Never Say Die! or, How to Improve Workflow - Part I

"No updates since January!!! Where you been at TS?"

I flatter myself that you are thinking this. 

I've been short on posts for a few reasons this year. I have been playing and running A LOT of games in the last few years. I got on Discord, made new friends, played in some pickup games, joined some campaigns and had lots of fun (hails to all the cool and weird folks I've met on many different servers, too many to name). 

Mainly though, I was running my own games for my own players. No matter how much I use modules and steal material from everywhere I can, inevitably either my players take a weird turn forcing me to write new material and/or I get a cool idea I have to write up for myself anyway. As I've said before it takes me forever to write even a small dungeon, so there was no energy left over for blogging.

It'd be a lot cooler.

Several recent developments have hampered my gaming even further: 

I am studying for a work exam on evenings/weekends (normally this would be 3 months of full-time schooling, so doing it in my spare time takes a while). This really cuts into anything else I might spend my time on. I have put my online game (running since October 2019!) on hold for several months to focus on school stuff, and my in-person games (both of them) have slowed down completely over the summer/fall.

More importantly: due to a relentless and constantly-evolving rehab & weightlifting routine, the tendonitis that plagued me for years is finally in retreat and I can use my hands again! It is impossible to overstate how positive this change has been. For the last 5-6 years I haven't been myself at all - being unable to play music has really been wretched. Only now that I am out of it can I see, by comparison, what a deep mental pit I was in for a long time. Like having my mouth sealed shut for half a decade - all of a sudden the duct-tape has been ripped off! 

I only dived deeply into RPG gaming more intensely a few years ago because my hands hurt so much I couldn't play. Now that I'm back I am making up for lost time, spending hours in the studio, finishing up projects and taking on new ones, not to mention practising to regain my previous skills. Although my speed is nearly at peak levels I've noticed my endurance, accuracy and precision on my instruments are *not*. This will take time... time that I'm not prepping for games.

*****

"Okay TS, that's great (and verges on oversharing) but what's the point?"

I need to write more gaming material in less time than ever before. Running multiple original sandbox games (even using modules when possible) has placed a creative demand on me that I've never had to deal with before. Here are some of the ways I have kept the workflow going, and some mistakes I've made & lessons I've learned along the way.

Other People's Suggestions

First of all, I tried to find reading material on speeding up my prep time. I couldn't seem to find anything good. I asked plenty of other gamers and found that sometimes even communicating my problem was basically impossible - a baffling situation!

The Alexandrian has a lot to say on the subject. Many of you will find all of it old news, others will benefit. Start here. I read these articles a long time ago and they are helpful if you are currently a beginner or mired in counterproductive habits, but for me at this point they don't say anything new.

Sly Flourish's book The Lazy Dungeon Master just sucks, don't read it, fucking embarrassing.

If anyone else has suggestions for "smart prep" resources, I'm all ears, but strangely this is one area of gaming that I don't see too many people discussing. Am I an outlier? Am I just missing the conversation? Let me know in the comments.

A Short Tale

I was house-sitting for my brother a while ago, spending most of the time on the couch with the cats and watching all the streaming TV that I don't have at home. I eventually felt guilty I wasn't being productive so I brought over the gaming material I could fit in my laptop bag: the Sword & Magic rules, my campaign notes & maps and a 2 or 3 helpful booklets (more on that below).

I tell you, I created more dungeon rooms in my notebook on the couch with inane sitcoms droning in the background, than I do on my computer with a modern word-processor and access to a veritable mountain of gaming resources, tables, blogs, PDFs & books!

What can we learn from this?

Get The Fuck Off The Computer

The dangers of distraction are well-documented in the social media age. I have certainly killed a lot of time scrolling IG or hanging on Discord, but you know all about that stuff. 

My point here is somewhat different.

When I'm writing on my computer I try to stay organized. I want my dungeons to make sense, to 'fit' together into a coherent whole. So to help with that I have my dungeon map open in photoshop, a project overview & to-do document, a doc for the particular dungeon level I'm working on, my treasure tables, a stack of books beside me, my favourite generator tools, etc. Having all of this at my fingertips can drain my ability to do anything. Alt-tabbing around between documents, maps and different books is really distracting and soon, work bogs down utterly. Attempting to hold all the existing dungeon information in my mind while creating something new is pretty much impossible.

To an untrained observer I am "focusing" on creating a dungeon (after all, I am engrossed in these dungeon documents & maps, I'm not browsing socials or looking at my phone) but I can easily spend hours doing nothing of substance. I might be tweaking the map, reordering the to-do list, adding some inspirational source material I should eventually read, or re-writing the room keys to be more terse and evocative... 

But NONE of that help me decide what is in the next dungeon room - and that's what I need to figure out by game night!

Peter de Vries wrote "Write drunk, revise sober." Perhaps for me it should be "Write on paper, revise on the computer." Now on Saturday mornings I go down to a local hipster coffee shop with my notebook, get caffeinated and write down dungeon ideas. I just bang out cool rooms, monster lairs, dungeon dressing, 'specials' and anything else I can think of.

As it turns out my memory is fine for this purpose - I don't need all the keys and maps in front of me in order to write rooms that make sense in the context of the dungeon I'm working on. I can remember the basic organizing principles, and don't need to know exactly whether the pit trap is in room 10 or 11 in order to write something down the hall.

Use What You Have & What Works

The other factor in that house-sitting success story was my limited access to game materials. Instead of having access to my crammed gaming bookshelves (not to mention an unimaginable horde of PDFs on my computer) I was forced to make use of the books I brought along. Instead of browsing for that "one perfect table" I rolled on what I had, noted down the result and moved on. This kept me focused on generating ideas instead of "comparison shopping" indefinitely.

What many folks know already is that not all gaming materials are created equal. I have been running a city campaign for 4 years and never once have I used anything from Vornheim. Meanwhile The Nocturnal Table features in my game consistently. Coincidence? Um, just, like, my opinion, man? I think not! Good game materials deliver results when you need them. When you find powerful tables or useful reference works, use them all the time instead of indulging your inner magpie and looking for the next shiny object. I wasted years beating my head against substandard tools, trying to make them work because everyone else said they were great.

(This is where the dudes at old-school bastions like K&KA will steer you right. Ask them what kind of tables & reference books they use. I know they seem scary, just be cool and don't talk about B/X.)

Here is a short list of highly useful tables and reference works that I can recommend to everybody. It isn't anything earth-shattering, and most of these you probably know already. Some are hard to find but don't @ me. Get these in physical copy or download & print them, stack them beside your desk, turn off your computer and get more shit done than before:

- The 1st edition DMG

- OSRIC (get the Black Blade hardcover if you can) 

- Hack & Slash - Treasure (the best thing Courtney ever wrote, fight me. PDF only but I printed it out for my gaming binder. Yes, it's that essential)

- Judges Guild - Ready Ref Sheets, Wilderness Hexplore Revised, Wilderlands of High Fantasy, City-State of the Invincible Overlord (and plenty more, but these are the best)

- Matt Finch - City Adventures, Tome of Adventure Design (Honestly I don't use the TOAD as much as some people, but certain sections of it are gold. There is a bit of a learning curve while you get familiar with what it can do and where to find things)

- Melan - The Fomalhaut Oracle from Fight On! Magazine #3, The Nocturnal Table

- Muddle's Wilderness Location Generator (the dungeon one isn't too bad either)

- New Big Dragon Games' d30 Companions (duplicates some DMG stuff but both have useful shit)

- Ktrey's Wilderness Hexes. Too bad this is not available in book form. (hint hint bro, my money is yours for all the use I've gotten from these over the years) Also you can browse his blog for even more material.

I'm sure I omitted your favourite book or table. There are lots more, but the point is that these are some of the basics. Start with a useful core of books that definitely work and expand one piece at a time as you find useful things. For further reading, some of these and more are mentioned in Melan's blog article Great Tables of D&D History.

*****

A lot of this advice comes down to working on what actually gets results.

This post got really long, so I cut out some for a future article to make things a bit more digestible. Maybe writing post was a distraction in itself... Oops, time to go! I hope this was useful or interesting. I'm still out here gamin' hard, and I hope you are too. 

Have fun everyone!

To return to the reason for this post: here is one guitar player who wouldn't let a little setback - an industrial accident that cost him TWO FINGERS - prevent him playing some of the heaviest shit ever committed to tape:

State of the Sorcery 2019

Well, it's that time again. Yule logs are crackling, a new Star Wars movie is out, I have to field calls from my relatives asking when I'm going to get my life together. But first let's look at how things went over the last year.

I wrote fewer posts this year mainly because I had other creative projects to balance, like starting a new campaign with some brand-new players. One of my bands recorded a new record so I spent most of the spring & summer practising really hard riffs that nobody will ever listen to! The Land's End crew still gets together about once a month for wilderness exploration and the players are having a great time. I'm learning a lot about the sandbox format in every session.

Most Popular Posts:

Why the OSR? / YOU RECOGNIZE NOTHING - As soon as I said I wouldn't get mad... We haven't been back to game with this group, for a handful of reasons including those I enumerate in the post. Sorry I got so pissy, but this post reached a LOT more people than my blog usually does, so I hope at least a few of you who came for the yells stayed for the skeletons and random tables.

Review: The Stygian Library - Not much else to say here, this is a great module. I will post a follow-up play report once my players have explored it. They're very close now, and I hope my personal touches don't twist it too far out of proportion.

RMGS Round 3 - My second-favourite of the series after Hyper Diabolism Edition. I break down the monster generators in the Tome of Adventure Design, Carcosa and the Gardens of Ynn.

Tomb of Abysthor - pt 2 - The Pit of Bones - Part of my ongoing attempt to adapt that venerable Necromancer Games/Frog God adventure for my home setting and rules. I'm glad people read this post, I'm proud of this little bit of my setting!

Return to Land's End sessions 8 & 9 - The most-read of my play reports! I'm glad someone likes these although I've fallen off writing them of late. They take too much time, I'd rather work on new material for my game. Maybe I can do more point-form reports that contain all the essence of these writeups, but take less time? I don't know if they'll be very interesting to read.


Least Popular Post:

REVIEW: Library Generation Table & Locks, Vaults and Hiding Places - and a blurb - I wonder why more people didn't check this one out? I suppose there isn't much point in reviewing something that's PWYW on DrivethruRPG, folks can just get it for free and see if they like it.


Failures:

Didn't get around to playing Warhammer with my group at home.
Posted less than I did last year.
Wrote more angry rants than I wanted to.


Successes:

Wrote a lot of reviews!
Wrote my 100th post!
My own writing made it into a printed book!
Started a new drop-in game with some players brand-new to D&D!
Refrained from publishing some of the angry rants that I did write!


What's coming next:

Land's End: The Tomb of Abysthor remix is progressing, the group have ventured inside and battled the relentless skeletons of the Font of Bones. I have edited the first two levels in an attempt to stay at least one whole level ahead of my players at all times, but the lower levels will require much MORE work than higher ones! The entire frog level basically needs to be deleted or completely rewritten for E6, same with the temple of Orcus. Meanwhile they are following up clues to the lost temple of Mordiggian the Charnel God, and about to venture into the drowned lands where the lizardfolk live!

Viridistan: My new drop-in game is set in & around Viridistan, the City-State of the World Emperor. After watching what Ben L. did with the Wilderlands for his game, I was inspired to read up on it. I have placed Land's End there so both games take place within the same world. This one will have less wilderness adventuring. Instead it focuses on cults, conspiracies, city adventuring, socializing, random tables, and reskinning all my LotFP adventures with a more Swords & Sorcery theme. In other words, only & entirely things I've never done before! So expect catastrophic failure, or at least some hilarious gaffes along the way.

Fun on the Velvet Horizon: A few of these are in progress, hopefully they'll be done this year.

Summoning Rules: My adaptation of Ben L's awesome monster-summoning pact rules will hopefully continue this year. This is closely tied with FotVH of course.

Nameless Cults: More of these will be added. I have selected six of the seven demon-lords that rule the forces of Chaos in Land's End. Further development on the cults of Orcus, Tsathoggua, Abraxas and more is upcoming, along with some antagonists that aren't 'infernal' so much as 'extraterrestrial'...

Play Reports: probably not!

More new material: I have written a few original dungeons for Land's End that crib from my favourite bloggers less than usual. Nothing to make a big deal out of, about the size of a dungeon from Fight On! But if my players have fun playing 'em, I'll reproduce them here for you guys to check out.

Reviews: Well, I did buy a fuckton of new gaming books this year! It'll take me a while just to read em all. I'll write up a few just keep my hand in, you understand. I am so busy that I would rather dedicate my limited blogging time to playable things for my setting. Still, if I can drive a handful people towards a really cool product, that's worth doing.

Review, Remix, Repent: I am teeing up on a controversial, well-reviewed but much-maligned module, one which perhaps fell victim to the hype surrounding it. I am attempting to extract the interesting parts. We'll see if it ends up being more work than it's worth, and who wants to lynch me after.


*****

Happy new year everyone, drive safe and drink lots of water!!

Why the OSR? / YOU RECOGNIZE NOTHING

Another wave of blathering was stirred up on G+ a few weeks ago (and another? and another? and another???) regarding the OSR and what it's all about. Here is a story that illustrates a few things I've learned about OSRism that I find really important.

So. I've been playing on and off in a 2nd edition game for about two years, with a few old friends (two of my Land's End players) and some of *their* friends. It's always the same guy DMing - we will call him "D." He and I are the only players with significant experience (he a lifer like I am). Two players are rank beginners and the ones who play in my Land's End game have no experience other than that.

Our party ranges from levels 8-12. My character is an 8th-level psionicist (I'll cover this in a future post) so sometimes I'm almost completely useless. We're playing some high-level adventures. Many of them are D's own concoction, with some published material. Of late we're playing through Temple, Tower & Tomb, a series of three pretty tough dungeons.

Things finally reached a pass last weekend, and I know I said IN MY LAST POST I wasn't going to blog while angry, but fuck it. I thought if I waited a week I'd have a more objective look back at what happened, but today I write this missive to you still feeling slapped in the face and I gotta get this out of my system.

I missed one of the sessions in the Temple, but it was cool except for one incident that set my spidey-sense tingling: while sifting through a huge pit of bones for magic items, we uncovered an odd NPC: a sentient flying skull. Turns out some dude was killed by the evil clerics of the temple and just woke up that way. Fine, I can work with this, but...

My suspicions began to grow when the floating skull, named Ollie, did not say "Thanks for rescuing me, goodbye!" but followed us around the dungeon making comments. Flying into rooms to grab treasures. Even offering suggestions on dealing with the various traps in the temple.

You guessed it. The dreaded "DMPC" had reared its ugly head. I thought I had left those behind when I graduated high school. But it gets worse:


The Tower

The delve last weekend really irritated the shit out of me. We were grinding through this dungeon slowly, and I was doing my best to keep my mouth shut. The kind of place where checking for traps and casting Detect Magic on every single door is mandatory, but the walls are made of wood. I honestly considered setting the whole place on fire and sifting through the ruins in a few days later for the stupid MacGuffin we needed.

I was basically going along to get along, letting the newer dudes set the pace. Previous game sessions had already given me deep suspicions that we were playing on "easy mode." I wondered what the fuck would be necessary for the party to fail for once.

Finally we reached the lich's hidden throne room.

The fight began in a normal enough way. Lich with Stoneskin dropped Unholy Word and Reverse Gravity, got whaled on by our fighters and went down. The magical punishments continued from an unknown source, and one of the prisoners in his sanctum was revealed as a fire elemental covered by an illusion. Makes sense so far. We began attacking the other "innocent prisoners," assuming one was the lich in disguise.

I should point out that all these irritating things so far were in the module, AFAIK. D can be blamed only for deciding to run it. But what happened next really ripped my dick off:

My psionicist was standing back, shooting arrows since I was all out of PSPs, when Ollie the fucking floating skull appeared seemingly out of nowhere (another immersion-breaking device that will probably cause me $2000 in dental reconstruction just for thinking about it). He said "The Emerald. The Emerald!"

Of course. There was a large green gem sitting on a throne in the middle of the room. Why wouldn't the lich leave his fucking phylactery out in the open? Makes perfect sense right? The DM was telling me how to defeat the boss, so my character dutifully smashed it and with a puff of smoke the lich was destroyed. My eyes rolled so far back in my skull, I'm currently typing this while hanging from the fucking ceiling.


What I'm Trying To Say

"The ultimate object of education can scarcely be knowledge anymore: it is, rather, the will born of such knowledge."  - Max Stirner

Some folks have complained about the OSR approach. The latest is from Chimeric Reservations in particular. For example, here are the Artpunk D&D "commandments" which I also subscribe to. (note the fucking quotation marks okay?)

Reading about Jacquaying the Dungeon, the Quantum Ogre, the Dirt-Cheap Sandbox or 1000 other awesome, educational, informative and fun-as-hell blog posts in the OSR world is worthwhile not just for ideas and rules but because taken together they inculcate a certain perspective. A perspective that includes freedom, choice and consequence for the players and fairness from the DM. Things that I found frustratingly lacking in last weekend's game. It doesn't matter if you're an OG from '74 or you play Pathfinder like I do. Absorbing these ideas will raise your consciousness. You'll understand why a "gimme" like this is in fact robbing your players of the fun they otherwise could've had.

"You are privy to a great becoming..." 

I don't know if anyone thinks or claims that OSR-ing is a fully general solution to every problem in roleplaying games. This session exemplifies just one frustrating and totally avoidable ending to a session that OSR-style thinking would have prevented. You can accuse me of "one-true-wayism" all you want, but I would never in a million years have pulled that fucking move with my players. What I'm saying is that at least in my case THE OSR IMPROVED MY GAMES, SAVED MY SOUL AND KICKS ASS. It has real effects on people, and a little reading on D's part might have saved me from this lingering taste of piss in my mouth.

Why even bother playing if we already know what's going to happen? I'm trying to think and solve problems and play my character to the hilt and survive. Too bad it's all a bunch of wasted effort. Why keep track of anything? Why roll the dice?

What To Do Next?

A great number of pursuits compete for my time. Too many to list. Why spend any of my limited hours getting this pissed off? At the very least I'll be contacting D in private to discuss my misgivings, although I strongly doubt it will make a difference. I believe he is just pandering to the newbies, and since there are four of them and one of me, the best option may be to quietly reduce my attendance. I mean, they keep coming back - who am I to tell them how to have fun?

State of the Sorcery 2018

It's been a year of ups and downs. The impending closure of Google+ has people feeling bummed out, spreading folks across a wide range of substitute social platforms, each one denounced by at least some people (reddit is for neckbeards! MeWe is the fourth reich!). Meanwhile a few sadly inevitable culture-war struggles fractured our small scene even further. Noisms actually did what we all think about every day. It's a bummer to watch people gradually drop off the map until one's G+ feed is a chorus of shills and crickets. A sad but familiar feeling - this kind of thing happens to scenes.

To compensate for this, I added a big new stack of blogs to the reading list. In case anybody's under a rock, you can find a big nasty old list of gaming goodness right HERE.

As for Terrible Sorcery, it's been the best year by far since I started blathering about my D&D notions back in 2011. I put The Spoils of Annwn on the shelf for a while with a case of thematic confusion. I returned to Land's End with some pals again. Having a looser, less high-concept setting is easier for me to deal with. Since actually playing is the important part, anything that gets me PLAYING more often is a good thing! My players seem to really love the sandbox format and are excited to come to the table and roll - more than this, a DM couldn't ask for.

I feel the quality of my writing has improved a lot this year. Probably because I spent more time doing it! Obviously I've tremendous room for improvement. I still don't have the focus to really follow an idea through in detail to the end. There were a few articles this year that only skimmed across the surface of their subject, which I don't feel great about. My style needs to be clearer and more concise. Sitting down to blog while I'm irritated has also led to some sloppy work in the past, so I should try and relax a little bit. On the positive side I'm still full of ideas, both for my home game and things to blog about.

Links have started cropping up on the pages of D&D bloggers I like and follow, which is everything I hoped for when I started out. Somehow more people have been checking out Terrible Sorcery, and the numbers are tremendous (by comparison). I don't know if this is poor internet form, but take a look:





What the hell happened? Did I turn into a porn site? Start selling vape accessories? Pay some bots to drive traffic? Maybe my posts are actually getting better...

If anybody has an explanation, I'd love to know!

This is also the first year enough folks left comments to have a conversation. Pretty cool, so I hope that keeps up. Thanks to everyone who has followed along on this journey - whether you started in '11 or are just stumbling over the page now!


Most Popular This Year

Random Monster Generator Book Shootout! 1 and 2 - These were wildly popular compared to anything else. Unsurprising - every good-hearted DM loves monsters and random tables. I only wonder why nobody else has attempted a survey of these books before.

The Lunar Giant - My entry in the Henry Justice Ford monster manual project, which you can score right here (for the low price of fuck-all). I'm proud to be part of this one, thanks to Eric Nieudan for putting it all together. I hear a print-on-demand version is in the offing; watch this space!

REVIEW: The Gardens of Ynn - In retrospect a muddy and all too brief write-up, I hope at least my enthusiasm about the module was communicated. It's awesome, so give it a look.

The Tomb of Abysthor remix - The beginning of my reinterpretation of a great Necromancer/Frog God Games dungeoncrawl. Juking the stats so I can play it in Epic 6.

Nameless Cults VI - The return of a classic series, this one's about the cult of Tsathoggua.

The Three D&D Economies - This was an excerpt of a much larger series I found on a D&D wiki which I wanted people to hear about. Go look at the original stuff!


Looking Forward

Many possibilities and projects lie ahead in 2019:

The death of google+ - MeWe seems the default option. I suppose I could try it...

Land's End - Plenty of ideas and content here for future posts. Dungeons, new monsters, blurbs about the setting in general. It needs more juice, more imagination, more weirdness, and that's where I'm going with it next.

The Tomb of Abysthor - I have the next two installments in progress but they'll be posted up slowly. I want to playtest them before I get too far ahead, so it all depends on the direction my players take.

Nameless Cults - The King in Yellow, Thasaidon, prince of all turpitudes, and some of the freaky shit from the Book of the Damned are up next.

REVIEWS - I'm having fun with the few I've done so far. New stuff, old stuff, whatever I buy with my leftover Paypal change, maybe shit I get for Christmas?

Warhammer Fantasy - Reading ATWC's Bringing Down the Hammer turned me on to WFRP 1st edition. I found a cheap old copy on eBay for 40 bucks (or '40 wooden nickels' to non-Canadians). Follow me as I force my players to try it out and everyone gets disembowelled! My roommates have a few friends that want to try out roleplaying games, so let's get them started out with something ancient, unglamorous, weird, gritty and violent with black & white illustrations! The complete opposite of the video games they've all been raised on!

Trying to convince my players to switch from Mathfinder - The DM's job is a thankless one, but less so than the evangelist's! If I can't manage it, expect more posts about paring down the complex rules systems to make my life easier.

*****

Now play us out into the winter dark:

Nocturnal Supremacy

OK, so back having a job. Right now I'm working nights, and it looks like I'll have some free time so expect more fun posts to come along! In addition to my previously promised writings, I have some more fun stuff to go up as I brainstorm this Labyrinth Lord one-shot for the Friday group. Some good tricks & traps, ruminations on the setting and my newbie encounters with the retro rules. I'm also going to talk more about my home game and some of the hijinks that have happened recently. The actions of one Trigger McGillicuddy, drunk-ass wizard, deserve at least one post of their own.

Edition Strugges and more backstory

Well, now that I have a big cup of coffee in me it's time for another blog post. Read the first half of this here.

After I moved out west at 22, my old gaming group had a Pathfinder game going over MSN messenger for a few months. I found myself poring over the SRD, comparing each feat in minute detail. My fighter was only 1st level and I had 3 different feat 'builds' written up all the way to sixth. After a while, I started to get really wound up analyzing the differences between each feat. I just wanted to play the game and instead I was spending all my downtime giving myself anxiety, rearranging my feat progression. It was lame, unfun, and just distracted from the real questions. Things like "how the fuck will we survive this ratman-infested dungeon? What's the deal with those ancient markings?" etc.

My main gripe with 3.x is a problem which reaches its apex in Pathfinder: holy shit you have to make a lot of decisions during character creation. I found digging out my mechanics textbooks and explaining the workings of a differential easier than running my roommates through chargen in 2 hours. And they're playing rogues and rangers! Thank fuck no one wanted to play a Sorceror, god forbid an Oracle or Witch. Handing my players the feat list, I could see their faces slacken, daunted.

Gaining levels in Pathfinder is anticlimactic next to the decision-making and notation you do at first level. Racial abilities, feats, skill points, beginning class abilities - a huge range of choices. Yet your character's areas of expertise are now set: they'll be basically the same at 20th level. You'll still be a half-elf sorceror with the aberrant bloodline, just with a few extra abilities and more damage dice to throw. After spending so much time creating a PC, how can you help but feel that he's special? Feel that he's entitled to live?

When I first got into reading various OSR blogs, the term 'Retro-Clone' jumped out at me. I already love classic videogaming ('90s PC games and the SNES), so why not retro pen-and-paper games? Once I absorbed the core ideas it made perfect sense. I would much rather generate simple characters in 10 minutes and spend the rest of the night dungeoncrawling. If the characters manage to grow in the telling, we can give them special abilities later. Right now I just want to see what's behind the next door.

I'm too young to have played OD&D, 1st edition or B/X. I'm not interested in "nostalgia" or returning to my own roots - 2nd edition was all over the damn place. But damn do I hate 'splatbooks', sourcebooks, and mostly anything that doesn't say "core rules" on it. What I am interested in is playing a rules-light, fast-paced, easy to teach and learn version of the fantasy roleplaying game I know and love, which allows me to generate my own content easily. I'm interested in exercising my imagination. If I wanted someone else's imagination, I'd read a story or play a videogame.

To this end, I tracked down a copy of Labyrinth Lord a few weeks ago at my FLGS, and have been itching to play it with my Friday group. We're currently playing Warhammer Fantasy (read about it), but I'm prepping for the day the GM calls in sick and I can hit them with LL...

on and off the wagon

Today's been pretty busy, and now that I have a new dungeon filled with vegetable mold-men to torture the PCs with (I hope they don't get too cocky at 2nd level), it's time for a relaxing blog post about some of my own experiences with the roleplaying hobby.

I was first introduced to D&D by a kid on the bus to school. I can't even remember his name now. This was the beginning of 4th grade, which I think is when I started going to a different school, so I would have been just short of 10 years old. All this guy had was one six-sider and the most tenuous grasp on the rules; no books or anything. I recall being captured by gnolls and failing my d6 roll to escape - game over.

For some reason, I found this experience compelling enough to repeat. When my family moved to the next town, I found quite a few friends that knew about D&D. I got the Forgotten Realms boxed set for christmas, and for the next 7 years or so, all we did was play AD&D 2nd edition. Sure, we had a few rounds of Magic: The Gathering and Warhammer 40,000, but AD&D was the only roleplaying game on the map. It was all we had and we fucking loved it. I met some of my best friends in our middle-school lunchtime AD&D group.

Later on in high school I branched out. I started buying weird-ass old games at the used bookstore: Paranoia, a few Palladium books and some other things I don't recall, although I could never get anyone to play them with me. I got a copy of Champions from my aunt (and fuck did I ever love it). Somebody brought some White Wolf games to our lunch-hour group, and they blew our minds at the time.

Vampire and Werewolf I could take or leave, and Wraith I never bothered to play, but both Changeling and Mage had a feel that was unmatched in my experience. They were a total package, with production values a lot higher than I was used to. The artwork, the (at the time) out-there systems, the sidebars packed with obscure bits of flavor text, leaving you with more questions than answers (it's difficult to maintain this feel in actual play with real people, which is why our high school White Wolf games were totally gonzo). Through all this, we still played 2nd ed AD&D.

When 3rd edition came out, I thought just like my friends: bullshit. Those corporate weasels would never take any more of my hard-earned allowance! Until one day when I actually opened up the books and found a lot to like. Regularized XP tables, the new skill system (no more weapon proficiencies), and a more streamlined approach to rolling (no more bend bars/lift gates) all appealed to me. The clutter had been swept away; it was a new format, the art was different, there were new mechanics but it was still D&D.

It took me years to actually play it.

I suddenly have a lot of free time.

I was in a band until about 2 weeks ago, when the bullshit finally became too much. After 2 1/2 years of tantrums, yelling, imperious commands, and generally being treated like someone's whipping boy and slave, it was time to go.

Similarly, my "job" has gradually reduced in hours/week until I can't survive on it anymore. So begins the hated resume-polishing, door-knocking and cold-calling.

I've been gaming with a few acquaintances on & off for the last year. Our sessions are infrequent, many players don't show up for a month or more, and we have a bad case of "gamer ADD" - before a given campaign gets off the ground, we've started playing something new.

I had been reading Ars Ludi and The Alexandrian for several years, but without a regular, serious gaming group, I could only take notes and dream of running a game again. In the spring, I stumbled across some of the OSR blogs and began reading voraciously. Suddenly, I remembered what my life was all about back home - gaming! I went out and bought the Pathfinder core rulebook, roped my roommates into rolling up characters, and just like that - I'm back!

GMing again feels like riding a bike after five years away: I'll never forget how to do it, but I'm a little unsteady. It's great fun sitting on my bedroom floor drawing maps on graph paper while listening to REM, just like I did when I was 14. After very little consideration, I decided to start up my own blog and see how it goes. I'll be posting up my ruminations as I develop my campaign world; new monsters, spells and magic items; session reports (maybe); house rules, and all kinds of other fun stuff.

That's more than enough preamble for now. Let's give the people something they can use:


OUBLIETTE, aka CAGE SKELETON

This is a monster that's geared towards scaring your players. It's a skeleton inside a man-shaped spiky metal cage, hanging from the ceiling by a chain. It looks like some unfortunate bastard stuck in there to rot by the local Duke or whoever, until it reaches through the bars to choke the shit out of passersby. Throw it in your next prison or torture chamber to surprise-attack the PCs!

Stats for these things are pretty simple.

Use regular Skeleton numbers, except their natural AC and hit points are higher, and give them some more Damage Reduction if you have that in your game. They have the 'Grab' and 'Constrict' abilities if you're playing Pathfinder.

We almost had a TPK when I put these up against my PCs, because I didn't read the grappling rules for Pathfinder very closely. I thought 'Grab' allowed an instant grapple when it only allows for a free grapple check. So every time they attacked, the PC was immobilized and started taking damage. It didn't take long to put a few guys below 0, but the ranger and cleric pulled a few clutch moves and saved the day, so it all worked out in the end.