Death Ferox Doom!

My regular Sunday group hadn't played for a few weeks, and even though half the group was down with the flu, I wasn't canceling again. The decision almost killed them, as there were only three of them, two clerics (one which wears no armor, carries no real weapon, and is pretty much a non-combatant) and a magic-user. All level 5 or 6, I forget exactly.

The first few sessions for what will be Death Ferox Doom were kind of slow.

They disabled and impersonated the people that were supposed to be going on the mission (per an oracle's orders), and traveled to the Southern Continent to the Empire's colonial beachhead, Fort Coronado. (This preliminary stuff won't be in the module; it will start at the Fort.)

Once there, they collected information about the mission: the Great General, Royal Blade of Arms, Mortimer Coleridge, and Imperial Arch-Mage Shelton Farrington had led an expedition searching for a City of Gold in this region... and disappeared. Someone has to find them.

They learn that the entire region is covered in thick jungle and had several native tribes living along the waterways. the colonial administration (little more than the military garrison at the fort at this point) considers the natives to be little more than animals, and the natives consider them to be something unto gods. The tribe local to the fort has been "domesticated," and one of their number is assigned the task of being the party's guide.

Their only clue at the beginning as to the general and arch-mage's fate (along with the squad of men-at-arms they brought with them) is an amulet - the Dead Sign. Word from the natives (who are all terrified of the symbol) is that one of the "pale men" returned from the east, alone and stripped of other equipment, wearing it. No sign of the rest of the expedition.

They don't travel up the river I'd set out for them... they boat up the coast a bit and go upstream on the larger river than can support canoe travel. They learn that the tribes in the area pretty much all hate each other, and in fact can treat each other worse than the imperial military treats them.

Most of the native tribes are not much trouble, however, as they are already frightened - Coleridge and Farrington had apparently not been gentle in their treatment. They finally come to a tribe that had given the expedition some grief - the Dida-Sine, a tribe at the fork of the two rivers that has a very large rust monster herd. Here they get their best leads to the City of Gold, and a warning about the To-Lem - the cannibals of the jungle.

My players, at least a couple of them, have honorable characters right now, so the trek through the jungle was much less eventful than it could have been. Let's just say a group of more mercenary or paranoid types can commit a bit of genocide on their way through the wilderness, and they might be able to easily excuse their slaughter as self-defense. Life is different in the jungle, and in addition to the more expected dangers to come, I offer the opportunity to make the players rather disgusted with themselves.

But my players avoided that as they avoided most of the tribes altogether, and dealt peacefully with those they did encounter. While this robbed them of the opportunity to get some important information, they avoided a lot of bait and temptation, and in fact one of the possible conclusions to the adventure is now closed to them (which is not a bad thing), unless they royally go out of their way to mess things up on the way out.

After some traveling, they find the "City of Gold." It is actually a pyramid in a clearing in the middle of a dead part of the jungle.

Before the pyramid are two large Dead Sign scultpures. Also a couple pools, and refuse pits - one filled with human remains. A large amount of equipment has been strung up on one of the Dead Signs - including the Arch-Mage's staff. If the PCs figure out how to use it, they will have a potent magic item.

The pyramid has eight entrances, and all three (plus the top) surface levels are much like Death Frost Doom - a lot of setup and things to look at, but not much that will get you if you keep a level head. The multiple entrances (including the shaft which sinks straight through most of the levels, allowing the party to go to the bottom level before entering any other room) correct one issue I have with Death Frost Doom - the linear nature of the map.

To show how cautious my players are, there are several altars with treasure, including a ruby, just sitting out in the open. In the three or four sessions they've been there, nobody has touched any of this treasure. It's actually fairly satisfying that nobody ever wants to touch anything in this place, but they know they have to in order to accomplish anything.

They've been pushing on into the lower levels of the pyramid and have found a number of interesting things. They've suffered many interesting threats. There have been multiple deaths in this pyramid (Explosive Runes for the win!), and this session one cleric was turned to gold, until a scroll was expended to fix the problem.

The great shark skeleton didn't pose much of a threat, but the squad of warriors clad in colorful ceramic armor, led by a mage, was almost the death of them. If the Hold Person didn't work, this would have been a TPK. But they were able to run away.

I want to see the looks on their faces when they discover who these guys are. :D

Oh yeah, and they're kind of trapped at the pyramid. The cannibal tribe discovered their presence, and while the cannibals won't enter the pyramid (or even the clearing area after having their butts handed to them a couple times), they do prevent escape. Their poisoned blowgun darts are a potential instant incapacitator, and with some of the party in plate mail, there will be no outrunning them.

The party has explored around (but not done much with) the Final Areas, but they haven't yet set foot in the more bizarre sections of the dungeon yet.

I won't be able to properly write this module for publication until bigger projects are completed, but especially this session, I got very excited about this and feel like I've got a worthy followup to Death Frost Doom on my hands. My big fear by making Death x Doom a series of modules is that I'll dilute the idea and lessen Death Frost Doom, but as long as I'm not just cranking them out, I should be OK. One a year sounds good to me.

gaaahh, I have so many frickin awesome things to do, and only so much time. Ah well, once the box is out, the floodgates will open. I've had a lot of time to get excited about a good many projects, and once I can get to them they should come out in fairly rapid succession. This will be a good year.

Poverty is a Wonderful Thing

I'm not being sarcastic.

I just paid off the majority of my art costs last night. Had to pay off the American artists ASAP, before the work was done, because the euro is trending down down down.

I still have a fun chunk that I have to pay the Finnish-based artists, but that won't be until that work is done.

But I'm still swimming in really great/stupid ideas for artwork, with the knowledge that all I have to do is spread some bucks around and I can get pretty much what I want from pretty much who I want.

So thank goodness for not actually having a great big pile of cash sitting around, because impulse control has never been my strong point.

Still, for 48 hours I've had this idea of "A young King Arthur pulling Stormbr^H^H^H^H^H^H^H a black runesword from a stone to claim the throne of England." With a specific artist in mind who probably isn't very cheap.

So three cheers for poverty and its control on random ideas!

(or, "Fuck it, I'll send an email and get a price quote anyway.")

Bill Willingham and Lands of Adventure

This game (and cover) has been mentioned in a couple places today. I'd never heard of the game or seen this picture before, but wow.

If You Die by Fire, Turn to Page 54. If You Die by Poison, Turn to Page 12.

I finally stopped sandbagging and got around to outlining the choose-your-own-adventure style section for the tutorial booklet.

9 areas, 10 "plot point" flags (those certainly need renaming), over a dozen ways to die, 148 entries in total.

The original intent was just a standard walkthrough of a dungeon, but as I was plotting the various choices, the possibilities opened up. One of the possible deaths caused my wife to get that sickened look on her face and she needed to confirm that this was indeed for beginners. I took that as a compliment, since it is supposed to be quite horrible.

Soak the beginner in atmosphere and then light him up to highlight the dangers of the adventuring profession, that's what I say. None of this "Have a boatload of success to make you feel great about this swell game!" nonsense.

Just looking through the rules, it might be easy to think, "Oh, same old shit." But everything, all together, will be about as "same old shit" as any of the modules I've released. It's good to get some of the material written that will give this its unique character rather than worrying so much about the stuff that needs to fit in with everything else.

I still have to update all the numbering for the entries (I did them in order first, then shuffled and renumbered) and do the actual writing, but the hard part of this section of the project is the organization and that is done.

"Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night...

... can screw up a movie with awful plot twists and CG that looks like crap."

Guess what I saw today?

It was alright, not an insult or desecration or anything, but it was a lot less than it should have been.

Probably more disturbing is watching movies with my wife. She's always "been there." When we watched Star Wars, she said "I've been there!" We saw The Wolfman today, "I've been there! I've had a pint at that pub!" The advantages to using actual locations rather than sets, I guess.

Managed to talk some business with a local retailer, made an art contact, ran into one of my players on the street, had lunch, you know, the usual day in the life of a gaming high roller. :P

Back to work!

LotFP Weird Fantasy Role-Playing Version 0.03 Available Now

"I'll just do a quick mock layout," he says. "Look out for that this evening," he says.

*facepalm*

Anyway, that was just a slight bit more complicated than I figured. I didn't get to try out a lot of tricks I was planning to do, but even though the layout's not exactly professional quality, it should be a bit easier to read than the previous text dump.

The file is here.

It's a complete draft. Sort of. I took out the Waterborne Adventures section because I'll be heavily revising is, if not completely rebuilding it from scratch, for the northern seas adventure.

The entire thing needs a rewrite to make sure it's all in the same "voice" as it is in large part a cut and paste of existing OGC, so suggestions about wording or typos isn't necessary at this time. Things like combing through all the spell listings and making sure the saving throws match my categories exactly, that hasn't been edited yet. I hope a lot of this can be trimmed of wordiness as well. This is but a "skin" at this point.

But if anything just looks wrong as far as the meat of what's being said, certainly inform me.

This draft, when finished, will be two separate booklets within the box.

Next items: Finish the tutorial booklet and then attack that referee booklet and get significant portions of it done.

All the while tinkering with some of the fiddly bits in the rules. I want to get that encumbrance stuff nailed down so character sheet design can begin. There's a good idea for an encumbrance system bubbling there but I don't think I've hit paydirt with it yet.

And my copy of CAS' Vintage from Atlantis arrived earlier today and I didn't even crack it open because I was doing this. Ay ay ay.

Second Interior Cover for LotFP Weird Fantasy Role-Playing Box

Kevin Mayle's work on the as-yet untitled wilderness/maritime adventure that will be both included with the box and sold separately for those of you who like my adventures but have no interest in another full game.

You can see the progress of the work from the beginning in this post over on Mayle's blog.

This adventure will be a northern exploration adventure, as I've become rather amused/horrified at the tales of the expeditions to find the Northwest Passage in the 18th and 19th Century and I'm currently making my way through a book on the subject. I've got the adventure outlined, and I have plans for what the physical product will look like, but I am a bit worried about its scope and how generic it would be for an individual referee's campaign. The subject demands that there be rival powers offering rewards for certain discoveries, and the better part of an entire continent's far northern areas must be detailed (in rough form at least) for exploration. Making expedition patrons generic shouldn't be too difficult, but copping out on a specific map for an exploration adventure would be unforgivable.

And I do have to say I'm worried that I'm being a most unreasonable boss when it comes to the art on this project. I don't have the first clue how most publishers/art directors interact with their artists, so I just hope I'm reasonably handling my five million "change this!" requests that are happening per piece.

Probably doesn't help that the original instructions are vague, but I generally have only a general sense of what I want and it's only after seeing something that it comes together in my brain.

I should be getting the first prelim sketches for the main box cover soon, and I supplied that artist with a list of links for clothing references, weapon references, did half a dozen thumbnails, and have models for the figures to establish what it is I'm looking for so hopefully a lot of this "Wait, no, do that instead!" can be avoided.

As for the promised next draft of the rules, I just have two short sections to complete, and then I'm going to do a layout using my new software. It won't at all be the layout, but I figure I should practice with the software and become familiar with its basic functions so I'm not learning at the same time I'm doing final layouts. Look for that this evening.

"How Many Games Can the OSR Sustain?"

Last month I found out Goodman Games was doing their own sorta-retro game, and that news seems to have gotten out this past week.

And again there are the concerns of "How many companies and products can the Old School community support?"

It's irrelevant, and after a few days' thought my response is now, "Stop acting like lepers or victims of some sort of gaming apartheid."

"Niche of a niche" is bullshit defeatist phrasing, and I keep reading it. It should be what detractors say about us, not how we describe ourselves, for fuck's sake.

It's good now, because it's good. It's not good just because it's like it was 25+ years ago. "Play Swords & Wizardry/Labyrinth Lord because it delivers this awesome fucking experience," not "Play Swords & Wizardry/Labyrinth Lord because your 1974/1981 boxes are too valuable/worn to actually handle during game play!"

Our games can stand proudly next to anything ever done for this hobby (because they largely are the games that laid the foundation for the hobby, untrademarkedly speaking). The trick for anyone releasing material is to stand your ground and release only material which reflects and reinforces your gaming principles, not adjusting those principles to any sort of movement/philosophy and not for the sake of appealing to the larger market.

Build it, and build it well, and they will come. It won't spark a new Golden Age, you're not going to outsell WotC or Paizo or whoever else is on top of the mountain right now, but there is a whole damn lot of space between "failure" and "#1" that anyone should be proud to inhabit. And there are a shitload of modernist, state-of-the-art games that don't get the attention that "our" games get, so quit whining. If people don't go for your project (because there is never any guarantee that people will give a shit no matter how spectacular you feel it is), well, be bitter and disappear for a little while (you've earned it if you've put in the blood sweat and tears), then get over it, and come back.

Don't accept a ghetto. You want that house on the hills? "Market conditions" are not an excuse. "The economy" is not an excuse. There are people who are making good money in RPGs, and people that have been gainfully employed and increasing their standard of living during the current recession. This will be what we make of it, not what prevailing conditions will allow us.

Practical Advice from Uncle Jim

Using Google Alerts is a great way to keep up on who is talking about your stuff, you, or other topics you might care about. I use it to keep track of who is talking (trash) about the "Old School Renaissance," for instance.

However, if using that particular program, don't name any of your own work after common phrases. I find Death Frost Doom has a pretty much 100% relevancy rate. No Dignity in Death, however, has netted me slightly less than thirty million hits talking about the Haiti earthquake, and I get notified when anyone posts the lyrics to that Robbie Williams song anywhere, or when someone digs up any story about anything involving dying. Lots of people are talking about Roger Ebert right now thanks to that Esquire piece.

Grinding Gear is slightly more annoying since I get a lot of technical links and did you know that online games have some sort of tactic called "grinding for gear?" I didn't until I started getting these hits.

So the dungeon adventure in the box will not be called The Wizard's Tower, but rather something like "The Tower of GHeoweoisdv'kdfd'sfdf'd." Should be unique enough for the internet.

Odo of Bayeux

I've been reading Sean McGlynn's By Sword and Fire: Cruelty and Atrocity in Medieval Warfare to keep the correct atmosphere for the writing and revising I haven't been doing while I've been all icky-poo.

It mentions one Bishop Odo:

Clergy came under the nominal protection afforded to non-combatants, but many clergy exempted themselves from this category. Active ecclesiastical participants in warfare ranged from the highest to the lowest, from Bishop Odo of Bayeux vigorously swinging his club over his head at the Battle of Hastings as depicted in his famous tapestry (he wielded a club and not a cutting weapon for as a churchman he was forbidden from spilling Christian blood)...

Anyone have any more historical/academic references dealing with the traditional D&D cleric's weapon restrctions? (... figures my game won't have the restrictions...)

In other "news," I've gotten the dice bagged into the cutest little baggies, received a rather disastrous preliminary quote from the printers for this summer's box set (but just the one quote so far, and I will negotiate that down as there are some oddities), and set about assigning more artwork where needed.

As far as actual work that I do (content!), I've fixed the OGL problem I mentioned and several of the missing rules sections have been filled in, but I really have been knocked on my ass all this week so everything I wanted to have done isn't quite there yet. I'll deal with that this weekend (barring relapse), so look for a posting Monday.

I may have another cover to post soon. The wilderness adventure that was formerly going to be about pirates is now going to be about arctic exploration (and I bought a book about the search for the Northwest Passage , Voyages of Delusion by Glyn Williams, as reference material), as all my pirate ideas were too expansive for my desired 16 page limit.

Those of you who A are good at making character sheets and B want a free box set should start doing your calisthenics. :D