Death Sparkle Doom: Why? and First (Recent) Playtest

"Gee, I'm already trolling the busybodies by making a Grindhouse Edition with zombies putting hands up hoohas and putting out Carcosa which portrays evil sorcery as evil. Pushing much more in that direction is fun but we're going to get to a point of diminishing warblegarble returns if we keep pushing that way. How to achieve the same effect in another way?"

That 'effect' being important because as a 9 year old owning the AD&D books, the sense of everyonethinksD&DisevilSatanicI'mgoingtocommitsuicideforplayingit, and I can't let my mother see the insides of the books she's bought me because they have drawings of boobies, and I can't read the Monster Manual at night because some of these pictures are really scary! were as much a part of the base RPG experience for me as "There's this game where you can do ANYTHING and not argue about whether you missed or not!" and I have to pay it forward. ;)

... and after a couple years of publishing, and over a year of seeing TONS of what my peers are doing through my OSR-based retailing on the web and at cons, I have this idea that releases should be events, they should be presented as unique and special things, lest they get lost in the sea of releases, lest the ideas within get ignored once purchased because the whole thing appears so mundane and same-old.

I could point lots of fingers there (and have a bit), but instead of being an armchair internet critic, I get to show 'em how it's done, right?

(and then everyone else sits back and gets to complain that I make a big deal out of everything and oh my god how much cheaper would that have been if he hadn't done that!)

Anyway, my latest outrage technique was to go cute. Present an adventure in the manner of a children's book, nice thick pages, very very bright and colorful throughout. The cover will be influenced by the colors and atmosphere of My Little Pony and the Care Bears.

That will be the new face of fear!

But I need something to put into such a product, right? Flashy is awesome, but it's one thing to make something that gets attention, it's great to do something that makes people feel they need to have it because ohmygodhowawesomedoesthatlook!!!, but it needs to be unique and original and awesome to be worthy of a presentation that's unique and original and awesome. Or else it's all shit.

... I had just the thing in the archives! The adventure was originally run about five years ago or so. It was a little puzzle-based dungeon based on the chromatic dragon color scheme, where solving several different color-based puzzles opened up a passage to go up this mountain; the alternative was to fight their way up to the top. I forget why they were going up there. Was it the observatory where dwarfs had enslaved some hill giants?

I pulled this adventure out a few years ago in an attempt to get it into publishable form. Remember, before deciding I was going to be a publisher, I was just going to have other people publish my work. I was going to submit the adventure to Brave Halfling to publish, but in my "genius" I sent the module straight up its own ass as the five chromatic dragon color scheme was muddled by including ultraviolet and infrared light, microwaves, gamma rays, etc. It turned into a big glop of shit, so I abandoned it and wrote No Dignity in Death instead... and then ended up stipulating so many things concerning the presentation that it didn't make any sense for someone else to release it...

So this "color-based adventure," if it could be brought under control, seemed to fit the "colorful children's book presentation." But it needed something a little more... Tying it in to the whole Duvan'Ku thing and making it a Death x Doom release would give it that little kick. It's been well over two years since Death Frost Doom and over a year since Duvan'Ku got any publication mention (in Hammers of the God), and Death Ferox Doom is in developmental hell, so to speak (how to get rid of the overly Traditional D&D* elements without gutting all the key parts where they are currently included, how to make the social sections of the adventure come truly alive -- the "Here are the tribes!" sections I've written seem static and boring!, and how to present it all so that it's too cool for school are all issues I am struggling with), so I'm not draining the Death x Doom well dry.

So a few weeks of organizing, note taking, general dressing up, and integration of the Duvan'Ku "mythology" (including an explanation of why this place exists and how it would function by those that made it), I had a dungeon ready to play.

It's an "everything you touch messes you up and you have to touch a lot of stuff to beat the thing" type of affair.

The first play-through of the new dungeon concept wasn't a total success.

I mean, the three PCs that went through the thing were suitably messed up. I think the basic setup is good. They conquered the dungeon, but one of them is now 18" tall, another is 20' tall, and before he accidentally popped himself out of existence the third PC was made of mist and enveloped in a field of darkness.

The Problems As I Saw Them (my players can chime in if they like):

• The PCs destroyed the source of clues in the adventure. I actually had to fudge them not being completely destroyed as they should have been or the whole thing would have gone to shit right away. There needs to be a clue about the clues.
• I'm getting really awful about the reward/XP thing in adventures**. "This structure protects a treasure!" OK, fine, there's a specific treasure to find at the end. But it's not a pile of gold or silver or anything. And playing shouldn't be a total binary "succeed/fail" proposition. The adventure needs more tangible rewards here and there.
• Needs more urgency. A lot of the puzzles are tense enough, especially once the players get the pattern of what's going on. "If we touch that one there one of our items is going to go bad... and we have to touch it." But when the players are just guessing or working from wrong assumptions (say, because of destroying the clues...) it becomes a repetitious treadmill of "suffer an effect, then go check to see if it did what we want it to do." Presenting some other dangers so this isn't all being done quite at the PCs' leisure is in order, and the means to provide that is already in the adventure.
• I used a master effects table for the various elements. So no matter if the players touched a colored energy field, got clawed by a guardian of a certain color, or decided to have fun with colored lotus powder, each color rolled on the same effects table. I think I need to separate that out so while, say, a violet energy field, a violet guardian, and violet lotus (PURPLE LOTUS III!!!!!) will be thematically linked as their effects go, the specific effects should be unique to whatever element is triggering it.
  

That concludes this edition of "what I wrote while waiting to download the revised Carcosa production PDF with changes made in light of the printing proofs."

* this one's hard to explain. It's just important for me, no matter the underlying system and procedures of play, to have my stuff feel different from traditional D&D. The classic TSR stuff has been done. It's continuing to be done and redone by numerous authors in our scene right now. More power to them, but I want something a bit different and distinct, "this is 2011!", not something that slides comfortably beside what was done in 1980 or a "what if?" experiment or whatever. That's one frustrating thing about the fly-by Weird Fantasy critics, yes, it's a retro-clone kind of thing, but if you embrace its assumptions, playing it leads to a different atmosphere and creative space, and dare I say a whole different game than say OSRIC or Labyrinth Lord if you run a campaign. It's not "a slightly different way to play the same old D&D." At least I don't think so. Or maybe my degree of differentiation is so slight that there effectively is no real difference. Whatever. I follow my muse, you follow yours.

** if LotFP gets a third edition someday, the level system is on the chopping block.