Power Score's Planescape Faction rundown

Sean over at Power Score did an excellent rundown on the Factions of Planescape, organizing all of the information about each from a large variety of canonical sources:

Dungeons & Dragons - A Guide to the Factions of Planescape

It's up to his usual standards of organizing information from different sources, and it's probably useful if you run Planescape. Me, I really like Planescape.

Planescape has such a "let's get those people who like Vampire: The Masquerade!" feel to it, though. The art, the very affected in-character-ish way the books are written, the typeface, the pastel colors and spiky bits everywhere. Even the factions have that Vampire feel - each has a name, cool powers, a nickname, an attitude that comes with it, etc.

But the concept of Planescape is very strong - belief affects everything. Belief defines everything, and the beliefs of enough people can shift planes and affect the world strong around them. That and the bit melting pot mix of Sigil - devils and demons rubbing shoulders with good-aligned adventurers and an explanation for every oddball mix - is a great adventuring base. Planescape: Torment does a good job of setting the scene and feel of the setting. So I'm always interested in reading more about it. That post highlights some the very play-driving detail that is out there for Planescape.

What gets the Amorphous Stone Meta-Trait?

Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 3: Born of Myth & Magic, contains a new meta-trait that I wrote up.*



So, where to apply it?

In my games, it's applied much more broadly than just to Rock Trolls. In general, I give it to rock and stone types who I feel should be more worried about crushing damage that pulverizes them than cutting damage that slices them.

Here is the general breakdown I use for Homogenous beings:

Flesh: Homogenous

Wood: Homogenous

Stone: Amorphous Stone

Metal: Homogenous

Water, Slime, etc.: Homogenous

In other words, just stony, rocky beings. Not all of them, either. If I feel like their main weak point should be shattering, cracking, being broken to powder, etc. I give it to them.

For example:

Rock trolls have the Amorphous Stone meta-trait. So do stone golems. Obsidian golems have it as well. So do Obsidian jaguars.

But strange creatures like the living pit do not - they're not more likely to shatter, and for all of their rock-like features they aren't really rocks to be broken up. Earth elementals generally don't have this - they are earth, stone, clay, etc. all mixed together; they're more resistant to breakage than vulnerable to it.

If a stone creature write up has Fragile (Brittle) or a Vulnerability to Crushing damage, I'll use the trait for that creature. I'll generally replace the multiplier for Amorphous Stone with a stronger modifier if the creature has one - I won't add or multiple them.

Designer's Notes:

So this is how I always liked to run Homogenous in GURPS 4th edition. In 3rd, I used to put "No Cutting Multiplier" on monsters and give them Vulnerability to crushing damage. In 4th, I basically just ran the trait like it was Amorphous Stone on stone creatures. No longer was a sword the best way to kill people, cut down trees, and shiver stone golems. Crushing damage had a place.

That doesn't mean cutting damage is useless. In actual play, you'll see my games end up with clearly-stone creatures getting waxed by swordsmen but only damaged by crushing attacks. A good part of that is sheer damage. When the heavy fighter with the greatsword does 2x as much damage as the crushing weapon fighters, he's still going to kill many of them.

And I'm a lot harsher on "using the flat of your sword" for crushing damage. When that damage is in the 3d and 4d range, it seems likely to me the sword would suffer from the abuse more than it would make a better hammer than a hammer. So I roll for swords bending on heavy hits. By all means, cuff the hirelings with the flat of your sword . . . but smash stone golems with it at your own risk.

And this is slightly off-topic, but it's worth mentioning to my players - elemental shaping and destroying spells work on animate beings only if those beings possess a special vulnerability to them. Purify Air, Shape Earth, Earth to Air, Destroy Water, etc. - they do nothing except to beings that have a Weakness disadvantage that points them out. The spells may have a use against them but they aren't automatically converted into damaging spells. The caster won't know anything except that it failed to do anything - this is worth research and Recognition can help. After all, some beings are straight-up weak against those spells. But just because something is or could be Amorphous Stone doesn't meant Earth to Air is a damaging attack spell. It probably will just fail; save it for the inanimate rocks you face.




* With critically important support from Sean Punch.

Oops, not painted after all

The other day I was stocking my megadungeon and reviewing the areas I think are reasonably accessible to the PCs. Then, I went around and started the process of gathering my minis for the sessions.

After all, we play at a friend's house, so I can't keep the entire collection on hand. I need to cut it down to the ones I expect to use plus the emergency extras.*

I needed some fodder-types. I knew I'd gotten a few in my Bones set from Reaper. So I went to look for them.

I couldn't find them anywhere - not in any box, bag, case, or storage rack.

Until I found them in the worst of all possible places - the unpainted minis boxes.

So I hadn't painted them. I'd planned to, set them aside, and then never got back to them.

I started line-painting them this week.

"Line painting" is the term I learned for painting identical or nearly-identical mini, part by part, in series. So, all the flesh on all of the figures. Next, all of the armor. Next, all of the accessories. Etc.

I don't need the minis for the encounter. I don't even need them painted. I might not even have enough. But what's the point of having gotten these and kept them if I'm only going to have them unpainted and sitting in a box when I do deploy the NPCs they're meant to represent?


So, this week, on top of all the other things I have to do (it's a busy week for a lot of reasons), I have to get 8-10 minis painted and ready to play with on Sunday.

Good thing they're reasonable moderate detailed - not too fiddly, not so under-detailed that they look flat and trashy once paint brings out the lack.


I'm trying to keep this from distracting me from finishing up the stocking details. I have more than enough to play, but less than enough to make it really shine in play.


* Like the "Orc box." You never know when the delver-orc war will erupt. When it does, I have 60-70 orc minis handy, plus counters and Cardboard Heroes, and I can get the others for next time.

Stock Block

Stock Block (noun, verb): the phenomenon where you're stocking a dungeon, and can't think of what should go in a particular keyed area.

"Room 10 is really stock blocking me."

Why yes, I am filling out some sections of my megadungeon. Why do you ask?

Why I write mostly positive reviews

Erik Tenkar has a nice post up today about the dearth of negative reviews of gaming products, and why.

That got me thinking about why I post generally positive reviews.

Partly, it's because I like to keep my blog positive. I don't want to engage in trash talking, arguing, dissing the things I dislike, etc. I want to engage in discussing play, examining rules, expressing my generally positive thoughts about my hobby, and shining a light on the things I enjoy. My reviews are like that - I want to tell you about things I like, in the hopes that they might be good and enjoyable for you, too.

The other reason is that it sucks to write a bad review. First, like Erik says, you have to slog through something bad. Then, to make it worse, you have to sit down and spend time writing about it. Even when I've given something the thumbs down, I try to explain why it wasn't for me and why it didn't fit what I wanted out of it. If possible, I want to highlight the good parts. But generally, it's easier to just say, nah, didn't like it so much, I'll put it aside and not go around saying how it wasn't so good. I want to save that bandwidth for things I do like.

Bryce Lynch's reviews over at tenfootpole.org are another reason I generally don't review the things I don't like. He reviewed a few Dungeon magazine adventures and panned them rather badly. Yet, in my experience, those were great adventures. One was so memorable that as long as I played with that group (Jack, Fred, Joe, Anthony) they never really stopped talking about it. The other was such a clever challenge that they really reveled in figuring out how to crack it. Yet, they got panned on a read-through review. So I keep that in mind - maybe I don't like it because it doesn't fit my taste, or I can't see the value in it. That doesn't make it bad. It's just bad for me. I might be missing how it actually plays out and the value it really brings to the table in the right circumstances. Does knowing it's bad for me help other people?

I also distinctly remember reviews that were dead wrong. There was one in Dragon magazine that looked at GURPS and said, basically, nice enough, but SJG can't support it with supplements. Yeah, and what is GURPS most famous for? A supplement for everything.

So with all of those things in mind, I write generally positive reviews. I want to highlight the good things I find in gaming and showcase them. So those are the kinds of reviews I write.

Random Felltower Notes

Just some random notes on Felltower today.

Return Missile and Invisibility

So I've been generous with Invisibility. I let you cast Missile spells and Melee spells and hold them and stay invisible (which is really bizarre given that some of these give off light, like a fireball). I'm not a jerk about how you somehow stay in formation and people don't run through your hex while you're invisible.

But I draw the line at places where you're effectively attacking in all but name. Casting Return Missile is an attack - the missile returns to hit the attacker thanks directly to your action. Casting any kind of hostile spell on someone, or even a non-hostile spell on an enemy, ends the spell. Lobbing grenades is an attack, even if it's not at any actual target. Otherwise, it's starting to be "avoid directly attacking someone or using damaging spells, and you can stay Invisible" - and that's making the spell even more valuable than it should be. Even in a dungeon full of folks that target by aura, smell, hearing, who can see invisible, sense vibrations, etc. I've already been a little too generous with the Missile and Melee spells, I don't want to extend that by saying any action that isn't based on one of the five Attack maneuvers or a spell that directly causes damage is somehow therefore not an attack. That way lies the non-DF version of the spell, which is too powerful for a combat-centered game.

And speaking of Return Missile, I'll stand by my ruling that you can't return lobbed grenades with it. You have to cast it on the target, not the missile, and you can't cast it on part of the target.

Levels

The players clearly found either a new level, or a new portion of the level with the trolls and Mungo. It's not really known to them which one.

This is because I never tell anyone which level they've arrived at. I don't use level numbers when I describe things, nor do I tell them when levels changed. This is deliberately because I:

- have some "half levels" that are just areas sunk below (or raised above) the level of the surrounding map level.

- have some sub-levels that don't connect to anything else, sometimes on the same depth more-or-less as other sub-levels they are remote from.

- want to leave the PCs unsure what's above or below them in terms of other levels (if I say you're on 2 and now it's 3, you're reasonably sure there isn't a 2.5, and stuff halfway is a sub-level)

- like to let the PCs decide how things fit together.

The place they got to was clearly deep (100-120' below the level they entered it from, which itself is down below the surface and then down some big stairs). That's all they know so far. Revealing it was really new wasn't a giveaway, they all knew it.

In a megadungeon, I think this has some serious merit - the more I define what things are, the more I'm telling the players not to look for the definitions themselves.

Have a Thought for the New Guys

For many, many sessions now, the PCs have been trying to find a way down to the deeper levels of the dungeon. Once they got the door open to the "Lord of Spite's room" (as they called it), they found stairs down.

Now, the veterans knew the stairs were there. They'd spotted them when the Lord of Spite came out of that door way back in Session 23, Felltower 15.

But they never really talked about them. I wasn't really sure if they'd remembered, so I never brought them up (hey, I run the game, I don't want to play the delvers with you.) The players who started after that had no idea. They knew it was a room with the Lord of Spite in it. They knew nothing of stairs behind it, as far as I know. So whenever discussions came up about stairs, this wasn't discussed.

Actually, that goes for other areas too - the vets "knew" where certain stairs or doors on the map went, and waved off investigation. Turns out they had discarded those prematurely.

This is for a good reason - you don't want to re-hash and re-explore everything when new people join. But it has a cost - you often end up blind to things you've chosen to write off that a new perspective can help on. I think it's worth keeping that in mind for any game - you have fresh eyes and a fresh perspective, use it, don't tell them what to ignore because you're ignoring it regardless of your reasons for ignoring it.

Finally!

So I've been waiting for the PCs to find the big staircase down since, I don't know, a few years ago. Once they found it in Session 23, I thought they'd make the connections about how to open the door. They did not. I piled on some rumors, made sure there were people who knew the answer (they never sought them out or talked to the ones in the dungeons that did), ensured I wasn't being too opaque (I thought, anyway). What it finally took was a delver determined to push all buttons and touch all weird things to get the door open.

So, yeah, finally. All those discussions, all those "Can't we hire sages to find a new entrance to the dungeon?" All those "Why don't we just make servants and pickaxes and have them dig us a tunnel into Felltower from closer to town?" plans . . . yeah, I was just being patient and waiting for someone to try to put the pieces of the puzzle together. And be willing to take a risk.

Tweaked Retribution spell for DF

During the Dungeon Fantasy Kickstarter, Pee Kitty, aka the Assistant Line Editor for GURPS, put up a new spell for clerics, called Retribution. You can see it here:

New Spell: Retribution

You can see in the comments that I came down pretty hard on the idea of using it in my games. I can see a lot of potential abuses. And even making clear it's injury, not damage, that is reflected, it would still be extraordinarily useful against "glass cannon" type monsters (attacking kills themselves), those with Cosmic Ignores DR attacks (same), and especially against high-damage boss monsters (suddenly, they are vulnerable to being attacked and from attacking). The last one would have very strong negative effects on my game.

It took about five minutes after that went up for one of my players to say, "We need Brother Ike to learn this!" With two berserkers in the group, and some low-DR types and free access to zombies, skeletons, created servants, etc. this spell would be a fantastic benefit to the group. It's easy to learn (PI being so useful in and of itself that it's not an obstacle), cheap to cast and maintain (3/1, which is 2/0 with skill 15), combat-fast to cast (3 seconds, much like the offensive spells generally I see used and buffs like Great Haste) - all of which compound the concerns I had.

As I put it to my players:

"Would you guys fight The Lord of Spite without putting this on everyone? No, right? How about the orcs? Might not matter, but may as well? The dragon? The "behir"? Stirges? (low HP, always seem to cause damage to you guys)?
ANYONE?"

Equally, though, it would be a fantastic detriment to the group. People already seek to maximize their defenses at all costs, and then (and only then) increase offensive firepower. If there is a potential that striking foes who hang around clerics means you might take your injury back, you really are encouraged to ensure you can't reasonably hurt yourself on the first strike and then open up with the followups. Easiest way to do that is lower damage strikes and more HP in case you don't pull the blow enough.

And with two berserkers in the group, one of who regularly gets pasted for a lot of damage, this would be an automatic buff for them. And a repeated one - first guy striking the naked screaming guy hurts himself, and then 2-3 seconds later it happens again, and again.

So we said no to it.

One of my players liked it, but then it turned out he thought it was caster-only.

And that is a tweak I think I like.

Retribution

As written, except the spell is caster-only.


. . . and, done. I might use that. In order to have this matter, the cleric has to get injured. Now, to paraphrase the wise man Malak, "It's bad luck to kill an evil high priest." It's spending 1 character point you can use elsewhere and accepting a -1 to your other castings to make sure if your cleric gets hit the attacker will take injury if you do.

If that's too restrictive, you can limit it a bit less:

- only subjects with Power Investiture or Holiness. (Clerics can shield other clerics and Holy Warriors)

- only living subjects. (No zombies, no doors, no Created Warriors)

- only living, willing subjects. (No orcs forced into your service, no rats)

- Only those with a specific subset of disadvantages that apply to your Holy Might powers (Must have one of, say, Honestly, Disciplines of Faith, Sense of Duty (Co-Religionists), etc.)

Or you can tweak any of the costs and duration and time to cast:

- Cost: 3/2.

- Time to Cast: 5 seconds.

- Duration: 10 seconds.

Me, I like caster-only. Evil clerics can be tricky to attack because, hey, the demons and Chaos Gods and Elder Things they serve might smite you back. Hitting the good cleric might be the last thing anyone does (and the good cleric baring his chest to the vampire might be faith in his god's Retribution, not self-sacrifice.) Then it's a cool spell, not the automatic buff for berserkers and the source of "what can we get the dragon to breathe on so it kills itself?" tactics.