Apologies for the long absence ... had a lot going on lately. Still do. And gaming, at the moment, isn't really a part of that at all.

However, I'd be totally remiss if I didn't mention that tomorrow was Free RPG Day. Some great stuff - new, and for free - from some great gaming companies. Did I mention it was free? So hopefully your Friendly Local Gaming Store is participating, and you can go check things out there (and support your FLGS while you're at it.)

Myself, I'm looking forward to checking out the Warhammer 40K Deathwatch offering from Fantasy Flight Games, and the new Dark Sun 4E adventure from Wizards of the Coast. (Always loved Dark Sun ...)

Oh. Right. And some guy wrote this for Goodman Games.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Happy Dice Rolling!

“Shadows of Leningrad” – my first foray into creating a “Call of Cthulhu” adventure for publication – was a challenge to write.

It also was a hell of a lot of fun.

As I’ve noted before on this blog, “Call of Cthulhu” ranks as one of my favorite games of all time. When the Age of Cthulhu line was announced by Goodman Games, I immediately contacted the good folks there, and let them know that I’d be very interested in writing an adventure for the line. One thing led to another from there, and … wham. From there, the ball started rolling on “Shadows”.

Writing “Shadows” proved to be much more difficult than any other adventure I’d previously written. One of the main reasons for this was because I wanted to make this a non-linear adventure. For the most part, the traditional fantasy adventures I’ve previously written for publication were very linear – players (and their characters) were expected to go from point A to point B to point C during the adventure, in that specific order, without much room for deviation. In a fantasy adventure, that’s simple enough to do – especially when you make the environment of the adventure a castle, or a series of underground caverns, where you can better control all of the chokepoints in the adventure, and where and when encounters occur. That works fine for fantasy … but in a city-based Call of Cthulhu adventure, not so much. There may be unspeakable horrors lurking in every shadow of a CoC adventure, but the game’s firmly grounded in reality. And reality involves choices. Forcing players down a linear railroad just wasn’t something I wanted to do with “Shadows”.

(“No, you can’t go to the sanitarium yet, you need to go to the library, even though based on how you’ve read the clues, it makes perfect sense that you'd want to go the sanitarium.")

So I structured “Shadows” in such a manner that you could start the adventure from a few different scenes, not just one. Clues in each scene would potentially lead to several other scenes, in a way that the order wasn’t terribly important, and in a way that usually meant there were choices. In "Shadows", you don’t have to go from Scene 1 to Scene 2 to Scene 3, in that order. Instead, you can potentially start in Scene 2, then go to Scene 1, then go to Scene 5, then to Scene 4, for example … it took a bit of planning in the early writing stages, but it’s possible.

The scenes all eventually lead to the same place, but I felt it important that players in the adventure have options, and be able to make legitimate choices, not ones forced upon them. (In one of the playtests, the investigators skipped over an entire scene, believing it not to be important, and it ultimately didn’t affect the outcome of the adventure.) This looser, investigative structure mirrors much more closely how I tend to run my own home games (whether Call of Cthulhu, D&D, or Warhammer), so I’m pleased that I was able to work a similar structure into “Shadows”, despite the extra planning that it required.

The other difficulty came from trying to make the adventure historically accurate. I’ve always been fascinated with Russian culture and history, so the original thought – “let’s set an adventure in Leningrad” – seemed an easy choice. However, if you want to make an adventure set in an actual place believable, it means making the details accurate.

In a fantasy adventure, it’s very easy to say “the orc has a sword” without getting into specifics of what type of sword. The made-up town that the heroes need to travel to – how long does it take them to get there after leaving the dungeon? Since I just made the dungeon and the town up in the first place, it’s easy for me to say as the author “oh, three days”, and not worry about checking for things like accuracy. In cases like that, I'm not checking facts, I'm making them up, and it works.

For Call of Cthulhu, though, when you say “the Soviet secret policeman has a gun” … well, what kind of gun? (The answer is “typically a Nagant M1895 Revolver, in 1927.”) When you say “they take the characters to the sanitarium” … was there actually a sanitarium in Leningrad in the 1920s? (“Yes.”) Was the city even called Leningrad in 1927? (“Yes. The city was originally named St. Petersburg, then renamed Petrograd in 1914, then renamed Leningrad in 1924 after Lenin died, and then finally restored back to St. Peterburg in 1991.”) What was the U.S./Soviet monetary exchange rate in 1927? And so on. A lot of it doesn't necessarily relate to the actual adventure itself, but it does all tie into making the world in which the adventure takes a believable one.

In adventures like this, you can’t just make assumptions about how things work. As an author, you need to take the time to research all the details properly. And there’s a lot of details, many of which only get a casual mention in the adventure … but it’s important to get all them right, if you can. The process added up to way, way more research and work than I would typically need for writing a fantasy adventure.

Ultimately, though, the process was enjoyable, and I think the adventure’s all the better for the additional work, so I can’t complain.

(And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the editorial crew on “Shadows” – Chad Bowser, Ken Hart, and Matthew “Pookie” Pook, who took the time to review what I’d written. I'll just say that if the historical facts are right in “Shadows”, thank them for verifying what I’d originally written, or for correcting my mistakes; if you find something that’s wrong, blame me.)

As I said, the adventure was a challenge. But I enjoyed writing “Shadows” immensely, so it was all worth it … and then some. “Shadows” stands at the moment as one of the adventures I’m most proud of writing so far in my freelancing career. I’m glad I had the opportunity to contribute something to the world of “Age of Cthulhu”.

And I hope you enjoy it as well. Please let me know if you do.

And if you do like it … well, here’s something to look forward to, to be released on Free RPG Day – Saturday, June 19, 2010.

Three things you may have noticed in yesterday’s post, about the long-ago encounter with the vampire queen.

1) The average level of the characters in the party was around 4th-5th level. We were fighting a vampire with access to magic-user spells, a bunch of ghouls, and I think a wraith were in the fray as well. In a straight-up fight, we were completely outmatched. Fortunately, we fought dirty, and the little trick with the makeshift holy water made the odds a bit better.

2) We still didn’t win the fight, at least not in conventional terms. The vampire queen survived, as did probably half the ghouls. We only got rid of the wraith with a lucky turning roll by my cleric, killed a few ghouls, and mostly stalled until the thief got the sword we wanted. Then we ran. We considered it a win, even though in terms of the fight, we would’ve been killed if we stayed around a couple rounds longer.

3) John’s druid was – thanks to a deck of many things – several levels higher than the rest of us. I think he was 8th-level (that’s what pulling the Sun card will get you!) while the rest of us were 4th. But the same deck also killed another player’s character when he pulled the Skull card, and another lost all of his magic items and treasure when he pulled the Ruin card. For the most part, that deck was extraordinarily cruel to our group.

In short? An unbalanced group, and an unbalanced encounter.

Shockingly, the campaign worked very, very well.

I’ll be the first to say that designing encounters for 1st-edition AD&D could be a complete bitch. There wasn’t anything solid to look at when you wanted to see what 4th-level characters could handle. Some 5 HD monsters worked better than others, some would have weird powers that would make them ten times as powerful as another otherwise equivalent monster, some sucked as lone monsters but were great in groups … experience, built by trial and error, was the best guide towards developing your own personal “challenge rating” for monsters. And it wasn’t always pretty. I know I ran one or two adventures where the monsters started “missing” just to give the players the opportunity to retreat, since the players were about to otherwise get slaughtered (and they knew it). I had no qualms about having monsters kill people’s characters; I just never wanted it to be because the DM (me) designed a lousy encounter.

However, I will say this – the attitude kept you on your toes, and led for much more of a variety in encounters. Oftentimes, the encounters weren’t too powerful, they were too weak … but in the context of an adventure, they made sense. I remember one adventure when the same group (more or less), a couple of levels higher, had to storm a stronghold of a warlord. The warlord was a tough son-of-a-bitch who rode a blue dragon, or something like it that was hideously tough, and some of his main henchmen were extremely powerful as well.

As for the guardians of the stronghold , patrolling its walls? Orcs. Ordinary, shabby, 6 hp orcs. Our fighters could kill them with a single swing of the sword (adding up bonuses for Strength and their magic weapons, they automatically dealt 6 hp of damage, if not more.) Unless the fighters rolled a 1, the orcs died. The trick was to do it quietly, so they didn’t warn their masters. We never looked at having to kill lowly orcs as a waste of time or a pain in the ass; it was part of the adventure.

On the other side of that, we got fights like the warlord. And the vampire queen. Foes that we weren’t sure if we could take in a fight or not. There were encounters – some, not often, but enough – where we were overmatched, and we had to retreat to stay alive. And that was taken as a given. Resource management and tactics played a part in things, but there was always a chance that no matter how well we approached an encounter, no matter how clever our tactics, no matter is every character and every hireling was at full strength, our characters were going to die if we fought until the bitter end.

(This didn't necessarily mean we were expected to die when we were overmatched, by the way. Sometimes it was a not-too-subtle way of saying that we were missing something, like a particular magic item. Sometimes it meant coming back for revenge at a higher level. Sometimes it meant getting more hirelings and henchmen. And, sometimes, it meant talking with your enemy was a far better idea than drawing your sword.)

We entered virtually encounter not knowing if we’d survive or not, and damn it, it was exciting. We usually lived, but there was enough character deaths from opponents who were too powerful or the ever-lamentable failed save vs. poison to know that our characters lived in a dangerous, violent world. Just surviving a trip through a dungeon was great; surviving and grabbing the treasure was awesome.

When Third Edition D&D came around, I remember spotting the Challenge Ratings that had been assigned to each monster. I remember reading about Encounter Levels, and nodding my head. Thank Crom. No more need to agonize over whether mixing a bulette with six hobgoblins would be too tough for a party of 5th-level characters, or whether a fight in the graveyard would be better with five ghouls or eight. On the face of it – and I still believe this – knowing how to balance encounters in a game is a Very, Very Good Thing.

But …

The problem – again, just in my opinion – came when players began expecting encounters to be balanced, and when the adventures published for the game took that into consideration.

An initial fight in a D&D 3.5 adventure – or, for that matter, one in 4E – is almost never considered to be something lethal by players, unless it’s completely misplayed or everyone’s dice goes cold all at once. Balance has evolved the game, to a certain degree, into resource management. Players know that as long as they face reasonably-balanced encounters, they almost certainly can survive a couple of combat encounters before needing to heal up and memorize new spells.

And, in a modern gaming philosophy, they expect reasonably balanced encounters, since that’s what is presented and recommended in the rules, and that’s what gets featured in most modern adventures. Players usually don’t give any real thought to retreating from that first or second fight because it’s too tough, since according the “balanced” philosophy, it shouldn’t be too tough. If retreat becomes necessary, then the encounter’s labeled “unfair”. (Assuming the players recognize the need to retreat, of course; if they don’t, then there’s a Total Party Kill before the encounter’s labeled “unfair”.) If the encounter’s not balanced, then the thought is something is wrong, and that’s something I don’t agree with at all.

Other changes to the modern editions of D&D, made in the name of balance … yeah, I didn’t like those much, either. Poison that just causes damage, rather than killing characters outright? Ugh. The deck of many things somehow made the cut to Third Edition, but I wasn’t surprised to see it cut from 4E – Crom forbid that a party not be comprised of everyone from the same level. Ugh.

I totally get the basic premise – balance makes for better designed encounters, which can lead to better adventures. And nobody (well, almost nobody) is a big fan of having their character die simply because they botched one lousy saving throw. If you think balance is a good price to pay for making your adventures better, and makes the players at your table happier, well, I can’t – and won’t – argue with you. If you hate the randomness of the old school game systems, that’s totally fine.

My point is this – much like the rules of an old-school game versus those of a modern game, I think balance is better as a guideline, not a rule. Balance should help in creating adventures, but it shouldn’t be a given that all encounters must be reasonably balanced. Retreat isn’t always a bad thing. The adventures don’t always need to be fair in terms of design or rules. The simple fact that your character can die in any given encounter – to me – makes the game much more dangerous, and much more exciting. And, to me, that keeps the adventures more interesting, and makes the victories all the sweeter.

Just my opinion, though. Or, maybe the rantings of a gamer screaming GET OFF MY LAWN. So feel free to ignore them.

Although I guess I’m more of an old school gamer than I originally thought.

More and more lately, I keep finding myself trying to define what an old school game would be. Some people say it’s not something that can be defined; I don’t really agree with that. Some people define old school as simpler games; can’t agree with that, either. Just take a look at the character creation rules for Traveler sometime, or all the henchmen tables in the 1st-edition AD&D Dungeon Masters’ Guide – not simple. In fact, pretty clunky and rules-heavy at times.

Arriving at a simple definition of old school gaming isn’t something that’s painfully obvious (at least to me), so I decided to give it some thought. I’d previously taken a look at the various editions of D&D and AD&D, so I went back to that and tried specifically looking at the break from 1st and 2nd Edition AD&D to its more modern counterparts – to me, the dividing line comes somewhere in there. After knocking the idea around for a bit, what I concluded was this:

Old school – to me – means that the rules are firm guidelines, intended to mostly define how the game works, but do not ultimately decide how a situation works. The gamemaster is intended to be the final arbiter of how things work. In a more modern game system, the rules aren’t guidelines, they’re laws. The gamemaster’s job is to interpret those laws.

Let me give an example of this.

A very long, long, long time ago on a Tuesday night, in my friend Eric’s 1st-edition AD&D Tunnelworld campaign, our hardy band of adventurers encountered a Haigyptian vampire queen beneath a pyramid. The vampire queen had several ghoulish friends with her, and our party was outmatched and outnumbered. We were there, ostensibly, to parley with her in order to acquire a magic sword from her, or something like that. I think Eric’s plan was that we would agree to go on a quest for her, get some cool artifact, and return to the pyramid after we’d gained a few levels and were capable of taking her on. But, like all good villains do, Eric had her start monologuing at us, so we started plotting ideas.

I was playing a cleric (about 4th-level, I think), my friend John was playing a druid (a deck of many things had him a couple of levels higher than the rest of us). We hit upon the same idea at about the same time.

“Hey, did you know create water is a ranged spell? Only takes one round to cast it.”

“If we create water over her head, and bless it, would that be holy water?”

“Holy water does what – 1d6 points of damage for a direct hit from a vial, 1 point for a splash, something like that?”

“It says we can create a couple of gallons of water with a create water spell.”

“How much water is in a vial?”

“The book says 4 ounces.”

“How many ounces in, say, 4 gallons?”

Pause, for some math.

“Holy shit.”

“Let’s do it.”

So, when the monologue was completed, we announced our plan to Eric. We wanted to dump several gallons of holy water on the vampire queen’s head.

After a brief amount of shock, Eric went through the Dungeon Master’s Guide to see if our plan was even viable, and we pored over our Players’ Handbooks. We really didn’t think the plan would work – it seemed way too easy (and we hadn’t really grasped the concept of ‘broken rules’ as yet, so that notion didn’t occur to us, either.)

Now, here’s the part that helps define old school. Technically, we couldn’t do it. Page 114 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide actually explains the creation of holy water (it’s a ritual that takes hours, spells like purify water are also needed, etc.) But we never found that rule in the book that particular night. Nor, quite honestly, did we look terribly long for it. We were used to the rulebooks not covering exactly what we wanted to do, so we didn’t assume the rules for making holy water must be in the book. Were this D&D 3.5, for example, or 4E, I think we would’ve pored over the books for hours if needed, looking for the precise rules to fit what we were attempting. We would’ve been more determined to have the rules of the game precisely define our actions.

Instead, after maybe fifteen minutes of looking over rulebooks and failing to find what we wanted, Eric made the decision. He thought it seemed ridiculous to just be able to make the equivalent of a holy water atomic bomb over a vampire, so he said we couldn’t do that. However, he basically gave us the equivalent of a Dexterity check (roll your Dex or less on a d20) to cast our spells without being noticed … and then our makeshift holy water would do 6d6 points of damage, or something like that. If we wanted to go through with this plan, that’s how things would work.

So we agreed to it. And we pulled off the plan, such as it was, and much to our own amazement. We rolled really well with the damage, fought the vampire queen and her ghouls long enough for our thief to sneak off undetected and snag the magic sword we were supposed to negotiate for, and then we all ran like hell. We didn’t kill the queen, but we caused enough mayhem to get the treasure. (In what I always thought was a great touch, we encountered the vampire queen again later on in the campaign, with her formerly beautiful face covered by a jewel-encrusted silver mask, as the holy water had horribly burned her flesh.)

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “You can do that with 3.5 and 4E as well.”

Well, yeah … but both systems are designed to more precisely define what you can and can’t do. They’re intended to be the laws defining the game world, not be guidelines. If you ignore the rules in 3.5 and 4E, well, you’re ignoring a lot. But if you’re playing Holmes/Moldvay Basic D&D, or 1st-Edition AD&D … the game’s a lot less dependent on the rules. They might be overly complex or cumbersome at times, but they’re not meant to necessarily describe how every possible action in the game works. In those earlier games, the rules are intended to help shape the game, not rigidly define it.

Another example of this, perhaps.

You have a character in a game. You’re chasing after a villain in a grand ballroom. You want to leap off a balcony, grab onto a chandelier, jump to the ground, and take a swing at the villain before he can escape.

In 3.5, if you’ve got the right combination of skills and feats, you can pull this off. You probably even have a good idea of if you’ll be successful or not. If you don’t have the right combination of skills and feats, you know right away if you can do this or not.

In 4E, same thing. You may even have class powers that help (or not), and the DM may choose to frame this as a Skill Challenge.

In more old school games … there’s no hard and fast rules for this. It might come down more to the DM saying “you can’t do that”, and that’s the end of it. However, in most games I’ve played, the DM may allow this with some rudimentary sort of check (roll under your Dex, make a saving throw vs. Dragon Breath, whatever). I tend to personally prefer this, only because this method – to me – often better serves the adventure at hand. A wizard in 3.5 and 4E would never try this in a million years, only because the odds of achieving all of the appropriate skill checks (and having all of the appropriate feats) are next to none. A magic-user from an older game, though … well, the odds might be low, but at least there’s a chance.

Old school games tend to be a little more wide open, which inspires creativity. It’s probably the thing about D&D 4E that I find the most disappointing – the powers, to me, limit what your characters can do. In running mid-level fighters in 1st-edition AD&D, I found myself trying all sorts of crazy tactics in battle, unsure if they would work … and that was part of the fun of it. In 4E, you try to figure out how to maximize the use of your at-wills, your encounter and your daily powers … and you tend not to stray too far from them, as you’re giving up too much by doing so. Can your 4E fighter do other things in combat? Absolutely. But the rules aren’t designed to actively support that openness, and they don’t encourage trying new things.

I don’t say this in any way to knock newer games. (Hell, I just started running a 4E campaign of my own!) Old-school games have plenty of their own issues. For me, there isn’t a dream edition of D&D or AD&D – each has their own merits and flaws.

But there’s something I personally prefer to the old-school approach, which is probably more of a gaming philosophy than anything else. I prefer DMs working with players to achieve crazy things, like dumping several gallons of holy water on a vampire queen’s head, with the rules meant as something to guide a game, rather than be the game. And for what it's worth, I personally think old school games lend themselves better to achieving moments like that.

Memo to any would-be writers out there – never, ever throw anything you’ve written away.

You never know when it might come in handy.

A couple of years ago, I was asked to write a follow-up to a project I’d written that had already been published. That follow-up included a full-length adventure, and some gazetteer-type material giving some history and backstory to both the new adventure and the initial project.

Of course, I agreed to write the follow-up, and was pretty stoked to do so. In particular, I was stoked about writing the gazetteer parts of the follow-up. I tend to write lots of backstory for just about all the adventures I’ve ever written, even though that backstory usually doesn’t see the light of day – I just like figuring out the hows and whys behind an adventure, and backstory is a good way of figuring that out. For example, I’ve got lots of material on the duergar armies and kingdoms for “Dreaming Caverns of the Duergar”, even though the adventurers only meet a duergar advance scouting party in the adventure. I wrote a whole history for the frost giants in "Talons of the Horned King", even though they aren't even encountered in that adventure. It’s a bit overkill, but it works for me.

So the chance to take some of that material and work it into something worthy of publication … awesome. I spent quite a bit of time on that and the adventure (which remains probably the best adventure I’ve written), sent it to the publisher, and … waited.

And waited. And waited. Finally, I got asked to rewrite parts of the adventure. Did that, and waited. And waited. Finally, I got asked to rewrite parts on the adventure again, and to trim it down to about half its original length. Wasn’t thrilled about that, but did it anyway. And then waited, and waited, and waited …

All of the rewrites happened during the first year after I’d submitted the original drafts. I spent another two years simply waiting. During that time, I’d send an e-mail to the editors every few months, inquiring as to the status of the project. Sometimes I got answers; usually, I didn’t. When I did get answers, they usually said something along the lines of the manuscripts would probably go into production “shortly”, and the follow-up project would be published “soon”.

Second memo to any would-be writers out there – when you’re being told “shortly” and “soon” by a company for over two years, and that company is publishing other products during that time … “shortly” and “soon” aren’t quite the answers that apply to your situation.

The real answer is “we have your project, we keep meaning to publish your project, but now we have a ton of other projects in the production line we’d rather publish instead, we really should just cancel your project, but since there’s maybe a 2% chance we’ll actually publish someday, we won’t do that.” Which, on a certain level … well, I appreciate folks that mean well, but I appreciate realists far more. I’d rather that people be blunt and cancel a project that’s going nowhere, instead of trying to be nice, and inadvertently stringing freelancers along for far too long about something that's realistically never, ever going to be published.

So at the beginning of last year, I simply asked to have the rights to all of the material to be reverted to me. I didn’t care about payment, I just wanted my stuff back, and the rights to publish it elsewhere if I so chose. For some reason, the editor was very confused as to why I’d ask for such a thing, but accepted my request. I was left with an adventure and a gazetteer with nowhere to go … but at least they were going nowhere because of me. I could live with that.

A few weeks after that, I got asked by Paizo to contribute to a book called “The Guide to the River Kingdoms”, a gazetteer for the Pathfinder RPG. The River Kingdoms are a rough-and-tumble collection of bandit kingdoms in Paizo’s campaign world of Golarion. It’s the sort of place that’s chock-full of wild adventure, just my sort of taste for a campaign setting … and very similar to the material in the gazetteer I’d already written a few years ago.

No, I just didn’t rename my existing gazetteer material and submit that to Paizo. For one thing, the project had a bunch of specific requirements that I hadn’t covered in my old gazetteer material. For another, I needed to make the material much more specific to the Pathfinder RPG, to the world of Golarion, and more importantly, to fit in with the material of the other authors for the River Kingdoms book. (I got to collaborate with Colin McComb of “Planescape” fame on a bunch of ideas, which was a lot of fun.) For a third … well, I’m not the sort of writer who can let something sit around for years and not tinker around with it. The original material was good, but I knew I could make it better.

So, the material I wrote for my section of the River Kingdoms – the Kingdom of Pitax – was by and large new, written and rewritten more specifically for Paizo. But the core of that material, and many of the underlying ideas, came from the original gazetteer material I’d written years before. Waste not, want not.

I guess Paizo liked what I wrote about Pitax, because I was later asked to expand upon it and write additional gazetteer material for an upcoming Paizo Adventure Path called “War of the River Kings”. There’s also going to be full-blown maps available for Pitax and the other River Kingdoms, which is pretty damn sweet.

I’m very pleased with how it all turned out, and hope you’ll enjoy it as well. Myself, I’m still scratching my head over how my name is mentioned in the credits alongside the likes of China Miéville, Chris Pramas, Elaine Cunningham, and Steve Kenson … but I’m not complaining. Not at all.

So, save what you write, even if you don’t think it’s going anywhere, or you don’t know quite what to do with it. You’ll find a use for it someday.

Promise.

I was planning on writing a blog post relatively soon about one of my favorite games not featuring "Dungeons & Dragons" in the title:

However, I noticed that the main person responsible for creating the game - a certain Mr. Jeff Grubb - wrote an interesting post regarding the genesis of the Marvel Super Heroes RPG. For those interested, by all means, please go read it: HERE.

I'll save most of my own thoughts on the Marvel Super Heroes RPG for a later time, but suffice it to say I found it to be a great, easy game to play. It also emulated the superhero genre quite nicely - when playing a character, you felt like you could do anything you'd ever seen or read in a comic book. I've played other superhero systmes where that simply wasn't the case - your character would take forver to heal from a simple battle, or be unable to even do simple things like running from rooftop to rooftop. The fact that Marvel Super Heroes could do so while using a pretty simplistic rules system was always something impressive to be.

Besides ... FASERIP. That's just a great name for a rules system involving superheroes.

Time to get out the boxed set this weekend ...

I think I found my dream version of Dungeons & Dragons.

Sadly, I don’t think I’ll ever find a group with which to run or play it at this point in my life … but them’s the breaks. I’m just happy to have found it, to have read it, and to just know it exists. Someday …

The way I was introduced to playing D&D was sort of weird. However, I think it happened in a manner that many gamers who started playing in the late Seventies and early Eighties (like myself) would understand. I made an elf as my very first character, using the Moldvay/Cook Basic/Expert rules set for D&D – the ones with the Erol Otus covers. With a little “tweaking” from the DM, I played that character in “Expedition to the Barrier Peaks” … a module written for 1st-edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. My sister Laura had a similar experience, as she made a halfling from the B/X D&D rules and played it in “Tomb of Horrors” as her first adventure – talk about a trial by fire! In both of our cases, we made characters for one rules set and played them in another that was sort-of-but-not-really-100%-compatible … and, for the most part, it worked.

Most of my earliest gaming experiences worked like that, randomly bouncing things between “boxed set” D&D and the “rulebook” AD&D, like playing assassins in “Castle Amber” and other such things. For a long time, it didn’t really occur to me that there was anything really different between the two. Both D&D and AD&D were all supposed to be “Dungeons & Dragons”, so I assumed (as did most gamers I knew at the time) they were all meant to be part of the same game.

At the time, I was also flying model airplanes in competition events where there were four skill levels: Basic, Intermediate, Advanced, and Expert. For some reason, I assumed that D&D worked exactly the same way as my model airplane competitions, and that “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” was somehow supposed to slide neatly between “Basic” and “Expert”. The fact that a careful analysis of “Advanced” D&D would instantly shoot holes in that logic never fazed me; at the time, that’s just what I believed. (I also spent an inordinate amount of time searching for “Intermediate” D&D rules, to no avail …)

Though the D&D/AD&D games I played back then eventually moved over towards something far closer to what was in the AD&D rulebooks, and the Basic/Expert D&D elements eventually got phased out, those games that I played always remained, by and large, houseruled games. I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about this in recent years, and I think it’s one of the main components of what I’d call the “grognard” experience. Basically, I learned how to play D&D/AD&D not from reading the rulebooks in any great detail, but simply by playing with more experienced gamers who “already knew the rules”. I learned enough of the rules so that I could make a character, but I never really knew a lot of the fiddly details. It was much more of an informal experience – rather than relying on the Rules As Written, there was much more of a reliance on the Rules As Played. When I eventually started running my own AD&D games, I essentially took the rules as I’d learned them through play, and used them to run my own games, despite the fact that a close examination of the rulebooks would’ve revealed I wasn’t doing certain things “correctly”, or at least with the Rules As Written.

I think this is how a lot of gamers learned to play back in the late Seventies and early Eighties. There was no online community, no global group of gamers with which to easily check and compare ways to interpret rules or to optimize characters. The only way to get rules clarifications from TSR was to mail a letter to “Sage Advice” in Dragon Magazine and hope that it got answered … in a couple of months. Rules disputes and interpretations back then were all handled within the group, without relying on “official” rules interpretations.

Compare that now to D&D 3.0, or 3.5, or 4E. When 3.0 was released, everyone started from the same playing field, so to speak … it was no longer a matter of learning from group to group, but an entire community learning how to play a game they loved all over again all at once. And, with the advent of the Internet, it was easy to share that experience, and to compare notes with one another, and to get “official” rulings and errata from the writers of the game very, very quickly. That’s when the game shifted more from something that had rules which varied from group to group, to something where everyone could adhere more strongly to the Rules As Written. I don’t look at either method as necessarily right or wrong … they’re just different.

I’ve learned over the years that I really liked the loose flexibility of my old AD&D games. I never really liked the mechanical bloat of D&D 3.0/3.5 and its stubborn insistence on explaining how everything works. I like D&D 4E a little better, but it strays perhaps a bit too far from the old versions of D&D/AD&D for my liking. I like both of those versions of the game, and enjoy playing them a lot, but they’re far from my own personal “ideal” version of the game.

My own dream version of D&D is something that’s rules-light, and that doesn’t rely on miniatures for combat. While I used to love painting miniatures, I never really used them in my own games, apart from big battle or when combat would get super-crazy in terms of the number of opponents the characters faced. I never used the weapon speed factor chart from AD&D as written (then again, who did?), instead relying on a slight penalty for polearms and a slight bonus for darts and daggers. I never used the flanking rules, or a whole bunch of other combat rules listed in the good old original Dungeon Masters Guide (most of which I didn’t remember, or even knew existed until a careful re-read of the book a few years ago!).

In short … my ideal version of the game is Basic/Expert D&D, with a healthy smattering of 1st-edition AD&D thrown in for good measure.

A few years ago, Goblinoid Games put out a game called Labyrinth Lord, a “retro-clone” of the Moldvay/Cook Basic/Expert rules set for D&D. Now, they’ve just put out the Advanced Edition Companion for Labyrinth Lord … an optional rules set that lets gamers add in fun stuff to their Labyrinth Lord games like gnomes, assassins, and the demon lord Orcus.

Kind of sounds like Basic/Expert D&D, with a healthy smattering of 1st-edition AD&D thrown in for good measure, and it is. And it works beautifully.

The main thing I love about the Labyrinth Lord/ Advanced Edition Companion combination is that it retains that wonderful “old school” simplicity while streamlining and cleaning things up. A Labyrinth Lord game using the Advanced Edition Companion wouldn’t be like the old days of mishmashing B/X D&D with AD&D – the Advanced Edition Companion makes the amalgamation of the two concepts pretty damn seamless.

Granted, I wish there were a few more tweaks to the Advanced Edition Companion rules that more closely matched some of the better house rules I’ve heard for AD&D (like giving magic-users a spell bonus for high Intelligence, in the way clerics get a spell bonus for high Wisdom), but overall, I can’t complain. It’s done extremely well. Kudos to Daniel Proctor for making such a great addition to an already great game.

So now, the Advanced Edition Companion sits on my shelf, patiently waiting to be played someday. Realistically, that day might never come. Most of the gamers I know right now are much more into D&D 4E, or Pathfinder, or Exalted. Of all the gamers I know and roll dice with, “old school” D&D seems to be something that only interests me at the moment.

But if you want a game that provides a fantastic old-school gaming experience, one perfectly suited for the dungeon crawling days of yore, look no further than Labyrinth Lord and the Advanced Edition Companion. It’s a perfect fit for that open style of gaming.

And who knows? Weirder things have happened. The Advanced Edition Companion may get its chance someday …

Certain monsters always grabbed my attention. I don't know why. I suppose it's because most of them featured prominently in many of the modules I played during my earliest forays into gaming. The yuan-ti, of course, remain the favorite. But I've also always had a soft spot for critters like the xorn, the phanatons from "The Isle of Dread", yellow musk creepers ... and, of course, vegepygmies, who very nearly killed my very first character during "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks".

I've tried - where I can - to incorporate these nasty beasties into the adventures I've written over the years. One of the reasons "Dreaming Caverns of the Duergar" remains my favorite published adventure to date is because it contains a good number of those creatures, such as the executioner's hood, the yellow musk creeper, yellow musk zombies, and vegepygmies. (True story - that almost didn't happen. I submitted the original outline for "Caverns" to Joseph Goodman, who sent back a quick note saying "Nice, but why don't you put a fungal garden somewhere in the caverns?" I thought about what sorts of creatures would live in that garden, and suddenly some vegepygmies and yellow musk critters decided to make their way into the adventure.)

I even went so far as to start writing some additional supplemental material about the vegepygmies in the adventure, but between word court and relevance to the actual story adventure, it didn't really fit. So I cut it out of the final manuscript, and saved it for a project for another day.

Today's that day.

"Behind the Monsters: Vegepygmy", published by the folks at Tricky Owlbear, is now available. It lists me as the writer ... truth be told, it's a collaboration between myself and Bret Boyd. For whatever reason, I could never get my original concepts to mesh in a finished format that I liked. It was mostly there, but certain elements were missing, and I wasn't happy with that. Bret took my ideas and polished them up nicely.

My personal favorite part of the piece is the vegegyant (someone big who's green but decidely not jolly), but overall, I think it came out pretty well.

If you're interested in checking it out, it's available at a bunch of places, like RPGNow, YourGamesNow, and Paizo. It was a neat little project to write, and I hope you enjoy it.

Confession time – I’ve never been a big fan of mega-dungeons.

I think this is more due to my typical game play style than anything else. Most of the original adventures run and played by my own long-time gaming group simply don’t fit the mega-dungeon format. Our adventures tended to prominently feature roleplaying and investigation, with a smattering of combat here and there. If anything, a typical adventure session of my group has aptly been described as a sword-and-sorcery version of “The A-Team” – receive a mission, come up with a ridiculously elaborate plan to combat the enemy, and then fight the enemy in one big battle. (The ridiculously elaborate plan rarely survives initial contact with the enemy, but that’s neither here nor there.) Sustained, small encounters didn’t fit the style of our group … nor did adventures taking place at a single location. Our characters were the original group of well-armed mercenary hobos, going from place to place in search of adventure, never stopping at any particular location for more than a gaming session or two.

As you’ll see later, it’s a style that doesn’t always lend itself well to a good mega-dungeon format.

That being said, mega-dungeons always fascinated me. They fascinate a lot of gamers. If you’re a longtime gaming grognard (like myself), I think the legend of Castle Greyhawk has a lot to do with that. Castle Greyhawk was undeniably the original mega-dungeon, and the late Gary Gygax wrote and spoke about it frequently in the early editorials of Dragon Magazine and other places, as did the other TSR folks who played in Gary’s original D&D campaigns. It always sounded awesome – bigger (literally!) and better than any other adventure. The fact that Gary kept talking about finally publishing it someday – but never getting around to it – also helped to build its mythical status as something grand, as anticipation built up steadily for it for years and years, with gamers wanting to finally get a glimpse of one of Gary’s greatest creations.

(Sadly, that never came to fruition; hints of what was and could’ve been only came through the wretched abomination known as the module WG7: Castle Greyhawk; the much-better modules EX1: Dungeonland, EX2: The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror, and WG6: Isle of the Ape, which showcased some of the extraplanar levels of the Castle; the much-later Greyhawk Ruins and the much-much-later Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk, which finally started to assemble some of Gary’s original scattered ideas for Castle Greyhawk into a consolidated format, but written by different authors; and finally, Castle Zagyg, which was finally the Gary Gygax-penned iteration of Castle Greyhawk everyone had always hoped to see … but it unfortunately was not fully completed before he passed away.)

And even if the legend of Castle Greyhawk was something that never piqued your interest as a gamer … there’s something about the mega-dungeon concept that’s just damn cool. Tackling a mega-dungeon is a challenge; conquering it is just awesome. The sheer size and scale of the mega-dungeon usually means that the player characters have to do far more to survive and be successful than they would in standard dungeons, meaning that the rewards – and the sense of accomplishment – of beating one is all the sweeter.

I recently began work on a “Lost City” mega-adventure that would’ve essentially been a mega-dungeon. Though this project sadly has been shelved (and I don’t expect it to see the light of day again), it did provide me the opportunity to sit down, look at a bunch of mega-dungeons and mega-adventures, and see what made them work or not work. The better ones, I think, all shared a few common themes. Here they are:

1. Big adventure, big picture, big story. The mega-dungeons that are essentially nothing more than ninety-thousand rooms filled with monsters, traps, and treasure do nothing for me. The adventure’s big, so the stakes need to be big. There needs to be compelling reasons for the characters to be tackling the adventure. The better ones have both small, short-term goals and larger “big-picture” goals for the characters to achieve. (And, ideally, some of these goals are completely unrelated – see the next point and you’ll understand.) But a big hook towards keeping the players’ interest will probably eventually be on the endgame for the mega-adventure – ending the prophecy, killing the big dragon, finding the lost artifact, or whatever else becomes the thing that makes your players go: OH HELL YES, I WANT TO DO THAT.

2. Escape is a healthy thing. The mega-adventure or mega-dungeon means you’re in the same place for a really, really long time. In my experience, that means players invariably get bored, no matter how exciting the adventure might be. You can mix things up a bit by throwing in some unrelated plot threads in your mega-dungeon, but sometimes players will just get sick of the place. Having a nearby town where the players can refresh themselves, reload, and have some different sorts of adventures is a good idea, so make sure the characters can leave the mega-dungeon without too much difficulty. (Portals to other places within the dungeon aren’t a bad idea either, provided your gaming style lends itself to that sort of wackiness.)

3. Payback’s a bitch. In my old campaigns, the incessant wandering of the heroes from place to place meant there were rarely repercussions for their actions. They never got to see that slaying the kobold tribe near the village meant that they’d effectively ended a decades-old war between the kobolds and the orcs, and that the orcs now could focus their hostility directly on the village the characters thought they had “saved”. In the mega-dungeon, because so much happens in essentially the same place, you can have fallout like that from the players’ actions. It’s easier to have recurring villains with long memories and axes to grind. The mega-dungeon’s a more living environment, where even the simplest of actions might mean dire things down the road.

4. Overall holistic design. Living environment also applies to the guys writing and designing the mega-dungeon as well. The place as a whole needs to make sense. How do the various denizens of the place get along? Are there groups of allies or sworn enemies? Also, keep in mind that stuff found in one part of the adventure could affect something else down the road, often to a great extent. That “invincible” frost giant jarl at the end of the adventure won’t be so tough if the characters loaded up on all the fire-based magic items you loaded into the beginning of the adventure.

5. No chokepoints. There better not be a point in the dungeon that the players hit where they are faced with “solve this/defeat this OR ELSE YOU CANNOT GET ANY FURTHER IN THE DUNGEON”. Should they fail, nothing sucks worse than this. Absolutes should not be a part of any dungeon, but their problems get magnified in a mega-dungeon.

6. Indexing and organization. There’s a hell of a lot going on in a mega-dungeon. Knowing that the key on the third level opens the chest on the ninth might be important, and being able to quickly look up that sort of information is extremely helpful. While an index is perfect for these sorts of situations, just organizing the adventure to cover those situations is very, very helpful. This gets back to holistic design – if the demon lord on the thirteenth level of the dungeon is badly affected by a magic sword found on level six, putting a page reference number to the stats for that magic sword in the demon lord encounter is a great idea.

Of all the mega-dungeons and mega-adventures I read over the past year, three stood out above and beyond the rest to me. Castle Whiterock, hands down, I consider to be the best of them. Maure Castle is also excellent (and possibly the closest thing we’ll ever see to a complete old-school Gygax-styled mega-dungeon), as well as the original Caverns of Thracia (odd to call it a mega-dungeon, as it’s just 80 pages, but author Paul Jaquays created something really cool, original … and open. There’s no right way to explore the Caverns, no great big villains or set pieces, but it really works great nonetheless).

Your favorite mega-dungeons? Your experiences with them?

I’d love to hear about them.

This is the one that pretty much got my freelancing career started.

When I first starting running games, my games of choice were some of the earlier editions of D&D and AD&D, and the first incarnation of the Warhammer FRPG. The first adventures I ran were published adventures, like “Dwellers of the Forbidden City” and “Shadows Over Bögenhafen”. Later on, as I got more confidence and gained more experience with running various game systems, I started writing and running my own original adventures, set in my own campaign worlds. The stories framing those adventures probably weren’t all that great, but they were mine. I learned a lot writing and running those adventures.

However, while the stories were original, the mechanics weren’t. I never really deviated from what you’d find in the rulebooks for those games. If there was an evil wizard in one of my AD&D adventures, all of his spells came from the Players’ Handbook. If there were monsters in a dungeon in a Warhammer adventure, they came from the rulebook or from a White Dwarf magazine article. I liked creating my own stories, but I didn’t tinker around with the games in terms of mechanics. For one thing, the existing mechanics worked; for another, I didn’t have a lot of confidence – yet – in straying too far from the Rules As Written.

When I started running RIFTS, though, that changed. I think it was because of the wide-open gonzo nature of the game. There were a lot of stories I wanted to tell in my various RIFTS campaigns, and quite honestly, the rulebooks didn’t nearly begin to cover what I wanted to do. (To date myself, there were only four RIFTS books when I started running the game: the main rulebook, the first sourcebook, and the Atlantis and Vampire Kingdoms world books.) The monsters were limited, the equipment was limited, there wasn’t much there in terms of magic … if I wanted to tell those stories, I was going to have to develop my own source material and game mechanics.

Also – although the possibility that rules could be “broken” hadn’t yet dawned on me – I did realized that certain aspects of the game really didn’t make much logical sense. So there were certain parts of the game where I started to adjust the rules so they’d make more sense for my gaming group.

So I began tinkering. I wrote my own monsters, my own spells, my own equipment, my own rules … in other words, I started designing. Again, I don’t think I knew what a game designer was at the time, but that’s what I was doing. Using the basics of the rules system, I went beyond just writing adventures, and started developing original game mechanics as well.

While running RIFTS and developing new material for my campaign, I also spent a bit of time submitting articles to Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine, which at the time were still run by TSR. All of these proposals got rejected, but I had it in my head that I wanted to write games somehow, or to work for a gaming company.

Somewhere during this time, while getting yet another rejection letter from Dragon (poor Roger E. Moore, who edited the magazine at that time – he must’ve hated reading the dreck that I sent his way) – I took a look at my desk and saw all the spiral-bound notebooks I’d filled with ideas for the RIFTS campaign. A lot of it was very, very detailed. And that’s when it dawned on me: why write something for D&D? Let’s write something for Palladium instead?

That didn’t exactly work out as expected. You can find the full story of that saga HERE, but suffice it to say that the material I wrote for that campaign never got published by Palladium Books. However, it did lead me to write two books. The first was “The Banwok Hunters”, and then I followed that up with a second book called “Demon Heart Falling”, which you can download HERE.

Much like “Demon Heart Falling”, I got a trip out of re-reading “The Banwok Hunters”, which was originally written about fifteen years ago. It brought back a lot of fond memories of that old campaign. I’d forgotten about stuff like the Hellstar Complex, the base that the player characters used (which was really a landbound version of the Liberator from Blake’s 7), or the villainous cybernetic Tyrannosaurus Rex known as Jericho (who I based on the Ultra-Humanite). Lots of gonzo, over-the-top stuff in there, which reflected that campaign pretty well. Crazy, but tremendous amounts of fun.

I hadn’t bothered to scan “The Banwok Hunters” into digital form only because my own copy of it was pretty crappy. I was afraid to put the pages through the scanning feeder, as I was pretty sure they’d get shredded in the scanning process. Fortunately, my friend Eric had a copy of the book … so, thanks to Eric, you now have a copy as well.

Curious to see what all this looks like? Download it by clicking: HERE.

I’m curious to hear what you think of it.

Enjoy!