Let the Dice Fall Where They May

Though I began gaming in the 80s the 90s proved to be very formative in my gaming style. I absolutely ate up story-based games like Vampire: The Masquerade as well as the story-based style seen in D&D 2nd Edition products.

One of the frequent elements of that style is not letting the dice get in the way of the story. I'm not going to bash that gaming style - I had a lot of fun gaming that way, playing through the Forgotten Realms Avatar-trilogy of adventures and managing to have a great time, despite its strong element of rail roading. It's a style and if everyone is having fun with it then there's nothing wrong with it.

One of the dangers with that style is players can turn into spectators or actors for a story designed by the GM (or a pre-packaged adventure). You'll have villains who absolutely cannot be killed in the first encounter, events that must happen no matter what the players do. One of the innovations I've seen over the last decade is game systems which incorporate these assumptions into the game. For example, in various FATE games (such as Spirit of the Century and The Dresden Files) if your freedom of action is restricted by certain story or genre elements you get rewarded for going along with it in the form of FATE points. At the same time you can spend those FATE points to override that loss of narrative control. This, in my opinion at least, is a good way to run such a game. It removes the players from being passive observers but still drives towards telling a story, with modifications to prevent it from simply being the story the GM wanted to tell. I think it emulates well what you'll often hear writers of fiction say when they indicate the characters they created dictated a different ending. For example, Stephen King indicated he was surprised to discover some of the characters he created for 'Salem's Lot chose not to go along with the horrible end he'd anticipated for them.

"Old school" games typically advise against this sort of play. In my experiments with such games, Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) last summer and my recently begun Adventurer Conqueror King System (ACKS) campaign I've tried my hand at the style of play. One consistent piece of advice I've seen in such games is letting dice rolls be binding. To the best of my recollection, I first read that in Hackmaster and saw it furthered in Dungeon Crawl Classics with advice for all die rolls to be in the open. In both games I've operated in this manner. In both cases I used random character generation. In our ACKS game I had each player roll up five characters and generate two PCs. Since we've typically had around four players per session I've had players run both characters at once. DCC has players generate four zero-level characters and whoever survives the first adventure (if anyone does) gets to be 1st level. The only allowance I've made is allowing 1st level characters to start with maximum hit points.

It's probably worth noting that I've not gone fully random, allowing the dice to determine the contents of every hex - but it's something I may end up doing as I've only detailed the hexes immediately around the starting home base.

The obvious reason for writing all of this is to discuss how it plays. I'd have to say it represents quite a change from what I'm used to. Generally speaking I'd roll the dice behind a screen. Which means I might fudge the results. "Well gee Bob is down to 3 hp and so 10 hp damage would pretty much finish him and it's first encounter of the night so it seems anticlimactic to kill him now." There's pretty much zero chance of me doing that. It makes the word an unforgiving one, where even the brightest, most skillfully played character can get unlucky. But it also discourages trusting to luck unless there is no other choice. But it also adds to accomplishments - most characters have penalties to at least one ability score, some several. That max hit points I give out is still subject to Constitution penalties which several characters in the group have.

I'd like to think this makes success all that much more noteworthy. In both DCC and ACKS games I've seen characters who are pretty much average people scrape their way through some horrific scenarios and escape by the skin of their teeth - or die trying. It also makes death, oddly enough, less frightening. The odds of your character perishing in his or her adventures are decidedly greater than zero so be bold (but not foolish) while you live. I've grown to greatly enjoy the mortal wounds table in ACKS - our poor band of adventurers has a number of persistent injuries....

I'll likely talk at a later point about the effects of removing a set plot in a later entry, but I do find the randomness coupled with players in more control of their destines really leads to the players determining the plot line and importance of various events and locations. The player of the cleric, for example, was rather interested in undoing the defilement created by an unholy altar to Orcus while another player was more interested in moving on to a tomb they had been gathering keys to.

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The Fine Art of Combat Avoidance

The Art of War
(Source: WikiMedia Commons)

"He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight."

- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

I've seen it mentioned on other blogs but I got to experience it myself in last night's Dungeon Crawl Classics game. It is something of a lost art to have characters not plunge into every encounter.

Starting with its 3rd edition, D&D is geared towards balanced encounters. This doesn't mean that an encounter is easy. Rather it means that for any given encounter the Dungeon Master has a pretty good idea what sort of challenge the encounter presents. Moreover, in a bit of meta-gaming, your typical player will know that any encounter is something that the party can reasonably expect to defeat.

In my earlier gaming days this was not always the case. First of all the idea of balance wasn't quite so prevalent in the games which I played. If you were trying to build a reasonable encounter you'd have to eyeball it, there were no real metrics as to what was reasonable aside from the experience point value of the monster(s).

Scene from New Line Cinema's
The Fellowship of the Ring

Moreover, there was less an expectation of balance. There were times when players were expected to take the better part of valor. This is itself in keeping with a lot of the fiction that inspired D&D.  One situation which quickly comes to mind is early in The Fellowship of the Ring when the hobbits hid from the ringwraith which was looking for a hobbit with the name of Baggins. Similarly, in Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar series Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser make more than one ill-advised trip to the Thieve's Guild and are fortunate to survive the experiences.

In last nights DCC game the zero-level characters faced the most challenging encounter prior to clearing out the entire dungeon. Though a small dungeon, I'd designed it to be a little less linear than what my players and I have gotten used to. Fighting a giant which had just escaped its imprisonment took a painful toll on the party. The group, already well reduced from its peak of 24, was down to around 8. Though that was the most challenging encounter and they were victorious, they could not afford any more major combats. That lead to some creative handling of encounters. Having been slaughtered by a freeze-ray firing statue, upon re-entering the room two characters went down low and worked to topple the statue. Finding themselves in a room consisting of a broken walkway ten feet above the cavern floor, a floor covered by animated skeletons, the players found a way across without risking a fight with the skeletons. Though the gap was over 25 feet they used their iron spike to secure their rope in the cavern ceiling and swung across the gap Indiana Jones style. Its not how I thought that encounter would go but it was a nice surprise.

Having survived the Shrine of Pluto our heroes have at last reached 1st level. And these are probably the most hardened 1st level characters I've ever seen.




Note - At this point we'll be evaluating what's next for the group. We might go back to Call of Cthulhu but I've a hunch we'll continue DCC. Though the zero-level funnel adventure was fun I think the players are going to want to be able to play some more powerful characters. If that's the case we'll also be looking into how to add new folks in response to a few queries I've had. Though it'd be a pity to deprive those characters of the fun of a funnel adventure...

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Actual Play: The Shrine of Pluto Part II [DCC]

Summary

As our valiant band of would-be adventurers looted the barbarian bodies (and those of their friends) additional patrons of the inn from the previous night arrived - either they had slept late or it took time for them to build up their courage.

In the funnel, all are Redshirts

The entrance cavern sunk into the depths of the earth. Borrowing a goat from one of the many farmers in the band, a hardy dwarf drove it down. Tragically both of them perished around the same time from the toxic air they had been breathing. A swarm of rodents of an unusual size (large, not small) emerge from the side of the corridor and began consuming the dead. One climbed atop the goat and also died from poison air, yielding a vital clue - the air was not poisonous close to the ground. Hugging the ground the remainder of the company charged at the rodents and with only a few fatalities - peasants and slaves whose names history will forget - persevered.

The next chamber featured an statue of a hideous being with a combination of goat and humanoid features wielding a skull-tipped mace, one of the less pleasant aspects of Pluto. It did however, have nice sparkly gems. Oooh sparkle. Icy blue. One of a pair of halfling brothers, Ringo, scaled up the 7-foot statue to grab one. Oops. As he pried it loose he was frozen solid and shattered. Though he did get the gem, for which the survivors were grateful. They tried for the other gem, the brave farmer trying for the other gem, hoping to pry it loose and get clear fast enough. He too was shattered by the ice. Oops. But again, another gem was obtained. For which there was much celebrating. 

While there were some cracks leading to rodent lairs our brave(-ish) adventurers pressed deeper into the complet, reaching their first door. Thankfully it wasn't trapped, though it did open to a narrow walkway over a floor fifteen feet below. There were three other doors to the north, east, and west, with their door on the south. In the center was an elevated platform with another nasty goat-man statue looking at them with icy blue eyes. A rumbling sound emitted from the platform as it rotated to face them and its eyes fired beams of cold, freezing a poor gong-farmer dead. The gang ran, some getting frozen, others falling, others getting away to the east door. Some of those who fell perished, landing on pointy piles of bones whilst some others managed to crawl back up and escape, slamming the door behind them.

Adventuring, it turned out, was a dangerous profession...

Notes

We didn't get as long a session this week, with some communication hiccups and a little trouble getting to a quorum - though we did manage to get some fun gaming in.

There is definite a certain fun in watching zero-level characters go forth to their horrible deaths. One of the players asked if they really needed to level up at the end of this...

The poison trap at the entrance is based on a real shrine to Pluto - in the city of Hierapolis in Anatolia (modern Turkey) there was a shrine to Pluto, a Plutonium whose entrance has carbon dioxide gas. To avoid the suffocating gas priests would drop down low and crawl on the ground - or hold their breaths. Failure to do so could result in death. Admittedly I've probably cranked up the danger factor for purposes of drama and funneling but it was neat to actually find a real-world deathtrap. 

Yes, the statue of Pluto is from D&D's Orcus. Pluto was a Roman composite god - largely from the Greek Hades but also with aspects from Plutus (god of wealth), Dispater, and Orcus (both gods of death). I decided to borrow the D&D version of Orcus for the image above. While I'm inspired by our own world's history I want to emphasize this is still a fantasy setting and the D&D version of Orcus seems a good way to emphasize that.

We've probably one session left in the funnel. No fear, I wouldn't expose zero-level characters to the demon Orcus. Well, probably not...

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See You at Munden's

Back in the 80s and 90s my brother and I were perplexed by a frequent letter-writer in comic books, one "Uncle Elvis" who used to close his letters "see you at Munden's". What the heck was he talking about and why was the editor replying as if she knew what he was talking about? You know nowadays one simply Googles for the answer to such questions...

Eventually my brother discovered that Munden's was a bar in a city at the nexus of realities, Cynosure. Cynosure was the setting of the comic book Grimjack, published by First Comics and created by John Ostrander and Tim Truman, both still active in comic books last I checked. At the time my brother discovered all this First Comics was either out of business or about to go out of business, though over the years (and with the help of eBay) he was able to get a complete collection of Grimjack comics. I've inherited that box of comics and I've also been purchasing the collected versions from IDW, though they aborted the publication halfway through and have begun again with smaller sized omnibus editions. I've yet to do a complete read of Girmjack but I've been thinking about the setting of Cynosure.

Cynosure is a "pan-dimensional city", one where multiple realities meet. You could be walking down a street that is straight out of Lankhmar, take a few turns and find yourself walking down a street that would fit in perfectly in Mos Eisley Spaceport or Coruscant. On one block magic and technology might work perfectly while on others one of those might be partially or completely limited.

It's a tough concept to fully wrap your brain around, one that I think requires some suspension of disbelief. I'd always try to figure out how such a city works. How tightly together is the city? Do people use it to travel from one dimension to another? What do the inhabitants of the component cities, the parts not part of Cynosure, know about Cynosure?

That said, it makes for an awfully neat place for gaming. I think it would be especially appropriate for games like Dungeon Crawl Classics where other planes and dimensions are an expected part of the game and many of the source materials make use of such concepts.

As far as RPGs go I can think of just one RPG which is about a pan-dimensional city, Nexus: The Infinite City. Nexus definitely feels like a game of its period, the early 90s, when a lot of interesting game ideas came out - it saw the birth of The World of Darkness and also saw lots of little-remembered games such as Nazis in space in Reich Star or after the rapture in The End (the latter having a d20 version several years ago). Nexus was published by Daedalus Games which also did the first edition of the better known Feng Shui RPG. Looking at the credits for Nexus it had a lot of people who have gone on to be very well known in the gaming industry - Robin Laws, Bruce Baugh, and Rob Heinsoo coming to mind. It's worth picking up for inspiration if you can find it but it is hard to find - I stumbled across it in the discount box of a game shop several years ago.

To do a full-fledged game in such a city I would think you would need a game which can handle genre crossing easily. On the crunchy side games like GURPS or Hero could certainly handle such things. If one is more on the storytelling side of the axis various incarnations of Fate would certainly work well. Grimjack features scenes where its protagonist, John Gaunt, uses his knowledge of the city to know just where to go to make bullets not work against him - a great example of the sorts of actions taken with Fate points.

However, one would not need to do a full game in such a city - it certainly could be used for an interesting adventure in a game like Dungeon Crawl Classics where adventurers encounter such a fantastic city.

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Actual Play: The Shrine of Pluto Part I [DCC]

Summary

The adventure began at the Inn of the Flying Swordfish, a small inn in the old section of Tagentium. It wasn't a place where adventurer met. Rather it was a place for tired fishermen, farmers, tradesmen, laborers, and the like to rest after a long tiring day.

This proved not to be the case on the evening of our tail in late summer in the year MCCLXXVIII since the founding of the Imperium's First City, now under the rule of the barbarian lord Marcus Olbar. While enjoying their drinks a half dozen skeletons, un-dead creatures with coldly glowing blue eyes, burst into the front and rear of the inn. The patrons drew whatever they had with them to battle these skeletons. For most, this was little more than a knife though there were some out of work mercenaries - mercenaries armed but not bloodies. Sadly a scribe quickly fell to their weapons though by overwhelming sheer numbers the remaining patrons overwhelmed the skeletons.

After the battle an old-timer, Quintus Decius came up from under the bar. He told them how he remembered as a young lad he saw skeletons like that. When the barbarians were raiding the island the priests of Pluto aided in the defense of the island with skeletons just like them, complete with glowing blue eyes. The shrine was a few miles to the west of Tagentium. He remembered as a child people would buy pigeons and seagulls to release into the entrance of the shrine, a tunnel descending into the earth - and the birds would die! But the priests could enter unharmed, though it was rumored that any mortal not sworn to Pluto would die as well. It was there they supposedly kept their vast wealth. The battle against the barbarians was successful, though all the priests died in it. The citizens sealed the shrine with a great boulder, fearing more of the un-dead more than they coveted the riches.

Riches? That was an incentive for these now-bold common-folk. The thought of not needing to worry about every copper... They agreed to meet early the next morning to venture to the Shrine.

Not all of them showed up. But enough of them did - eleven bold would-be adventurers. They came with swords, nets, pitchforks, and livestock. A walk of about an hour took them to the old ruins - a small village from the Imperial Era, now abandoned. Decius had told them of a geyser immediately in front of the entrance to the Shrine, one which they quickly located. And indeed a great boulder had been rolled clear of the entrance. However they neglected to examine a nearby ruined building which housed four barbarians of the warlord Marcus Olbar, including one of his feared shield-biting berserkers. A javelin ended the career of the would-be adventure Vishner the fisherman. A battle broke out, much bloodier than the one at the inn. Yet they proved victorious despite the butcher's bill, consisting of the fallen fisherman, a petty cut-purse known as Otto, and a pair whose names none recalled - a corn farmer and a trapper. 

Yet surely the gods had selected these seven survivors for greatness? Unbowed, they approached the shrine's tunnel entrance to seek their destiny...

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DCC: Actual Play Impressions

After some scheduling hiccups my gaming group had its first game using Dungeon Crawl Classics. I'll probably be doing an actual-play writeup later this week but for now I'm focusing on my impressions of the game.

This was our first time using Google+ Hangouts as a virtual tabletop solution. Originally we all hung out at my house but with the real world intruding not everyone is able to make it (and not everyone is even in the country any more). For our group's Call of Cthulhu we used the Fantasy Grounds tabletop application. It's a program that worked very well for us but it is rather difficult to tweak for games it doesn't explicitly support.

For our Google+ Hangout we used the free Tabletop Forge application, an application that adapts Google+ Hangouts to serve as a Virtual Tabletop. It worked pretty well with some hiccups that my group will be working on going forward. Off the top of my head, the biggest issue seemed to be one of latency - for some players the Hangout suffered from extreme latency. My brother, who is in the group, usually shows up in person (as my house is on his way home from work it works rather nicely). He was sitting next to me on the same network and yet for part of the game he suffered latencies of up to ten seconds when typing. I'm suspecting this was an issue with Google as it cleared up later for no apparent reason. We did have some echo issues - for next game we're going to try everyone having headsets. As Judge I did run into an issue with a map I was sharing showing up for everyone - but me...  I don't want to be overly negative about the app - especially given both the Hangout and Tabletop Forge are both free and constantly being refined. Overall they were tools that serves us well - and as all of us are in the software industry we pretty much assumed we'd have some hiccups to deal with.


As far as the game itself goes... I wrote up my own adventure dealing with our potential adventurers encountering some un-dead skeletons in their town and tracking them down to a supposedly sealed off shrine to the god Pluto. We didn't have a full-house - it was me and three players, each with four 0-level characters. The fatality rate was rather high. In the first round of combat a scribe (who hadn't even been named) lost his head to a skeleton. Overall, of the 12 characters 7 survived the evening. And there is still the Shrine of Pluto to explore.

As far as the rules went the players adapted to them rather easily, despite not all of them having had time to go through the rules. Mechanically it is a very simplified version of the D&D 3.x rules, a game that everyone in my group has a lot of experience with. What was notable though was the tone the game encouraged.

First of all there is the fatality rate. Though I started gaming in the 80s I was strongly influenced by White Wolf's Storytelling games of the 90s. As a result I have a habit of concealing dice rolls and been willing to fudge things to help the story along. The DCC Game advocates pubic dice rolling and purely random character generation. While I don't view one style of play as "the one true way" I decided to give DCC a try as written. I generated, using Purple Sorcerer Games zero-level character generator, 15 groups of 4 zero-level PCs and allowed each player to pick one grouping. For combat I made all the rolls publicly. This very quickly established the tone - this is not a friendly world where the fates seek to keep you alive for some great destiny. If a barbarian hiding in a ruined building near the Shrine hurls a javelin at a fisherman, chances are good that the fisherman will die.

However, even though it made death more likely it also made death simply part of the game - I'm not sure how to describe it - but there seemed to be little fear of character death despite its likelihood. Almost an attitude of "seize the day for tomorrow (or today) we may die".

Even though no one has reached 1st level yet the first session also really drove home how notable any leveled character is. These are people who ventured, willingly, into a scenario where death wasn't even possible but was likely. They watched others like them die deaths that no bard will sing songs of. Brave? Most certainly. A little bit crazy? I would imagine so.

That's got me thinking about other "important people" of the setting. I'd felt this way before but this first session drove it home - being important is not sufficient reason to be above 0-level. This is a world full of 0-level mayors, dukes, kings, priests, bishops, and the like. There may be some veteran soldiers who have fought in many battles, but even with that I suspect most of them aren't 1st level warriors. They might have extra hit dice and bonuses in combat, but it seems to me this is a world where leveling up to a class also involves a choice - a choice to truly risk one's life in pursuit of adventure.

Our next game will involve actually delving into the dungeon itself. I'm thinking I might have to supply the players with a few more 0-level characters to make a total party kill less than a certainty.






Note - if you've expressed interest in joining the game and weren't able to - or if this sounds interesting, give me a holler - we'd love to have you. And our poor adventurers need more potential targets in the funnel. We game every other Monday from 7 to around 9:30 PM Eastern US Time.

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Religion in Fantasy Settings

As a preface to this post it probably makes sense to describe how I view religion in the "real world" as it surely has an impact on how I view it in fictional settings.


I was raised a Roman Catholic and I remain one though I suspect if the pope ever had a chance to have a chat with me he'd probably show me the exit in short order. I believe in marriage equality (aka same-sex marriage), believe the church's teachings on the ordination of women and contraception are flawed, and I don't believe Catholics or Christians have an exclusive claim to salvation - to be honest I'm a believer in making this world the best it can be. I am a huge fan of Jesus who spent an awful lot of time telling people to love one another and not much time talking about birth control or homosexuality. Generally speaking if your religion gives you what you need and leads you to a compassionate life I'm fine with it. Heck if your lack of religion takes you there, awesome too. A lot of my philosophy was shaped by the former Catholic nun turned atheist turned theist Karen Armstrong and her Charter for Compassion.

I've found people to admire in a wide array of religions, including my own, and I've found people to despise in a wide array of religions, including my own. I've got a pretty strong hunch that the infinite is beyond the ability of any one set of beliefs to describe.


I begin with this long statement to give an idea as to what I like seeing in portrayals of religion in fantasy settings, whether for a setting for RPGs or for fiction. I generally am not too crazy about settings that have "one true way" - a pantheon of gods that regularly interacts with mortals. It is not an exercise of faith to believe in a supernatural force that regularly visits the world. While I greatly enjoyed the Dragonlance novels when I was younger as I grew older this became a point of frustration for me with Paladine and Takhisis walking the face of Krynn.

Issek of the Jug from TSR's
"Lankhmar: City of Adventure"

I have enjoyed fantasy settings where the gods have worshippers but those worshippers tend to be without "clerical magic" - though sometimes it is suggested there may well be something to these gods. For example, in the short story "Lean Times in Lankhmar" Fafhrd becomes an acolyte of Issek of the Jug but neither he nor anyone involved with Issek has any supernatural ability. Conan refers to his deity Crom numerous times but there is no expectation of ever seeing Crom taking direct action.


One fantasy gaming setting which I felt did an excellent job portraying multiple religious beliefs was the Eberron campaign world for Dungeons & Dragons. It featured multiple faiths. The most common faith was the Sovereign Host, a pantheon of nine mostly benevolent deities. Their counterpoint was the Dark Six, six malevolent deities. You had the church of the Silver Flame, dominant in one nation but able to be found elsewhere. You had elves worshipping their ancestors (who could often be found wandering around in a sort of undead state). You had death worshippers, forbidden cults. Worshippers of all these faiths gained spells but even with that the worshippers actually weren't certain as to the actual source to their powers. The deities in question did not make their wishes or even their existence known. It's not even certain in the game world that the deities are the sources for these powers. This is an approach I greatly liked as it gave the expected powers of clerics but it added the real-world ambiguity that all religions have. Additionally, this made it easy to portray religions in multiple lights. In one adventure I had the main villain be a zealot of the Silver Flame. In another adventure there was a heroic NPC who worshipped the Silver Flame. In most settings the deities are monitoring the behavior of their clerics and withhold spells from those clerics who abuse the tenets of the faith. No such luck in Eberron. Just like in the real world these people may be judged harshly in any afterlife but in this world they may well get away with their subterfuges and abuses of their faiths.

RuneQuest is one game which has embraced multiple world views. While I am not an expert on Glorantha (truth be told Glorantha kind of frightens me), I recall the 3rd edition of RuneQuest having practitioners of shamanism, divine magic, and sorcery write as to why their beliefs represent "the one true way" and why followers of other beliefs are totally wrong and some horrible fate awaits them in the afterlife.


From my exposure there seems to be less portrayal of religion in fantasy literature than in fantasy gaming. For example, there's not a priest to be found in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. The Chronicles of Narnia represents one exception and even has multiple religions but only one of those religions is "correct".

Winterfell Godswood from HBO's "A Game of Thrones"

One fantasy series whose portray of religion I greatly enjoy is George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. The continent of Westeros has two main faiths, worship of the Seven and worship of the Old Gods. The Seven are more popular in the civilized south whereas the Old Gods are worshipped more in the north. Sacred trees with carved faces are dedicated to the Old Gods and in later novels we learn there is actually something to the belief that the Old Gods can speak through the trees - though not in the way that most worshippers would imagine.

The worship of the Seven reminds me somewhat of Christianity's place in medieval Europe, with officers of the faith having great temporal power and their holiness varies from true dedication to all-out charlatans.

The worship of the god R'hllor and belief in a dualistic evil other is prevalent on the nearby continent of Essos and begins to become a factor in the politics of Westeros, with one of the rivals to the Iron Throne of Westeros becomes a worshipper of R'hllor. Interestingly the priests of R'hllor are found to have some powers, especially of divination, though they are far from infallible.


These ideas have been bouncing around my head as I contemplate how to portray religion in my Dungeon Crawl Classics game. Clerics in DCC need to stay in their deity's good graces which tends to indicate some amount of certainty as to how you're doing with your god. But... it shouldn't be difficult to throttle back on the certainty. Yes, these angels are telling me I'm telling me I'm doing a lousy job. And unless I make them happy I'm going to have a hard time with magic. But am I absolutely certain they come from my god? Also, I plan on making it possible for a worshipper to forsake his holy vows and still have access to magic - though in such a case he is now effectively getting his spells from a new source and needs to keep that source pleased with him...Yes communing with the divine is possible, but the results of doing so are less than reliable, similar to the problems priests of R'hllor in Westeros and Essos tend to have when interpreting visions they see in the sacred flames...

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Developing a New Campaign Setting: Tagentium Map Finished

Finalized my map of the starting town for my DCC campaign. It was interesting how I began finding a story to match the map.

The west side of the map is the older part of the city and the one where the patrician families are most likely to be found. The buildings are made of brick and concrete, the streets are all paved, and there are many pleasant garden areas to be found. One can see the palace of the administrator of the island, the Comes Fraterculus. Nearby is the old market, still in use where one can find more luxury goods.



The eastern half of the town is the newer part though it is also not in as good shape. A century ago the town was sacked by barbarians and the walls were breached with much of the town destroyed. It was rebuilt, though many of the eastern half of Tagentium consists of wooden buildings and dirt streets. There's a lot less planning to be found on this side of the river as well, with nice back alleys for cutpurses. We've also got the main market and church to the monotheistic deity (in development).

The southeast part of the city is the most rundown, used primarily by fishermen and slaves for the fields to the east of the city. Instead of the solid stone wall protecting the rest of the city it is protected by a "temporary" wooden palisade. There are plans to fully extend the wall but nothing has come of that save a gatehouse and towers which look absurd rising above the rotting palisade.

The island at the mouth of the river has a temple to the former patron of the city, the god Neptune. Though the old religion is no longer the state religion it is still highly revered with a significant minority clinging to the old gods.

I eyeballed the population to be 3,600. This is on the low side for the number of buildings but I wanted to stay in keeping with the urban depopulation that the western half of the Roman Empire experienced in real history. It makes for some ancient abandoned houses that can be used for a quick adventure. I tried to have a compromise between the more planned cities that the Romans built with the more chaotic cities of the Middle Ages. One problem with a lot of gaming maps of pseudo-medieval cities is the amount of open space they have - buildings tended to be crammed as tight together as possible. Streets weren't really planned but were more just a default use of the space between buildings, some main thoroughfares excluded - and often that required enforcement to stop buildings from creeping onto main streets. Even the slums to the southeast are probably a bit more open than a medieval town or city would be.

I'm not certain how much adventure I'll be having in this town - my plan has been to move to the larger Kraken Isle with its Venice-like city but this seemed a useful practice exercise for practicing my urban map-making abilities.

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Developing a New Campaign Setting: The Town of Tagentium

Some dental "fun" (I wonder if clerics can fix teeth) and work-related issues have forced me to delay kicking off my DCC campaign by two weeks. During that time I've been doing some reading on late Antiquity and noodling around with my setting. As I've mentioned previously, my game's feel is inspired by the decades following the fall of the western Roman Empire. I'm not looking to create a 100% historical analogue. But there's a lot about it that screams D&D. You've got your barbarians kingdoms. You've got the eastern half of the fallen Empire that still considers those lost lands part of its territory (paging Emperor Justinian). Now we'll be adding to the mix the undead, dragons, sorcerers, and the like.

I've been giving some thought to the starting town of the game, currently named Tagentium. The idea is the game begins on a small island close to a much larger island. I've not been planning on developing it too much as I expect play will move off the smaller island, Little Brother, after a few adventures. But with a little bit of extra time I've had some time to fool around - a lot of it being an excuse to play with Campaign Cartographer's City Designer add-on. I've done well at overland maps and dungeon maps but I've never been all that good at designing cities. Working on a town has made me think about some elements from the larger campaign. Using S. John Ross' Medieval Demographics article he describes a town as having a population of one to eight thousand, typically around 2,500. They usually are not walled but for this exercise I decided to make a walled town - given the recent violence a walled coastal town seems a reasonable assumption.

After some experimenting I found a map style I liked. I wanted to get a basic idea of what the town looked like and I'm far from complete but I felt sharing a work-in-progress might be illuminating. As with most drawings you can see a bit more if you click on it. Looking at it I realized I was a bit inspired by the town of Threshold in the D&D Expert Rules. Tagentium is at the end of a small river on the island of Little Brother. Keeping with my idea of a town founded during a Roman Empire-like period it has its own amphitheater. You can also see a palace for the ruler of the town and a large building to the east of the river which is a church. I'm still in the process of drawing out the streets. I started out with the main streets which are better planned than the unpaved side-streets. The main streets have buildings made out of concrete whereas the side streets also have wooden buildings. In the empire this would probably once have been unheard of but one of the things that suffered in Western Europe in our world after the fall of Rome was the massive civil engineering of the Empire. I'm guessing this town has been sacked a few times and some of its original concrete buildings have been replaced with lesser quality buildings.


The presence of a church has me thinking about the religion of the Empire. On our world both halves of the Roman Empire were officially Christian by the time of the fall of the west. It should be noted there were some massive doctrinal disputes that made the Christian religion far from unified, many of them concerning the divine vs. mortal nature of the Christ. Interestingly, my readings has taught me that the barbarians who came to rule over the lands of the western empire were typically Christian though the common people were often pagan. For this campaign I'm going to assume that the Empire did indeed move towards a monotheistic religion. I believe this is also in keeping with some of the assumptions of AD&D - consider for example the illustrations of clerics in raiments reminiscent of Christian priests. However, I'm thinking it would be interesting for it to have been less than universal and in this campaign, like in our world, the barbarians have still to have been converted. Plus I'd like to make some use of Roman religious beliefs - my research revealed all sorts of things about Pluto, Orcus, and Dispater that I'm planning on using in my first adventure. As far as the monotheistic religion goes I'm keeping it vague until the game starts - if a player wants to be a cleric of this religion I'd like to give him an opportunity to have some say in it.

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Inspirational Reading for Classical Rome and Late Antiquity

This isn't so much of a full review as it is some quick thoughts on some of the  inspirational pieces I've perused in preparation for my current campaign. Many RPGs are set in different historical eras and D&D tends to be in a setting that has some resemblance to the Middle Ages. This was probably more true in older incarnations of D&D - later generations of D&D tend to crank the fantasy dial up quite a bit.

While I'd indicated that D&D tends to be rooted in the Middle Ages I'm tweaking that assumption for my Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign. This campaign, while not set on Earth, is taking a page from Adventurer Conqueror King and is using the period of Late Antiquity as its primary inspiration. What is Late Antiquity? Its exact timing is a matter of debate, usually including some or all of the period between the 2nd and 8th centuries. It is the period where the western half of the Roman Empire fell and its eastern half found itself fighting for survival in the Byzantine-Arab Wars. It can be thought of as the transition from the straight Classical period to the Middle Ages. There is some debate amongst historians just how much of a transition this period was, some going so far as to view the end of the Roman Empire as not a calamity but rather a step in a transition to the birth of modern Europe. (I would imagine those living in Rome when it was sacked might disagree with that assessment.)


Currently I am reading Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe by William Rosen. It covers the reign of the Eastern Emperor Justinian. By his time the Western Empire had fallen. However during his reign the Eastern Empire retook much of its lost lands including Spain and Italy as well as conquering land which had never been under Roman dominion. His dreams were cut short by the plague which devastated his citizens and soldiers and provided Europe with a preview of the Black Death.

Moving back in time to the end of the Roman Republic and the birth of the Empire is there is Tom Holland's Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic. This book gives an overview of the political and military structure of the last years of the Roman Republic and the challenges it faced and how and why it collapsed. It then covers the power struggle that emerged that allowed Augustus Caesar to become Rome's first emperor (in all but name). Both these works offer awesome inspiration for gaming with players having the opportunity to become major movers and shakers in a period of great change. 


Though a dramatized account which makes some sacrifices in accuracy for the purpose of drama, the joint BBC/HBO Rome series is something well worth seeing - in it Rome becomes a real place with people with real ambitions, ranging from wine and women to rulership over all of Rome. 


Closer to the period I am using for for my game is the History Channel's Dark Ages, covering the centuries just after the fall of Rome. It is not very detailed but provides a good overview of the period making it a good starting point.

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Developing a New Campaign Setting - Welcome to Kraken Isle

I've spent a bit of free time working out the details for my campaign setting for Dungeon Crawl Classics. It actually took a bit of debate going back and forth between that and Adventurer Conqueror King System. In the end I decided on DCC, largely due to its somewhat lighter workload for the Judge, though I definitely want to run or play a game of ACKS at some point. I've posted some previous musings on this setting and this may contradict some of them - as the game gets closer to its first session the setting is becoming more concrete as some ideas are modified or discarded.

As I mentioned previously I'm inspired by what I consider to be TSR's old "mini-sandbox" adventures. I don't foresee running a "true" sandbox game with everything wide open but I do want to incorporate a large element of player control. This is what I observed TSR doing in several of their early adventures. While the Lendore Isle series of adventures remains a big inspiration, I am going with a time period of Late Antiquity instead of the Middle Ages as the inspiration for the feel of the cultures. To me that seems more true to the "Appendix N"-ishness of DCC. It seems a setting that has barbarian tribes, decadent cities, slave markets, battles between city-states, and ancient ruins.

I've been bouncing back and forth between starting the game on an island chain off the coast of a main continent or one in a sea resembling the Aegean branch of the Mediterranean. Regardless, I've mapped out the islands themselves:

You can click on it for a bigger version of the map. I'd originally named it Chronos Isle, named after the Greek god of time (and an homage to Lendore Isle from the World of Greyhawk, named after the Suel god of time). However, one of my players got a look at the island and immediately called it "Cthulhu Island". I wasn't about to rename it that but it did get me thinking about its squid-like look which led me to renaming it "Kraken Isle". The main port is on the bay at the northwest quadrant of the island - Rel Kelenan. The naming style is inspired by the World of Greyhawk's Great Kingdom, which often prefixed Aerdy city names with "Rel". This is definitely a city, albeit a smaller sized one, possibly akin to early medieval London in size. I decided I wanted it to have a little bit of character so it is built over a lagoon and therefore resembles Venice in character, with traffic going along its canals and providing protection from ay marauders and invading armies. There are several villages and towns in its vicinity to support the city with crops and there is a another grouping of settlements on the island around Turin's Pasture, on the other side of the Central Highlands. There isn't as much trade as there might be between the two groupings given the marauding tribes that dwell in the woods and mountains of Kraken Isle.

Lets talk about the marauding tribes. If you're like me, when you read that you probably pictured orcs and goblins. (Or you came here to learn about illegal drugs of the 1970s, one of the oddest search terms to ever reach this blog...) James Raggi's The Random Esoteric Creature Generator makes a most excellent suggestion regarding humanoids (and demi-himans):

Eliminate them from the game. If it has two legs and two hands, remove it and replace it with humans. The important thing is – don’t change the cultures or characterizations involved! The ones that were “dwarves” are now mining clans, short and stocky, the “elves” are forest-dwelling hunters, “orcs” are remorseless and savage barbarians, etc. Perhaps they should even keep their special racial abilities (now labeled “cultural abilities”), although it might be difficult to justify seeing in the dark. But really, is there any reason to use an ogre when a human warrior with a few levels on him will do? Is that adding to the danger, the suspense, or the mystery of the game? Details don’t even have to be changed in doing away with non-humans. Normal unclassed humans have roughly the same stats as goblins in most of the individual systems, so there would be no real balance issues in doing this. Don’t make the converted humanoids any more cultured, either.

Raggi indicates going this far out may not be for everyone:

Such issues may not be of interest to every referee or player group. And perhaps the classic fellowship of characters as presented by Tolkien, his peers, and followers is the basic lure for fantasy gaming in the first place. Fine. Use the races, but go back to the source if you do so – Tolkien brought his races together only in the direst of circumstances. 

Assuming a humanocentric focus to the game, every other demihuman and humanoid should be very rare. This does not mean limiting your players’ character choices! Let them be as they wish, but a referee should always be sure that the players are aware that their non-human characters are unusual and never trusted by more superstitious members of the population.. The average human never came into contact with elves or dwarves.

Raggi also goes on to discuss how humanoids such as orcs and goblins appeared only rarely in Tolkien and in special areas. This is a model I want to use. I want to include the classic races (species really, but the term race is perhaps unavoidable in gaming) but I want them to be special. Where are they on my island? I don't know. If there are no PCs of the given race they might not even be there. As far as orcs and goblins go, I'm going to hold off using them at the start. That doesn't mean I won't be using the stats for such races as he suggests if I need quick stats for brigands or barbarians. But I want to save orcs and goblins to be the servant of some wicked sorcerer who may have been responsible for their creation in the first place.


So back to the island. It is nominally part of the empire on the mainland but the empire isn't likely in the best of shape and is far-off. It isn't going to be sending troops to help with marauding humanoids in all likelihood. The ruler of Rel Kelenan is in charge of the archipelago but his control is limited to the settlements - the regions between are wild. And his control of the settlements isn't incredibly powerful either, given his lack of ability to clear the island of threats. But it is a good place for adventurers, with a volcano-destroyed city in the center of the island and ruins to the north reclaimed by wetlands.

But this scope is still a little on the large size. Which brings us the island known as "Little Brother" to the south of the island. I sized it so I would be able to map it in its entirety at a small scale. The map shown here is at a scale of one mile per hex.

The hex grid is a little tough to make out unless you click on the image to see it at actual size. Little Brother is an island that is lightly settled along its southern side with a main town and several villages close to it. To the north I created contours to show a hilly forested region that surrounds a swamp. Some ruins in both the swamp and the hilly region with bad reputations. To me this felt like a starting point for low level adventurers.

However, I'm a constant tinkerer and to be honest I was less than thrilled with the way the map came out. I liked how Kraken Island came out (using Campaign Cartographer) but the map I generated for Little Brother didn't quite feel right. So I went ahead and traced an image of it into Hexographer and tried making a pure hex map, making use of contour lines to show different degrees of hilly and mountainous terrain. I liked this result a bit better:

Again it needs to be expanded to see it in detail. Interestingly, when I tried to generate the map in Hexographer initially I had little luck - my creativity wasn't sparked. However when I started with a Campaign Cartographer 3 drawing as my starting point I found I was better equipped to make the map I wanted to of Little Brother.

My plan is for the characters to begin on Little Brother and those who survive will make it to 1st level. They will in short order go adventuring on the larger Kraken Isle, allowing me to exchange a tiny sandbox for a medium sized one.


One final note. My DCC campaign is currently scheduled to start on Monday June 25 at 7 PM Eastern Time using Google Hangouts. We probably have room for another player if anyone is interested - give me a holler.

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RPG Review: Expedition to Barrier Peaks

Having just seen Prometheus this weekend science-fiction is a bit on my mind right now. This has me thinking about one of the odder 1st edition AD&D adventures, Expedition to Barrier Peaks.

Expedition to Barrier Peaks was, according to its preface, written for the Origins II convention as a way to introduce players to Metamorphosis Alpha, the 1970s TSR RPG about the inhabitants of a lost generation ship (who are no longer aware they are on a ship). In this adventure a space colonization expedition was struck by a plague. Attempting to stop the spread of the plague the components of the ship separated and went their separate ways. The one the adventure takes place on found its way through a black hole to the World of Greyhawk (obviously one could move it to another fantasy setting). Per the story worker robots cleared the cargo hatch and released various alien fauna, some of which prospered (providing an interesting explanation for some of the odder D&D monsters).

Of late local lords have been plagued by strange monsters - monsters discharged from this large alien ship at periodic intervals. Their source has been identified and the PCs dispatched to investigate.

The point of this adventure, if there is one, is to have a romp through a spaceship. There isn't much an overriding threat, though the local lords would surely appreciate it if the PCs could stop the monsters from  harrying them. The adventure consists of lots of memorable locations - for example there are crew quarters, control sections, 'tween decks, recreation areas, a huge park area, cargo areas, etc. There's all sorts of critters and gadgets. Some of the memorable encounters include a tribe of vegepygmies (plant-matter barbarians) and a mind flayer with a blaster.

As you can see, this adventure was also memorable for its illustrations, including an entire booklet of illustrations. It also had a "treasure" that every group I ran this through loved - high-tech gadgets! Blasters, lasers, needlers, powered armor. Tragically the PCs have no way to recharge these gadgets, so they get to play with them for a little while and then its back to "boring" magic weapons - though I can recall at least one player who used a wish to be able to recharge one of his gadgets.

How does this all work? In my experiences this was usually a neat adventure as a diversion. It is a huge "dungeon" so there is some risk of overdoing it, especially without a bigger purpose in the adventure and the inability to keep much of the treasure. There is one encounter where the ship's robots may give the PCs the boot and one time I ran this the players decided that that was enough for their expedition - they didn't try to batter their way back in (not that they didn't enjoy it). 

This does remind me a bit of the situation in Andre Norton's novel Witch World, where there were technological aspects that had found their way into a fantasy setting (indeed, Ms. Norton wrote the novel Quag Keep which featured role-players from our world finding themselves in a D&D world). Were I to use this today I think I would add a rival from the PCs world seeking to secure (or gain more of) the technology in the ship. This is an adventure whose concepts are easy to adapt and would fit in especially well in a Dungeon Crawl Classics game.

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Assembling Resources for a DCC Campaign

With a nice sized group of players I'm in the process of gathering my resources for a Dungeon Crawl Classics game. With a family and job the days of creating everything from scratch are in the past but I still generally like to have my own setting and adventures, though borrowing where possible.

One of the neatest resources I've found is the set of tools developed by Purple Sorcerer Games. They've developed a set of character generators which will randomly roll up a group of four zero-level PCs, including starting background, equipment, all stats, etc. Perfect for an opening adventure. The tools also have a dice roller which has dice-rollers for all the types of dice DCC uses. Adding to its usefulness it also roll for fumbles, critical hits, corruption, spell effects, etc. It includes summaries of various rules such as aspects of combat, special abilities, etc.  Purple Sorcerer has a Kickstarter campaign to make this available as an Android and iOS app - I'd encourage all who play DCC to contribute - at the time of this writing they are about a quarter of their way to their modest goal.


Since the group is geographically dispersed we need some sort of tool for online gaming. For past campaigns I've used Fantasy Grounds but that program has no DCC rules. Therefore for this game I will be using Google+'s hangout feature with the Tabletop Forge add-on, providing tools for maps (including battlemaps if we need them), dice rolling, etc.

While not free, there are some very cheap resources available. 0One Games has a series of low-priced high-quality maps perfect for a dungeon crawl - especially if players go off the beaten path and I need a map in a a hurry.  (I've accidentally discovered that there are certain advantages to starting your name with a a number - I suspect they knew there were advantages). I also suspect I'll be raiding Lamentations of the Flame Princess for adventure ideas, settings, and other resources.

I'm sure I'm missing some but it's worth mentioning that Wikipedia, while not reliable enough for academic use, makes an excellent resource when developing a background, learning some history, getting a quick geography lesson, etc.

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Player vs. Character Abilities

On a recent Google+ conversation I found myself discussing what makes an "old school" D&D game. Part of the conversation involved whether throttling back character abilities is what makes something old school. For example, in AD&D your magic-user can cast a single 1st level spell once per day at first level. He might have as few as 1 hit point and can wear no armor nor master the weapons of a fighter. In the 3rd edition of D&D your 1st level wizard may have multiple spells per day with high intelligence, is guaranteed to start off with at least 4 hit points (barring low constitution), can wear armor if he wants to risk spell failure, can learn how to use fighter weapons, etc. Moving on to 4th edition this wizard at 1st level now has an unlimited amount of magic missiles available to him.

Clearly character abilities, especially at low levels, is something that has increased with newer editions of the game. I'd argue that is certainly part of what one finds in an old school game.

Another part of the equation I would venture is the difference between games that test players vs. those that test characters. In newer incarnations of D&D your character's abilities are far more spelled out. Any character can search for traps or sneak around, it is a simple matter of rolling his or her skill vs. a difficulty. In original "white box" D&D there are no general skills. With AD&D 1st edition we see the introduction of secondary skills. This was very basic - the Dungeon Masters Guide had a table of possible former professions for player characters to give an idea as to the types of things a character might be able to do outside the bounds of his class. The 1st edition Oriental Adventures book expanded on the AD&D concept of weapon proficiencies to double as a rough skill system with non-weapon proficiencies, an idea which was made a bit more formal with the Dungeoneer and Wilderness Survival Guides and made a part of the core rules with the 2nd edition of AD&D. Personally I found the non-weapon proficiency system to be rather mediocre - you received only a small number of them and improving them was something you could only do every few levels. With its 3rd edition D&D moved to a full skill system where many character abilities became linked to skills. In my opinion the skill system developed in 3rd edition is far superior to the non-weapon proficiency system introduced in later 1st edition books.

However, I'm uncertain if D&D always needs a skill system. This isn't to say skills are some newfangled idea that we must huff at with disdain. After all Chaosium's RuneQuest, introduced in 1978, and Game Designers' Workshop's Traveller, from 1977, both had skill systems. So skills are far from a new innovation, even if it did take D&D until the year 2000 to really fully integrate them.

What I've observed in my own experience is what a difference a tightly integrated skill system makes in the way D&D is played. In older versions of D&D it often seemed to me the goal was to challenge the players. There were devices, traps, dungeons, etc. whose challenges were primarily directed at players. In newer versions of D&D a large part of that challenge has been siphoned off to the characters run by the players. I don't want to give the impression that I'm saying all games of 3rd edition or later are simply exercises in dice rolling with no player creativity to be found. I've played and/or DM-ed all versions of D&D except for the original white box and I've found ample opportunity for player creativity. But what I'd see in later editions is a lot more looking at character sheets to see who will perform a given action. Bob thinks of an awesome bluff to get past the guards but Mary's character has a higher fast-talk skill so Mary's character goes to talk to the guard. Mary thinks of a way to solve a puzzle but Bob's character has a better disable device skill. I know a lot of people reading this will say "that's not a bug, that's a good thing". And I can see that point. I'm not a believer in such a thing as badwrongfun or "one true way".

However without such a strong skill system I've found players often do a lot more out of the box thinking. And to be honest, this requires game masters to also do a lot more out of the box thinking as well, which I tend to view as a good thing, despite usually being GM - the way I figure it, it's only fair if I too have to react to a changing set of circumstances. There's such a thing as taking this too far. A common argument is that a character will often have knowledge that a player won't and I tend to agree with this. If my character has lived in a medieval village all my life chances are my character has better wilderness survival skills than I do, even if he's not a ranger or druid. I think the key to handling this in an older school game is having the players leverage their character's knowledge. This often involves a give and take between the player and GM as they discuss what is reasonable for a character to know or be capable of.

There are issues that can make this model work less well for some groups - it requires the GM to adjudicate rulings on the fly very frequently, something which can be tricky to do, especially consistently. But it can make for a very different style of gaming experience and one that I feel is worth trying out.

One of the things I've enjoyed about many of the newer "old school" games is how they deal with the issue of character skill. Dungeon Crawl Classics takes a hybrid of 1st edition's secondary skill system with the 3.x skill resolutions. Adventurer Conqueror King System gives access to a very basic proficiency system which gives characters access to abilities that are somewhere between feats and skills. Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy formalizes the "x in 6" task resolution implied in the D&D Basic/Expert rules into a skill system, making its specialist character the only type who can readily improve such skills. None of these skill systems are so extensive as to preventing the give and take that I described above but they provide a basic foundation which avoids everything falling into "GM fiat".

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RPG Review: Dwellers of the Forbidden City

Earlier I examined some of TSR's earlier adventures which features what were essentially miniature campaign settings. They all had home bases for the adventurers, a wilderness, a decently sized dungeon, etc.

Dwellers of the Forbidden City shares some commonality with those but is also its own beast.

A friend in my first D&D group lent me his copy of Dwellers of the Forbidden City. There was one thing that grabbed my attention immediately. The map. It was a gorgeous map, portraying the titular Forbidden City in all of its glory. Moreover, unlike previous D&D adventures, this map was a 3D drawing. The Forbidden City itself lay at the bottom of a rift. Even without reading a single line of text one's imagination could not help but be stirred. To the best of my knowledge this was the first isometric map to appear in a D&D adventure - it might be the first such map to appear at all.

As can be seen by the low-quality image to the right, the Forbidden City lay at the bottom of some sort of rift. The city consisted of ruined buildings and a lake in the middle of a swamp.You got the impression that these ruins represented a small subset of a larger ruin, though perhaps this section was the only part to survive - perhaps some disaster caused to sink into the earth.

Technically set in The World of Greyhawk setting, this adventure would take all of a second to convert to other setting. All you really need is an unexplored jungle to plop it into.

The background for the adventure involves reports of all sorts of interesting items found by merchants that hail from the Forbidden City. None of these ever make it to market for the caravans are waylaid on their return to civilization. The characters follow rumors of the city into to the jungle and eventually a friendly chief gives them directions and gives them basic information as to what sorts of dangers they might encounter.

There are a few possible ways the characters might get into the city, from attempting to climb down the rift walls to working their way through some tunnels into the city, though of course these are infested with monsters (and for some reason, a reverse gravity region - why is it there? Who knows... That's always been part of the charm of older adventures for me.)

There is no "meta-plot" per se within the Forbidden City. Whose city its once was is fairly unspecific, though there is a suggestion that the serpent-men known as the yuan-ti are degenerate descendants of the original masters and the "mongrelmen" (hybrids of a few gazillion humanoid, human, and demi-human races) are descendants of the original masters. The yuan-ti are a neat little Lovecraftian monster which has become a classic of D&D - I believe this was their first appearance and I believe they've appeared in every AD&D/D&D 3.x/4e version since. They are degenerate men who have somehow interbred with snakes, with various stages of degeneration. One interesting tidbit is they are only encountered as wandering monsters, venturing into the city and back out again, much like the adventurers.

The city itself is full of factions - an evil wizard, bullywugs, bugbears, mongrelmen, etc. My group got a kick out of encountering bullywugs given they were the main mooks of the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon of the early 80s. The characters have an incentive to become one of the factions - wandering monsters are an extra-painful threat at night in the Forbidden City, though after the adventurers keep a camp for an extended period of time the chances of encounters decreases dramatically as their presence in the city becomes accepted, if not loved, by the other factions. This is important, as there is no "home base" for the characters within the city, though in an emergency they could presumably seek out the native village from whence they received directions.

The adventure ends with some additional suggested reasons the characters might visit the city along with possible adventures and expansions to the city. There is also a section of new monsters, for a lot of the creatures within were new at the time.


Like many early TSR adventures, this adventure can double as a campaign. In a brief booklet we've got material that could be used for a single adventure or easily stretched out for an entire campaign. As its tag of "I1" indicates it is for intermediate level characters. It could easily be adapted to many of the newer "Old School" games. Of the ones I've reviewed so far, the lost city element of it certainly seems appropriate to the "Appendix N" nature of Dungeon Crawl Classics. It has the Lovecraftian elements which make it a good fit for Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy. And in a game of Adventurer Conqueror King characters could conceivably try to set up their own domain in the city or in its vicinity or use its riches to finance their own domain.

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