty simple fight, but it was pretty fun. My rules for swarms are this: A swarm is a group of tiny creatures the size of a normal creature in aggregate. A swarm deals half damage when their attack misses. A swarm suffers only 1 damage from single target attacks (regardless of how much damage the attack would have dealt). A swarm suffers double damage from area effects. And this particular swarm had a couple of special effects, since they were termites: They dealt double damage to wood objects or wood creatures, they broke scale armor with their attacks (which would include wooden armor), and they weakened the floorboards beneath the creature they attacked, potentially dropping them through.

Poor Forram the wood troll. The termites went straight for him, breaking his barkskin (a layer of natural armor that heals overnight when broken). No one fell through the floor, but they quickly learned to hit the termites with an area attack: Forram’s ice wand. They collected a few valuables and moved up the next staircase.

Fourth floor: This was a floor of military theory and military history. They got ambushed almost as soon as they stepped into the room. This one was a bit of an experiment. They were attacked by a skeleton with several levels of training in the vagabond class, making him evasive and tough to wrangle. Vagabonds get bonuses to their armor class, and at high levels, they don’t take any damage from effects that they successfully save against.

This fight was difficult, and one of the players just found it frustrating. His character was not a warrior, but he fought with a hand weapon and just couldn’t get a hit in. This led to me later adding a couple of combat-based options to the pilgrim class for players that feel they want such things. It doesn’t turn the pilgrim into a warrior, but it gives them some unique possibilities.

I liked the fight, but I do think that characters need options when they run up against something that they can’t hit. From an adventure/monster design perspective, I think that requires giving enemies reasons to flee, and making sure that players understand that they also don’t always need to stand and fight.

They won, of course, after a bit of a struggle. They found a combat manual that gave warriors a special option for training. And, of course, the moved up to the final floor.

Fifth floor: The librarian’s office. No librarian to be found. Instead, sitting at the desk was a rotund, gremlin-like fairy called a nocker. The gang had encountered a few nockers before: little pointy-eared, long-limbed pests that look a bit like hairless raccoons. Nockers like to snatch baubles (like potions) and run away with them. This nocker was much larger and rounder than the other ones they’ve seen. Notably, the nocker was sitting at the desk, gnawing idly on a couple of magic wands.

This fight felt a bit more fair. But honestly, it was mostly just goofy. And I like that tone for this game. I’m just not interested in doing the grimdark “fantasy dark ages” thing that a lot of “old school” or “retro” RPGs go for. We’ll have serious moments, sure, but also we have this fight. An oversized gremlin-looking monster, hanging out in a library even though it not only can’t read, but it’s probably no more intelligent than a field mouse, absent-mindedly chewing on a magical wand, accidentally setting it off and sending a blast of lightning at the heroes. That’s the kind of thing we’re doing here.

Once they defeated the nocker and collected valuables, they left the tower and set off on the path up to the large stone building.

Next time, I’ll talk about the structure of combat, and specifically how we keep it moving quickly. After that, we’ll talk about the adventure exploring something more like a traditional dungeon.

Let's Go Shopping

This is a game about treasure hunting. Obviously, that involves a lot of daring-do: avoiding deadly traps, facing terrifying monsters, solving tricky puzzles, and, apparently, talking to ghosts. A lot of them. A surprising number of ghosts. Some real sad-ass specters. At the end of such adventures — and probably along the way as well — there is of course treasure. But it’s the journey that really counts, right? It’s not where you’re going, it’s how you get there, right?

Wrong. NO.

I’m kidding. Yes, of course. The adventure is great. But that’s no reason that you shouldn’t have fun with treasure and all the stuff that comes next.

So, when the characters return from an adventure, they are going back to a settlement of some kind. They should have some gold or valuables in tow. They get to town, and they commence with spending their gold.

But — here’s the important part — there are actually interesting and useful things to buy. A handful of shops, each with their own menu of items and services for sale.

So here’s the thing: The GM actually needs to take some time to prepare the town. It’s just as much a part of the adventure as the dungeon. It needs some attention. The GM needs to decide what shops/merchants/interesting people are in town and what services and gear they are selling. This doesn’t need to be difficult, though.

RPGs always have monster lists and sample characters, so that you don’t have to make up all the enemies in every combat yourself. In this game, shops and merchants are given the same treatment: there will be a bunch of pre-made shops and sample items for you to populate your towns with. Ideally. this will be available as a deck of cards, so that you can just lay out the shops in the middle of the table, perhaps alongside some index cards with useful notes. Designing a settlement is as simple as picking a size and a culture, then selecting an appropriate number of shops. That’s all you actually need, and you can fill in the other details to your own taste: drawing up maps, writing histories, listing other important characters, only as much as you think you need.

Here are a couple sample shops:

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Amulets of Protection (traveler: craftsperson)

Bearded man in a red turban and long black coat. Carries a heavy backpack

Samuel, Amulet Maker (The Book); lv 6 magician, lv 5 pilgrim

Human. He studies the mystical disciplines of the Book to guard against the dangerous shades and sorcery. He carves and inscribes protective amulets to this end. Unmarried. More concerned with his studies than starting a family.

Items for Sale:

Amulet Against Shades (4): 80 gold. When a shade attacks you in any way, they automatically fail, causing you no harm of any kind, and they suffer 2D8 holy damage (resist +10 for half damage). The amulet then crumbles to dust. 

Amulet Against Sorcery (2): 80 gold. When an unwanted spell or prayer would affect you, it instead has no effect upon you. The amulet then crumbles to dust.

Services:

Magician Trainer: Samuel tutors the trainee on topics of magical science with the books he carries, which all have commentary written in the margins by his teacher.

Pilgrim Trainer: Samuel takes the trainee to a holy place for fasting and meditation.

You All Meet in Here (shop: inn)

Looks like a traditional tavern, but a little too new and a little too perfect. Kitschy treasure hunter theme.

Carmelo, Cook/Bartender, and Peter, Housekeeper (The Spire)

Humans. Dressed in a perfect facsimile of traditional local attire. Cheerful in a very practiced way. They go out of their way to cater to treasure hunters, as well as locals who enjoy the “treasure hunter aesthetic”.

Services: They will direct treasure hunters to helpful shops and merchants.

Tavern: There are usually one or two traveling merchants here.

The Bar Menu:

Healing Cocktail (3): 20 gold. Potion. Standard healing potion, but with a splash of whisky, bitters and a slice of seasonal fruit. Heals 2D6 HP or a wound.

Strong Brew (2): 80 gold. Potion. Standard strength potion, brewed as a dark, creamy stout beer. +3 to damage rolls for the rest of the day.

Rations: “Hidden Treasure” Rolls: 2 gold per day. A hearty roll with a sausage baked into the center. Heal 1 HP at the end of the day.

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These are a couple of basic shops. Notably, both provide at least one “standard service”, alongside their unique aspects. As a general rule, we assume that, while in a settlement, the characters can always find someone selling rations or offering training in the four basic character classes (Magician, Pilgrim, Warrior and Vagabond). It’s still useful to have the shops offer those services, as it provides us a clear prompt for describing those scenes. They’re not just “buying some rations”; they’re going to the inn to have Carmelo fill up their backpack with sausage-filled rolls. They’re not just “leveling up”. They’re spending their evenings studying with Samuel, reading his books and asking him questions while he carves new amulets.

Importantly, each shop only has a handful of items listed. While we can logically assume they sell other things, we choose simply to focus on the handful of items or services that would likely be of interest to treasure hunters. It’s best to keep these things simple, as it makes them more memorable.

Next time, we’ll discuss the playtest campaign and their adventure ascending a library tower that was sort of loosely inspired by Game of Death.

Playtest Campaign Part 7: Ghost Story

Our heroes — gnome alchemist magician Lendel, from the metropolitan nation of the Spire; dwarf vagabond, trapper and part-time warrior Tony Rockbone, of the Ancients; orc pilgrim Agorak, from the Hordes; and ettin wood troll and medical magician Forram, of the Tribes — had been exploring the abandoned Imperial town of Harzgard. Just recently, they started exploring the eastern district of the town, which, unlike the west, was overgrown with trees and foliage. The western district had been terribly damaged by a marauding ogre. This new district likely had its own ogre, but strangely had a whole forest growing within the town walls.

The group had explored a bit, notably finding a useful wagon, as well as a letter indicating that valuable smithing supplies had been moved to the workshop of Lady Juno Martell, on Brewer Street, before evacuation. They had no idea where Brewer Street was, but it became a goal to check it out. They also noticed a large stone building towering over the rest of the district. They decided to make their way toward it, through the streets of the district.

On the way to the stone building, they found themselves in a neighborhood with large shops and houses, including one building with a massive (destroyed) beer barrel outside. They concluded that this must be Brewer Street, and decided to explore the old brewery first.

Unfortunately for them, they did not notice the webs that lined areas of the brewery’s main hall. They were accosted by a giant (10 feet wide) spider, which led to a brief but tense scuffle wherein Agorak got caught in the webs, but freed himself by burning the webs (and himself).

This is where I should note that this game makes small, skippable fights like this work by giving the players almost nothing for free. This fight wasn’t difficult, but it caused some damage to Agorak’s warrior follower Jana. The spider even poisoned her. None of this heals automatically. Recovering HP and “wounds” like poisoning requires the use of healing spells or potions, or rest and healing in a settlement. And magical spells are not simply recovered for free each day. It costs the magician money to create scrolls — which fuel their magic — during downtime. Healing during downtime is also not free, though it’s cheaper than the potions you bring along on adventures. And since you level up your character by paying a trainer (not by gaining “experience points”), every loss matters, at least a little bit.

They found a little bit of treasure in the brewery: potions, in the form of bottled beer. Then, they set off to find Lady Juno Martell’s workshop.

This reminded me that I need to Google character names before using them. Apparently, Martell is a name from Game of Thrones?

They got to the workshop and found a whole lot of blacksmith gear, then suddenly heard a voice behind them. They turned around and saw the ghostly form of Lady Juno Martell.

She was a haunt — a ghost bound to a physical location, in this case her home and workshop. She was pleasant and fully aware of her current situation. The group spent some time talking to her and learned a bit more about the town.

Ghosts are a great opportunity for worldbuilding, especially in dungeon adventures that don’t normally have a lot of social roleplay.

Juno explained that, as a noble, she was discouraged from pursuing blacksmithing — a commoner’s craft — as a profession. She was ultimately indebted to the prefect of the Military District of Harzgard when he became her patron. During the evacuation of the city, when the creatures started attacking, she was working on her masterpiece. She refused to leave before it was finished.

Obviously, Juno was killed before she could finish her masterpiece. She was attacked by an evil shade that drained the blood of its victims, transforming them into lesser shades. Completing her masterpiece was her unfinished business, but she was not been able to do it in the decades since her death. As a haunt, she had complete control over her dwelling. She could work the forge and all of her tools, but, even in death, she was haunted by the same shade and its spawn. They attacked whenever she lit her forge.

The group agreed to stand guard for her while she worked.

This shade was called an alukah, and it is another creature (loosely) inspired by old Jewish folklore. It was a creature of darkness, looking like a silhouette of a long-limbed humanoid with flowing, wispy, hair-like tendrils. It is clearly related to the lilin, another shade. When the alukah bites its victim, it strikes with a circular maw full of fangs, similar to a leech. I chose to render it this way for three reasons: I wanted to clearly distinguish this creature from the more familiar vampire (which I do not intend to represent in this game), the word “alukah” is sometimes translated as “horse-leech”, and because I think it’s a lot creepier that way.

The actual fight was a little contrived, honestly, with a couple waves of attackers coming up the street toward the house, wolflike monsters and an alukah each time, until finally the greater alukah attacked. It’s a decent way to structure a fight, though, with escalating danger.

Once they defeated the alukahs, Juno completed her masterpiece: she had made a beautiful, lightweight broadsword, and then she blessed it, making it holy.

She thanked them for their help and offered them the weapon. She wanted only to know that she was a master smith before passing on.

Ghost encounters are reliably interesting, even with very basic objectives. I’ll have to work on the dybbuk and ibbur and see how they play, soon.

Next time I’ll show what merchants look like in the game, and talk about why I care so darn much that “shopping is fun”.

How to Make a Wanderer - The Culture of the Ancients

People who play RPGs with me or follow me on Twitter probably know that I kind of hate “lore” in RPGs. Those pages and pages of other people’s stories that fill the gaps between the actual rules in RPG books, the world maps in the back pages, the detailed histories, timelines, lists of characters that probably feature in novels I’ll never read. I just don’t enjoy that stuff. (Except maybe the maps. Maps are cool, even if I don’t use them in game.) I like creating my own worlds, inventing nations and histories as needed. Improvising at the table, without worrying that I’m contradicting something that a player read in the book but I missed.

But, on the other hand… making everything up is a lot of work. Official settings and lore are popular for a reason. So my approach to this game is not to define the whole game world for you, but rather to give you chunks, lore components, that you can mix and match as you want to create your own lore, your own world. I want to make it easy to play in the world you want, without feeling too restricted by official material.

The part I’m talking about today pops up in the very first session you play, during character creation: Culture.

Players will select a culture alongside their species. Whereas species is “what you’re born with”, culture is “what you’re born into”. Culture is what it sounds like: The traditions, beliefs, customs and social hierarchies of the community that raised your character.

Culture is primarily story-focused, rather than providing specific mechanical effects. It helps you determine your character’s backstory, and maybe even their motives. You’re not bound by your culture, of course — becoming a treasure hunter is almost always a break from social norms. Some treasure hunters keep up the traditions of their culture, while others reject them completely.

Culture does also provide two concrete effects: you always know the language of your culture (in addition to the common language of Elderword) and you also have one keepsake from your culture: a minor, but potentially useful object.

The keepsake is a brand new rule. I’m considering making the effects of the keepsakes a bit more clearly useful, with concrete effects. Regardless, weapons and armor are not going to be in the lists of keepsakes.

Here is a sample culture:

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The Ancients

This land is dotted with the now-decrepit ruins of a long-fallen civilization. Most of these ruins are only half-standing, and the historical record of the people who made them is incomplete.

The Ancients are the people who live among the ruins. They claim direct ancestry from the original builders. That nation left behind beautiful ruins and artifacts, most of which have long since been looted. Ancient artifacts are a common sight in the marketplaces of this land.

Some people will come to live among the Ancients, adopting their culture and religion. Once they are accepted into the culture, they are said to have joined the lineage, and thus will also consider themselves descendents of the fallen civilization.

The Ancients that live now have never truly seen their nation. They are taught to remember history, and many even worship their supposed ancestors. 

Ancient settlements are crumbling and underpopulated. Ancient leaders rarely wish to repair these settlements, for fear of distorting their history with the influence of the present.

“The Ancients” is also a term used to refer to the people of the fallen civilization. Some Ancient leaders claim to know the actual name of that nation, and will refer to it as such.

Ancient Characters: Ancient communities tend to keep to themselves, for fear of losing their history. Some folks rebel against their traditions, seeking a better, or at least easier, life elsewhere.

Others leave out of need. Ancient ruins can be quite limited in resources, and some communities are forced to disband, partially or wholly, when they can no longer support themselves.

Still others leave to help their communities, seeking out resources that their people lack.

Language: Ancient is a dead language, primarily written and read. When it is spoken, it is a coarse approximation of its original sound. Its text is complex, and its grammar laden with historical inferences. Ancient is commonly seen in magicians’ documents and manuals. Some magicians write their scrolls in Ancient, even if they don’t actually know the language.

    Keepsakes: Choose one:

• Roll of parchment, pen and ink

• Musical instrument: such as a hand harp, brass horn or clarinet

• Brass walking stick or cane

• Heavy robe

• Earhorn

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Next week, we’ll check in with the playtest again, for another ghost story.

Playtest Campaign Part 6: Trees and Geese

Last time, the group defeated a beastly ogre in the Merchant District of the abandoned Imperial town of Harzgard, and they acquired a magical wooden statuette of a bear. The statue can be transformed into the Elder Bear: a mystical, horned bear whose breath can cause plants to wither and decay. The gate into the eastern district of the town was bound up by oversized vines, so they had the Elder Bear kill the vines, allowing them to pass through to a new area of town.

I designed the town like a video game: limit your access to one zone within the town, until you find the “key” that opens up a new zone. I think if I designed an adventure area as big as this one again, I would break it up into more, smaller zones, with different “key” items to give you access to new zones. But this town only has three zones: The Merchant District (where they started), the Military District (where they’re going now), and the Governor’s District (where they want to go but haven’t yet).

They passed through the gate to the Military District, and they saw a very different place. The Merchant District was a ruined town, with half-destroyed buildings throughout much of it. The Military District looked comparatively pristine, with most of the buildings apparently intact, but with a thin layer of moss over most of it.

The streets of the Military District were arranged in three concentric loops, with smaller streets linking them. The loops surround a prominent stone building, which quickly become a target for the characters.

After a brief exploration, including searching some storehouses and finding a bigger, better cart for themselves, they decided to head back to a settlement to recover.

This time, they didn’t go to the city of Sole Harbor. Instead, they met a couple of members of “Elmore’s Rangers” on the road. Elmore’s Rangers guarded the roads in the area against bandits — while asking for a small donation from travelers. They were invited to stayed at the rangers’ camp.

At the camp, they met the rangers and several other folks living at the camp, including some hunters, a human named Samuel — an adherent of The Book who made protective amulets, and Vilmar — a dwarf from one of the Hordes.

Vilmar was, in fact, from the same Horde as Agorak (our orc pilgrim), though Vilmar left before Agorak was born. Vilmar was a berserker — a warrior who entered a trance-like state in battle — who fought against the Empire in the war. He regretted refusing to work with non-Horde rebels in the war, so he resolved to teach others his berserker trance techniques. It’s like a yoga class, but with sudden yelling.

Lendel — our gnome magician from the metropolitan lands of the Spire — decided to get trained as a berserker. He’s not a particularly smart magician, but he is strong, so being a berserker seems a good idea.

The gang stayed in the camp for about a month (that’s how long Lendel’s training took), then went back to Harzgard, to explore the Military District more deeply. This time, they entered town through the eastern gate, which was blocked by a massive tree. The Elder Bear’s breath causes the tree to recede enough to give them a path through.

Through the gate, they were surprised to find a forest. A complete forest had grown inside the walls of the Military District of Harzgard. They walked forth into the woods, dense and foggy, and they likely would have gotten lost, if not for the fact that Tony was a pathfinder — he had selected the Pathfinder vagabond skill, which means he never gets lost, always knows which way is north, and always knows the way to the nearest settlement. Tony guided them westward, toward the part of the town they explored.

They were accosted by a pooka (horse-headed, super fast, shapeshifting fairy), a spridjan (a wood fairy) and a walking tree. This was an imperfect, but entertaining, fight. Jana (Agorak’s warrior follower) quickly dispatched the pooka with her spear skills. For as much trouble as the earlier pooka fight gave them, this seemed quite funny. The spridjan quickly inflated itself, becoming bigger and stronger, and lurked in the branches of the walking tree.

Mostly, the tree pummeled our heroes. I mostly regret giving it such a good Armor Class. I have a clear system for determining a monster’s AC now. Big creatures are easier to hit, small creatures harder to hit, very slow creatures easier, very quick creatures harder. Then, some creatures have natural armor enhancing their AC, which can be broken by some attacks (like normal armor). I designed the walking tree before I figured this out, and its AC is way too good. It’s big and slow. It should have natural armor from bark and branches, but that’s it. It should be easy to hit, but with lots of hit points.

Between the tree and the spridjan, the group was beaten up pretty good, but Forram (our saber-wielding ettin magician) was able to dramatically slay the tree. Jana took a beating, but she’s an effective “tank”, and she made it through. The fight was good, but it could have been better. They were definitely frustrated (but in a fun way, I think) that they fought so hard and had to use up a lot of resources (like healing potions), and they didn’t even find any treasure.

They pushed through the forest and even saw the overgrown remains of some buildings, as if the forest had grown straight through the buildings. They reached the edge of the forest, and found the intact town they recognized.

They found themselves in a quaint neighborhood just swarming with geese.

The geese weren’t aggressive or dangerous, but if agitated, the geese would honk, potentially drawing attention from dangerous creatures. They explored the few houses where the geese were focused. First, the house of a strange obsessive man (now dead), where they found his journal and his “research”: dozens of bottles of ordinary water and a spell book he wrote. The spell was called Goose Mastery. He learned to summon geese.

They also found a house that had rocks jutting through the floor, revealing a spring. They observed a couple of geese drink from the spring and immediately become big, beefy and muscular. Lendel drank from it, and geese started following him. They could not predict what the spring would do, but it was definitely magic. No one else wanted to risk drinking from the spring.

Cowards.

Next time, we’ll talk about Cultures selected during character creation, and after that, our heroes encounter another ghost! She’s pretty cool, though.

How to Make a Wanderer - The Ettin Species

For some reason, I tend to start these things with “Let’s talk about (whatever)!” It’s a bit of a crutch, I guess.

Anyway, let’s talk about character species.

The role of species in this game is a lot simpler than you might expect. A species is not long list of special abilities and modifiers. It grants you one or two traits unique to that species, a small bonus to certain saving rolls (Resist, Avoid and/or Notice), and it determines the size of your Hit Dice. Species is the determining factor for how many hit points you gain each level — though you might also get bonuses from other sources, like having a high constitution or achieving certain levels of warrior training.

Species don’t modify your ability scores, because the range of ability scores (3 to 18) is considered to be relative to the average for your species. So, we know that an ettin with Constitution 10 is a bit tougher than a human with Constitution 10, because ettins generally get more hit points than humans. That 10 just means that they are average for their species.

Quick sidebar about language: I’m not really married to using the word “species”; it feels a little bit too clinical. It just seems better than the common alternatives. “Race” is both an incorrect use of that word and carries a whole bunch of ugly implications when you combine it with fantasy tropes. “Bloodline” just reeks of eugenics and royal lineage nonsense. So “species” it is, for now at least.

The playable species are broken into three categories: Trolls, Fairies and Beasts. Humans are beasts, in case you’re wondering. But today, we’re talking about ettins, and ettins are trolls.

Trolls are the oldest creatures in the world. There were trolls long before there were beasts or fairies. The term “troll” is a broad category, including intelligent creatures (“trollfolks” like gnomes, orcs and ettins), animalistic creatures and monsters.

Trolls have a natural connection to the earth. This isn’t inherently a mystical or spiritual thing. Some trolls have bodies made of stone or wood, or they possess strange physical abilities related to that connection. They are often long-lived and physically tough.

A trio of trollfolks: left to right, an orc, an ettin and a gnome.

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Ettins

Ettins are large trolls, usually about 8 feet tall. They have very large heads, with big, round noses, tiny black eyes and a pair of tusks. Ettins have long arms, short legs, and big hands and feet.

Some ettins have horns on their heads, and their tough skin can look like hewn stone in the right light.

Slumbering stone: When ettins fall asleep, they turn to stone completely. An ettin who curls up before sleeping could be confused for a boulder. Their belongings are not transformed. Sleeping ettins are completely immune to harm. Any damage or wound they would suffer has no effect, but it will wake them up.

Fists of Stone: Because of their great size and earthen features, ettins deal 1D6 damage when attacking unarmed, instead of 1D4.

Hit die type: D12

Save bonus: Resist +2

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The most important thing is that species is a physical quality. It doesn’t determine culture, personality, religion or morality. In this game world, folks of various species live alongside one another throughout the known cultures. There are orcs and ettins in The Hordes (nomadic communalist warrior clans), but there are also elves and humans and hobgoblins. In our playtest campaign, there is a yeshiva (a Jewish academy, though we just call the religion “The Book” in-game) led by Rav Zalmani, a wise, studious old ettin teacher.

I anticipate that some people will worry that detaching culture from species will make them feel same-y. That’s why each species has a distinct ability, something truly unique about them. This frees you to choose the Culture you want for your character.

Next time, we’ll talk about the playtest campaign and that time they got beat up by a tree. After that, I’ll feature a Culture.

Playtest Campaign Part 5: Ogre Time (Like Burger Time but it's an Ogre)

Last time, the gang explored the western Merchant District of the abandoned Imperial town of Harzgard. During their explorations, they caught sight of a massive ogre, 15 feet tall to the shoulder when moving on all fours (like a gorilla). They determined that this ogre was the most likely cause of the damage to many of the houses in the Merchant District. When they met the wood troll Eldora, she explained that this beastly ogre seemed to — directly or indirectly — cause the strange mutations that affected the animals that followed the ogre here. She — as a powerful old ettin warrior witch — had come to kill the ogre, but she was grievously injured by it, leaving her unable to walk.

The gang decided to go on an ogre hunt.

They had gone on several expeditions into the Merchant District already, bringing back a large amount of valuable treasure to their new home base, the city of Sole Harbor. They had made several purchases of useful gear, and gotten some training to level up their characters.

Tony — the dwarf vagabond — was trained by a fur trapper named Hera in the special Trapper class. This granted him the ability to make snares and operate other traps that he could find with greater effectiveness than other folks — including a set of bear traps he found in Harzgard.

Forram — the ettin magician — learned to be a wood troll from Eldora. This gave him a layer of protective bark on his skin that regenerates each day.

Agorak — the orc pilgrim — invested in his follower, Jana — an orc warrior. Jana studied alongside Tony, mentored by Hera’s partner Yani in the special Hunter class. This made her a more effective warrior, by granting her an ability similar to “critical hits”. Normally, there is no special bonus for rolling extra well on an attack. There are no critical hits. The Hunter class gives Jana the “Heartshot” ability, allowing her to deal bonus damage when she rolls much higher than she needs to on an attack — 1D6 damage for every 5 over the target number.

Lendel — the gnome magician — had sought out a bowyer to make him special arrows and a high-quality bow, to expand his combat options.

Between all this and a few other bits of shopping/training, the gang was very prepared for their hunt. So they went back to Harzgard.

Long story short, they went to a market square in town that they believed the ogre would come to at night, since it hated sunlight. (Spoiler — They were right.) They set up snares and bear traps in the square, and positioned themselves on rooftops and balconies. When the ogre arrived, they were ready and launched their ambush.

The fight was enjoyable enough. It was meant to be a bit like a boss fight — albeit an optional one. They could have gotten through the town without fighting the ogre.

The Beast Ogre

The fight was easier for them than inspected. One reason for this is that, as a very large creature, the ogre was easy for them to hit with their strikes. This is deliberate. It should work this way. Additionally, the ogre lacked an effective way to fight a large group, especially when they are mostly armed with ranged weapons, as they were.

Also, I still didn’t have a good gauge for the power levels of characters. I think the ogre simply wasn’t a strong enough foe for the group. It seemed to have a lot of health, but under assault by a large group of enemies, it drained quite quickly.

On the other hand, this isn’t all bad. The game is a sandbox game. I don’t build the fights to match the heroes. Instead, I build a place for them to explore, and if they come upon a dangerous enemy, they may have to retreat and come back when better prepared.

And that’s exactly what they did. When they first saw the ogre, they didn’t chase it. They rightly assumed that they couldn’t handle it. When they came back, they were stronger and very prepared. They had traps, they had a strong warrior — Jana — to take the lead and let everyone support her, and they even had special arrows for their bows that were designed to crack plate armor — like the bony plate on the ogre’s head. Breaking the plate made the ogre easier to hit.

They earned their win. I like that.

I still think they should have gotten a little more hurt doing it, but that’s how game balance goes, I guess. Trial and error. In a published version of this adventure or something similar to it, this ogre would have a slightly higher level, and either some protection from ranged attacks or ranged techniques of its own. Since it’s meant to fight solo, it needs abilities that can challenge a whole group, without just eliminating their advantages.

After the ogre fight, they found the ogre’s cave and (after some scuffling with the horse-headed pooka and potion-stealing nockers) acquired Eldora’s magical Elder Bear statue — a wooden statue that transforms into a large bear with ram’s horns that breathes an acrid green gas that decays plants. The Elder Bear was the “key” to get them into the eastern district, because the gates were held in place by massive overgrown vines and trees.

With the Elder Bear in tow, they set off to the eastern district, hopefully to find greater treasure.

Creature Feature: Ghosts

It’s the most spookiest time of the year! (I guess. To be honest, the only reason this month feels any different from last month for me is now my garden is dead. Spooky!)

It turns out, ghosts are a pretty major feature of this game. That was not one of my original design intentions, but as development has gone on, ghosts have featured quite prominently in my writing (and in the playtest campaign).

So, let’s go over what we even mean by “ghost” in this game. Ghosts are a kind of “shade”. Shades are spiritual creatures intimately linked to death. This includes reanimated corpses and skeletons, as well as dangerous spirits like the lilin. Ghosts are spirits of the dead, having left their bodies behind. They are immaterial shades, touching the physical world in limited ways. There are a few types of ghosts:

• Phantoms: These are not true ghosts. They’re not even actual souls; rather, they are shadows of the memories of the dead. They are translucent spirits that seem to swim through the air and have incomplete physical forms (usually no legs). They’re basically “sheet ghosts”. Many phantoms obsessively repeat a certain action, playing out a memory of a past event.

  Phantoms were partially (significantly) inspired by the ghost enemies in the old arcade game Gauntlet. I like the idea of them as ghostly counterparts to your basic undead walking corpses and skeletons. They are not complex or powerful, though they can be very difficult to hurt if the group is not prepared, because of their immaterial nature.

• Haunts: These are the souls of the dead who remain in this world out of a need to accomplish a personal goal. Their soul fuses to a certain place (often their home), and that place becomes the ghost’s whole world. They can be anywhere in the place they haunt, and they can manipulate things in that area (poltergeist-style), but they cannot even perceive the world outside of that place. They will pass on when their goal is accomplished, or when they are exorcised.

  Haunts are what I originally just called “ghosts” when I started writing. They have a great deal of narrative possibility, being intelligent creatures with a clear need and an inability to travel (meaning they often need help). They can also create hectic battles, given their invisibility, control over the environment and immaterial form. While the base stats below are somewhat weak (7 hit points isn’t much), the intention is that you would add class levels to the haunt to reflect knowledge and training from their life. The ghost of a tailor will likely not be a skilled combatant, compared to the ghost of a knight or a sorcerer.

• Specters: These are wandering souls. They detached from their body at death, driven by an obsession. They cannot find rest until they find peace with this obsession. Specters are still in early development. These are the kinds of ghosts that might stalk the roads or the forest — urban legend stuff.

• Dybbuks: Dybbuks are ghosts that possess the bodies of the living by invisibly clinging to them. They cannot directly affect the world except through possession. These souls remain in this world usually because they feel betrayed. Dybbuks are not always vengeful; many dybbuks are just depressed. They seek to force others to correct the betrayal in some way. They will pass on when they either accomplish this, forgive their betrayers or are exorcised. Dybbuks are ghosts from Jewish folklore. The concepts and themes are pretty well defined, but I don’t have complete rules for dybbuks yet.

• Ibburs: Ibburs are ghosts that enter the bodies of the living and share knowledge and power with them. Ibburs remain in this world because they need to help someone. Unlike dybbuks, ibburs don’t control their hosts — they merely empower them to accomplish the ibbur’s goal. Like the dybbuk, ibburs are broadly based on Jewish folklore; ibbur is the soul of a holy person entering someone’s body to get them to accomplish some good thing. I broadened the idea somewhat (the ibbur is not necessarily holy, for example), to allow for greater possibilities.

  I will likely have the ibbur grant their host bonuses similar to those associated with high ability scores (but not actually directly modifying your scores), so a strong ibbur gives you +2 to all damage rolls, while a wise ibbur gives you +2 to all saving rolls. They’ll probably also be able to grant bonuses based on the character class, but similarly, not actually granting you class levels.

  An ibbur could be a helpful ghost, granting a player character a bonus to help it out, or it could be a dangerous foe, empowering one enemy after another to defeat the characters.

Ghosts in Action

In our playtest campaign, the heroes have had several encounters with ghosts, specifically haunts and phantoms. One episode really highlights the versatility of ghosts as the basis for an adventure (or at least a single encounter).

As the heroes were exploring the Merchant District of the abandoned town of Harzgard (see the last post), they came upon a small neighborhood called Banker’s Row. If was a street lined with big houses with small fenced-in yards out front. This contrasted with most of the rest of the town, which was made up of tiny houses built with little or no space between them.

Most of the houses in this neighborhood were fully evacuated and cleaned out, like most houses in Harzgard. Three houses in the middle of Banker’s Row stood out, as their doors were closed and they were clearly not cleaned out. Curtains still hung in the windows. They decided to check out the three houses.

In the first house, they opened the door and immediately heard shouting. “Boy! Is that you? Get in here!” They cautiously entered (since they had met no other people in this town up to this point), and they announced their presence. The house was mostly empty, with a few packed wooden crates. They entered the main hall and found the source of the yelling: The ghostly form of a well-dressed man, sitting by the fireplace.

They talked to the ghost (a haunt), and found out that he was an Imperial knight who still believed he was alive and evacuating the town. He had no sense of what was going on outside, nor did he realize how long he had been there. Ghostly Sir Everett was just disappointed that they were not “the boy”, who was supposed to be loading his cart. The ghost demanded a favor of them: his neighbor, Friar Ammon, had scammed him out of some money, and he wanted Ammon to be held responsible.

They agreed. They didn’t want to antagonize the ghost, who kept a prized warhammer above his fireplace. In the neighbor’s house, they saw a number of paintings and Imperial holy objects hanging on the walls. This house was sparse, but definitely the home of a religious person. They were greeted by a pleasant voice, and saw the ghostly form of Friar Ammon.

Friar Ammon was affable and, unlike Everett, fully aware that he was dead. He talked to the characters and they learned about the business relationship between Ammon and Everett: Friar Ammon convinced Sir Everett to invest in a merchant, and they did their business through their neighbor, a banker named Lady Martine.

The deal fell apart, and Ammon and Everett lost all their money, and owed even more to Martine. Martine stole a valuable statue of a saint from Ammon to squeeze him for money, and Everett blamed Ammon for the whole thing. Then, the three died, but Ammon couldn’t remember how.

Ammon needed them to get his statue back, so they went to investigate the third house, and as they explored, they were accosted by various household objects (including all of the jars in the pantry). They were set upon by floating phantoms, and had to fight their way through the house, driving the invisible haunt of Lady Martine back while fighting wave after wave of phantoms. One of the adventurers, Agorak, is a holy man, an orc pilgrim with the Sanctifier skill. This makes him holy and allows him to bless others so that they are holy. This was important to the battle, as these shades are weak against holy things, and their immaterial trait doesn’t protect against holy things.

The haunt’s invisibility meant they were frequently hiding and looking for chances to strike, and the phantoms just kept coming. Eventually, then made it up to the master bedroom on the second floor, and found that the phantoms were crawling out of a foot locker. The group set to destroy the locker, and Tony, blessed by Agorak, delivered a killing blow to Lady Martine, exorcising her.

Martine was not a normal haunt. She had no intention of passing on, and she had developed life-draining powers. She was also just extra powerful: she had several “Predator” levels. (Predator is a character class that can be given to animals and monsters to make them more dangerous. Normally, a ghost would get normal class levels (if any), but Martine’s cruelty and predatory nature made Predator feel right.) The phantoms were reflections of other people she killed and drained.

The heroes found Martine’s money and ledger, Ammon’s statue, and some other valuables. They took the statue back to Ammon, after chugging several healing potions. The statue was of the patron saint of healers. When they returned it to Ammon, he thanked them, glowed brightly and disappeared. This light healed everyone completely. I couldn’t help but laugh that they had insisted on stopping to handle most of their healing first.

They returned Everett’s investment to him as well, and he also passed on, leaving his powerful warhammer behind.

While these encounters were all quite basic, they were a great opportunity to incorporate more roleplay and storytelling into a dungeon crawl, without missing out on the dungeon crawling.

I actually planned to have Everett attack them originally, but they handled the situation just right to work with him instead.

Next week: The playtest campaign’s hunt for the Beast Ogre!

Playtest Campaign Part 4: The Merchant District of Harzgard

Let’s discuss the group’s adventures exploring the western district of the abandoned town of Harzgard. As I explained last time, this town is essentially a big “dungeon”, with a handful of of smaller dungeons to explore within it, as well as a number of other interesting areas for the characters to explore.

This adventure took place over the course of several play sessions and several in-story expeditions. As you can see on the map below, the town was designed for open-ended exploration. Because of that, the various areas of the town aren’t designed to tell a linear story, but rather they provide a series of distinct encounters and vignettes, all linked by the background story of a disaster that drove the residents out and destroyed parts of the town.

I’m not going to try to recount everything; just the important bits and the parts that went particularly well or poorly.

This is the map of the district with the reference numbers from my notes

When the characters took their first expedition into Harzgard, they traveled on foot into town. One thing I’ve tried to do is make sure that all treasure in the game is not just piles of gold and jewels. A lot of the treasure they find contains valuable objects and resources: art, clothing, supplies. Of course, it’d be hard to justify the characters carrying a lot of these things out by hand (not that I’m using any strict rules for such things). So when the characters found a wagon in Harzgard, everyone instantly latched on to it.

This made me realize that wagons (or boats, if past sessions are any indications) ought to be a major part of the game. That’s not to say they need a lot of special rules. But it is worthwhile to make it clear in the rules that it is normal for travelers to have a wagon to carry supplies (even if it’s just a small one, pushed or pulled by the characters and their followers). If I were to create any sort of specific rules for different wagons, I might give each wagon a storage capacity, listed as a number of gold coins. That would be the highest total value of gold or commodities that you can store in the wagon at the start of an expedition. You wouldn’t bother to track this limit during an expedition; it’s just a limit on the amount of gold you can hang onto after the downtime between expeditions. This pushes characters to spend their gold rather than hoarding it.

The beginning of their adventures involved exploring the abandoned buildings near the front (2 on the map). By design, there was little to find in these buildings. No monsters, few valuables, just a few hints about what happened here: letters indicating that there was an evacuation because there were attacks closer and closer to the town. The conceit here is that the houses toward the front would have evacuated sooner, and thus be more thoroughly cleaned out. Of course, from a game design perspective, it also makes sense to put greater treasure deeper into the town, forcing them to venture further into danger to get it.

Their first bit of dungeoneering came about when they pushed north to 6. In this area, there was a tall tower that had partially fallen over, masonry covering the street and the top of the tower crushing a couple houses. They explored the basement of the tower and got into some weird magical hijinks in a small dungeon down below. That went fine. Afterward, they returned to the surface and searched the rubble. They found some valuables, including a satchel that carried five bottles of different magical beers. The beers are effectively just potions, but I enjoy the concept of magical beer.

In the rubble, they were also ambushed by a new monster (five of them, in fact): five boulders opened up and were revealed to be four-legged stone monsters that could roll up and bowl over enemies. This fight was sort of dull, actually. It dragged on for too long, and stoneguards are most dangerous when charging into battle. I had the stoneguards ambush them from up close, which eliminated the main threat. It turned the combat into just “roll dice until the bad guys are gone”. Not great.

Stoneguard: A headless troll-monster that can roll up into a boulder.

Later on, the gang got into a much more interesting encounter with stoneguards up in 15. This is a small neighborhood where the houses are all tall and have no space between them (think tenement houses). The streets are very narrow, and the houses are all boarded up. The gang encountered boulders in the street in a couple spots, almost as wide as the street. The boulders were of course stoneguards in disguise. When they rolled at the characters, there was nowhere for them to go. They had to come up with quick solutions, rushing to a nearby alley in one case, and later breaking down a door into a house. They actually avoided fighting entirely, by climbing to the rooftops and traveling that way.

Avoiding fights should be a valid option, so I’m glad they took it.

Over at 7, they walked a street of abandoned blacksmith workshops. One of them had a magical forge (permanently lit) and a magical anvil (can be used to enchant weapons, but only enough charge left to do it once). This was a fun little scene, with little danger, where they worked out how to operate the magic anvil. I like bits of low stakes interaction like this, between all the fighting or trap-dodging. The reward was significant (giving a weapon +2 to all attack rolls, permanently), so they didn’t feel like they wasted time.

After that scene, the characters spent the night in a shop (closing the door using a high-quality nail they bought in the City of Sole Harbor; I was very happy to see this purchase become meaningful). In the morning, loud stomping shook the ground, and they went outside to catch their first glimpse of the Beast Ogre that caused a lot of the damage in this district of Harzgard, leveling many buildings. The ogre had gorilla-like posture, curly ram’s horns, tusks, and it was 15-feet tall to the shoulder (more like 20 feet tall if it stood upright). Ogres in this world are huge, hungry monsters (not just big, mean humans). This started the group planning to hunt the ogre.

Eventually, they went to the huge manor house at 18. They had a brief encounter with a shapeshifting fairy called a pooka in the garden. It was funny, mostly. The pooka has a horse’s head, a human torso and two horse legs. Pooka run very fast and tackle people. It used this to separate Tony from his allies in the hedge maze. Then it just ran off, cackling.

In the manor house was perhaps the best fight of the campaign so far. The house was huge, and all the curtains were drawn. As they explored, Tony (poor Tony) was attack by a lilin, a shade that is invisible in the shadows and which magically extinguishes torches and lanterns. When a lilin grabs someone, it teleports them with it to somewhere else in the darkness nearby. This lead to a bit of panicking as the gang tried to find Tony and the lilin. Eventually, they started opening the curtains to reveal the lilin in the light and chasing it room to room. Nice reversal, very fun.

Lilin: A shade that kidnaps people in the darkness. Inspired by Jewish folklore.

In the ballroom, they encountered a sleeping ettin (a very large troll-folk; the player character Forram is also an ettin). This ettin was named Eldora, and she had been there hibernating for decades. Eldora is a wood troll, with a layer of bark on her skin. She is even taller than other ettins, but she had suffered terrible injuries to her legs, leaving her unable to walk.

The gang rescued Eldora, and she rewarded them by teaching Forram to be a Wood Troll. Eldora is a special trainer, and any troll character could learn to be a Wood Troll from her, for a significant expense. She has become a close ally to the group, who they visit in the woods for advice.

That’s not quite the end of their adventure in the Merchant District, but this has gone long. Next post will be all about ghosts, with a couple of stat blocks and some of the specific notions about ghosts present in this game. After that, we’ll talk about the hunt for the ogre, and the end of their adventure in the Merchant District (moving on to the eastern Military District).

How to Make a Wanderer - The Vagabond Class

Let’s talk about character classes!

During character creation, there are four character classes to choose from. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but don’t worry, there is ample variety. You’ll choose one class to start at level 1, and when you find enough treasure, you’ll be able to train to increase your level in that class, or even train to gain a level in another class. You’ll even be able to meet special trainers in play that can each train you in a unique special class (each of which usually only have 1 to 3 levels of progression).

The basic adventuring classes are: the warrior, the magician, the pilgrim and the vagabond. Each of these classes has up to 10 levels of progression available.

This game is very much about being a traveler, seeking adventure on the road or in the wilderness, and this theme is present in all four character classes, but the vagabond is the clearest demonstration of this concept.

Have a look at the first 5 levels of vagabond training, as well as some of the vagabond skills you can select.

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Vagabond

Vagabonds are survivors. They learn esoteric knowledge and varied skills. They do whatever they need to defy the perils of the road.

Vagabonds are expert travelers. Everyone is better off for having a skilled vagabond with them on the road.

This chart shows the most basic advantages of being a vagabond: they are talented survivors, so their Armor Class (which I’ll probably rename) gets better as they level up. Lower is better, so an experienced vagabond becomes very hard to hit in a fight. They also get better at making “Avoid” saving throws, which are rolled to move out of the way of danger, such as explosions, pit traps or falling debris.

Another thing you’ll notice is the “Training Cost” for each level. That’s the amount of gold coins your character needs to pay a trainer to progress to that level. Remember, this game doesn’t use “experience points”, so that monetary cost is the only thing you need to worry about.

The first level of every class is extra expensive at 500 gold coins. You get to skip this cost for the class you choose at character creation, but it serves as a bit of a speed bump for when you decide to gain levels in a different class during play.

Level 1: You must select one vagabond skill, plus additional vagabond skills if you have high intellect. See below for the list of vagabond skills to choose from. You’ll gain more skills at higher levels.

Treasure Hunter: A vagabond begins their long journey with knowledge of a valuable prize. You receive a treasure map; you may have found it, bought it, received it as a gift or learned the information from trusted allies. The map leads to a nearby treasure. The GM will let you know what the treasure is (though the information might be murky), and where to find it (though the journey may be perilous).

Level 3: Dabbler: A well-traveled vagabond picks up all kinds of knowledge and talents along the way. You permanently gain +1 to one ability score of your choice. You cannot choose your highest rated ability, unless all of your abilities have the same rating.

Level 4: Treasure Hunter 2: A well-traveled vagabond always has their eye on a new destination. You receive another, more valuable treasure map. You found it, decoded it or received it as a gift.

Level 5: Mystic Lore: A seasoned vagabond has an eye for special treasure. You can always tell if an object is magical or holy at a glance. In addition, you can use any magical item, ignoring restrictions on who can use the item. (E.g. you can wield a wand without being a magician, or a relic without being a pilgrim.)

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Those are the special traits that all vagabonds get at early levels.

They get treasure maps, just for being a vagabond. This means that a vagabond will regularly have a good reason to hit the road and seek adventure elsewhere. Of course, the characters could find more treasure maps in play, but a vagabond is guaranteed to get a few.

Vagabonds are the only character class that gets to raise their ability scores natively (at level 3 and a couple of higher levels). The only other way to raise ability scores in play is to find special trainers who specifically do that, but it is very expensive. Raising ability scores is rare and special, as it provides bigger and more universal advantages than you might be used to in other games.

Mystic Lore is just the kind of broad utility that is unique to vagabonds. It’s not overwhelmingly powerful, but it is unique, it expands the scope of what they can do, and it is still useful when you have other, more specialized characters around.

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Vagabond skills: Vagabonds learn a variety of useful skills that help them survive in dangerous environments.

A vagabond selects one of the following skills at level 1, plus additional skills if they have a high Intellect rating. Vagabonds gain more skills at higher levels.

Each of these skills grants the vagabond the ability to perform a particular type of task reliably, exceeding the abilities of untrained people and avoiding the risks others face in the same situations.

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Every class has skills, but the skills from each class are very different in both theme and function. They are a big part of how you customize the class for your character.

The skills above are just a sampling of what will be available. There should eventually be at least twice as many.

Vagabond skills are all practical and non-mystical. A big part of this game is that you don’t roll dice for “skill checks” like you may be used to. Instead, if you want to climb a wall, for example, the GM must use their rules and judgment to adjudicate success. If the action is dangerous, you may need to make a saving roll or suffer some harm. Vagabond skills do not merely tip that judgment in your favor — they give you clear advantages and protections. So if you have the Climbing skill, the GM would tell you if the surface is climbable… and that’s it. You’re good at climbing. You know you won’t have to make an Avoid save to see if you slip and fall, or a Resist save to keep hold after a long climb.

Other skills just give you capabilities you wouldn’t otherwise have, and they are similarly always effective.

By not falling back on dice roll bonuses as a way to represent skills, you are guaranteed to feel that your character’s skills are both unique and meaningful.

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So that’s the vagabond. Next post is going to be about the adventures of our playtest campaign exploring the Merchant District of the abandoned Imperial town of Harzgard. And coming soon, a post all about ghosts! (Not just because of Halloween, but pretty good timing.)

Playtest Campaign Part 3: I heard you like dungeons...

With our heroes all finished with Fort Valtengard (the dungeon from Part 2), they set off downriver in their rowboat, to sell their treasures in the big city: Sole Harbor. (Alternately spelled Sol Harbor or Soul Harbor, and also it’s unclear if it’s “sole” as in “only”, or “sole” as in “a kind of fish”.)

They got to the city and saw our campaign’s first big settlement — a large coastal town still rebuilding from the war. I broke the city down into a few districts: The Waterfront, The Market, The Elder District and the War District.

The Waterfront serves as their new, probably temporary home base. They keep their boat there, and they found an inn to stay at— a kitschy, adventurer-themed establishment called “You All Meet in Here”. It serves as headquarters for now, and it’s a place to get rations and potions. (Right now, they only sell an extra strong, extra expensive healing potion. I think in the future I’ll just have them sell a wider array of basic potions in the form of mason jar cocktails.) The Waterfront also has an anarchist dwarf printmaker named Tiago. He’s a magician trainer and an opportunity for me to play the role of an aging punk.

The Market is exactly what it sounds like, with a bigger variety than in the smaller towns. There’s a blacksmith that specializes in fancy nails, a hunter and trapper duo offering training, and a nerdy, bespectacled teenage witch named Moonsong.

The Elder district is the oldest part of town. It’s a prettier area than the Market. It has a shoe shop, a cafe, and a yeshiva where characters can get magician training and pilgrim training. The standout NPC in the Market is Roberto, an orc and retired gentleman thief. He’s got tusks and a thin pencil moustache, hair always parted and perfectly slicked down. He lives off his stolen fortune, just chilling, drinking wine, and telling anyone who will listen stories about his heists (some of which are true). He’s a vagabond trainer, and he can also train someone as a thief. No one has taken him up on that yet.

The War District is totally ruined from the war. There is little effort to rebuild it. If it comes up, this is definitely where shady criminal types will have meetings and face-offs.

The characters met an old Imperial ship’s-captain named Eva. She’s surly, she’s missing an eye, and she sells old Imperial goods back to Imperial merchants, out on the sea in neutral waters. She is tolerated by the locals in spite of her Imperial loyalties, mostly because she can’t actually return to the Empire (for reasons she doesn’t discuss). She is the only person the gang has met who will buy certain Imperial objects at full value (mostly Imperial art).

Eva bought the spoils of their trip to Valtengard, and offered them a new opportunity to pursue: The Town of Harzgard.

Let’s talk about what my idea was here.

I wanted to write a whole dungeon myself, but I wanted it to be believable. Not realistic, mind you, just believable in the game world. They can’t all be big underground mazes. So I maybe got a bit over-ambitious. This “dungeon” is a whole abandoned town, surrounded by high walls. The town is split into three districts, and each district is to be explored much like a dungeon, with different neighborhoods serving as the encounter areas in the way that individual rooms do in traditional dungeons. Then, scattered around each district, there are a few buildings that will be explored as traditional dungeons.

It’s dungeons all the way down.

There was no way I could actually design the whole thing ahead of time. So I focused on the district they would explore first: the merchant district. I made a map, defined each of the areas, and wrote up the monsters they would encounter. No more hacking old D&D monsters into the game. Everything is new.

Here’s the rough map of the merchant district that the characters would eventually find:

The gray areas are the other districts that I haven’t yet designed.

That’s a lot of buildings! Obviously, I didn’t go in and map out every building. I decided that since the town was abandoned, most of the buildings would be empty, fully evacuated. Each neighborhood instead has a few “places of interest” laid out in my notes.

This went long, so my next post will discuss the gang’s adventures in the merchant district of Harzgard, right up to the time they hunted and fought a huge bestial ogre in the Harzgard market square.

No More Kings

“You know, it’s dangerous up at that old fort. You sure about this, kid?” Marta looked up at the young man for only a moment, then dipped her rag in the bowl of oil and went back to polishing her sword.

Her house did not look like the house of an old soldier. The one-room hut had knit goods hanging from strings all over. Her elbow kept bumping into the spinning wheel that she had pushed out of the way to sit down.

“Yes, ma’am,” the boy said. “Life has placed me on this path. I must face danger head-on and reap its rewards.” He proudly stared out the window and into the distance.

Marta glanced out the window. The boy must have been looking at something else. All Marta could see was her husband, Karl, wrestling an unruly sheep in the hopes of shearing it.

Marta wrinkled her sunscorched brow. “Kid, I get it. I fought in the war, back before you were born. It was exciting. We were rebels. Some of us were even heroes.” She hesitated. “But this little expedition of yours… you’re risking an awful lot on the off-chance that you’ll find some hidden treasures that might not even exist.”

“I know, b-but…” the boy stuttered. He was a young man, lean and strong, but he had the wide eyes of a child.

“Like I said, kid, I get it! We risked our lives, too! But we always knew what we were fighting for. We knew it was worth the risk.” Marta drew her rag across the blade one last time. She picked up the newly-polished sword, holding the blade with a rag so as not to dirty it, and pointed the handle toward the boy. “What are you fighting for?”

He grabbed the sword by its hilt and gripped it tightly. His eyes narrowed, and with grim certainty, he said, “It is my destiny.”

Marta stifled a laugh. “Destiny?”

“I’ll show you.”

The boy sat the sword back down on the table. He knelt down and rifled through his old leather satchel.

“This is my destiny,” he said, handing Marta a pile of papers.

Marta looked over the papers, slowly mouthing a few of the words. She asked, “What am I looking at here? I’m not a magician or a lawyer.”

“They’re patents of nobility, Marta. I am the one true king of this whole land.” He smiled, finally revealing his secret. “My great-grandparents were dethroned by the Empire and driven into hiding. My family has kept this secret since then. Now, I shall gather the wealth to rebuild our court. I will reunite our land and forge a new kingdom!”

Marta dropped the papers on the table. “Burn these.”

“What?!” The boy took a step back.

Marta stared him down. “During the war, we fought for independence. We drove away the soldiers and prefects who stole our food and goods. We killed tyrants and oligarchs. We risked everything, sacrificed anything, so that no one would own us any more. We fought so that you could be born free.”

“This is my birthright, Marta.”

Marta looked like she had just bitten into a lemon.

“Build a farm, “ she said. “Learn to sew. Start a traveling band. Go to that fort and risk your life just because it’s fun. Whatever makes you happy.” Marta grabbed the sword off the table and returned it to its holder on the wall. “But, I assure you, no one wants another king.”

“They will learn…”

“No, kid,” Marta pushed the pouch of coins back across the table to him. “I will not.”

Playtest Campaign Part 2: Now for a Real Dungeon

Following the first adventure, our heroes had managed to salvage an intact rowboat from the ship they explored (and sunk). So they brought their rented fishing boat back to the village, comfortable knowing that they could return it and use their new boat to get around.

It was never my intention for the game to be so boat-focused. You never can predict what players will latch onto.

This led to the campaign’s first downtime: The time spent in a settlement (in this case, a fishing village) between expeditions. This is time to heal, to sell the spoils from your last outing, to go shopping, to stock up on rations (yes, this is a thing, and no, it’s really not a hassle), and perhaps time to train up to a new level.

Downtime didn’t go great. It wasn’t unpleasant, but the gang didn’t buy much, and no one gained a level. It wasn’t exciting, which is a bit of a letdown for the end of the first adventure. This comes down to two things: The merchants I designed didn’t have enough interesting stuff to sell, and I was just too stingy with the treasure in the first adventure.

My recommendation for first adventures will be to make it simple, something that can be finished in one session, and make sure the group can find enough treasure for everyone to gain a level. (There are no experience points in this game, you just have to pay a trainer a certain amount to gain a level, and the cost rises as you gain levels.) For later adventures, this isn’t such a big deal, but I think that getting everyone to level up at the end of the first session is a good way to get everyone excited to play again.

A good thing to come out of downtime was that Agorak hired the group’s first follower. (I prefer this term over “henchman”, which is needlessly gendered, or “hireling”, which just seems a little cold.) I had them encounter a group of young adults who were visiting the village, playing Crackabout (a better version of dodgeball). Agorak hired a young orc named Jana to join their party. The rules for followers are simple: You pay an upfront cost to hire them. You have to pay for their rations. You have to provide their gear, and any gear they start with is probably figured into their cost. They start at level 0, and you have to pay to level them up, if you want. (The first level in a class is always extra expensive.) They don’t have ability scores; they’re just assumed to be average (between 8 and 11, no bonuses or penalties). The player who hires the follower controls that character, though the GM can step in to role-play as the follower if the player isn’t comfortable.

After that they followed their new lead: an old Imperial shipping manifest that led to a hidden fort on the river. They loaded up their boat and set off.

I didn’t write the dungeon for this adventure myself. I used an existing one and substantially rewrote the parts that needed to change to fit this game. I used “The Monastery of the Order of the Crimson Monks” from Dragonsfoot, an “old school D&D” community. You can download it for free if you’re interested: https://www.dragonsfoot.org/php4/archive.php?sectioninit=FE&fileid=309&watchfile=0

I still hadn’t fully developed my notions of what the monsters in this game should be like, so I just used the monsters listed in the dungeon, adapting them to these rules. By the time the gang finished the dungeon, I wouldn’t need to do this anymore.

This adventure exposed some of the frustrations of old-school dungeon crawls that I want to avoid. I didn’t give the players a map, suggesting that they should keep a rough map themselves. The problem is that this dungeon map had some very weirdly shaped rooms with precise dimensions. This kind of stuff is really hard to describe in “theater of the mind”-style play, and you end up with everyone having different notions of what each room looks like. This is extra difficult because we play on Hangouts (or Zoom or whatever we feel like in a given week). In person, I can just sketch out a rough map to show them what I’m describing, without having to show them the actual dungeon map. Over video chat, this is a pain.

My approach to future dungeon design will be to keep the spaces “real” and believable. Most rooms are square/rectangular, unless there’s a reason otherwise. A building shouldn’t be a maze unless it was designed to actually be a maze, which shouldn’t be common. How many sadistic architects are there? It’s possible for a space to be interesting to explore without it being a pain to describe.

I also came to realize that the trope of the “secret door”, a classic part of D&D and other RPG dungeons, just doesn’t really work for me. This game doesn’t have skill rolls, so if a player wants to look for a hidden door, I can’t just say, “Roll for it.” And that’s fine. I think the problem with those types of rolls is that you’re rolling to see if something interesting happens. You always want the players to succeed on those, because it’s more fun. This renders the secret door meaningless, unless you link it with a puzzle of some kind. Secret doors probably have a place in the game, but they shouldn’t be common, and I want to work on ways to make them fun and interesting, without just resorting to random rolls.

On the whole, the dungeon went well. Some interesting role-play and world-building came about when they encountered a small gang of Imperial infiltrators, who were intent on taking artifacts back to the Empire. The Imperials ultimately attacked the characters, and all but one of the attackers was killed. The remaining Imperial, named Kisreth, was kept with the group for a while, as they debated whether to free her without weapons, or bring her to town for a bounty. Eventually, she helped Forram fight off some ghouls using her powers as a pilgrim, and he lightened up his stance on her.

The last bit of the dungeon had the group find a tomb to an old Imperial knight. Their new companion Kisreth recognized the knight as a notorious war criminal and the tomb as a declaration of sainthood. As a religious Imperial, she was appalled by this. This gave Kisreth a reason to help them find the remaining Imperial infiltrators, as she realized that she shouldn’t have helped the Imperial Order that made this place, the Order of the Crimson Banner.

After that, they found the prefect — a high-ranking imperial leader — who ran this operation. He was a magician and a pilgrim, giving him a variety of magical abilities, and he was protected by guards and conjured skeletons. The ensuing battle was exciting, in part because it was the first time they fought an enemy that could match — and even counteract — their own magic. One of my favorite moments saw Agorak leave the room to grab a couple of maces from defeated enemies, then return to distribute them to allies fighting the skeletons. Maces are better for smashing bones than swords are. (The advantage of this under my rules is that it eliminates the bonus the skeletons get to their armor class against cutting or stabbing weapons.)

This adventure played out over several expeditions, dipping into the dungeon for a while then retreating back to town. The group spent their downtime in a larger town upriver, where they could find more shops and sell more things than they could in the fishing village. This went much better. The players seemed to enjoy the shops, and engaged in more role-play with the merchants and townsfolk. One that went over notably well was a shop called “i like cloth” (no caps), where an ettin (large troll) tailor with a handlebar moustache sold and repaired vintage clothing. Lendel brought him the hide of a giant crocodile that they fought to make a couple pieces of armor. I gave them a discount on the purchase for doing this.

Lendel’s player likes to collect useful monster bits to hopefully turn into gear, and he’s continued to do this since. This is an idea that I’m considering codifying a bit. It might be enough to give some indication in monster descriptions of what kinds of things could be made from them, and having similar descriptions on gear, describing what kinds of supplies could be used to make it. Bringing the right supplies to a merchant or craftsperson could get you a discount on the product (probably half price, by default). What I want to avoid is fixating on this practice so much that it becomes an expected part of play. I never intended it to be a core game mechanic, and some players might — understandably — think it’s gross and not enjoy it. If I include this idea in the rules, it will be important to frame it in the context of hunting and wilderness survival, as well as making it clear that you can opt out of using those rules at all, if it’s not right for your table.

By the end of the adventure, everyone had trained up a couple of levels, and Agorak even paid to get Jana trained as a warrior.

This adventure was much bigger than the first, and certainly more successful. I started to figure out the right balance between combat, trap/hazard, and puzzle/interaction encounters. Throughout the adventure, I tweaked the character classes’ abilities to give them better and more interesting options, as well as just tightening up the rules.

Up next, I wrote up an adventure entirely from scratch. It’s huge, and it’s still ongoing. The next post will get you all the way caught up to the time of writing.

Armor

Your character is a brave adventurer: they jump over spear traps, dodge boulders, fight bears… whatever. They’re in serious danger of getting smacked around. They should probably strap on some armor.

It didn’t feel right to me to have you buy or find full suits of armor, then just have that suit determine your Armor rating. A full matching suit of armor? That’s for bougie adventurers. This is a game about scavengers. You’ll be building your armor piecemeal, from whatever scraps you find.

So that’s how it works — you acquire pieces of armor, and each piece provides an appropriate armor bonus. Most characters can wear 2 pieces of armor, but the Constitution rating can alter this. Characters with high Constitution can wear 3 or even 4 pieces of armor. Characters with low Constitution can only wear 1 armor piece, or even none if especially frail.

As long as you don’t exceed your limit and all of your armor pieces can logically be worn together, then you can wear any combination of armor pieces. You might find a leather tunic and steel gauntlets and wear them together. You could throw a fur cape on over your chainmail shirt.

(I know that “chainmail” isn’t really the proper word, and it’s just called “mail”, but I’ll choose clarity over accuracy any day.)

Here are a couple of example armor pieces:

The bear pelt not only enhances your Armor Class; it also improves your Resist saving throws and reduces damage from cold. The pauldrons, on the other hand, are pure protection. They make your Armor Class better, and you can have an attack break the pauldrons to reduce that attack’s damage.

Which brings us to the last thing: Armor can break. This is bad news and good news! Some armor has a special ability where it breaks against an attack, but it reduces the damage against you, like the pauldrons above. There are also monsters that have attacks that can break armor — like giant insects with pincers that crack plate armor, or wildcats with claws that rip hide armor. This means that a long day of adventuring may lead to a character wearing out their armor, putting them in even more danger. Then, when they get back from their expedition, they’ll have to pay a craftsperson to repair the armor if they want to use it again.

But it’s not all bad! Monsters and other enemies have armor as well, so a well-prepared group might be able to soften up their foes by breaking their armor. Certain weapons have armor-breaking abilites — like warhammers that crush plate armor, axes that split scales and chainmail, and daggers that cut hide armor. A well-equipped adventurer might wield their warhammer to break an ogre’s bony plates, before switching to their saber to slice their now-unarmored foe.

The goal here is to make sure players have fun choices to make and challenges to overcome, while minimizing the amount of rules to remember or tedious recordkeeping. Having a printed deck of item cards will make this even easier.

Playtest Campaign Part 1: The First Adventure

Once the gang had made their characters, I set them up for their first adventure. I still hadn’t codified the structure of the game, so I kept the first one small.

We established that Lendel, Forram, Agorak and Tony had recently started traveling together. Tony is a vagabond, and one advantage of the vagabond class is that they start with a treasure map. The group was going to seek out that treasure together.

The group started off by arriving in a small village. They started with very little money, so shopping was unlikely to be a priority. I created a few merchants for them to interact with. The one they gravitated toward was the old fisherman, a dwarf named Carlo (he hates fish). They made a deal with Carlo to rent his boat, so that they could take it down the river to their destination faster.

I decided that a fair reward for this was to halve the travel time to their destination. From then on, this has become the standard benefit for doing anything that should speed up travel. The journey would have been 7 days on land, so it would be about 3 days in the boat. This sort of thing is going to be a major focus of my text on gamemastering — guidance on adjudicating benefits for the players’ good ideas. The game’s systems are meant to be very straightforward, so the benefits need to be very clear and simple.

I also used a simple, temporary rule for random encounters while traveling: I rolled 1D6 for each day and each night, and on a 1, there is an encounter. I adjusted this rule several sessions later, when it proved to lead to too many random encounters. Effectively, I halved the odds. Later, I realized that the real problem was that I treated every such encounter as an attack. I started having environmental hazards (like bad weather that forces a saving roll), and more recently mixed in some non-dangerous encounters, like meeting other travelers. I’m not satisfied with the “daily die roll” for encounters, so I’ll be working on that eventually.

The group went to a cave on the river where the map led them. They found an old wrecked Imperial ship there, which served as the “dungeon” for this adventure.

The ship dungeon was almost entirely improvised. I hadn’t written up stats for any monsters yet, and I hadn’t quite worked out how I wanted this sort of thing to work. I made a rough map of the decks of the ship, and I had an old AD&D 1st edition monster manual on hand. I converted the monsters on the fly, and made some things up as needed. I didn’t get more organized until after this adventure.

It was a short couple of encounters on the ship. They explored a little, found some valuables in the captain’s cabin, went below deck and suffered their first trap/hazard: loose floorboards on the stairs. Tony failed his Avoid save, fell through the stairs, and found himself surrounded by bugs that released acid when squished, burning through the floor. The others pulled Tony out and decided to find a different way down. I did not expect this.

I planned for them to explore some rooms, fight some creepy crawly things, trip some traps/hazards, and make their way to the bottom of the ship. They decided to go back to their rowboat and take it around the ship looking for holes to enter the ship through. I decided that this was logical and told them that they found one. This led to the final “battle” of the adventure: Inside the ship’s hold, they found a murky pool of water, and suddenly, skeletal arms swam toward them.

I think the idea of swimming skeletons is neat. I’m not sure why.

The group started to fight the skeletons, but they were hard to find in the dark. Only Tony could see clearly, because he’s a dwarf and they have Ghostsight (the ability to see in the dark, and see/speak to ghosts). He saw that there was a ghost in the hold commanding the skeletons. Tony talked the ghost down, discovering that all it wanted was for the ship to sink completely. They convinced the ghost to let them take the valuables from the boat in exchange for sinking it. They busted a few choice holes in the hull and let the ship sink, helping the ghost pass on.

One of the crates they took had a shipping manifest with directions to a secret Imperial fort, giving them somewhere to go for the next adventure. In retrospect, this seemed a little bit on-the-nose, but it worked fine.

The adventure ended with the gang finally following the treasure map to a buried chest, which had a nice set of bracers made by one of Tony’s ancestors (a good piece of armor for Tony), as well as some gold.

I don’t think I handled the treasure map particularly well. It felt very tacked on. But it helped me work out exactly what I wanted from the idea of treasure maps in this game.

Treasure maps give the group a clear idea of where they can find a valuable treasure. The one thing I realized early on is that you need to make sure that a treasure map is clearly valuable. The group will always have adventures to go on (or else the game would be boring). So the treasure map needs to give them more than just somewhere to go — it needs to give them the promise of a specific reward above and beyond what they would normally expect. In this first adventure, I left the contents of the treasure map vague. After that, I decided to make sure that any treasure maps they acquired would tell them about a specific, unique treasure, like a magical object.

That first adventure was pretty flawed, but everyone had a good enough time to want to do it again.

How to Make a Wanderer - Ability Scores

Okay. There are 6 different ability scores, each rated from 3 to 18.

One of my biggest priorities designing these rules was that I wanted all six abilities to be useful and meaningful to all characters, regardless of their species or class. In most class-based games, each class has prescribed ability scores that you need to focus on. So a fighter’s highest score should always be Strength, maybe Dexterity if they’re an archer. Similarly, there are usually “dump stats” — abilities that are just not useful for certain classes, or sometimes not useful to anyone.

So I started over and tried to reframe the function of ability scores in the game. No dump stats. Every ability is good. You want to play a very smart warrior? Do it! It’s not just a quirky choice. It’s useful and different from playing a strong character or a tough character.

Every ability is rated from 3 to 18, always. Ability ratings of 8 to 11 are considered average, and they provide no special benefits. Ratings of 12 or more grant you a special bonus, while ratings of 7 or less give special restrictions or penalties.

This applies to all creatures. 10 is considered an average rating for an ettin or a gnome; an elephant or a mouse. Your ratings aren’t shifted based on species, because it’s all relative. For example, Ettins are naturally very big and tough. So, an ettin with Constitution 5 is frail for an ettin. They still pretty tough compared to most humans.

Importantly, each ability provides you with a singular, meaningful effect — not a bunch of things that you need to keep looking up, and not some vague, abstract “ability modifier”.

Here are the abilities:

Strength — High strength grants you a bonus to damage rolls — all damage rolls. Swords, bows, magic spells, traps that you set, whatever. Strong characters are good at efficiently exerting force. So strong warriors are probably exactly like you think, but you could also imagine a strong magician channeling their magic through their body to boost its power. Having a low strength doesn’t give you a penalty to damage, but it restricts the kinds of weapons you can use.

Agility — High agility makes you hard to hit, improving your Armor Class. Functionally, this is a penalty to enemy attack rolls. You get your agility bonus even when wearing armor, because quick reflexes are still helpful to turn to the side and make attacks glance off. Low agility penalizes your AC, making you easier to hit.

Constitution — High constitution increases the number of hit points you gain, of course, but it also increases the amount of armor you can wear. Armor is acquired in pieces, and characters can by default wear two armor pieces. High constitution can let you wear as many as four. Low constitution reduces your access to armor and shields.

Intellect — Intellect represents your talent for learning. Characters with high intellect get to select extra options from their character class(es). For example, an intellectual magician studies additional magical sciences, letting them use different kinds of spells, while a warrior would get to master additional weapons, gaining bonuses when using each weapon under the right conditions. Low intellect just means your character takes a bit longer to learn, so it gives you an extra cost to pay when hiring a trainer to level up.

Wisdom — Luck, instinct, alertness or faith, whatever it is, it keeps you safe. Wisdom is a bonus to all saving rolls. So when a trap triggers, you get poisoned, a spell is cast at you or whatever else, a high wisdom gives you a bonus to your saving roll to reduce the effect. Low wisdom means you’re a little too reckless or unlucky, and you get a penalty to those rolls.

Charisma — The most famous dump stat! Well, not here. In this game, charisma is good for everyone. If you have a high charisma, you get a number of free followers (“henchmen”, if you’re old school). And if they die or leave your service, a new follower will join. Everyone can hire followers for an upfront cost, but charismatic characters get a few without that cost. Your followers are your responsibility, though, and you’ll have to pay for it if you want to level them up. Low charisma, on the other hand, means that folks are a little less eager to join you, and you have to pay an extra fee to hire followers.

One last thing, and I think this is probably the most controversial thing in this post: I’m going with random rolls for stats. The way we’re doing it is this: Roll 3D6 for each ability and note the results. (None of that 4D6-drop-the-lowest stuff; it’s more fun if people have low stats sometimes.) If you don’t roll at least two values of 12 or more, reroll everything until you do. (I’m not going to make you play without some bonuses.) You can then rearrange your results if you want. Or leave the rolls straight! I’m not your dad.

I don’t plan to have a point-buy option at all; I know that this is something that some people insist on, but I really don’t feel that it fits the game. I’m considering creating a standard array for folks who really can’t get with rolling the dice. The standard array (if I decide to have it) would ensure that you have two low stats with penalties, two high stats with bonuses, and two average stats.

Playtest Campaign Part 0: Our Heroes, such as they are

I’ve been running a weekly campaign of this game with a few friends. I intend to start writing a postmortem post after each session, but first I need to go over how we started and what’s happened since.

At the very beginning, I didn’t have most of the rules written. I had enough for character creation (though many things would change later) and a rough outline of the rest.

The background story I gave them is as follows: The Empire colonized and dominated this land for a couple hundred years, until the people of the Land united in rebellion. Twenty years ago, the Empire retreated, leaving behind outposts, fortresses and settlements, many of which are still unexplored. The people of the Land are rebuilding. Your characters are all desperate enough to seek your fortune exploring perilous old Imperial ruins.

Below is a brief overview of each player character and some of the basic options they selected. One thing you’ll notice is that each one has a Goal. This is something I had each player come up with as the reason they got into “adventuring”. They had to pick a specific thing they need money for and a specific amount of money they need. Because the game is meant to be played in a “sandbox-style”, they each need something to motivate them, to push them toward adventure. In concept, once they have that much money, they can retire and accomplish their goal.

The best part about the Goal, to me, is that because money also serves as the currency for character advancement, the characters will find themselves getting a bunch of treasure that they could save for their goal, then instead spending that money on gear and training, so that they can maybe score even more treasure later. I like that little bit of tension in their decision-making. Most importantly, though, it ensures that every character has a concrete, in-fiction reason to be involved in these frankly reckless endeavors.

Here’s the cast of characters:

Forram: Species: Ettin / Culture: The Tribes / Class: Magician / Goal: Build a farm: 2500 gold.

Forram is from an animistic tribe on the outer edges of the Land. He is a magician who studies Travel (movement and teleportation) and Medicine (healing). He’s an 8-foot tall troll who fights with his fists when he needs to.

(Note: I’m not really satisfied with the concept that I originally wrote up for the culture of the Tribes. I will either rewrite it substantially or replace it with something else. Currently, the Tribes are just shamanistic cliches. Forram’s player does not play him as a “native tribesman” stereotype, thankfully.)

Agorak: Species: Orc / Culture: The Hordes / Class: Pilgrim / Goal: Acquire supplies for ritual to empower his chieftain: 7000 gold.

Agorak is from a nomadic, communalist warrior clan. He is a pilgrim, a person who gains power from their mystical and religious practices. He is a holy person with the power bless others (Sanctifier skill), and he can protect people by creating mystic shields (Protector skill). He is a shaman who believes his power comes from the favor of powerful spirits. He is not very strong, but keenly intelligent and wise.

(Note: His player chose to play an orc from a barbarian horde, which is a totally valid choice, but it is by no means expected of orc characters. All of the cultures in the game contain members of all species, and the characters encounter orcs from all sorts of backgrounds. All of the sapient species in this world — the “folks” — have free will. None of them are inherently evil or driven to violence.)

Lendel: Species: Gnome / Culture: The Spire / Class: Magician / Goal: Create a cure to his curse: 3000 gold.

Lendel is a gnome — a 3-foot tall troll made of stone — from the nearby wealthy, metropolitan nation of the Spire. He was a very bright student at a Spire academy studying magical sciences, when an alchemy accident cursed him by draining his intellect and enhancing his strength. He is now very strong, but dim-witted. He has lost much of his mastery of magic outside of alchemy.

Anthony “Tony” Rockbone: Species: Dwarf / Culture: The Ancients / Class: Vagabond / Goal: Re-establish the Rockbone “family business”: 4000 gold.

Tony is a dwarf — a 5-foot tall fairy who can see and speak to ghosts, and see in the dark — from an Ancient settlement. The Ancients live among the old ruins of their culture, fixating on the past and striving not to change things, for fear of losing history. Tony, on the other hand, wants to rebuild his family’s business empire, which fell centuries ago. He is a vagabond — a wanderer with great survival skills. Tony doesn’t pay for food. He can always stir something up with a little bit of hunting and foraging.