Tag: OSR

Setting Modules

In a discussion about The Maze of the Blue Medusa, one person mentioned that despite many highly positive reviews for OSR “settings”, there seem to be barely any people who say that they actually ran a game in Red Tide, the Red and Pleasant Land, Qelong, or Yoon-Suin. Despite the praise and the money people pay for it, they seem to be barely getting used by anyone.

Which wouldn’t really be that surprising as the people who enjoy this kind of content tend to be people who also create a lot of their own custom content for the campaigns they run. The main draw seems to me, and probably many others, to salvage these books for ideas. I regularly buy books for games I don’t have or know the rules for, or ever have any intention to play. It’s always all idea mining for me with everything I get for RPGs. I don’t think I ever used anything out of the box since my earliest hears with D&D 3rd edition.

And I believe many of the people who make OSR settings are very much aware of that. Vornheim and Yoon-Suin can’t really be considered settings in the traditional sense and are really all about being toolboxes for creating your own content. My impression of Red Tide is that the setting of the islands and the backstory of the setting is really mostly a practical example for how a world using the tools in the book could look like.

My previous Ancient Lands setting was very traditionally designed like the many settings of the late 80s and the 90s, but when I started all over with a blank canvas to do the Old World I abandoned that approach pretty much entirely. It’s not practical for running my own games and I doubt there would be more than two or three GMs in the world who would actually run a campaign if I would get it into a releasable form.

I recently looked into One Page Dungeon after talking somewhere about my frustration with typical D&D settings being so vague on adventure locations to be practically useless. As all dungeons are made independently by completely different people and the only format restriction is that it has to fit on a single page, people have been trying out a lot of different things with that idea. And I think this could be a really good approach for small scale campaign setting writers in the coming years. Completely abandoning the idea that a setting is a single world and instead providing collections of thematically matching but mostly stand alone pieces of content.

Retainers as local guides

Today I was watching Matt Coleville’s latest video (even as a GM of 15 years I still find them really helpful) and he mentioned that he prefers to answer any questions the players have about the world through NPCs. In fact, he finds it annoying when the players end up in situations where they have a lot of questions but he didn’t arrange for any cooperative NPCs to be around to ask. As a GM running a game, you really are the only channel through which the players can perceive and experience the world around their characters. Trying to trick the players into making mistakes based on false assumption is both trivial and cheap. There is nothing clever about it since the players can only know anything based on what you tell them and how to tell them.

Even when you have no intention to trick the players that can still be a problem. Unless the group is particularly screwed up, most players will always take their GMs by their word. Otherwise you can’t really effectively play. But very often you want the players to doubt what seems true and speculate about what’s really going on. That’s a major part of giving the players agency, which I consider the primary goal of anything a GM does. But it’s often not easy to clearly distinguish between what the characters actually see, what the characters know about their world, what the players have heard about the world, and what the GM declares to be factually true about the world. And having the questions of the players answered by an NPC is indeed a really wonderful method to clearly distinguish between what the characters have heard and what the GM is explaining to the players. Even when it’s something that is common knowledge in the setting and should be known to the PCs, having an NPC deliver an answer might often be preferable to telling the players what their characters already know. It establishes that whatever answer you give them comes from an in-universe source whose reliability the players have to judge for themselves. Very neat little trick, I think.

But always having a GM controlled sage around to interrupt the players when you think they are making errors would be a terrible idea. There are no such things as DMPCs. It’s a terrible practice that greatly interferes with the players’ agency. Because as I said, the GM is implicitly trusted unconditionally and when you have a guy following their characters everywhere and mention helpful things to them or provide assistance, it sends the clear message that you think the players are playing the adventure wrong.

But the last two weeks or so I have been rethinking my position about retainers. Named NPCs with some kind of personality who are servants of a specific player character and accompany the party on adventures and gain experience (As opposed to faceless mercenaries and laborers.) Who actually controls these NPCs has always been left largely open to interpretation. I personally think that they should be controlled in combat by the player who brought them in the first place, since the GM is already controlling enough combatants who are working against the PCs. They are also great in situations where it becomes narratively practical to split the party and one or two PCs would be gone for a good while. The players could either play a retainer for the while or perhaps a retainer could take care of the errand off screen.

But at other times it might be more practical when the GM plays a retainer so they don’t simply become a second PC for the player. And any time the players have a question about the world would be a perfect situation for this. What do the inscriptions in the Cave of Caerbannog say? Brother Maynard might know. Is there a way to disable the tractor beam? Ask R2-D2. Not only are retainers great to explain things the characters should already know, they can also provide helpful information on things the PCs would be very unlikely to know. I find that a much more elegant solution than making an Intelligence check or putting points into a Knowledge skill. It also provides a good reason why players would want to take an NPC they meet as a retainer and why the party should attempt to get a diverse team with various different backgrounds that don’t directly translate to additional firepower. The five Skullcrusher Brothers and Reverend Healbot don’t really add anything to the game that some magic items couldn’t do as well.

The Specialist class in the Old World

Probably the biggest oddity of the Lamentations of the Flame Princess system that makes it stand apart from any other versions of the Basic/Expert rules of D&D is the specialist class. It takes the position of the traditional thief class but attempts to be a lot more than this narrow character archetype. LotFP really only uses the rules of D&D but does not attempt to retain its style. In fact, it very much gets away from that to be a more generic system. (Which is part of what attracts me to it.)

The specialist is an attempt at greater versatility. You can easily make your specialist a thief, but you don’t have to. By focusing on other abilities you can also use the class to represent a range of characters who would not outright be considered combatants. Which I find very interesting as a possible character concept in a 16th or 17th century campaign that is more about being smart than fighting battles.

But in a setting like the Old World? This setting is very much Sword & Sorcery with a more hopeful outlook. And Sword & Sorcery is all about… well, swords and sorcery. What’s a noncombatant character to do in such a campaign?

One of the nice things about LotFP is that every character can pick up any weapon and put on any armor and use them. A specialist who is dressed in armor and has a spear or bow in hand fights just as well as any nonheroic warrior. Better actually, with a +1 bonus to attack rolls. And as the character gains more levels, hit points and saving throws keep improving, so even without the bonus to attack that fighters (and scouts) get, you’re still not completely useless in a fight. Quite far from that, actually. As a specialist you won’t be the big ass dragon slayer your fighter friends are, but you’re not limited to stand in a corner and wait until the fight is over. In the LotFP system, clerics, dwarves, nd halflings (which are not classes in the Old World) all fight only just that good as well.

But when does a specialist actually do shine in this setting? When is a specialist better than any other characters in the party? I spend a good amount of time thinking about characters from fiction with dynamics similar to what I have in mind who would make good examples for the specialist class. There weren’t a lot but the two main examples I found are Leia from Star Wars and Naomi Hunter from Metal Gear Solid. And no, it’s not a coincidence: Almost all specialist type characters from pulp-style fiction I could think of are women. That’s how competent female characters in the 30s worked and how it was retained by works that aimed to capture the style. Which is not really a bad thing for a single character. It’s only unfortunate when you end up with all the men as warriors and all the women as clever manipulators. Some sharing between the two is all I want to see. But I think it’s actually a very interesting and fun character archetype.

One thing that almost all these characters have in common is that they are smart and good at talking, which is generally their primary special power. OSR type games usually don’t address that. And I am mostly very much in agreement with that. When you have a group of people together verbally discussing and describing the actions of their characters, then it becomes necessary to rely on abstract game mechanics to represent combat actions, but it makes little sense to do the same thing when their characters are talking. You’re already talking so just say what your character is saying. However, the side effect of this approach is that it really comes down entirely to the players how a conversation with an NPC turns out with the players’ characters making no difference. Having some kind of Persuasion skill for the specialist class would be nice, but it should also be in a way that does not negate the need and purpose of talking with NPCs.

A potential solution to this mismatch of goals is the Angry GM’s advice to not let the players roll any dice when the result won’t make a difference. Say the players talk to a chief and make an offer of alliance which the chief likes. Why roll dice if the players can convince him, he already wants to agree! Or the players make an offer that goes completely against the goals of an NPC. Again,it would be nonsensical to have a player mae a dice roll with a chance of only 2% to succeed. Instead a die roll should be made in situations when the GM just doesn’t know what should happen. Say the players make an offer or demand that the NPC doesn’t really care for but also isn’t fundamentally opposed to. That’s a good situation to call for a roll. For regular characters, the odds to make such a roll is only 1 on a d6, which will mean mostly failures. 1 in 6 is really quite bad so it really makes sense to only have the players roll on these things when you think it probably won’t work but they might get lucky. But specialists have the unique feature of being able to improve the odds of any such skill by one every level and become really good at it.

One benefit of such an approach to specialist skills is that players don’t get to say “I make a Persuasion roll”. In any situation the players first have to talk with the NPCs and at the end the GM decides, based on how the conversation went, whether the NPC has been won over or refuses, or if he wants a player to make a roll for Persuasion.

This is also the same way I approach the Stealth skill. Any character can attempt to be sneaky and for as long as they don’t get close to any guards or stay out of sight this will usually work, no roll required. Sneaking up on a guard in a lit empty corridor while he’s looking in the character’s direction is impossible. But occasionally you might have a player who wants to sneak right up to a guard while there is no loud noises nearby and it would be a minor miracle to pull off. That’s when a role is made. For a fighter with only a 1 in 6 chance this is grasping at straws, but there are many situations where this has to be good enough. But a specialist with a chance of 5 in 6 this might actually be a decent chance to take even without great pressure.

However, I think for my own campaign I am going to remove the option to bring a skill to a chance of 6 in 6, which means that on a 6 a second d6 is rolled and only a second 6 means failure. That’s a chance of failure of only about 3%, which really is too close to being negligible for me. Getting people who are on the fence to come around 80% of the time is already really damn good. You don’t need to be able to impove it to 97%.

War Cry of the Flame Princess: The Scout

I retroactively added this post to the WCotFP series.

Earlier this year many people have been writing about the cleric class being an oddity unique to Dungeons & Dragons that doesn’t really fit in most other fantasy settings and seems rather inappropriate. Priests in other fictional worlds never really look and behave like that, and especially in the early edition a great amount of spells are taken from biblical miracles. There seems to be some move to not use the cleric class and instead represent priests and shamans through alternate spell lists for the magic-user class. I am fully behind that.

That leaves you with the now very well established scheme of warrior, mage, and rogue, which you’ll find almost everywhere in fantasy gaming. And I have to say, I also don’t like rogues.

han-lando
Scoundrels on the other hand are a completely different story.

The thief class for D&D was a later addition that didn’t exist yet in the first release of the game but was added very soon after. And in hindsight this move made many people angry and was seen as a move in the wrong direction. But the effect that the introduction of the thief meant that fighters and mages no longer had any reason to try to deal with traps or scout ahead because now there was someone who was always much better at it then them is not my main problem with the archetype. The original thief class had a clear identity but soon people wanted the thief to be good at fighting as well which lead us to the current form of the rogue. And rogues don’t really know what they want to be. The thief aspect has largely vanished and instead we have a fast fighter with light armor, who does huge damage with special attacks, or could be an archer. That takes away almost everything the fighter had left except for heavy armor. In a campaign with knights that’s not necesaarily a problem, but when you play in a setting that doesn’t have heavy armor or huge weapons, what is left? This was one of the reasons that made me pick Lamentations of the Flame Princess as my current system of choice, as its specialist class is meant to be neither great at fighting, nor required to be a thief.

But still, I am not fully happy with that. For my Old World that is full of barbarian warriors and made for adventures mostly set in the wilderness, the specialist seems a bit too flimsy to represent a hardened adventurer and the fighter too simple to represent the more skilled and sneaky hunters. On Dragons Gonna Drag, Justin presented the idea of merging the fighter and specialist classes together. But I really like classes and am already down to only three of them, so my idea is to do something similar but opposite.

drow_xendrik

One of the greatest idea I’ve seen for the warrior, mage, rogue archetypes is in Star Wars Saga Edition which has the soldier, scout, scoundrel, and noble classes as a spectrum of different approaches to fighting character and skilled characters. Neither the scoundrel nor the noble are exactly thieves, and the scout is something different than just a fighter/thief. And so I decided to come up with some kind of scout class that represents a more sneaky kind of warrior than the fighter.

One idea I’e seen a while back is that the halfling class would make a pretty good base for a Basic ranger. And while looking around for some more ideas I discovered that this is pretty much exactly what Adventurer Conqueror King did with the explorer class. It’s pretty much the B/X halfling with a different name. That’s also what I ended up doing.

Level Hit Points Attack Bushcraft Stealth
1st 6 +1 3 in 6 2 in 6
2nd +1d6 +1 3 in 6 2 in 6
3rd +1d6 +2 3 in 6 2 in 6
4th +1d6 +2 4 in 6 3 in 6
5th +1d6 +3 4 in 6 3 in 6
6th +1d6 +3 4 in 6 3 in 6
7th +1d6 +4 5 in 6 4 in 6
8th +1d6 +4 5 in 6 4 in 6
9th +1d6 +5 5 in 6 4 in 6
10th+ +2/level +5 6 in 6 5 in 6

Creating a scout class for LotFP turned out to be pretty quick and painless. The basic frame is once again the halfling class with the addition of an attack bonus half that of the fighter (other classes im LotFP always remain at +1) and the saving throws taken from the dwarf class (which covers a wider range of levels) and reduced by 2. Since it’s a scout class, the Bushcraft skill of the halfling is retained, but it also gains the Stealth skill with a chance of 1 lower than Bushcraft and not the flat 5 in 6 chance in wilderness environments that halflings have. A scout also can make a sneak attack for double damage with no option to increase like a specialist does.

And there you pretty much have it. I am considering giving also a 2 in 6 chance for Search and Climb, as it would fit the theme, but right now I am somewhat uncertain whether that might be a bit too much. Compared to the fighter the higher saves should even out with the lower hit points, which leaves all the skills compensated only by the reduced bonus to attack. But overall I am very happy with the class and it really took only about an hour to make, including research.

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.

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.