The D20 Hairstick Returns

My wife, Kelly Anne, is working on another set of d20 hairsticks this is the first to be completed. Note this is also one of her special color changing hairstick. In sunlight the hairstick portion changes from beige to a deep purple.


Tipped in glimmering amethyst Swarovski crystal, the red purple speckled d20 die focal of the Dappled D20 Hairstick is clasped between a pair of sooty gunmetal Tierracast pewter scalloped caps above an ornate beadcap on the warm pearl birch wood stick encased in a special paint that becomes wine purple in sunlight under a protective polyurethane gloss. The more intense the sunlight, the brighter and more saturated in color this stick becomes.

The Dappled D20 Hairstick is 7 1/4" long, and it has a usable length of 5 15/16".

Now, get as many Aliarose hairsticks as you like and only pay $4.95 for Priority Mail in the US, $4.95 first class to Canada, and $5.95 for first class to any other destination on the planet--no additional fees! http://www.etsy.com/shop/Aliarose

Gamer's Closet for the win!

Saturday was game day for my Swords & Wizardry campaign at the Gold Star Anime. Particularly interesting for this session is that Dwayne of Gamer's Closet had dropped the second batch of 3D Dungeon tiles he has made out of wood. The preview of which you can see in these series of posts.

Roster
Alagahzar, Human Mage of the Order of Thoth
Hazar, Human Thug
Riordan, Dwarven Paladin of the Battle Maiden (Mitra)
The Priestess of Silvanus (Elven cleric)
Grog (Orc Soldier)
Hunter the Halfling Fighter
Heimdell, the Dwarven Runecaster

I didn't use them right off as the group left off in the Brother's tower of Tegal Manor



The below shows them running into the undead guards and wights on the second level.



The 4th level cleric automatically turned the skeletons causing them to quail against the tower walls as the party dispatched the wights. Unfortunately one of the wights successfully struck Hunter the Halfling Fighter causing him to drop from 6th level to 5th level.



The party continued down the stairs and found themselves in a 5 foot wide passageway. Now comes in Dwayne's dungeon tiles. After a search they find two secret doors. Opening the first one they found themselves in a alchemy laboratory. Apparently whoever was working here last was trying to transmute copper into gold. In the lower right corner they found barrels of a powder that transmute flesh into stone as well as another barrel with powder that does stone to flesh. While they were poking around a fire elemental erupted from the cauldron of lava in the middle of the room and was stopped by Hazar the Thug throwing a pottery flask filled with the flesh to stone powder. The elemental turned into lava and collapsed to the floor.



Next the party entered the Game Room where they found several green felt card tables, two bowling alleys, a toy chest, and a magical organ that played itself! On one of the tables was a deck of cards. A magical deck of cards.
(cue ominous music)
The Deck of Many Things!

There was a scramble as half of the party lined up to draw from it. For most it was a wash, as they gained XP and then lost a level from the draws. However for Alaghazar his hubris got the better of him and he drew both the Queen of Clubs and the Queen of Spades, he was killed and then turned into stone.

The bowling alley had two animated bowling balls that proceeded to attack the party. Heimdell took care of one by grabbing it and using it to bowl a strike (He rolled a natural 20). Hazar kick the other down a giant rat hole in the corner of the room where they heard it roll away. The party congratulated Hazar on his thinking as the party despised the rat tunnels under Tegal Manor.



Next the party went through the second secret door.



It opened up into a bedroom where a women that was completely yellow lay sleeping on the bed. Her hair was yellow, as well as skin and clothes. Hazar went to examine her and carefully checked her pulse. Then her body collapsed into a cloud of Yellow Mold spores which Hazar died from after inhaling them. Fortunately Janus the Elven Cleric was still upstairs in the Brother Tower and could cast Raise Dead. (Janus was played by the store owner and he couldn't play that day, but he did come down to the game room to perform the Raise Dead).


Also it turned out that the keg in the corner was filled with poisoned wine. Riordan the Dwarven Paladin wisely let the Priestess of Silvanus check it out before consuming it.

The party checked out the south door.


There they found a room covered with piles of giant rat droppings and a giant rat hole gnawed out of the floor. Note that the Dwarven Forge folks really need not to paint one of their coin piles that particular shade of brown.


The party decided to forego searching that room and instead searched the closets of the room where the yellow lady was located. In one of them they found a secret door.

Opening it up they found themselves on the west wall of a huge hall with a throne at one end. The hall was covered with webs and there were nearly two dozen large spiders crawling around. Also they were treated to the unusual sight of six men in guard uniforms beating on the body of a giant rat. Despite being sympathizing with what they were doing the Paladin sensed they were undead zombies. Also webbed to one of the pillars was a Elven Knight who started shouting that he needed rescue. (The replacement character for Alaghazar).


Careful placement of a fireball, the priestess of Silvanus turning the zombies, and the fighter being able to use their multiple attack (spiders were less than 1 HD) resulted in the room being quickly cleared. The only causality was Hazar who wound up paralyzed.

After searching the room the party decided to search the rate dung room. Finding nothing except the sound of a bowling ball rumbling from the rat hole they continued southwards.

They passed through an empty room but unfortunately, Riordan, the dwarven paladin fell into a 20 foot pit in front of the south door. When that was sorted out the party found the door opened to a long gallery of portraits. Note the small six sided dice marks where the portraits are.

From previous experience the party knew that they each could have a magical effect on the viewer. Grog the Orc ran up to one and promptly disappeared. The Elven Knight peered at another and found himself unable to speak louder than a whisper. While the party considered what happened to Grog, the Elven knight continued to look around.

Found another picture, that allowed him to levitate, and finally watching one of a usurper killing a king that turned into a map to the throne room. At this point he promptly took off thinking there was great treasure to be found. Hazar was watching this, grabbed Heimdell, and the two gave chase.

They wound up in the throne room, an area already explored. After looking around they decided to hack up the throne figuring the treasure was hidden there. A single golden ring fell out, the Master ring to the 26 servitor rings that was found earlier! After a tussle, Hazar wound up buying the ring from the Elven Knight.

Back in the portrait gallery Riordan, the Dwarven Paladin, and the Priestess of Silvanus decided to go after Grog.



They wound up another bedroom and saw that a secret door to the east was opened. They came just in time as they found Grog laying on the ground nearly dead. The paladin healed him back up to 2 hit points, when he was attacked from behind. Whirling around he saw nothing! Puzzled again he was stuck again and his stomach nearly ripped opened as he took 25 points of damage! An Invisible Stalker just struck a critical blow. Luckily the Invisible Stalker focused on the paladin and while beating him down to 8 hit points, Grog hit the creature with two mighty blows, one a critical. They proved enough to bring down the stalker. The Priestress then teleported in time to heal them.


Exploring the rest of the area they found little of anything in the room they appeared in, including it's two closets. The next room to the west was a bedroom that was filled with dozens of small frog with a single huge toad in the middle. They were quickly dispatched with a flask of oil. Searching they found a five foot corridor to the west and that lead to an abandoned magical laboratory where they found healing potions and an amulet that gave +4 save vs poison.

Dwayne's new dungeon tiles worked out really well. All that needed in the future is to change the mix of pieces. I needed more 2x2 with a single wall, 2x2 tiles, 2 by 4 tiles, and 2 by 4 with a single wall. I will be continuing to use these in future games.

Getting started with Publishing tools

The Adobe tools are very expensive for hobbyist publishers and in some cases overkill. Luckily there are several free open source tools out there that can be used by the hobbyist to publish their materials. Among them are Gimp, Inkscape, and Scribus.

Learning them can be pretty daunting but fortunately a beginner's guide for Scribus, a desktop publisher has been released that you can purchase. In addition to covering Scribus, it has teaches how to integrate programs like Inkscape and Gimp into producing your document.

My Second Position

Over on Gothridge Manor, Rusty wrote a great piece on the idea of first and second position. It was very illuminating. I also know where he is coming from because of the years I spent managing live-action roleplaying events.

The basic issues is live-action is well... live. That means you need to have people in certain location at certain times with certain props and the set for the area all properly built. It also means if you don't plan well you find yourself in the middle of the event with your entire staff sleeping. All this means that live-action plot is basically a huge railroad. I ran some great live-action events but many of them would sucked badly as a tabletop session.

I lucked out with my first event in that my plot was heavy on NPC doing things (the roles played by staff) and roleplaying. As long as I didn't wear everybody out I was able to keep the event going at a fun pace.

The experience left me wondering what I hell I am going to do in the future. I was kinda aware of the limitations but didn't know how bad of a railroad live-action plot was until I had to do it myself.

So rather than wind up frustrated and return to being a player, I decided I was going to push on and learn how to run good LARP plot despite the limitations. And for the most part I feel I succeeded.

After the birth of Gregory in 2003 I no longer had the time or energy to run LARP events and tabletop gaming returned to being my primary hobby activity. I found the my LARP experiences really helped my tabletop. It helped my roleplaying (i.e. funny voices :D), being able to describe the action better, and finally made realize that I could make other styles of refereeing as fun as the sandbox game that dominated my pre-larp tabletop refereeing. As Rusty wrote about, I learned to play the second position in refereeing.

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For those who are interested, the key techniques that worked for me in LARP events where

• Schedule staff in groups of five for two to three hour blocks.

• Pace the activity level so Friday Night estabilshes the plot, Saturday Late Morning, and Early Afternoon build tension, Late Saturday Afternoon has a plot climax. Follow by an early Sat Evening build tension, then a Saturday Late Evening grand finale.

• Build your event plan to allow the plot to have many paths but one destination. So if something unexpected comes up in Early Saturday Morning, I have stuff prepared to use in Early Afternoon and the subsequent time block that reflect what the players did.

• Over events of a season try to give each players a plot where they are lead. They won't have something occur every event but over multiple events the story unfolds.

• Realize between events you have a lot more flexibility to respond to what the players did.

These are a few of the things I did that helped me run fun events. The one most applicable to tabletop is the Many Paths One Destination structure and the pacing. These techniques are vital for running a fun Adventure Path.

Monday and Tuesday Night Gaming

I concluded refereeing my Monday night Swords & Wizardry campaign which had a great finish. So now I am playing in Rusty Battle Axe's campaign using Castles & Crusades. I created Anbar a Human Illusionist. He is a basically a good guy but doesn't take much seriously. The first session went pretty good but we have some work to do to come together as a party. Dwayne's Father Dani (pronounced deny) was much more devout than I expected. Tim's bard's seem more compatible with Anbar's outlook but there is stuff swimming under the surface of that character too. It will come together.

Rusty did a great job as a referee especially with his NPCs. Plus I was wondering if my line-up of illusionist spells would be of any use but proved useful in getting the fox that was preying on the local's chickens.

The things I need be careful of is making sure that Anbar and Father Dani doesn't turn into what happen in another campaign with my character, Sir Hawk, and a character named Sir Jeffery played by another friend named Dave. Pretty much the values of Sir Hawk and of Sir Jeffery conflicted on every level. I was a Knight who served the people, land and king. Sir Jeffery was a Knight Templar first and foremost and damn anybody who got in his way.

I was aware of what Dwayne was planning to do, so decided to make Anbar basically a good guy who agrees with what Dani so devoutly preaches. He just likes having a good time too and not fussy in the way it gets done. Sometimes positively irreverent due he once a street urchin. We will see how it goes, I think it will work out.

Since I am not refereeing Mondays any more I decided to referee the game at the Gold Star Anime more often. Due to scheduling conflicts for the player I will still do the once a month games but will now do short evening sessions on Tuesday every two weeks. The first one was this Tuesday and saw the continuation of the exploration of Tegal Manor.

It started a bit chaotic due to the number of new players, including my wife Kelly-Anne! We been going up to Gold Star for a couple weeks now for board games and now she decided to sit on my roleplaying session. She rolled up a Human Burglar named Alia Juliet Day. A roll on Jeff Rient's XP Charts gave her enough XP to be fourth level. The other three new players rolled a Half-Viridian/Elf Artificer (a type of magic-user), a Orc Soldier, an a Elven Cleric of Silvanus. Returning characters included a Dwarven Paladin, another Elven Cleric of Silvanus, and a Halfling Fighter.

It was a bit of a zany mix but then again Tegal Manor is a crazy place. This session saw the returning players come down the stairs from clearing out the northeast wing and meeting the new characters. After a round of introductions they explored the immediate vicinity and found no way out except the way back to areas already explored. The was an entrance to the rat tunnels so they explored that. Came across a were-rat guarding his treasure and quickly dealt with that.

Further explorations of the tunnel found an exit into a bedroom that appeared to be home to a big game hunter. A strange lizard skeleton threatened them with doom unless it was fed with rot worms. Calling on the power of Silvanus, Janus one of the elven clerics, turn it into dust. Among other things in the room was a strange glowing circle. The Orc Solider took one look stepped into it and disappeared. Half the party went "What the hell." and stepped in as well. The other half also went "What the hell" and decided to search the room and see what beyond the one door.

The Orc Solider and the others found themselves in some type of strange zoo in one of the towers. Teleported one by one, outside of the protections of the viewing area in the center of the room, the creatures attacked the individual party members . They were two giant lizards, two giant toads, a lightning beast (a small blue 3H Lizard, with a horn that can shoot lightning 3d6), a giant dire wolf, a giant rat, and two panthers.

It was pretty dicey for a while. Both the Orc Solider and Kelly Anne's burglar were half-swallowed by the Giant Toads. But when Janus teleported in she turned the tide with a well placed sleep spell. Effected nearly 12 HD of creatures. With the remaining half of party coming in the rest of the creatures were dispatched. But not before Riordan's, the dwarven paladin, little Kobold henchman died after being fried by one of the lightning beast's blasts.

The kobold's last words were (in a Harry Potter's Dobby voice)

Master, I told you bad things happen when you step on those circles.

The session ended soon after and we will pick up again on Saturday with further exploration of the tower.

Killed by a Door and other thoughts on the DCC RPG

James at Grognardia has a good post on the lethality of the Dungeon Crawl Classic RPG. It was prompted by the blurb about the adventure "The Portal under the Stairs"

This adventure is designed for 15-20 0-level characters or 8-10 1st-level characters. Remember that players should have 2-3 characters each, so they can continue enjoying the fun of play even if some of their PCs die off. In playtest groups of 15 0-level PCs, 7 or 8 typically survive. The author has playtested this adventure with groups of up to 28 PCs and experienced one complete TPK and several sessions with only a handful of survivors.

That quite a estimated death count. Accurate give my experience with playtesting the DCC RPG.

In the comment section of James' post Chicago Wizards give this comment.

Something cibet said made me realize that the point needs to be made: DCCRPG is not D&D. It may be D&Desque in its pedigree, but it's not the same in "scale" or matched to any edition. It evokes similarities, but it's expectations and execution is/are far different.

The comment is spot on, despite similarities to the d20 rules and D&D it is own thing. I felt that Harley and Joseph succeeded in channeling 70s era fantasy. The potential weakness of the DCC RPG is in it's extensive use of charts and it will live or die based on how well they are presented.

The use of the extra zocchi dice is going to a minor issue in the long run. In the playtest I ran, Fighters and other classes improved their ability to critical by using a progression of dice that included the zocchi dice. Going off the top of my head, at 1st level you would get say a d8, then at 4th a d10, then later a d12, d14, d16, d20, etc. The bigger dice allow you to get better results on a critical.

There were a couple of negative comments on the need to have multiple PCs per player. Understand that you can still use the DCC RPG and play a campaign where the player starts out with a single character struggling to survive. If you use the adventures that Goodman Games has planned they will die as they are death traps, cool death traps but death traps none the less.

If you run your campaign in more naturalistic way, the character can avoid those type of locales and focus on the challenges they can overcome. Such has working their way up to the leadership of a bandit gang, or fighting a border war between two nobles. Slowly working up to the point where they can enter one of those death trap and survive. Nothing in the playtest ruleset precludes this style of play and there is a lot of interesting bits to the rules especially the magic system. You will soon be able to see for yourself after free RPG day when Goodman Games releases the beta.

Runequest is dead, Long live Wayfarer

Mongoose has announced that they are dropping the agreement with Issaries for Runequest. However they are not abandoning the d100 system they developed with Runequest II. They intend to drop the Runequest references and release it as Wayfarers. There is a thread on their board devoted to the topic.