Races of the Old World for B/X

One of the oddities of B/X D&D is that nonhuman races are treated as classes. It’s actually a nice streamlining of the fact that nonhuman characters in OD&D were all limited to just one class. All that B/X does is providing separate tables for human fighters, dwarf fighters, and halfling fighters and a table for elven fighter/magic-users.

When adapting the system to settings that are not limited to human PCs something needs to be done to make the other humanoids playable. In the Old World elves are the only race that has stats in B/X and humans don’t exist at all. In addition to that all races can be thieves and witches in addition to fighters. So my solution is very simple: Don’t use special stats for races at all.

All races can be of all classes (no clerics) with no level limits. It’s pointless to make twelve custom classes when I can just use the three classes out of the book. And what difference does race really have for characters? In most editions of D&D it’s almost none and what little there is evaporates to nothing after a few levels.

Though one thing I am currently considering is to create maximum limits for ability scores. Elves are limited to 15 Con, kaas to 15 Dex, skeyn to 15 Str, and yao to 15 Int. But I might even ditch that.

Why have I not been informed: New LotFP edition in work

I just now spotted an article on the playtest document for the new edition of Lamentations of the Flame Princess that has been send out to some GMs back in february. I also noticed just a few days back that the new Referee Guide is still in work, which will include new unique monsters for the game. I assume it will be released alongside the new rulebook.

I don’t have the playtest rules myself, but looking at this summary from Dragons Gonna Drag (another new OSR website, like what you did so far Justin) I already spotted some things that I found interesting.

Intelligence determines skill points at first level. After that only specialists keep getting more points. I’ve been thinking about ways to give fighters and witches limited access to skill in my campaign these last couple of days. This is certainly one way to make it work.

There’s also a Medicine skill, which is nice, as it indicates support to play without magic healing. Very Sword & Sorcery.

Strength affects how many items characters can carry. This is one shortcoming I’ve seen with the Encumbrance system of the current edition and something which I think the system by LS from Pencils and Papers did better.

What I find really interesting is that classes are reduced to fighter, specialist, and magic-user (the other classes are said to be put in an appendix). I did the very same thing for my campaign. There’s been some talk not long ago about clerics and how they are pretty much a unique thing of D&D and not really fitting for other settings that don’t want to be worlds defined by the D&D conventions. (B/X is a great system on its own, even divorced from its D&D legacy.)

All characters advance with the same amounts of XP, a topic that I’ve been discussing on a forum just today. And I am very much in favor of it. Making miniscule adjustments to XP required for the next level is pointless when level loss, replacement characters, and characters of newly joined players all have a much bigger impact on the different levels of characters.

Justin mentioned having the impression that group initiative is being ditched, which is something I wouldn’t approve of. But it’s trivially simple to do anyway, and it isn’t like Dexterity would become a useless stat if it no longer affects Initiative.

There’s a new saving throw mechanic that basically uses a d6 dice pool and counting successes. That’s something I really don’t see myself using if it makes it into the new edition. I think a d20 roll against a target number indicated by your class level is just fine and much less of a hassle. There’s also partial saves, which is more granularity than I want to bother with. This new system also doesn’t improve odds as the characters level up, which I think is a pretty important feature of B/X. I can see why Raggi wouldn’t want that in his home games, but it’s something that I would really not want to miss in mine.

There’s also big changes to how spells are prepared, but since I’m using a completely different magic system that doesn’t have anything to do with D&D magic anyway, this doesn’t affect me personally.

Overall, I think this all sounds very good. I almost certainly won’t use the rules straight out of the book, but I don’t think there are many OSR GMs who do that with any game that is around. I am very much looking forward to the new rulebook and referee guide.

Return of the Magical Creatures

One problem I’ve been struggling with since when I started working on the Old World setting is creating a clear concept of what spirits are and how they behave. Since shamans and animistic religion are a major focus of the setting, this issue is a pretty big deal. I’ve been doing a lot of shuffling around and recategorizing of my creatures over the years but never really got to a satisfying conclusion. The last set of categories I had been using was people, beasts, undead, and everything else was a spirit. They are all inhabitants of the Spiritworld after all.

But looking back, this only seems to have caused more confusion than clarity. And I now think this is because there are two fundamentally different types of beings that are all said to live in the lands of spirits, at least in the way we think about these beings today. The fey people of celtic myth, or at least their modern interpretation in the British-Irish tradition are not animistic beings. They are people. They are generally human in shape, talk in human languages, dress in human clothing, live in human dwellings, cook their food, and are apparently born and age. But they are the people of a parallel world that obeys diferent rules, which makes their behavior seem very strange and gives them powers that are for all intends and purposes magic. This is not unique to the British Isles, though. You find many similar creatures in India and Japan as well.

But the spirits of nature are fundamentally different beings. They can appear in human form, but that’s not their real form. They are not born and do not age, they do not need to eat and you can not kill them with a blade. They do not live in a river or in a tree. They are the river and the tree.

When you lool at original descriptions of supernatural mystical beings, I don’t think this distinction holds really up and doubt people actually saw them this way. But when creating stories for modern audiences, I  think it’s a quite important distinction that we take for granted, even if we never really think about that.

Taking these things into consideration, I don’t think my shie, naga, raksha, and giants really qualify as spirits anymore. They have supernatural powers and they are native to the spiritworld, but they are all people who were once born and who can be killed with a blade. While I think the execution of creature types in the RPGs Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder is a total mess, I think it is the right idea. There needs to be a category of creatures that are magical instead of mundane mortal, but also clearly different from immortal spirits of the land, angels, and demons. So I will be expanding the categories in my creature document from four to five and add the Magical Creatures group. Hopefully this will help me get a better grip on the supernatural in the Old World.

The Force is strong with this one

I’m not just a huge classic Star Wars fan, I am also one of those 90s kids who think Tie Fighter is one of the greatest videogames of all time. And purely be coincidence I found this video that has been around for over a year now.

If you played the game, you recognize that this isn’t just a Star War movie, this is a real Tie Fighter movie. I’ve played this game and X-Wing to no end and this one was clearly done by someone who has not just seen it, but knows how it feels to play. I’ve never seen such a smoothly done attempt at representing game mechanics in a movie. If you haven’t played the game, you probably won’t be able to spot the moments that emulate it.

Very nicely done.

RPG Review: Qelong

Qelong is a small sandbox setting written by Kenneth Hite for Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Since it’s a short little book, this will also be a somewhat short review. Qelong consists of a river valley on the coast of a fantasy country loosely inspired by Cambodia. Two immortal beings have been fighting over the country for a very long time, and some 20 years ago one of them discarded a broken weapon during a battle and it landed in the headwaters of the Qelong river. Since then it has been leaking a supernatural toxin into the water and into the air, making the calley barely inhabitable. The player characters are intended to mercenaries from a far away land who might be on a mission to remove the weapon from the poisonous swamp or salvage pieces of it for a sorcerer unbothered by its dangers.

117257The book consists basically of three parts: Mechanics, creatures and factions, and locations. The content covers 45 pages plus two simple maps. While it’s certainly compact, I am not a big fan of the organization. There are several important faction in the setting, but half of their description is in the monster section and the other half in the descrption of their base in the locations section. This made it somewhat difficult to get a first bearing and when I tried to read the book simply from front to back, most of the things mentioned in the mechanics section didn’t mean anything to me yet. It’s only once you made it through the whole thing (admitedly not long) that you get the whole picture and what the book provides and what it doesn’t. A general outline that tells me what this sandbox is about right at the front of the book would have been really appreciated.

I am also somewhat under the impression that this was not actually playtested. And that the author is not a veteran GM of this game system. As other reviewers have pointed out before me, the rules for the supernatural poison are much too long and complicated for the minimal payoff they have. There are three full pages on how the toxin works, but in actual play it will come down to the players starting to make occasional saving throws after a few weeks and eventually they will fail one and get a -1 penalty to most of their rolls plus some wild magic effects for spellcasters. Counting the number of days spend breathing the toxic air and how much poisoned food and water has been consumed, and how often each character was injured is just overkill. The other thing that stands out is the abundance of special attack that are basically instant kill. I think the naga should have no problem completely wiping out a full party in a single turn.

But the main issue I have with Qelong is the amount of content. For a hexcrawl (which I assume is meant to be the default use) there is just too little material there. The area is 24×18 hexes, yet there are only ten locations in total. Seven of which are already clearly marked on the player map handout. So not really anything to discover beyond the next hill unless the GM creates it. On the other hand, for a fishtank the factions are all much too one dimensional. It’s not really more than you would find in an old D&D module from the 80s. And what makes the whole thing somewhat annoying is that the content that is actually there could have been fully explained in a lot less space. You get a full page of text that doesn’t really give you any more information than “One 8th level dwarf with ten gnome slaves and a mechanical elephant mining for gems”. You still have to make a map yourself and have to come up with your own ideas for how interactions with the NPC could play out. So I have to wonder, who is this book for? The crunch is too little to be usable out of the box like a D&D module, and the fluff is too light to get stories going. Either way, you’re going to have a lot of work ahead of you to run a Qelong campaign. You can use it as a starting point for your own creative work, but the material that is already present doesn’t really seem that imaginative to me.

Pretty much all the reviews that I had read have greatly praised it as a wonderful Asian fantasy sandbox with great spooky and weird elements, but I am personally not seeing any of that. The Asian elements really only go as far as a few names and terms, with no real references to Southeast Asian cultures. Which I don’t have a problem with. Taking inspirations from other cultures is great, and there is no harm done unless you have an outsider who understands very little of a culture attempting to educate others about its traditions and social meanings. Which Hite really doesn’t do at any point in this book. Nothing objectionable about that. And it’s great when you see a western author create fantasy that isn’t set in faux medieval England. But there also isn’t any ground to praise Qelong for it’s presentation of an Asian fantay setting. It’s a generic fantasy setting with monsoon, lotus, and stupas. I am also not finding anything spooky or weird about it. When it comes to spooky content, Dungeon magazine adventures regularly went a lot further. Now the garuda-lich is a cool idea, I admit that. But the myrmidons, the naga-kin, and the lotus monks are all very much standard fare.

Now is Qelong a bad book? No, I would not say that. It’s reasonably well done and at $7 it’s also reasonably priced. But I am not a fan of it in any way, and neither do I think this is something others should check out. So when it comes to chosing yay or nay, it does come down to nay.

The Fishtank Sandbox

Sandbox campaigns are always and endlessly fascinating subject when it comes to roleplaying games. They are widely regarded as the type of campaigns that uses the unique abilities and potentials of the RPG to the fullest. No matter how well designed, written, and scripted a videogame is, having a gamemaster who can take direct input from the players and completely reshape the game world in response in a matter of seconds is somethings computers can not even approach to replicate. You can have very fun and entertaining adventures following a general chain of events and visiting locations according to a script, but to many this has a somewhat unsatisfying taste of wasted potential.

A sandbox campaign is the ultimate form of interactivity. The players can attempt any action they can think of and change any aspect in the world as long as the GM deems their attempts a success. You will never see the notification “you can not use this here”. The only way to really push the boundaries of a sandbox is to travel off the edges of the map. But even that could be fixed by giving the GM a few week to create more map. (Your GM will hate you for this, though. Have a heart and don’t do this.)

One challenge when talking about sandbox campaigns is the unclear terminology. There’s no kind of even informal authority among OSR gamemasters and designers. It’s true anarchy where terms become accepted because the majority uses them in the same way. But even then, you usually won’t find any clear definition. And to make things worse, people are using terms in the way they think they should be used, even if they are in a minority. Very often sandbox is used seemingly synonymous with hexcrawls. And after having been interested in this wider subject for years, I am only now starting to get an idea what hexcrawling actually means to the people who actually run succesful hexcrawl campaigns. (Those who complain that their hexcrawls sucked are usually told that they had a wrong impression of the concept.)

A week back I had started a thread about sandboxes at rpg.net, and wanting to make it clear that I wasn’t interested about either hexcrawls, domain building, or diplomacy sandboxes, I came up with the description of “dynamic sandbox”. One of the early replies was from someone who immediately got what I was getting at, who also mentioned that in Sweden they call them the equivalent of “fishtank”.

And I think fishtank is a brilliant term that really should get widespread use in our English RPG terminology as well. It just hits the nail square on the head. A fishtank is a kind of sandbox campaign (that is: no script, players set their goals), but one that is focused on and build around various factions and important people. The big fishes and the little fishes. And these are all swimming around in the fishtank, doing whatever fish business they have. The players are introduced into this environment – usually as the smallest of fishes – and mingle with the various other big and small fishes that already inhabit it. It’s the relationships between these important parties and players that the campaign is really about.

A fishtank campaign can have a hex map. Just like a hexcrawl or a domain building campaign. But it can also just as well be run using a point map, or a city street map. Since my Old World setting is a wilderness setting and I am more of a Sword & Sorcery than a survival or expedition guy, my personal choice is a point map that lets me easily track travel times with just a few lines and squares and without the need to create a sophisticated geography. (I think I’ll have to do a full post about this later this week.)

I’ve never seen the term fishtank used for this type of campaign, but I think it’s almost self-explaining to people who know the basic idea of sandboxes. It’s a sandbox of various actors doing their various things and fighting out their conflicts, and the players are joining them. As this is just the kind of sandbox campaign I have always been envisoning since I became familar with the concept, I am really hoping that it might gain a widespread acceptance. And maybe help more people become aware that a sandbox does not have to be a (poorly run) hexcrawl. I will certainly be using it to describe my campaign in the future.

Looking a bit around, I found the term fishtank referenced before in two posts at Gnome Stew. By a Finish author. Figures.