Barrier Peaks!

Over on Wayne's Books there is the first post on a playthrough of S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks.

I played it, in parts, in elementary school . . . and I want to see how someone gives it justice in a modern playthrough. We certainly didn't back then, although I did a pretty good job coloring in some of the black and white pictures in the module on my original copy. Heh.

Hommlet (and beyond) game summaries

I missed the launch of this series, but now I'll all caught up - T1 The Village of Hommlet, played with what sounds like 5th edition D&D.

I enjoyed the summaries . . . I ran that module often back in the day. We never really intereacted with the villagers.

Review: How to Defend Your Lair

Time for a review of something I felt had an impact on my gaming. For more reviews, check my reviews page.


How to Defend Your Lair
by Keith Ammann

Keith Ammann's new book is a GM tool to help a GM make NPC lairs better. More logical, more realistic, and based on principles of real-world (and yes, magical world) security practices instead of dungeon and adventure design principles. How would a big bad evil wizard actually protect his spellbooks, or his treasury, or his life? How would the ruthless assassin's guild head protect her assassins, her big book of client names, and her escape route? GM long enough and you can come up with some ideas. With this book you can organize the approach based on real world principles and a sensible and logical approach.

It's very good stuff. The book consists of a look at concentric security all the way from detecting threats to reacting to them, to responses after, and escape when things fail. Patrolling, gathering information, how to secure your front and back doors, etc. - it's all there. And it is sufficiently generic that only a cursory knowledge of D&D 5th edition will be enough to make use of it. You'll learn when mounted and foot patrols make sense, how to arrange your reaction force, what kind of numbers are needed to provide how many patrols in a given time window, etc. It's both concrete usable information and higher-level concepts so you understand how and why.

The end of the book is a bunch of example lairs. They're all good. I won't spoil them except to say that you'll need your thinking cap on to penetrate security on them.
Two things I found less than valuable in the book - interrogation, and value assessment.

There is an entire chapter on how to interrogate people. Interesting, and based on what I've read from actual interrogators, it seems workable and accurate. However, what are you going to use this for? You'd need captive players and a lot of interest in doing one on one questioning of them by the GM to get them to reveal information. In the hands of a player, this might make for more compelling questioning than the usual ". . . or we'll kill you!" threats and poor questions. But I don't see that coming up. So if a GM really isn't going to get to use this, and it's a book aimed at a GM to make NPCs more believable and effective, it's not really valuable enough to justify a whole chapter. Again, it's good stuff, but it doesn't belong.

I'm also a little less sold on putting number values on what is valuable to create a score. The author recommends that for every item of value, you assign a score based on different value measurements - basically how much the possessor values the thing or fears losing the thing. Okay, great. But do I really need to know if something is a 6, or an 8, or a 9? I can see a simplified system working better - rank the things the NPC has in rough order of value. Then just protect them in that order. Don't protect item #3 less than item #1 on the top 5, say. It's an attempt to put a number on a subjective value and do something with that number. It just doesn't seem necessary to get the job done.

How adversarial is it? I'd say, little to not at all. It's not set up from a "GM vs. players" approach, in my opinion. It's more like making the NPCs use the most effective and logical tactics and strategy to protect their lairs. Nothing is stopping you from making the foes easier or harder even as you do so. Or from having NPCs use the wrong tactics because they'd lack the understanding (or personality) to use the better ones. It feels more like making sure the GM is making decisions from a position of knowledge than from a position of opposition.

This book can make a good player tool, as well, if you're not the type to figure out how to run effective fortified-area penetration missions but want to know how. Although the entire perspective is from someone trying to stop penetration, if you know what they're afraid of happening, you can try to make that happen. And detect more easily when someone hasn't figured out their vulnerability!

Overall: I like the book. I'm very glad I purchased it and it is having a positive effect on my gaming. Recommended.

How I decided to buy Keith Ammann's new book

I decided to get myself an RPG book with some holiday cash. I'm getting myself this:

Keith Ammann's "How to Defend Your Lair."

Before I decided, though, I dug around for some reviews. I mean, I love his work, but I don't GM D&D5e so it's the systemless aspects I most care about. And it's not necessarily the positive reviews that help the most.

This review mostly explains why the book isn't good for the reviewer. Since the writer's play style sounds like very much the opposite of how I GM, I think this helps sell it to me. Especially this:

I continuously ratchet difficulty levels up and down for my players because I do not think TPKs are fun and I also want them to each get their shots in before downing the bad guys. I like for my players to feel involved in combats, and to experience the terror of thinking they’re going to die (but not actually killing them.) As a GM, I feel that my job is to challenge the players but not frustrate them.

And as much as I’ve loved the hundreds of players I’ve run games for over the years, I can confidently state that most of them don’t play D&D, or any other role-playing games, in order to think. They’re there for the action, and they’re there for the drama. The fun ones are also there for the lolz. My job as the DM is to facilitate all this, to make my players feel smart and capable and like big damn heroes. I have thrown away so many puzzles and lowered the success rates of so many secrets just to make sure my tables have a good time getting through carefully constructed adventures, whether my own or others’ (I’m a big fan of running from pre-written modules.)

So, that's exactly not me in a nutshell. It's quite possible that the last thing my players want to do at the table is think. But I run games that reward thinking and the odd bit of bold action. I don't run games that reward drama. I don't change puzzle difficulty even if people spend boring hours on a Sunday throwing keys at a door to try and open it.*

Finally, I found this podcast with the author, which finished my decision in favor of buying it.

It's on its way, and I'm sure my players aren't even slightly happy that my defended lairs will be even better designed and even more logically constructed.




* It's still not a puzzle. And they're still going to be mad at me when they figure it out. Hopefully that's during an online session because they outnumber me a lot.

Guardian Article by a first-time D&D GM

This article amused me.

‘Why can’t anyone make a decision?’ My first time as a D&D Dungeon Master

It's pretty funny - players diverted by throwaway nonsense, no one able to decide things, players agreeing with and then ignoring a GM suggestion - all the fun stuff.

Also, the author looks kinda like John Doe from X.

I do like to read articles aimed at a more general audience than the hard-core gamers that I write for. Not always, but this is one I got a chuckle out of. And there is a link to a nice site with a trap generator.

Plus the title reminds me of the time my players made the then-11 or 12 year old son of one of our gamers the leader. He'd groaned all day about things being slow, let's do something, let's attack something . . . they made him the leader and all of a sudden he couldn't decide what to do, needed to check the map, wasn't too sure about any given suggestion . . . good times.

What's an edition, anyway?

D&D is going to have a new edition. Or maybe a revision of an existing division extensive enough to be a new edition. It's not necessarily clear at this point what will happen or what the company intends to happen.

But what counts as an edition?

Looking at GURPS, it's had a few iterations:

Man-to-Man

1st edition

2nd edition

3rd edition

3rd edition, revised

3rd edition, revised, plus Compendium I and II

4th edition

Officially four editions. But two were so close to each other as to be difficult to easily distinguish (1st and 2nd), or so close that it was just relatively minor changes (3rd, 3rd revised). Or a new but compatible edition in reality but not in same - 3rd revised plus compendia. Others might disagree with how I count - and I wouldn't have counted the compendia as a new edition at the time, but they seem so in retrospect. And I clean missed out on 2nd, so GURPS Update rolled around and I found weirdness that didn't quite line my games up with 3rd edition, since I was still on 1st.

D&D has some of the same issues with counting editions. So does Traveller, to the point that I don't even quite know where I'd begin.

I'm mostly curious if the new D&D is compatiblew with the exiting 5e stuff - there is so much out there. We'll see I guess . . . but to me it doesn't seem clear what's what.

Quick Show & Tell Report

So my client was overwhelmed by The Tomb of the Bitchin' Chimera. I basically made her day.

Of course, I also ruined her day by telling her that getting a copy of it will be difficult. So it goes.

Interestingly, she wasn't familiar with any of the silly stuff from old AD&D days - Dungeonland, Land Beyond the Magic Mirror, Isle of the Ape (not silly, but the inspiration was pop culture), etc. So I may need to see if I have loaner copies of those to let her read.

You have to educate your clients, I feel.

Show & Tell at work tomorrow

I'm bringing Lost Tomb of the Bitchin' Chimera to work tomorrow.

I need to show it to one of my clients, who:

- plays 5th edition D&D

- loves punk rock, including the Dead Milkmen

I'm still looking it over, myself, but I need to catch a reaction. I'll try to get one up ASAP, plus a more typical GURPS-related post for Thursday.

Lost Tomb of the Bitchin' Chimera!

One Saturday I took a walked to Zipperhead, I met a boxed set that almost knocked me dead!

Somehow, I had no idea there was a Kickstarter for this. As much as we're cookied, tracked, and so on, despite me posting about RPGs, dungeons, Kickstarter, and The Dead Milkmen, I didn't get a glimmer of a hint that there was a Kickstarter for a Dead Milkmen-themed RPG product. I even took a walk to Zipperhead one Saturday in 1999 just because of the lyrics from Punk Rock Girl. I mean come on!

But my fellow gamer, and the person who introduced me to The Dead Milkmen back in High School with "Big Lizard in My Backyard," found out about this. And he and my gamers conspired to get me a copy.

My copy includes maps, a dice bag, dice with the grinning dead cow logo on the 6, and a couple of little extras.

I absolutely want to run this . . . but I think only one of my players would get even 1/10th of the references. He'd get them all. The rest would really wonder about that Wurster kid and why it's a Burrow Owlbear and why there is a Tiny Town. Humor is tough. But this would make a good alternate destination for a Jester Gate.

Thanks for the gift guys!

Random Friday Roundup Post 7/17/2020

More random stuff for Friday.

- Bruce Heard has an interesting take on memorizing spells in D&D-based games. Essentially, you reserve some of your daily spell slots for later, and then memorize the spells you need then:

Delayed Spell Memorization

- My post on the difficulty of hiring NPCs in town, specifically sages, has really expanded in the comments thread. You can find a wholly developed Bard character, several ideas on social disadvantages, the benefits of a limited pool of disadvantage points, and more.

Hiring Sages when Everyone has negatives

- I very rarely bring up fiction here - quite on purpose, this is my gaming blog, not a reading blog. But I just ripped through a re-read of The Dragon Never Sleeps, which has some really fantastic elements for a very non-Star Wars-like space opera. Unless you assume the "ku" are "jedi" because they're trained warrior types, I suppose. Like Glen Cook books in general, it's heavy on the characters and light on the technical specs, so don't expect much detail on equipment. You do have fast and slow space travel, competing Houses, lots of planets, aliens and "artifacts" (made-to-order living beings), and replication technology with memory backups - great for PCs. Highly recommended. FWIW I have both the Nightshade version and a much older paperback; I recall hearing the Nightshade edition was revised in some way but I honestly didn't notice anything different. So I might be recalling that incorrectly. I'd say "On to the Starfishers books next!" except I read all four all right before this. Maybe Darkwar, I finally read the short story that caused them to be written.

- These summaries of the Tomb of Annihilation make me want to buy it and run it. I won't run it, I have nothing like the time to run it, but it would be a fun read based on how it's playing for this group:

Setbacks in the Tomb of Annihilation

The arm sacrifice would be largely meaningless in a GURPS Magic-based system ("Okay, just do it and you're down an arm until we get back to town") but the sacrifice of a PC to avoid a TPK was very cool and would be a sacrifice anywhere.

- Warren "Mook" Wilson is working on GURPS for a VTT:

Setting Up Foundry VTT For GURPS

I'm reluctant to spend money ever, I mean, on a VTT I haven't experienced in actual use, but I do know Roll20 isn't cutting it despite all the work my players have put into it. More native GURPS support would be great, especially if I can turn elements on and off.

So I'm paying attention but not deeply so at this point. Maybe when there is something I can touch and feel and play with, for free, I'll take a look. My gaming is all VTT right now and even post-pandemic it will become so at some point in the future, so finding a good one for GURPS would be useful.

- I need to put up an update on War in the East. It's going slow. Long story short is, I clearly overextended a little in the middle and trusted a pile of dug-in Romanians to keep the Crimea sealed off a bit too much. I'm actually getting pushed back hard and fast in those areas, with the Romanians just cracking under the slightest pressure and the Soviets applying very strong hammerblows. My supply situation is terrible and I'm short on trucks and I can't see a good place to loot trucks from my divisions to deal with it. I'm using all of my rail capacity to shuttle division from Army Group North to Odessa to try and keep the Soviets from retaking much of the south. They're in terrible shape supply-wise, despite sitting in Leningrad getting supplied by ship and rail alike. I still hold a chunk of Moscow and despite pressure to the north I can't see me losing it just yet. I guess I should have halted my drive earlier and dug in? Looking back I didn't really have a better spot to stop. The only bright spot is that although much of the Finnish forces withdrew, those that I have got a massive increase in their offensive firepower during the icy months, so I'm actually advancing around there. Hard, hard game. It's only mid-December and I think I have like 3-4 months of winter-like conditions to cope with over 5-day turns. Maybe I should have checked off "reduced blizzard effects." It's not too late, but that seemed cheap. But it's utterly brutal how bad it can be. A good example is I had a panzer division with ~275 AFVs attack a Soviet brigade that moved up next to it, at around 18:1 odds or so . . . I lost 25 AFVs and had over 75 damaged and out of service to push the Soviet brigade back. Months earlier that would have been 2-3 AFVs damaged or lost and a shattered (destroyed) brigade. I may have effectively lost the whole campaign a half-dozen or so turns back when I took Leningrad and failed to maximally shift forces to the south to buttress that area and by my failure to extend rail lines in the center fast enough. We'll see, I guess - but it does means turns take time as I try to, desperately, maximize my ability to survive the next turn.

- Re-running modules? If I listed only the AD&D modules I ran multiple times, I'd probably only cut this list in half. Maybe less than half.

White Plume Mountain 5th edition - Session Summaries

Over at Wayne's Books is the first session report on White Plume Mountain:

White Plume Mountain session 1

I'm a big fan of White Plume Mountain.

Here is my review of it:

Review: S2 White Plume Mountain

And here are session summaries of it when my normally-GURPS centered group played it with AD&D 1st edition.

Character Generation

Adventure Logs

Session 1

Prepping for Session 2

Session 2

Power Score on Mordenkainen, Gary Gygax as a GM, and Castle Greyhawk

I'm posting this so I don't lose the links when I need them.

Sean McGovern over at Power Score put up a post about Gary Gygax's character Mordenkainen. Sean seems to own everything and have read everything, but comes at it with a freshness as if he's just read all of it right now and was totally keen on telling you all about it.

Linked off of that post is a good one about Gary Gygax as a GM, and about encounters Gary used in Castle Greyhawk.

It's all my kind of post, and the type I tend to lose track of . . . unless I can search my own blog sure it's there someone. So I share with you so I won't struggle to find it myself.

Equipment in GURPS (and in D&D)

Paul over at Paul's Gameblog put up a post about tools in D&D:

Tools in D&D

He poses a good question for D&D games - what technology level is your game?

With GURPS, this is much easier. Variable tech levels as a concept is baked into the basic form of the game.

Even so, what tool are available wasn't always an easy thing to answer, especially in the early days when digital search wasn't that great and resources just weren't up online.

These days, I just say, GURPS Low-Tech is the place to look.

Before the first GURPS Low-Tech came along, my go-to for equipment in my campaigns was . . . And a 10-Foot Pole by I.C.E., for Rolemaster. I found it a great resource for relative costs, weights, and availability by technology level. If you can find it, it's a useful resource. It's much better if you're playing Rolemaster of the same era, but either way, it's a very useful book.

After the first edition of GURPS Low-Tech came along, I used that. The next edition, the one I helped write, was much easier to use.

These days, that's where I go. For my DF game, for example, things are in the low-TL4 level of technology, augmented by superscience tech and magic. In my previous game, it was a solid TL4 minus gunpowder. I think it would be useful for a D&D GM, too, but I'll admit I'm biased in favor of the utility of GURPS books.

Secrets of Saltmash, first glance

I received and have been reading through the Secrets of Saltmarsh.

Overall, I'm enjoying the book. It's well put together, and it ties together the three original adventures with some additional later edition adventures related to the sea.

It does make some changes to the original. Some of them make sense with the changed edition. Some of them seem to be changes just for the sake of change. Some are decidedly odd to my eyes - like half-demon and half-dragon characters just around because . . . somewhere along the line those became normal races to have around.

Overall, though, what I've read so far is interesting and useful, and makes the Saltmarsh area a nice little hotbed of adventure. I'm looking forward to finishing it.

One special note, though, about Holmes Basic - the Tower of Zenopus is the sample dungeon, and the Zenopus Archives has had posts about how similar it sounds to the setup of U1. Well, now it's part of the Saltmarsh adventuring area. Nice. Very nice.

Saltmash is here

This arrived today:



it would be at the very top of my reading list, except I picked up Glen Cook's "The Swordbearer" to find a specific quote and starting re-reading it instead. But this will be read, soon. I do miss having the time to post reviews, perhaps I can do one for this one since I'm such a big fan of U1-3.

I hate page flipping through Dungeon of the Mad Mage

I'm still steadily reading my way through Dungeon of the Mad Archmage Mage, and I'm really enjoying it. It has a very old-school feel, and a very Forgotten Realms feel as well - at least how it felt in 1st edition FR products.

It does have two traits that really annoy me, though.

Page Flippling

The maps are not in a separate booklet. I'll have to see if they are available as such online, somehow. So I keep reading, flipping, reading, flipping.

Not only that, but:

No Monster Stats

Monsters are given names and it's up to you to go read their stats in the Monster Manual. I don't really have those remotely mastered yet, so I keep having to go flip and look. Even a few stats plus a page reference would be huge.


The dungeon itself is very cool, and incorporates many things I thought to include in Felltower and things I wish I had - and ones I can add later. It's very good. It's just I feel like it's going to be hard to use if I don't basically make a per-level cheat sheet of monster stats and copy all of the maps. Annoying. Worth it, but annoying.

Old School play with new school rules?

Douglas Cole also blogged about this. Go read that, too.

Necropraxis put out the results of that OSR survey I linked to a while back.

OSR Games


The comments are where the really interesting discussion is, for me - can a game not be old school, but play old school well?

Of course my answer is yes. I'm playing 4th edition GURPS and Felltower is very much old school. It's inspired by the games I played as a kid running AD&D and by the things I heard about from games earlier. It's a megadungeon crawl with a minimal outside world with a very high body count.

I think that's what D&D5 is, too. It's a new game, and new school in many ways. But it clearly can play old school - and it even as a very playable and interesting megadungeon published for it.

And as a total aside, I find it pretty amusing that more people think Labyrinth Lord is OSR than AD&D 1e is. Heh. I can kind of get it - AD&D 1st edition isn't a revival, renaissance, or resurrection, it's just the old school itself. Yes, there are older games than that, but if the DMG isn't old school gaming, if AD&D is somehow less "old school" than DCC, well, I'm not really sure we're all using the same definition. Which we're almost certainly not. Is an original old school game OSR, or just original? Is it more or less OSR than OSR games? And it's funny to think of people in, say, 1979, lamenting how the hobby had gone all new school with AD&D. Heh. The more things change . . .

Dungeon of the Mad Mage - First Impressions

I've begin reading through Dungeon of the Mad Mage


So far, here are my impressions and comments:


Great:

- Maps are black and white and highly readable. Also, they aren't poster-sized.

- levels come with a preamble telling you what you'll find - and good ones, at that! Very useful for OPM.

- room descriptions are minimal, just enough to work with.

- maps that include levels with multi-level structures on them, and many connection points.

Good:

- pages 5-12 are intro, adventure seeds, necessary prelims, etc. and then it gets right to the dungeon.

- play supports PCs getting in over the heads, and moving "ahead" of their level-appropriate challenges (and back-sweeping, as well.) Nice.


- lots of adventure seeds to give you reasons to keep going down - and have focused exploration - besides just "we need to get some XP and gold!"

- more monsters, including the creepy lava children from the Fiend Folio!

Ugh:

- "Each dungeon level contains enough monster XP to ensure that characters who clear out the level can advance to the point where they're ready to take on the challenges of the next level down." I have very definite feelings about megadungeons as ones you don't go around clearing level by level. You can, I think, but basically want to in order to make it through? Ugh.

- I personally still have an issue with the whole "pit to the dungeon in the middle of the Yawning Portal tavern." Really? You let people go down and stir up dangerous monsters in a big hole in the middle of the floor? You bet on their success and failure and let them die screaming below because they don't have the money to come back up? In my book that isn't "Neutral," that's flat-out Evil. Evil stands by and watches you die because you can't cough up a coin right now. Even Roman gladiatorial games seem less cruel.



So far, I generally like it, and while I won't run a D&D5 game, I will use some of what I like from this in my own GURPS game.

Christmas loot

I looted well this Christmas!



Ork! The Roleplaying Game 2nd edition - I ran a memorable game of Ork! first edition during some Christmas gaming many years back.

Kobolds & Cobblestones - a minis skirmish game from Osprey.

Dungeons of the Mad Mage - a 5th edition D&D Megadungeon, and I was pleased to note that Greg's friend James Introcaso was credited in it.

Pretty exciting stuff. As a megadungeon GM, Ork fan, and minis painter, this is a great haul.

I also got some other very nice stuff that wasn't gaming related, but that's so off topic.

Old school gaming with new school rules

Over on Back to the Dungeon, Eldrad wrote about old-school gaming style with the newest of the D&D rules, 5th edition.

Old School 5E Without Changing the Rules

I would sum that up as, it's not as much the the rules, as it is how you play them.

My own GURPS game is an example of this.

It's hard to die in GURPS, even though combat is potentially lethal.

It's easy to spam out magic and rest and recover from injury - so much so that the rules have their own special cases to limit that.

It's a skill-based system with non-random character generation, something that dates back to prior to much of the old school games but yet is mostly associated with newer school games.

Given all that, you should really need to house rule the hell out of GURPS to make it play lethally, right?

Not really. The campaign graveyard is full to bursting.

The PCs risk death every delve.

They can't rely on rests any more than Eldrad's PCs can rely on a short rest when it's convenient.

Rules have a heavy influence on how the game runs, but you can run a game in a style that changes that.