Jury-rigging it

In adding science fantasy elements to a setting, we are leaving open the possibility that PCs will find high-tech items. I've mentioned previously that these in general should not be reproducible, so that the society doesn't wind up migrating from fantasy to science fiction entirely. But there are other possibilities, particularly because technological artifacts will by nature be prone to breaking, and weapons will run out of ammunition, and all of them will run out of power eventually.

So how do PCs find out if they can jury-rig a solution? I'm thinking that this is a good place for some Judges Guild style tables, akin to some of the things from City State / Ready Ref Sheets, giving a series of cascading chances to scrounge spare parts from other artifacts, rig up a solution, and of course what happens when it works or doesn't.

When the PCs run out of juice on the ray gun and the personal shield is malfunctioning - I'm thinking that the rules should allow them to sacrifice one artifact to salvage another with some reasonable chance. Or perhaps they go looking and find an inoperative beam rifle from a different period and manage to mix and match a few parts and get it to work - if nothing else, it's cool if it works at least once for a big boom before it is totally useless.

The chances of malfunction should always be present, barring a major success; if you have two identical pistols and replace one's firing mechanism with the other's, that will work reliably. But for the most part there needs to be some chance of backfiring, fizzling, or exploding, perferably in the most entertaining way possible.

Extending this idea, I'm thinking that a chart of different high tech weapons and defenses, combined with a set of rules for jury-rigging fixes, perhaps that can also double for what happens if they use malfunctioning equipment. Any special requests or ideas for this? It'll be for Dungeon Crawl #3.

Some further Dune concepts

I've been thinking more about the technology and ideas in Dune, and how they might apply to old school D&D and other games. I've already gone a bit on the Spice, but there are other concepts that I think could really play an interesting part in the game. Some of these draw on the later novels, which I think are much less widely known.

In the last three volumes of the original books (and that's all that counts), Herbert spends a lot of time dealing with the ramifications of the prescience that he has given Paul and Leto II. This is useful in fantasy games because similar problems occur with spells like ESP, Clairaudience/Clairvoyance and ultimately Teleport making secret hiding places less useful and ultimately impossible.

One of Herbert's key technologies here is the no-chamber, a room that is impervious to precognition. This is the only way that things can be hidden from people with limitless precognition, and their development is what ends the reign of God-Emperor Leto II. A no-chamber in a dungeon or in an enemy's lair would provide protection from the concept of just being able to magically find your enemies, teleport in, and kill them, particularly if it was immune to all magic acting at a distance. Of course not every villain can have a no-chamber but it makes for a good and interesting reason why PCs can't use that kind of tactics.

Then there are the Bene Tleilax - a very useful type of people. The axolotl tanks are revealed to be monstrous female Tleilaxu in the later books, and they produce gholas, perfect clones of a dead person who can recover their original memories at a certain point in their life. The Tleilaxu Face Dancers are also a great adversary to swap out for the AD&D Doppelgangers. A dungeon or megadungeon level where the Bene Tleilax have set up shop might be a fascinating and weird adversary's location.

And of course there are the Bene Gesserit, women with tremendous mental capabilities and female-line ancestral memories as well as hand-to-hand combat (the weirding way). Just the ability of a character to use the Voice would be a tremendous ability, perhaps allowing a save versus spells. I think a Bene Gesserit PC would have to start out pre-Spice Agony if someone went that way, perhaps at higher levels getting access to the really amazing powers.

Just some ideas for mashing up some classic science fiction into your fantasy games; Dune has a lot of great things for people who want a wheels-within-wheels plot.

Magic, Drugs and Breaking Commandments

In my last post I touched briefly upon the Spice, Melange, from Frank Herbert's Dune. Anyone who knows the Dune universe should know that the Spice is addictive, to the point where not using it means death. It has me thinking about the myopic late-era TSR Commandments, specifically this one:

16: NARCOTICS AND ALCOHOL

Narcotic and alcohol abuse shall not be presented, except as dangerous habits. Such abuse should be dealt with by focusing on the harmful aspects.

This forecloses on the ability to make really awesome, but addictive, magical substances. And so, like many of these rules, I think it should be defenestrated.

Both Dune and Dungeons & Dragons came about in an era when people still thought of drugs as mind-expanding. Of course this crashed and burned in real life - but since when does fantasy have to follow reality? If drugs are really gateways into alternate worlds or ways of seeing reality, why not depict them in both positive and negative aspects?

One thought is that the fantasy world may have powerful hallucinogens that, rather than simply showing delusions to the viewer, actually reveal elements of the truth. Magic mushrooms or psychoactive substances like peyote may, in addition to rollicking hallucinations, impart upon the user the ability to detect magic or detect invisibility as per those spells. Deep in a trance, a character may be able to use spells such as ESP, clairvoyance, or clairaudience. Of course, side effects and addiction should both be likely.

Another drug might empower magic use further, allowing the user to cast spells as if they were a certain number of levels higher - for instance, a 5th level Magic-User casting an 8-dice fireball. Such impact might follow the typical "de-escalation" pattern of a mundane "high," where achieving the same result requires more of the drug. There could also be the danger of burnout, with the user needing it just to cast spells that have been over-optimized.

I might do some of these as magic items in the next Dungeon Crawl. Any thoughts?

OD&D Setting Mashup

Blog of Holding, home of the excellent D&D with Michael Mornard posts, just released a mashup of the OD&D setting I detailed in this blog with an idea from Jeff Grubb about a world overrun with evil where most humans have taken to flying ships. This has shades of Burroughs to it, so I most heartily approve. Check it out.

One setting I've been thinking a bit about is Dune. There's a documentary coming out this year about the attempt by surrealist cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky to make a Dune movie basically as a sci-fi acid trip with lots of symbolism, but he assembled massive amounts of talent to get it made. Of course that blew the entire budget and some of the people he'd brought together went on to make Alien, while David Lynch more or less failed at making a Dune movie. The world and its aesthetic always appealed to me, though only really Dark Sun among D&D settings ever scratched a vaguely similar itch. It would be an interesting exercise to stat out melange (the Spice), sandworms, and Fremen for D&D; from later volumes, no-rooms would be tremendously valuable, as would people immune to prescience.Not too hard if we assume a bigger desert in a D&D planet.

Science fantasy seems to be a natural fit for old school Dungeons & Dragons. We've had touches of it for a long time: Barsoom in OD&D, Temple of the Frog in Blackmoor, Tékumel, Jim Ward's Metamorphosis Alpha and Gamma World, Wilderlands of High Fantasy, Arduin, S3 The Expedition to Barrier Peaks - the list is not short. Holmes mentioned his Dreenoi PC and this is just a taste of the possibilities. I think that this was a phase as much in fantasy as anything else; as worldbuilding rather than imagination became the word of the day, flagrant discontinuities such as lasers or force shields in a fantasy game had to go away. (Though there's magic in some popular sci-fi, Star Wars being fantasy in most regards.)

This is something I've touched on before and will again. But really check out the mashup idea from Blog of Holding, I think it's onto something there.

Holmes on Options

On the OD&D community for BLUEHOLME (an excellent simulacrum available free here) I came across this article, a review by J. Eric Holmes of the 1981 Dungeons & Dragons boxed set edited by Tom Moldvay. It's mostly positive, but Holmes says this:

Character classes: Player characters are restricted to being a Fighter, Cleric, Thief, Magic-User, Elf, Halfling or Dwarf. This probably covers the roles most beginning players want to try, but I am personally sorry to see the range of possibilities so restricted. The original rules (the three little brown books) specifically stated that a player could be a dragon if he wanted to be, and if he started at first level. ... I enjoyed having dragons, centaurs, samurai and witch doctors in the game. My own most successful player character was a Dreenoi, an insectoid creature borrowed from McEwan’s Starguard. He reached fourth level (as high as any of my personal characters ever got), made an unfortunate decision, and was turned into a pool of green slime.

Holmes's own rulebook lived up to that in a minor way, where he talked about other AD&D classes such as witches, illusionists, paladins and assassins. I also like where he mentions "a lawful Werebear" - seeing as werecreatures were part of the early D&D scene.

But at the same time, the more proliferation you have of varied classes, the more you run the danger of getting bogged down in the details. I think the challenge with taking OD&D and Holmes Basic is to add variety to the game without crowding things with rules; even the supplement classes have a bit of bloat on them relative to the pure simplicity of the basic three of fighting-man, magic-user and cleric. The dragon and the Dreenoi give examples, as does the Werebear - these do not need new classes with convoluted mechanics to represent them. The key, I think, is in OD&D's exhortation to start small and work up.

The werebear, for instance, is immune to non-silver weapons, has HD 6 / AC 2 / Damage 3d6. Maybe a PC werebear is only able to transform once a day for limited time at low level, and the numbers start low and advance with level - until at 6th level, they're equal to what is listed. Further growth continues along similar lines.

Not that this is all hypothetical - I have issues of Alarums & Excursions with similar tables for various creatures. But I think it's a lost art, one of many that we have lost over the years, in favor of an approach of building out too many classes. I might write up rules for playing a werebear in the next issue of Dungeon Crawl as an example, and I'd be interested to know what folks have been doing in this regard if they're playing OD&D, Holmes or some other old-school game or clone.

As an aside - Holmes is either wrong or the essay is mildly revisionist. The original rules mention playing a balrog, not a dragon. This was excised in the sixth printing ("Original Collector's Edition") which is also the basis for the PDFs that were (however briefly) made available a few years back.

Once More Unto that Vast Stony Hell

I ran Stonehell again last night. It went well: the PCs hired two clerics in the keep to investigate the Quiet Halls, and they actually turned the Bone Thing which had some of the best treasure thus far. They both failed to turn skeletons, who killed one of the clerics (he was laid to rest properly on one of the biers) and a crypt thing was fought off successfully, though it involved a burning door and some smoke inhalation.

After that, there was some adventurous touching of teleport glyphs, which led them ultimately to the third level and the obelisks that bring fresh air into the dungeon. They were close enough to get up to the stairs, which led (through two hobgoblins) to a part of level one they hadn't seen before. There was a fight with kobold slavers, which killed the other cleric but won the freedom of the slaves, two of whom became new henchmen-types.

Some thoughts:

1. There haven't been PC fatalities in a while. This is for two reasons: they keep making saving throws, and they haven't been outnumbered in a fight since the first session.
2. Swords & Wizardry has an omission from the OD&D rules that I consider pretty serious: magic-users don't have the ability to make scrolls. I've found in running OD&D and Holmes that this really makes M-Us much more useful at low levels, where scrolls are basically bonus spells in return for time and money.
3. I've found that giving +1 to damage for a natural 20 keeps the "critical" hit exciting without overdoing things and making the game too swingy. At higher levels I may increase it but for low levels I'm really liking this as a simple method.
4. The treasure the PCs found was really quite excellent and re-affirmed my feelings on 1GP=1XP. It rewards exploration much more than fighting.
5. I liked how the PCs shifted tack on Stonehell's kobolds once they found the slave market. The whole adventure really reinforced how well Stonehell is actually built as a dungeon, between wondrous things and great monster factionalism.
6. I'm so used to thief skills at level 1 sucking that I was surprised when the party thief actually found a trap on a treasure chest.
7. I've come to hate making up names on the fly. So I've resorted to naming NPCs with interesting names from the backers list in Swords & Wizardry Complete. RIP Kimmo and Diogo. Hopefully Thaldon and Bracton have better luck. Seriously, any good naming lists out there?

Integrity, the Living Dungeon and Module Design

Ha! How's that for a title? The kind that beats a mild case of writer's block.

So let's start with this post by Mike Mornard on RPGNet, and a follow-up here that clarifies what exactly he's talking about. This is what I'm calling integrity: the concept that the fictional world in the game exists independently of the characters who are going to adventure in it. This is important, because various types of fudging and "modernist" rules can violate this integrity. It's also crucial for game design, because once you embrace world integrity the idea that, frex, things should follow a CR system go out the window. There were trolls on level 1 of Castle Greyhawk. They were there whether you were 1st level or 12th level, because they were there in the fictional world. So there's that.

So that's a picture of Gary Gygax, with his dungeon binder open. It's a tremendously complicated series of rooms, but Gary just has a single page of handwritten notes, one line per room at the maximum. That's all he needed to run his games. I've talked about this before, but I'm bringing it up in the context of Mike's quote: what Gary had on his paper, that's what was written in stone about his world. The rest was a living thing that came about in play through memory and winging it. Which brings me back to the living dungeon.

This really hit me about modules when I sat down to write the Caverns of Temeluc (the Dungeon Crawl #2 adventure). Specifically, I had an environment where it didn't make sense to me that the inhabitants would sit in one particular cave/room and not be moving about. So I took it to the maximum and had the monsters and treasure be dynamic and based on the referee, with some of them doubling as wandering monsters. I liked that approach, but I'm thinking it went a step or two too far, and that there may be a middle way. (Which I'm planning to experiment with in my Dungeon Crawl #3 adventure.)

One of the things I would have preferred in Temeluc was to have the treasures in fixed locations. It just allows things to be much more interesting; a treasure hidden in a weird part of the room, a puzzle, a loose stone - whatever it is, there are great places to stick a treasure in a dungeon. I also want the next dungeon I put out to have more of a sub-region feel where different monster types tend to congregate, with a "monster roster" of total creatures that are encountered between four or five rooms, and in random encounters, etc. I've used the same subsystem before and it lets you have a neat mechanic specific to certain areas.

How I'm thinking this will work is as follows:

1. The module will be keyed with treasure, immobile objects, and a few single-room monsters in the main key.
2. The map will be divided into 3 areas, each consisting of 10-15 rooms. Each area will have a separate list of, let's say, 10 potential encounters.
3. The referee will pre-populate 5 or 6 of these encounters per area. The remaining 4-5 encounters will go into the wandering monster list while in that area.
4. The wandering monster chart will have 6 "global" wandering monsters and the rest will direct the referee to use local monsters.

So: does that sound useful? Would you be more or less likely to use it than a module set up like B1 or Temeluc where no room/treasure/monster combination is set in advance? Is it too complicated, am I barking up the wrong tree here? Does it get the "living" dungeon feel I am going for, or is it too "in the background" as a method?