A Cow in the Attic

One way I enhance immersion is add a healthy dose of realism to the campaigns I run. In one infamous incident I went way way overboard.

Harnmaster is one of the view specialized RPGs I like. It is focused on running low fantasy campaign in a medieval setting namely Harn. The best part of Harnmaster is it's combat system. It is one of the few combat rulesets I seen that manages to pull the players into the game.

The trick is that it doesn't have hit points. Instead each successful hit deal so much injury. The injury act as a negative modifier to your subsequent attributes rolls (varying d6s) and skill rolls (percentile). If nothing else bad happens you will be reduced a shambling wreck barely able to lift your sword.

The really bad stuff happens with the individual blows. When you get hit the injury that you inflict caused the victim to make various saving throws against their attributes, unconsciousness, dismemberment, shock, and yes death are some of the possible results. The attributes rolls are effect negatively by your current injury levels so it is unlikely you will be dead before reaching the shambling wreck level.

The clunky part of this system is having to record each hit you take. Mainly because the healing rules involve treating individual wounds instead of getting a chunk of hit points back. Also you absolutely need the one page combat chart. Luckily it is a marvel of graphic design and snap to use. The armor system is detailed and something you don't setup on the fly. It involves adding up different values for a lot of hit locations. However this is all work before the start of play.

However despite the chunkiness of having to record each wound this the mechanic that really immerses the player into the game. The combination of knowing what type of damage that was inflicted (blunt, slashing, piercing, etc), the detailed listing of hit locations, and exact severity of was done to your character's poor body just pisses yes pisses off the player.

Again in actual play that marvel of a combat chart makes it quick to resolve actions. So the player quickly know that he just got slashed in the upper biceps. Or got a severe bruise in the upper chest that left him winded. The accumulated effect is that your enemy is out to get you and by god you are going to get him back.

Oh right the cow story

Well I ran two successful Harnmaster campaigns in college. When I returned home I thought I could interested my group back in Meadville. This was after we quit using Fantasy Hero 1st edition and before we started used GURPS. I was trying out multiple RPGs on everybody and rightfully so they were getting tired of it.

So relucently two of my oldest friend D and Boris the Bagger agreed to try Harnmaster.

A short background note here. Harn is mostly wilderness. Culivated regions are clustered into several small areas.

The players started in the Kingdom of Kaldor in the eastern part of Harn. The first part of the adventure went off relatively well. They had a few fights and like the previous campaigns the combat system really drew them in.

I don't remember the reason for this but it wound up they had go west to the Trobridge Inn. The Trobridge Inn is halfway on the Salt Route between Kaldor and the western realms of Harn. Several days into the wilderness. To be fair they did heed my warning about stocking up. However the price lists of Harn are just as brutally realistic as the combat and there was only so much they could buy.

During the journey to the Trobridge Inn, they got caught by bad weather (randomly rolled). The Salt Route became muddy and soon they were looking at a journey a lot longer then they planned.

One of the player had a decent tracking skill. So they decided to hunt before starving.

In one of the Harnlore magazines there is a niftly little hunting system. Basically you have a chance of finding a trail, the trail is rated in the number of hours old it was, you also rolled for what made the trail. Every four hours you rolled your tracking skill and success will reduce how old the trail was. When you hit zero you found what you were tracking.

Well it may be a niftly little game within a game but a combination of failed and medicore dice rolls meant this went way longer than it should have. For the next two days they followed this animal's trail exhausting their supply of food.

Finally they got the number down to zero and was able to track down what they were following.

A cow.

The two turned to each other and looked back to me. "Rob, this is absolutely the stupidiest game you ever ran. We are never going to play this again. You had us nearly dying to track down what! A cow!"

This incident had a powerful effect on my later style. I will explore this more deeply in a later post. But the short answer is that prior to this incident I was a realism junky, afterwards I started examining why I using realism and more importantly what my friends really wanted out of the game.

This change did not happen overnight, it took several years and one more infamous incident (this time at a boffer LARP) to ram the point in.

A tale of two 4th editions.

I like crunchy combat rules. I got started with Board and Counter wargames in the late 70s before playing the Holmes edition of D&D. I love rules heavy games like Star Fleet Battles and Battletech. Around 1987 I adopted as my main RPG one with the heaviest of rulesets, GURPS. Flash forward 20 years and I still play GURPS using the latest edition (4th). 

But a new 4th edition has arrived in the form of Dungeons & Dragon 4th edition. I got Dungeons & Dragons 3.0 when it hit the hobby like a storm in 1999. Like many others I wasn't looking forward to D&D 4th when it was announced. I would have given it a automatic pass. But when you are starting out in publishing you need to take any opportunity that comes your way. Since D&D is the most popular system I needed to learn it. So I bought the books. I found several things

• Fourth edition is not the Dungeon & Dragons Game system.
• It is High Fantasy 24/7
• It takes away the character customization found in 3.X
• Open Licensing is gone, gone, gone.
• Combat is one of the crunchiest I seen.
• Everything else reaches earlier than AD&D 1st and reflects the spirit of OD&D than any other modern edition.
• The DMG is the best since the 1st edition AD&D DMG
• The design of the combat system works and plays well.

A lot of these points are almost custom designed to cause fans (both causal and hard core) of older editions not to move on to the next edition. Wizards is placing a huge bet that they can attract an entirely new audience.

It is a good game. That's my short review. I am not going to stop using GURPS as my main fantasy RPG. While D&D combat is as crunchy as GURPS I like the gritty feel of the GURPS rules as well as the extensive options for customizing characters.

When the 3.0 edition came out I used it to run a pair of short campaign to learn the system and then returned to GURPS. Recently I started a D&D 4th edition campaign with the same goal.

The first two sessions used Keep on the Shadowfell and they didn't go so well. The whole thing felt like an exercise in pure wargaming. My good friend, Tim, said "Look Rob I want to learn 4th edition as much as you but next time just run it like you do your normal GURPS campaign. Don't use precanned stuff." A couple of weeks later I ran a games for a bunch of friends in Pittsburgh. Instead of using any published modules I used my Majestic Wilderlands and winged it. It went great. So did my subsequent sessions.

For a long time my normal mode of GMing has been to let my players wander about my campaign world doing whatever their characters want to do. I keep the game from being rudderless by immersing the characters into the game world. They have contacts, patrons, and friends that serve as hooks for various plots they can pursue. I keep a stack of NPCs, generic locales, and specific locales (sometimes includes published modules) by my side. Pulling out whatever I need when the players decide where they go.

One of the features D&D 4th was the ease of prep. I decide to really push it and just wing the whole thing straight out of the Monster Manual. Also this session used 9th level character instead of the 1st level characters of the previous tries.

And it worked great. The only issue is that I wished I had a stack of monster cards instead of flipping through the manual. My monster manual had numerous bookmarks sticking out of it by the session's end.

A lot of people complain about the rigid nature of the encounter system of 4th edition and parcel system of treasure. I found it a useful guide and didn't feel particulary bound by it. It helped me craft the type of encounter I wanted at any particular time.

This is important because my campaign isn't just a bunch of static locales. I try to protray a dynamic setting by having players encounter people about their daily business or just random stuff happening. Most of these are pretty mundane power wise. But a few are very dangerous and the encounter system help figured out how to use the monster to get the effect I was going for.

The game took place in the Forest of Dearthwood just outside of City-State. It is a huge forest covering several hundred square miles. It was once an elven kingdom but now is the home of a dozen or so nasty orc tribes. The players were searching for a lich named Darkon because they uncovered a plot that he was uniting the Orc Tribes. A very bad thing for City-State and the surrounding communties.

The adventure involved the characters tracking down Darkon's lair. They finally wound up in an old elven ruin where some of Darkon Minions were working. The dungeon was pretty basic consisting of an outdoor encounter outside of the entrance, a upper room, a upper store room, a lower chamber, and a long stairway down to the lower chamber, along with a secret passageway connecting the upper chamber to the lower.

If that seems redundant it because the stairways WAS sealed and WAS trapped. Darkon Minions cleared out the traps when they broke in. I do stuff like this from time to time to give a sense that the players are part of world with people and entities going about their businness outside of what the players are doing. Also all of the players were Eldarin so a despoiled Elven ruin made the situation a little more personal for them.

So there were wights in the upper chambers. A mix drawn from the several types presented in the Monster Manual. I always thought the level drain ability of the original was too nasty. The new version steal healing surges, and it is a very effective way of instilling fear into the players.

In the outdoor encounter that I ran previous to this, it was very obvious that 4th edition combat is a back and forth affair. The players will get beaten down, the clerics, paladins, and second winds start flying and hit points go back up. Sometime a perfect storm will happen and a player will go down before they are able to get any healing. However this doesn't last forever as all of this is moderated by the healing surges avalable. Once you run out for the day characters are very vulnerable.

Wights taking Healing Surges away was a morale breaker for these guys. They won the fight in the upper chamber. Found the secret passage, but when they found there were more enemies in the lower chamber. They retreated to the secret passage, sealed both ends and cast a ritual to return to a arcane circle in the Guild of Arcane Lore in City-State.

Which brings me to the hidden gem of 4th edition D&D. The ritual subsystem. This subsystem should looked over carefully by DMs as much of it has implications for how a campaign world works. For example there is a ritual that allows you to recall a chest to you from anywhere in the world. A smart party that is a member of a guild or has a well organized setup can use this to supply themselves even when they are several levels down into the dungeon. Phantom Steed, the teleport back to a arcane circle, and more all have stuble impact on the game world.

All of this can be used by any class fairly easy by taking one or more feats. It can be used as many times you need as long as you have a supply of components (rated in gp). Overall the ritual system is a win.

The combat system was fun to run and the standard, move, minor action regulated the actions quite nicely. The exception based power system works as well as it does in Magic the Gathering which is very good. However like the monster, I wished I had cards for a lot of this. Things would have been a lot quicker to look up.

However the packages of powers that make each class is what makes the game feel like High Fantasy 24/7. Previous editions of D&D weren't exactly paragons of realism but the oldest edition were so berefit of description that you could impose a specific feel by how you DMed. 3.X could generate a particular feel due to fact it allow extensive customization of characters.

I think a variant of 4th edition where there were warriors, priests, thieves, and mages combined with powers giving a gritty feel to the game would solve this problem for me.

The final word on D&D 4th edition, It not D&D but it is a fun game. If you like action and high fantasy, you won't go wrong with this edition. Otherwise stick with 3.X, or one of the older editions. Note that there are several retro-clones and you can get PDFs of the original material including the 1974 rules.

From the Attic: Maps from the Past

For you fans of hand drawn maps. I have a scan I did of one of the 17" by 22" maps I did during the late 80's and early 90's. This one of Central Flanass of the World of Greyhawk. It is drawn in Harn style. Unfortunately part of it got nailed by water at some point.

City Guards

Shamus Young talks about arresting PCs.

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1633

He makes some good points. My own solution was somewhat different.

I promote immersion. I find that when players have characters that are woven into the setting they are less apt to do things just because they can. They view the contacts, connections, and resources they have built up just as valuable as magic items and treasure.

I enhanced the immersion by running a campaign where the players played the City-Guard. One of the things they had to deal with was unruly adventuring parties that were significantly stronger then they were. They came up with a variety of solutions, mostly involving teamwork. I used these solutions in subsequent campaigns and the City Guard had a lot more respect after that.

If you are having trouble with an aspect of your campaign setting whether it is how wizards deal with each other, city guards, thieves, clerics, etc; I recommend running a theme campaign where the players play just one type of character and let them solve it for you.

It doesn't have to result in everyone playing the same class. I ran a thief campaign where one of the players insisted on playing a wizard. Because of that we came up how magic users are involved with the Thief guild.

Most of my fantasy campaigns are run using GURPS. Some of this will work with D&D 4th, 3.X.

For the City Guard campaign the players developed the idea of the knight killer crossbow. It is a high strength, high damage crossbow. Before each patrol they crank them up and engage a lock to keep the bow string from being triggered. If they get into a serious fight they release the lock, load the crossbow and fire them at their most dangerous foe. There is no time to crank them up again so they drop them and go in. Most patrols will have half their number equipped.

The result is a devastating volley particularly if their are 5 or more guards firing. The odds that one or two will he even the most skilled PC. The crossbow do so much damage that the result is a downed or dead character. Just threat of being hit by one of those bolts usually is enough to calm the most agitated of characters.

Because of the high maintenance, specialized design of these bows. PCs don't try carry them around. Some PCs will use a more manageable lower strength crossbow in the same way, but the knight killers remain used by the various guard units.

The other trick was the Guard stick. In each barrack or post there are sets of two thin dowel rods about a foot long. When a patrol goes out they take one of the pair. If the patrol needs help they will snap their rod causing the corresponding rod at the barrack to snap. Since the patrol walk a known route. The reserve follows the route until they find the original patrol unit.

If the situation escalates a system of rods allows the City-Guard in my campaign to summon the entire force to a situation within an hour. The barracks will snap their rod which summon the reserve from the main headquarter. There are rods used to signal a extreme situation where all the off duty as well as on duty guard will be called up.

This resulted from a situation in the City Guard campaign where a rouge adventuring party was able to escape because they were able to defeat individual patrols separately before runners could reach the barracks. The systems of linked rods allow the message of "Help in I am trouble send reinforcement" to be conveyed much quicker.

If the guard are going into a known situation, like a raid on a thieves nest. Then multiple rods will be issued to ensure that at least one will be broken if trouble arises.

Concerning wizards in the thief campaign, my groups had ran a game where the players were all mages. So we had a good idea of how wizardry worked in general in my setting and unfortunately what we established meant that the main culture of wizards would not be working with thieves in any capacity.

However we did established that there was a sub group of hedge wizards, and renegades hunted by the wizard's guild. So we decided that it was with these guys the thieves guild dealt with. The skills sought most often where healing potions, items or spells that buffed up the character, and fogging.

What is fogging? Well the big problem for most magic system and thieves is that there are divination spells. This problem exists in most RPGs to a greater or lesser degree. The basic issues that the wealthiest of individual have the resources to get a divination casted to tell them the identity of anybody who stole a high value object. It make take a long time or a short time but in most fantasy RPGs the identify of the thief will be eventually uncovered through magic.

Foggers are wizards, usually renegades, working with the thieves guild. They cast anti-divination spells so that high value objects may be stolen. Just like there is a hierarchy of thieves there is a hierarchy of foggers. The highest status goes to those foggers that can foil the divination of wizards hired by the King/Emperor/Overlord's court.

Bat in the Attic

My house was unusual in that our garage had a full attic. By high school it was used for little more than storage by my family. For me it was great as I could have a table with any game that needed to stay up for a long time. We played many long hours of Dungeons & Dragons.

It was a warm summer's night on Meadow Street and there was three of us playing D&D; D, H, and myself. We did not notice that another creature had entered the attic.

Suddenly the light from the overhanging bulb flickered as something flew past. Startled we jumped away from the table, "What was that?" H said. "It is a bat!" D said. The bat began to fly crazily around the light. As we frantically waved our hands and rulebooks to wave it off. "How are going to get rid of it!" I shouted.

As bat made another turn D reached down and picked up an old book. One of my Dad’s old thick business directories (they were hardcover back then). We stopped and looked at him in shock when he stepped into the path of the creature. Calmly D eyed the bat and readied the book in his hand. At the last possible moment he let the book fly.

The book sailed through the air and hit the bat straight on. The poor creature was knocked straight back when it hit the wall with its wings outstretched. Slowly it slid to the floor

The three of us rushed up to where the bat laid on the floor.

"I got it!" said D

H, looking at the bat, "You got it all-right, I think it is dead."

I knelt down and poked it with a ruler. The bat reacted with a gasp. "No it is alive!".

D looked at the bat, "Well we can't leave it here and I am not going to go near it."

Looking at the other two, H said "Well I not touching it."

I went to the attic door "We don't need to touch it! I got an idea." I rushed down the stairs to the garage itself where hanging on the walls were the snow shovels. I though their large flat blades will be perfect for the job.

Coming back up the stairs I showed them the shovel. "We will use this." My two friends backed away while I used the shovel to carefully scoop up the bat. All three of us went down the stairs to the garage and then outside into the driveway.

In the driveway H looked at the gasping bat "Now what?". D shrugged "It has trouble breathing I don't know blow on it?" We looked at each other and began blowing on the bat. The gasping stopped and the bat began to try to move around.

“It looks better." I said "I am going to toss it and help it get flying." The other two backed off, while I started lifting the shovel up and down. "1.. 2.. 3.." and then tossed the bat into the air. Almost immediately the bat began flying, first to the left, then to the right, down a little, and then forward right into one of the doors of the garage!

As the bat fell to the ground, H quipped "Well that was good."

We advanced on the bat and saw it was still alive. D looked around "Maybe if it had more room?".

"Let’s try it out in the street" I answered. Scooping up the bat in the snow shovel, I walked out into the street. "1.. 2.. 3.." and again I tossed the bat into the air. The bat went left, and then went right, down a little, and then forward and flew away up into the night.

We cheered and when we could no longer see the bat went back into garage, up into the attic and once again entered our world of goblins, dragons, and treasure.