gamemastering

Ideas on using Notice in Worlds Without Number

One of the additions that Worlds Without Number adds to the common oldschool structure is skills. The system for skills is not bad. Basic skill checks are 2d6 plus the appropriate attribute modifier, plus the character’s level in the respective skill for the task. Skill level can be as high as 4 at 9th level, but with the way the cost for each skill level increases each time, I don’t think you’re going to see that often, except maybe for skills like Stab or Magic, which are not usually used as skill checks but rather as modifiers to attack rolls or how much magic a Mage can use per day. I think +2 and the the occasional +3 added to attribute checks is the most that will be commonly encountered in the wild.

However, one of the skills is Notice, which is something that is usually considered one of the big things that make newer D&D editions unsuitable for classic dungeon crawling, which in the defense of Worlds Without Number, it never claims to do. The GM tells the players the things in a room that are immediately obvious, and then it’s up to the players to ask the right questions to find the things that are not immediately obvious. “You can not roll dice to avoid playing the game.”

Worlds Without Number does not specify when Notice checks are supposed to be made, but after some pondering, I’ve decided that there’s still ways to both make the skill work and also make it worthwhile to put points into for players. One approach is to make the target number of a Notice check to “notice something unusual” very high. I would consider a character with a +2 Wisdom modifier and a +3 skill bonus to be highly specialized, and quite likely the highest total modifier that players might actually be able to field in play. Maybe a total of +6, but that’s probably really it. With a +5 bonus, a character would have a 28% chance to make a difficulty 14 check. A character with a more modest +3 would only have a chance of 8%. That doesn’t seem too bad.

But to still make players work for their progress, I’d add the following rules to making a Notice check to find hidden things: Since searching an area is a group activity, I’d only allow a single check for the whole group, with the highest modifier of any characters in the party. They don’t get four or five checks to maximize their chances of someone rolling a 12. Also, I am thinking that this method can only discover a single hidden thing. So the players better search the place as well as they can before they make that roll. You don’t want to waste it on something that you could have found yourself with two more minutes of thinking. Making a Notice check should be the the final gamble after the party has given up on finding anything else themselves.

Another way to use Notice checks is when it comes to surprise. Worlds Without Number only addresses surprise in regards to one character waiting in ambush to attack another character. In which case it’s a Notice check against a Sneak check. It doesn’t mention how you’d do that with groups of characters (if everyone rolls, it’s boils down to the defenders’ best Notice roll against the attackers’ lowest Sneak roll), and it also doesn’t go at all into the situation where wandering monsters just happen to stumble into the party entirely by accident.

The regular surprise system in B/X is rolling 1d6 for both sides, and on a 1 or 2, that side is surprised. (Both sides can be surprised, and neither side can be surprised.) This roll could instead by made by having both sides make a Notice check, rolled by the character with the highest modifier. Monsters and generic NPCs in Worlds Without Number usually have a +1 or +2 modifier in whatever skills they would likely to be good at. I think Notice checks to determine surprise should always fall under that. Players would easily have a +2 or possibly +3 advantage over the creatures they encounter, and since 2d6 give a normal distribution, that’s really quite big. But this can be addressed by tweaking the difficulty of the check.

In B/X, the chance to become surprised is 1/3rd, so the chance to detect the other group is 2/3rds. Since most monsters and guards in Worlds Without Number have a skill modifier of +1 or +2, setting the default difficulty to detect a group of adventurers exploring a room to 8 gets the closest to those 2/3rds odds. PCs will regularly have higher modifiers to that, since they also get to add their Wisdom modifiers to their check. But monsters prowling the dark tunnels of a dungeon are much less noisy, so to detect them, the difficulty should be a higher 10. And if you have really sneaky creatures prowling in the dark, that difficulty can increase to 12.

Now you might be wondering: “Why do this much more complicated approach to get basically the same result?” That is a good question, Timmy. If I’d design a game from scratch, I just wouldn’t bother with a Notice skill in the first place. And as GM, I totally have the option to just modify the rules and kick out Notice entirely. But each small change you make to the system comes with a cost when it comes to recruiting players when you’re not in the position to tell your existing group that this is what you’re going to play from now on. Getting players for a more obscure system (that is, everything that isn’t D&D 5th edition) is not quite trivial to begin with. Having a somewhat well known and highly regarded name like Worlds Without Number helps a lot in that regard, but when that’s your way to lure in players to your campaign, many of them will show up to play Worlds Without Number. And every change you make to the default rules slightly decreases the enthusiasm people will have to join your campaign. There’s already a good number of changes I am making to the system, like ditching a couple of foci, two of the magic traditions, and completely overhauling the High Magic spells. I’m ditching much of the weapons and armor lists and the whole equipment modification system. All of this adds up to make the game less of what people think of when you ask who wants to play in a new Worlds Without Number campaign. A change like this doesn’t really change anything on the player facing side of the game. They still can get their Notice skill and all the foci that give bonus skill levels to Notice, and they are still going to make plenty of Notice checks while they play the game. Even players who know the rules might not even notice (huh huh) that anything has been changed at all.

Re-associating exploration speed

Many rules in OD&D and B/X look very weird on paper, when you approach them as “new rules” that are added to what you consider a typical Dungeons & Dragons system. Giving XP for picking up treasure instead of fighting enemies is perhaps the most famous of them, but there are plenty others, like encumbrance, random encounters, or reaction rolls. But I think the purpose of all of these in a greater exploration system has become fairly well reestablished, and I believe I’ve written quite a bit about all of that already.

But one of the things that to me still stands out among these is the unexpected way in which movement outside of combat is handled. In Basic/Expert, the default movement rate for characters exploring a dungeon is 120 feet per 10 minutes. That’s 12 feet per minute, or about one step every 8 seconds. The rules explain that this doesn’t actually mean characters are moving that slowly. What happens is that the characters are carefully searching their environment and drawing reasonably precise maps. Dungeon has become a fairly generic term for any complex of passages, but I think the original idea of what a dungeon is like was less strolling through a castle and more exploring a cave. While very few dungeons are actually natural caves and most have long been used as regular passages by humanoid inhabitants, cave explorers often only manage to progress 300 to 500 meters per day, or say 1,200 feet. If they are at it for 10 hours per day, that’s 120 feet per hour. Even if the PCs are heavily encumbered and have their speed reduced to a quarter, that’s still faster than cave explorers. So maybe not actually a ridiculously low speed.

But where things start feeling strange is when encumbrance comes into the picture. In B/X, encumbrance reduces your encounter speed from 40 feet per round to 30, 20, and eventually 10 feet. And the same modification is also applied to exploration speed. When you take, on average, one step forward every 8 second, you spend almost the entire time of exploration not actually moving forward at all. Heavy loads slowing your movement to half or even a quarter is somewhat believable (maybe the characters are literally dragging heavy bags of loot behind them). But that also reducing the speed at which you can look and poke at things the same way is a cognitive disconnect. It’s a dissociated mechanic. A party with more heavy gear making slower progress makes sense, but representing this through reduced movement speed doesn’t feel very plausible.

However, B/X already has a small, seemingly mostly forgotten rule, that can be adapted for the purpose. Part of the rules for exploration movement is that after every 5 turns of exploration, the party must rest for 1 turn or the characters suffer a -1 penalty to hit and damage from exhaustion. Of the eight retroclones I have, only one carried over this rule. It just seems pretty pointless when you can assume characters are already getting sufficient rest for their legs during the regular exploration turn. And maybe people are right to throw this one out, but I think it’s a great place to apply penalties for encumbrance during exploration instead of reducing speed.

Instead of reducing the movement rate during an exploration turn to 90 or 60 feet, you can instead increase the rate for required rest to resting for one turn after every 3 turns or every 1 turn of exploration. This seems like a huge decrease of time actually spend on making progress, but because of how the math works out, this system actually makes parties progress somewhat faster than under the default rules. Which is fine with me. Numbers in D&D have never been an exact science anyway and are always simplified approximation. Being 10% faster than by the book isn’t going to break anything. But I feel that this change makes it much easier for players to intuitively grasp why their characters are making slower progress with heavy loads and don’t have to accept it as something that just is because the rules say so.

Return of the Mapper for online games?

Have you heard the good message of our savior Gus L? I learned entirely by accident that he didn’t stop writing RPG stuff but instead has been sharing new stuff on his new site All Dead Generations for the past three years. All the stuff on the site is about what he calls Classic Dungeon Crawling, which is basically OD&D and early Basic D&D, and how that style of Dungeon Crawling is an exploration fantasy game and not a combat fantasy game. A fantastic resource that I recommend to everyone, though it comes in hefty chunks that take quite a while to chew on.

After my overall pretty great D&D 5th edition campaign last year, I was throwing the towel on trying to make dungeons work, because I just could not figure out how to make a dungeon an interesting place that is not simply a warehouse for nonsensical puzzles. All the advice I was coming across on that front was “Well, sometimes funhouse dungeons can be fun.”But now, after 20 years as a GM, I finally get dungeons!

Dungeon Crawling and exploration in general isn’t just an aspect of an RPG, it’s even more a system of multiple mechanics than I previously had realized. Treating the whole dungeon as one big puzzle that will reveal the safest ways to the best treasures when figured is a great focus draw players engagement with the campaign. Especially when there’s no plot and characters don’t get shiny new toys every time they level up.

Part of solving that puzzle often is to fully grasp the layout of the dungeon and gain the ability to pinpoint the likely locations of possible shortcuts or otherwise completely inaccessible areas. Gus mentions that having players draw the map themselves is particularly bothersome in online games, where the GM can’t peak at a player’s pencil drawn map to spot obvious misunderstandings of his descriptions. (Minor errors in dimensions are desirable though.) But I took a quick look at Roll20 and found that at least in this case, this thing is actually very easy to do.

Roll20 has the paintbrush tool, which also has a shapes tool that draws rectangles by simply clicking and dragging. As a lifelong diehard user of pencils and grid paper, I think this is actually a lot easier and quicker than drawing lines around squares with a pencil. To correct errors, you can just click on one of these shapes and delete it, without any messing around with erasers. Now I’m definitely going to bring back this aspect of the game in my Great River Campaign. At least giving it a trial run. I’ve been told that there isn’t a function like this in Fantasy Grounds, but I’ve never used that myself. Which seems like a shame, since this is something really simple and basic. Though I guess when you do your mapping like this, you might not be bothering with something as fancy as Fantasy Grounds.

A take on Reaction Rolls and the Charisma modifier anomaly

The Basic/Expert rules are the system that keeps on giving. At only 121 pages (of which 43 are monster and treasure descriptions), they would make a pretty thin rulebook and still I keep coming back to them to reread various sections over and over. I’ve seen people considering the ambiguities and unfinished nature of some rules to be a virtue many times, but I don’t consider it good design or even intentional. I’m quite certain that Moldvay and Cook mostly had specific rulings in mind but were not aware that they didn’t sufficiently communicate them in a clear way, and possibly in some cases simply copied things that Gygax had written before without really understanding how it’s supposed to work either. I’m usually not too hard on this, giving them some leeway considering that they had no real reference for what they were doing and making things up as they went. And with rules that into only 78 pages, filling in the gaps is not that much amount of work.

One section I was going over again recently are the mechanics for Reaction Rolls. The reaction roll is used to determine how randomly encountered creatures react to the party, if their behavior isn’t already obvious given their nature and circumstances of their encounter. Creatures like zombies always attack everything they encounter. Goblins always attack when they encounter dwarves. And if you have the party trying to sneak into a guarded enemy stronghold and they run into a guard patrol, the attitude of the guards is also obvious. The Reaction Roll is for situations in which the reaction of the creatures could be anything. But there’s still a lot of ambiguity left. What are you supposed to do with “Uncertain, monster confused”, which is the most likely of all reactions? How is it different from “No attack, monster leaves or considers offers”? The reaction roll is also modified by a character’s Charisma score. But whose charisma score? And if the Charisma score is 13 or higher, the result of “Immediate attack” is impossible to happen. So after pondering the issues over several days, I came up with the following procedure. I believe it mostly just fills in some blanks without really changing anything that is printed on the pages.

Beginning an Encounter

An encounter can start in two ways: The party enters an area in which monsters are already present, or the GM made a roll for Wandering Monsters for that turn. In the order of events for every turn (10 minutes of dungeon exploration) the first step is rolling for wandering monsters. The second step is “moving, entering rooms, listening at doors, and searching the environment”. Dealing with monsters comes as the third step. I think this order is significant because it can mean that wandering monsters can stumble into a room while the party is in the process of searching it. The random encounter is something that happens within the turn, not between turns.

Surprise

If the party and monsters encounter each other, the next steps are determining the distance at which they can become aware of each other, and rolling for surprise. These two steps happen basically at the same time and it doesn’t appear to matter which of the two rolls you make first. But I think it’s actually more convenient to roll surprise first and determine the distance after.

To roll for surprise, both the party and the monsters roll a d6. By default, a 1 or 2 means that they are surprised, while a 3 to 6 means that they are not. Two d6s allow for 36 possible results that cover four different outcomes.

Odds	Outcome
4 in 36	Both sides are surprised.
8 in 36	Party is surprised, monsters are not.
8 in 36	Monsters are surprised, party is not.
16 in 36	Neither side is surprised.

Some monsters have a special ability that makes the party getting surprised by them on a roll of 1 to 3 or even 1 to 4, which significantly changes the odds to get the jump on the party in their favor. (A monster ability that modifies the party’s roll instead of their own roll isn’t very elegant, but it’s probably the least complicated way to get the desired result.)

The results of both sides being surprised and neither side being surprised are basically identical. However, I’ve seen a rule somewhere, and to my actual surprised it’s not in B/X, that in the case of both sides being surprised, the encounter distance should be half of what it would be in the other three outcomes. I really like it and so I’m mentioning it here anyway. This is also why I would make the roll for the encounter distance after the roll for surprise. Inside a dungeon, the distance is 2d6 x 10 feet, outdoors it’s 4d6 x 10 yards (or 4d6 x 30 feet, because we really don’t need two different units of measurement).

Something that surprised me coming from later editions is that the rules for surprise don’t really seem to take into account that one side or the other could by lying in ambush, or have time to quickly set one up. However, the Expert rules state that a group of three or more gains surprise outdoors they could be set up to have surrounded the other side. Maybe the idea is that even when you see a light at the next corner or hear footsteps approaching, there just isn’t enough time to set a proper ambush indoors. But I am a big fan of sneakiness myself, and I think it should absolutely be possible for players to avoid getting noticed by the wandering monsters, or quietly retreat from an area that has unaware monsters inside.

The rules as they are written only state that “those not surprised my move and attack the first round, and the surprised enemy may not”. I think the whole game becomes much more interesting if the side that has surprise can use its turn during that first round to back away without the surprised side becoming aware of them. Not only can it be a great opportunity for fun shenangians on the players’ side, it can also be interesting to have monsters stalking them in secret and wait for a good opportunity to strike.

Reaction

After surprise and distance have been determined, the sixth step is the Reaction Roll. As I mentioned earlier, the reaction roll is modified by Charisma. But whose Charisma actually? I long assumed that it would be the character who is walking at the head of the column or perhaps the party member with the highest Charisma, but that never really felt right since there is no indication either way.

The new idea I got recently, and which is the reason for this entire post, is that the reaction modifier for high or low Charisma only applies if a PC has the opportunity to talk to the monsters before a fight breaks out. If the monsters are surprised but the party is not, one of the PCs can hail the monsters and they make a reaction roll modified by the PC’s Charisma. If both or neither side are surprised and the party wins initiative for the first round of the encounter, the players also have an opportunity to hail the other group.

There is also the possibility that the monsters surprise the party or they win initiative, and their reaction is “Uncertain, monster confused”, which is the most likely result for an unmodified 2d6 roll. I’ve seen some retroclones rephrase this result as the monsters waiting to see what happens, which I think is a great interpretation. What you get is the monsters simply doing nothing for now. Then when it’s the party’s turn and the party is aware of the monsters, the players have another opportunity to hail them. At which point you could make a second reaction roll, but this time modified by the respective character’s Charisma.

And there’s actually something in the order of events for each exploration turn that supports that. Step six is making a reaction roll, but step seven, the resolution of the reaction, says “If both sides are willing to talk , the DM rolls for monster reactions and initiative, as necessary.” Making two reaction rolls is already written into the rules as they were printed. And I think it makes perfect sense to have a character’s Charisma modify a reaction roll only in those cases where that character is talking to the other groups. In situations where the monsters spot the party but the party is not aware of them, I think the reaction roll should be done without any modifiers at all. It’s of course also possible that the players might think of something so convincing that no reaction roll is necessary at all. If for example they encounter a group of guards and know the password to identify themselves as people who have permission to be in the place, then making a reaction roll can become moot. In the same way, if the party has surprised and decides to attack immediately and ask questions later, no reaction roll is necessary either. (Though a morale check might be.)

The Charisma Modifier Anomaly

Unlike in AD&D, the modifiers to various things based on the various ability scores are quite consistent in Basic. An 18 in Strength gives you a +3 bonus to melee attack rolls and melee damage, an 18 in Dexterity gives you a +3 bonus to ranged attack rolls and Armor Class, and an 18 in Constitution gives you a +3 bonus when rolling your hit points for each level. But Charisma stands out. An 18 in Charisma gives you only a +2 bonus to Reaction rolls instead of +3, and a 16 or 17 only a +1 bonus instead of +2. Some retroclones fix this by applying the same modifiers to all six ability scores, and I actually did this myself in the past. But I now think that this inconsistency is not an oversight but actually a deliberate choice.

The modifier in question is not a generic modifier to Charisma rolls, but specifically an “Adjustment to Reactions”. Reaction rolls are its only intended application (though this includes retainer hiring reactions for which the following calculations apply equally). The Reaction roll is 2d6, and the Reaction table lists results from 2 to 12. The “Immediate attack” result can only happen on a 2 (or lower, one presumes), and the “Enthusiastic friendship” result happens on a 12 (or higher). If you get a +1 bonus to the roll, a result of 2 becomes already impossible. You can’t go lower than 3 and get “Hostile, possible attack”. Which is one more argument why some Reaction rolls should be done without applying Charisma modifiers. But not only that, the 2d6 also give us a bell curve and shifting a bell curve sideways results in often very significant changes in the odds for any given value. When you get a +3 bonus to the Reaction roll, even the hostile result only has a probability of 3%. Pretty much anything would be somewhat friendly if you’d happen to have someone with 18 Charisma doing the talking for the group.

But I think the +3 bonus from an 18 is not even the main reason for why the modifiers are different for Charisma. The chance for any given Character to get a randomly rolled 18 on 3d6 is under 0.5%. In a group of four characters, that’s still below a 2% chance for any of the characters to have an 18, and that player might not even want to do all the talking with everything they run into. It’s an unlikely scenario. But the chance for any character to randomly roll a Charisma score of 16, 17, or 18 is almost 5%, and getting someone in a party of four with a 16 or better is 17%. And a bonus of +2 to Reaction rolls is still really big. At +2, you have a 17% chance for a friendly reaction and only an 8% for a hostile one. With a 42% chance for monsters to negotiate. That frankly doesn’t sound particularly fun to me. Having the odds for this scenario being only 2% for any given party of four instead of 17% seems a very sensible change to me, even if it breaks the beautiful symmetry of ability score modifiers.

You used to be an Adventurer like me?

This post somewhat continues on my thoughts from two months ago.

When Dungeons & Dragons appeared and became the last common ancestor of basically all RPGs today (I know, it didn’t appear ex nihilo in a complete vaccum), it wasn’t even called a Roleplaying Game. It was labeled on the box as a “Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames” and later “Fantasy Adventure Game”. The PCs went to the dungeon because it was there. They looted all the treasures in the dungeon because the treasure exists to be looted. The adventurer’s life of dungeon crawling started as a game mechanic. Some kind of plausible fictional reasoning for why people would engage in an activity with such an outrageous fatality rate for the sake of collecting piles of gold they didn’t actually have any use for was tacked on later. It also followed the footsteps of Greek heros and Arthurian knight. The adventurer makes sense within the world of the dungeon, but its existence becomes much more far fetched and implausible when it is migrated into a semi-ordinary world of towns and farms, inhabited by lords and peasants who are going by their everyday lives.

Seas of ink have been spilled on how the world of the Forgotten Realms makes no sense, in which low-level adventurers have to risk their lives to save villages from deadly monsters if the local tavern owner or herbalist could wipe them all out in a matter of minutes with their legendary magic swords and awesome arcane powers. And when Fantasyland with its D&D conventions reached Japan and found its way into shonen anime aimed at 10 to 16 year old boys, we eventually ended up with stories that specifically acknowledge that the internal logic of the world runs on game mechanics. That American D&D cartoon, that I’ve never seen, probably played a big part as well. (Portal Fantasy is cancer!)

What we ended up with are fantasy world where adventurer is a common profession, with many larger settlements having a local branch of the adventurer’s guild where people come to list contracts for adventuring work like killing the rats in their basement. These worlds make no sense. And no, I’m not talking just about some juvenile anime or bad fan fiction. It’s all the way up in the most prestigious, big budget, and mass audience works of contemporary fantasy.

I feel that to have a world in which people go into ancient ruins to face terrifying beasts and deadly traps, adventuring does not make sense as a career choice for regular people. To be in any way plausible, a setting for adventures of dungeon crawling, monster killing, and treasure looting needs two main elements (and a third lesser one):

First, ordinary people must not be able to fight back against “Real Monsters”. And this also includes professional soldiers. A king can not just send 30 of his best trained and armed men to deal with monsters threatening the realm. If that were the case, there would be no need for adventurers other than cutting costs by outsourcing the work to contractors. That hardly sounds heroic. When I am talking about real monsters, I mean stuff like a basilisk or a manticore. To my knowledge there are no famous tales of Sir Lancelot and the Wolves, or how young Perseus fought eight goblins. Those stories would not be worth telling either. Sure, a fantasy world can have fictional critters. I’ve made plenty of them myself. But those are mostly background flavor, not the stuff of heroic tales.

The second thing is that PCs can’t just be adventurers who thought fighting monsters would be an interesting career choice. This goes completely against the first point that I just established. PCs need to be Heroes, with a capital H. Extraordinary people who have been gifted with exceptional powers and abilities. The heroes of ancient myths are very often descendants of gods. And even in Athurian tales, you could argue that noble knights are a unique kind of people, different by birth from the ordinary folk and granted special status by god. This is something I’ve never seen mentioned in D&D outside of Birthright. Which I guess might very well be an American thing. But then, Superheroes are also one of the most American things ever, and they all have unique superhuman powers from birth, or incredible funds from a highly privileged upbringing. Now I am a very outspoken critic of Tolkien and seeing The Lord of Rings as a big apologetic manifesto for the racial superiority of the English aristocracy, so I can fully understand if people don’t like the idea of PCs being destined to be Heroes instead of earning their merit through hard work and dedication. But a special trait that makes rare individuals capable of becoming Heroes in ways that are completely out of reach of most people does not have to be tied to specific ancestral bloodlines. You can also have something like Star Wars, where being strong in the Force is a rare inborn trait that apparently can appear in everyone completely at random. But I think it’s important that player characters are not random people, and not everyone can become a Hero. If that were the case, nothing would stop the king’s 30 best trained men from becoming 8th level fighters and deal with all the monster problems in the realm themselves.

I believe that for a good background setting designed for campaigns that center around dungeon crawling and monster slaying, having a distinction between Heroes and normal people is important. And it can even be valuable to have that distinction be consciously understood by the people who inhabit the world, and make it part of their culture. I feel that the whole life of adventurers makes so much more sense and feels so much more believable in such a cultural context. It provides a reason for why the PCs gain access to the highest ranks of society that are usually barred to common folk, and why people put all their hopes into them. It’s a relatively easy way to make the setting shape itself to the game, rather than awkwardly trying to make the game fit a setting.

Earlier I mentioned a third worldbuilding element that helps making a world of treasure filled ruins much more plausible, which is one possible most people here would already have heard about long ago. It is the idea that the implied environments of early D&D were all post-apocalyptic settings. And it certainly helps. Why are there so many dungeons everywhere, often within a relatively short walk from the nearest settlements? Why are they loaded with huge hoards of treasures and magical items? And most importantly, if they are that easy to access, why haven’t they been plundered centuries ago? It all makes a lot of sense when you assume that there was a civilization much wealthier and with much more magic than there is today. And it also used to be that way until relatively recently.

There are so many magic items in abandoned ruins and old tombs because at the time, these were not nearly as rare as they are now. The minor king who was buried with his legendary sword and ring of incredible power did not take the greatest treasure of the realm into his grave. Those were only baubles with sentimental value to him, but sacrifices his successors could afford to make to honor his memory. And why do adventurers keep breaking into these tombs to loot all these magic treasures today? Because these tombs and forgotten stashes are the only places where you can find such items now. It’s less treasure hunting than salvaging. Not to say that all the magic items used to be minor junk in the days of Atlantis, but their presence in tombs and old castles makes a lot more sense if you assume that these items were not nearly as valuable as they are today. One reason for it being people being able to make more of them. The creation of new magic items being nearly impossible is a big factor in making the looting of old ruins worthwhile and the pillaging of grave goods more justified. If your average town alchemist or blacksmith can make minor magic items, this aspect starts coming apart at the seams. Wizards being required to be 9th level to start creating magic items might seem excessively high and seem a bit implausible. But when the goal is to make the creation of new magic items exceptionally rare and difficult, it does make a lot of sense.

It all also becomes more plausible the more recent you place the fall of the previous civilization, or at least the rise of the new one. Even low-level PCs can still find great treasure in relatively easily accessible dungeons because they are among the first people who have come to raid them since treasure hunting became the primary way to gain access to such riches and items. The people in the village may know about the old ruin up on the hill, but since the founding of the village the PCs are some of the first people who have shown up and might have a shot of surviving crossing the first threshold.

So yeah, my points. Insert witty conclusion here.

Mythic Fantasy and the Days of High Adventure

Among the many different branches of fantasy, one of the more obscure ones that is rarely seen in the wild is Mythic Fantasy. I believe it’s actually more a hypothetical idea than an actual concept anyone is working with in practice. I’ve seen it come up a few times in Fantasy-RPG books for gamemasters, as one of several suggested options for what different forms of styles a fantasy campaign could possibly take. The general idea seems to be fantasy that takes its main inspirations from Iron Age myths of the Greeks, Celts, and Germanic peoples, which tell tales of gods and superhuman heroes. And that’s usually about the full extend of detail for how this kind of fantasy would work. The only concrete suggestions I’ve seen is generally “I don’t know, I guess you use some medusas and minotaurs, or something”. But I say no, that’s not how you make a mythic fantasy campaign. That’s just reenacting Greek myths as an RPG. When we are talking about how we can give a fantasy RPGs like D&D different tones and flavors to make it more similar to other styles of fantastic stories, the goal is to put the default material into a new context. Stories of ancient myth are one thing, but I think when we use the term Mythic Fantasy, we should apply it to something else. Mythic is the adjective that describes that thing. Fantasy is the noun that is the thing.

I’ve been thinking about this these past few days, and I’ve come to a couple of conclusions to how you can create original fantasy material, in a newly envisioned world, and present it in a way that evokes a similar overall feel without just directly copying existing material.

The Monster

This is a big one, and I believe, the most critical of all the points I am going to make here. Modern fantasy in general, and fantasy RPGs in particular, seem to have lost touch with The Monster and forgotten it’s central role it plays in many of the oldest tales that survive to this day. Not all stories need monsters, just as not all fantasy needs to evoke the style of ancient myths. But we just don’t see The Monster anymore. RPGs in particular are full of “monsters”, but these tend to be swarms of critters that appear as the heroes come around the corner, and after a short action scene, are immediately forgotten one’s the turn around the next. Monsters are there to be fought, because fantasy is supposed to have monsters that are fought, but they generally don’t really have any impact on the greater story. The story plays out between human(oid) characters. And I believe this even mostly holds true in D&D, with its big tomes of high level monsters. Yes, you might occasionally have fought a beholder or aboleth. But how often was that creature the main villain of the adventure that the entire story revolved around? What interactions did the PCs have with that big monster before they opened a door and found themselves immediately attacked? These monsters may make big and memorable fights, but from what I’ve seen over the past decades now, they are almost always just window dressing for a story that would work just as well without any monsters in it at all.

This is very much not the case with the monsters of ancient myths. There may be both perception bias by me and survivor bias by the ravages of time, but most if not all of these tales are about one monster. Medusa, the Bull of Minos, the cyclops Polyphemus, Cerberus, Fenris, Grendel, Humbaba, Ravana. They all have a name. They all are known to the people living near them and greatly feared. They have a history. They are not just some random creatures that live by themselves deep in the wilderness, minding their own business. The heroes who fight these monsters are not simply showing of their strength and power, they are performing a great service for the community. Yet somehow, we don’t really see that in modern fantasy. I think having these unique great monsters, that are an active thread to society and that ordinary people can not deal with are a central element of what makes a story feel mythic and really need to be included when trying to make a world that feels like Mythic Fantasy.

The Courts of the High Kings

Mythic tales as a whole seem to have a much bigger focus on specifics than the general, compared to what is overwhelmingly seen in games. Take any setting book for a fantasy RPG and look at the description of cities. If there is any useful information at all, it tends to be general stuff about the overall feel and appearance of the city, for when a group of mercenary adventurers is coming through on their way to new adventures. Cities often are central to mythic stories as well, but usually they are not described at all. When mythic heroes come to a city, they really are coming to a king’s court. That’s really the only part of the city that matters. Perseus comes to Knossos, to meet with King Minos. The city of Knossos is irrelevant to the story. All that is important is the palace of king Minos. Beowulf travels to Heorot, the court of King Hrothgar. We would assume that the king’s hall is inside a small city or town, but it is of no importance of the story. The name of the king’s court is not.

As a broad generalization, mythic tales like to give specific names to all the important characters and places. Myths will often take care to mention the homes and lineages of even secondary characters. It is possible, and perhaps even likely, that the original audiences of these stories would have been able to glean a great amount of context from these pieces of information. The home and lineage of different characters could inform deeper meanings in the things these characters say or the things they do, that are now lost to us. But even so, I still think that we would recognize such thing as being characteristic of ancient myths. And this is something that shouldn’t be too difficult to emulate in a game. When introducing new characters that are to some degree relevant to the story, don’t just tell the players their names and outer appearance, but also have them be introduced as “the son of X, brother to the king of Y”. It does not have to actually mean anything, but it still creates an impression that these things would be greatly meaningful to the people within the world of the story. Present NPCs as important leaders and emissaries, and have other NPCs treat them and speak of them as people who have influence and power, or at very powerful and influential friends. The world of myths is in many ways a very small one, in which everyone knows everyone and everything is connected.

The heroes should be Heroes

In common usage, the term hero is often used to simply mean protagonist. Or simply any person who did something risky out of kindness. But that’s not the original meaning of the term. A mythical hero is a person who stands above all others and exist in a different category than everyone else. And furthermore, they perform great deeds that bring a significant and permanent benefit to society as a whole. Unsurprisingly, many ancient heroes are said to be demigods who are descended from divine beings. A hero almost has to be superhuman by definition. Heroes are the people who go down in history, and they don’t even have to be good guys.

If you want to have a game that feels like stories of myth, the protagonists have to be heroes. And in any kind of roleplaying game, the players have to play the protagonists. There are many awful examples of published adventures where this is not the case and the PCs are merely spectators watching the real heroes do cool stuff and save the day, which has been emulated by countless numbers of GMs. But that’s objectively bad gamemastering and adventure design. The medium of roleplaying games demands that the players play the protagonists of the story. The game is the story of the PCs. In mythic stories the protagonists have to be heroes, and in roleplaying games the PCs have to be the protagonists. This means that in a Mythic Fantasy campaign, the PCs have to be heroes. And what makes or makes not a hero are not their deeds, but the perception of their deeds. A hero is who the people regard as a hero.

One major aspect of realizing this in a game is in the way that NPCs talk to the PCs and behave towards them. Heroic PCs should be treated as being exceptional people who stand tall above the common men of women. Heroes mingle among the highest ranking people of society, and they will gain the personal attention of kings and queens when they arrive in a new city, who will treat them with the same honor and respect as foreign dignitaries. Even when the PCs are from simple backgrounds with no titles and few possessions to their name, their deeds elevate them to being part of the elite.

To make this really work and feel believable in an actual campaign, PCs need to exceed the prowess and skills of ordinary warriors pretty early in the campaign. Having PCs start at a higher level or with larger numbers of character points is one option. But I am personally much more in favor of instead having ordinary NPCs all be of the most basic type. The default soldier and brigand are usually good enough for all common soldiers and brigands throughout the entire campaign. When the PCs reach 5th level, there is no need to have them encounter ultra-elite soldiers and brigands. If they can just steamroll over any ordinary warriors they encounter then let them. They are heroes. They are supposed to be superhuman. Equally important is that this makes it more believable that the ordinary soldiers are not capable of dealing with the monsters that threaten their cities and people. In some fantasy setting, many adventure ideas are frequently shot down with the simple reason of “why doesn’t any of the powerful NPCs or the giant armies take care of the problem?”. The answer to that is simple. There are no powerful NPCs. There are no armies that could be wasted to die at the feet of an ancient horror.

Swords of Legend

As with monsters and NPCs, another way to make a game feel more mythic is to apply the same principle of specificity to magic items. In mythic tales, there are no +1 swords or mass produced amulets that are found in some random hole in the ground. Every magic item is unique. Often they have a name, and almost always they have a history. They don’t just lie around to be found by the first person who stumbles upon them. They are either pried from the dead hands of slain main antagonists who used them for their evil purposes, or given as gifts from influential people as rewards for outstanding deeds performed by the heroes. Or alternatively, the heroes go to on a quest to retrieve the items from their ancient resting place, overcoming many hardships and foes along the way.

But even with this in mind, that doesn’t mean that you can’t have any magic items that are discovered unexpectedly in forgotten ruins. A great example of this is early on the movie Conan the Barbarian. Conan has been released from slavery by his master and is being chased by wolves, and trying to climb to safety on top of some rocks, falls into the well hidden entrance of an ancient tomb where he discovers his new sword. Since the movie has barely any dialog, neither the scene nor the sword gets any mention later in the film. But as the story have it, it was supposed to be a highly special and remarkable sword, a relic from the great and powerful realm of Atlantis that has long faded into myth. And in that scene where Conan discovers it in the tomb, this really comes across. He does not just find a sword lying around. He discovers an opulent tomb, with an ancient warrior king in his armor, sitting on a great stone throne, covered in dust and spiderwebs, the sword in his skeletal hand.

We do not know the name of the sword, or the name of the king. And we do not know any of their stories. But the way in which the sword is found makes it clear that this is not just some random sword from the shelf, that you can sell to a village blacksmith in bundles of ten. This is a unique artifact with a great history, even though the tales have been forgotten. And it still might just be a sword +1.

Illustrations by Justin Sweet, showing scenes from various Kull stories by Robert Howard.