22 Adventurers

Twenty-two.  That was the number we had for the last Madison Traditional Gaming meetup, running from 10am to 5pm, on Saturday April 16th.  Generally speaking, we've averaged somewhere between 8-15 people at previous meetups, but this time things seemed to work just right.  One of the players in my Tuesday night D&D campaign, Nix, ran a game of Brave New World, James K. ran Labyrinth Lord, while I ran a game of Empire of the Petal Throne.

I started Madison Traditional Gaming just over a year-and-a-half ago, meeting once a month primarily at public library branches around Madison.  We met twice at UW's Memorial Union, but the combination of expensive parking on-campus and difficulty securing a regular location resulted in a return to library meeting rooms.  I've been using Meetup.com and Facebook as the primary means of letting people know what's scheduled, and that has worked out quite well.  Once a month is great for one-shot adventures, but not really suited to on-going campaigns.

We were fairly lucky in getting a sizable contingent up from UW-Platteville's Platteville Gaming Association, the good people who put on Plattecon very year.  Erin U., the chair of the most recent Plattecon, was able to persuade a bunch of them to come up for the meetup, which was just amazing.  I am hoping to arrange for a full track of role-playing events for next year's Plattecon, and between now and then recruit some more referees to run Old School RPG campaigns around Madison and Wisconsin.

Many thanks to Mark S. from the Milwaukee Traditional Gaming meetup, Clint P. and everybody else who showed up and played games.  I really think we have something good going on here.

30mm Historicals - but different

From English Russia - what does someone do when they really want historical miniatures?  Well, they make them from plasticine.  Cheap Soviet-era plasticine.  Go check it out.

The Garden of Weeping Snows at Gary Con

Adventuring in the Jakallan Underworld at Gary Con

The Metamorphosis: Alpha game ended with Alpha, the AI in charge of the station, doing in the entire party because we had decided that the alien menace was, well, too menacing.  I was able to get Jim Ward to sign my character sheet, which was very gracious on his part.  However, it was too late to start another game, so I retreated to my hotel room and ordered in pizza.

The next morning, I got breakfast in Lake Geneva - there were several cafes and restaurants doing what seemed like a land office business.  I got back to the convention fairly quickly, and went in search of other Tekumel fans.  I was able to talk to Jeff Dee for awhile, showing him the Tekumel materials I had brought with me - he was sufficiently fascinated to take time away from his V&V game to chat.  He encouraged me to go to North Texas Gaming Con in early June; I am hoping to go.

By noon, I had a number of players assembled and we went off in search of an open table.  The Tekumel maps are a quick draw for potential players and kibitzers, so I quickly set up the materials and began the game.  The objective was simple: take a letter from Prince Rereshqala to the Undying Wizard Nyelmu, ensconced deep under the city of Jakalla in the Garden of the Weeping Snows.  This was really an excuse to get into the nitty-gritty of the third level of the Jakallan Underworld, using Empire of the Petal Throne (and some house rules).  Within about 20 minutes, characters were generated and we were off.

Running EPT is not hard; the mechanics are not that different from Original D&D, and much better explained.  But the background for Tekumel is often daunting for players and referees alike.  To make things more complicated, the Jakallan Underworld as originally written by Prof. Barker is very much like a D&D "dungeon" - very "old school" and very much an abbreviated version of the vast depths I've explored only tiny sections of as a player in Prof. Barker's Thursday Night Group.  It's taken me several years to appreciate just how much of the "actual" Jakallan underworld Prof. Barker crammed onto several large sheets of graph paper.  So when I run a game, I work very hard to convey as much Tekumel "flavor" as I can in each gaming session - and I think in this case I succeeded:

"Fascinating!  You can run Empire of the Petal Throne and you don't have to be M.A.R. Barker..." said one of my players, after experiencing some of the game.

You don't have to be Prof. Barker to run Tekumel.  What people get hung up on is making their game as identical as possible to Prof. Barker's game and that's a mistake.  There's more than enough material in the original EPT rules to make a campaign work, and if you add more material from other sources, it becomes even easier.  Don't be afraid of creating another "branch on the Tree of Time," as Prof. Barker would say.

In the end, the characters survived their trip through the Underworld, eventually being granted an audience with Nyelmu - who promptly opened a Nexus Point and sent them through.  (The outcome of that will be determined at the next Gary Con.)  Allan Grohe was kind enough to stop by and take a couple of pictures (see above).  After the game was brought to its exciting close, I packed up my gear and drove home to Madison - happy and tired, all at the same time.

I was caught metagaming by James Ward!

Okay, so I went to Gary Con this past weekend.  My trip there was somewhat eventful: I had a tire go flat on my way there, which meant that I missed the morning round of events on Saturday.  However, I was back by Noon to the Lodge at Geneva Ridge, and decided to take a look around.

• I saw a number of old Tekumel hands almost immediately, including Mark Eggert and Bill Hoyer.  Since I had brought the Jakallan Underworld with me (as I have for previous UCons), we immediately started talking about running some Empire of the Petal Throne during the weekend.
• I also spent some time talking to Jon Hershberger of Black Blade Publishing about a modest idea I had for making more Old School games and products available at game conventions here in Wisconsin.  I also picked up a copy of OSRIC for $26 (!!!) - a complete steal at that price in hardcover.
• I ran into Jeff Rients and showed him some of the dungeon maps my players had drawn of Xylarthen's Tower - he was very pleased to see just how much fun they obviously had had.

I was invited into a game of Moldvay D&D with one of the fine crew from Kenzer and Company, running The Isle of Dread, which I had played a LONG time ago, but could not remember to save my life.  It was a relatively quick adventure, since we never really pulled together as a group and figured out how to cover for one another.  I had a 4th level magic-user, properly done up on notebook filler paper, and the rest of the party was mystified why I spent a great deal of time avoiding combat.

We ended up in a nearly endless combat with zombies, with some of the party trying to attack the ones that our cleric had turned - I tried telling them that was a bad idea, but....  In the end, we lost half the party, went back above ground to the nearby village, and were unable to finish the adventure.  You might think I didn't have much fun, but it was fascinating to see how another referee ran the game, and how other players I had never gamed with actually played.  I had a great time.

Somewhere in there, I got into a grand discussion of maps and mapping with Ramsey Dow of Sickly Purple Death Ray. His maps are totally amazing - and look for an interesting series of adventures he is working on and should be releasing soon.  Ramsey got me into the 6pm game of Metamorphosis: Alpha with James Ward - was I going to miss a chance to game with James Ward?  Heck, no!  The rest of the party was a really good group, including (among others) Jon Pickens.  Our characters were very simple to generate, and aside from weapons and goodies, we had "luck points" that could be used to modify rolls.

We were a bunch of expendable soldiers sent from the Starship Worden to figure out why Outpost Alpha, above one of the planets of Alpha Centauri, wasn't responding.  In our scout ship, we went to the base and discovered that the atmospheric integrity of the dome has been compromised by a weird black alien flying saucer.  The AI in charge of the station had been compromised, since it did not believe there was a flying saucer.  Nevertheless, we went into the station, and immediately got into trouble with the AI (named "Alpha" and don't you dare call her "Computer") for minor damage to the station.  Eventually we discovered the weird alien fungus and strange alien darkness that was taking over the station.  After strangely getting ourselves put in charge of the station, we tried fixing things using lots of alcohol and attempting to get the fungicide in storage.  However, our plans went awry, and before we could set off the self-destruct on the station, Alpha decided to do us in to prevent that from happening.  End of our merry adventure - there was a lot of laughing as we bumbled through it.  (I hesitate to say it, but there was an almost Paranoia-esque quality to our mission.)

As the referee, Jim stayed firmly in control of the flow of the game, and did not hesitate to guide the emerging narrative to suit his whim.  That might sound like he was arbitrary, but in sheer point of fact, he knew exactly what he was doing by keeping player initiative on a very short leash.  This resulted in players having to think on their feet, and having to pay very close attention to what was going on.  For quite awhile, nobody used luck points, and as we slowly got ourselves deeper and deeper in trouble, I ended up blurting out "but you could use a Luck Point to make it work!" just before another player made a crucial roll.

Uh-oh.

I found myself being sternly rebuked by our referee, who informed me that BAD THINGS would happen if I was caught metagaming again.  I did admit me my fault, and meekly allowed that I would refrain from doing it again.  The rest of the party was highly amused.

The rest of the adventure was very cool, but it did mean that we had to postpone Empire of the Petal Throne until Sunday, which we did.  More on that in another post.

Binding Wounds

"He's almost dead!"  (i.e. a PC is somewhere between 0 and -something hit points)
"Quick, bind his wounds!"  (i.e. what you do when you have no cleric in the party)

One of the things I've done in Aldwyr has been to allow for "binding wounds" - this involves post-combat action to bind up physical wounds so that someone does not bleed to death.  I've done this several different ways in the past, including 1d4 and 1d3 hit points regained.  But for some time now, I've been using 1d4-1, giving a range from 0-3.  Binding wounds prevents a character below zero hit points from getting any worse, but it might not result in them regaining consciousness.  I understand that Swords & Wizardry White Box has a similar "Binding of Wounds" rule.  I used to think there was a rule in either OD&D or AD&D that was the original inspiration.  There apparently isn't such a rule, which only served to underscore my deepening unease about this practice.

D&D is supposed to be deadly.  Yet, rules such as "poisons do damage, rather than just kill" and "you can bind someone's wounds" and "zero hit points isn't dead, -9 or -10 is dead" make for a less deadly game.  Indeed, I wonder to what extent they subtly encourage players to get overly invested in their characters.  One could argue that there ought to be really deadly poisons, and really massive amounts of damage, just to counter-balance this trend.  But the "escalation of power" doesn't always make for a better game.

I'm still thinking about this.

Now It Can Be Told...

For just over a year, I've been running an OD&D game on a weekly basis.  We've moved from one game store to another, gone from just one player to a group of six to nine players, and their characters have advanced to nearly fifth level.  We've had several characters die, some in some very dramatic ways, others in more prosaic fashion, e.g. "oh, so that trap was poisoned?  I roll a 4.  Oops."  Magic items started off with a magic sword - now in a somewhat dysfunctional relationship with the halfling thief in the party.  Now there is another magic sword, a magic spear, a net of underwater something (no, they haven't figured it out), and one or two minor items.

The impetus for the campaign was simple: I wanted to play D&D, and I did not want to spend a lot of time on setting up a huge homebrewed setting, for fear that (a) the players wouldn't like it, and (b) it would become its own thing, rather than a backdrop for adventure.  I also wasn't sure just what I wanted to do with modifying the rules for D&D, since that seemed inevitable for me.  I decided on using Goblinoid Games dependable Labyrinth Lord; it seemed more easily amenable to modification than either Swords & Wizardry or BFRPG.

Taking a page from Ars Ludi's The West Marches campaign concept, I set things at the edge of a great-but-largely-offstage Grand Kingdom, in the modest frontier village of Kingsbridge.  Right nearby could be found the ruins of a wizard's tower, now long abandoned.  With that, I had the basics covered - dungeon and refuge of sorts.

In detailing Kingsbridge, I found myself liberally borrowing from a variety of sources.  The local tavern was Falgrave's - mentioned in The Dragon #8, "The Development of Towns in D&D" and I kept the Aryan-Transpacific pantheon from my earlier Southlands campaign.  The one place where I began adding in my own creativity was in the realm of NPCs:

• Sieglinde, the lieutenant in the Royal Army and commander of the local militia.  Sieglinde had a positive dislike for adventurers, but despite that ended up with a fondness for Kyle, the aforementioned hobbit thief.  (It was a series of really positive reaction rolls, and I went with it)
• Father Xylos, the local village priest.  Very elderly and somewhat frail, Father Xylos became something of a confidant of the party - usually as a result of having to patch a wounded player-character up.
• Evpraksia, the local soothsayer and alchemist.  Clever, secretive, and more than capable of driving a hard bargain.

Relatively shortly after they began delving deeper into Xylarthen's Tower, I realized that there was a need for more variety.  So I added The Ruined Monastery, roughly two days journey to the south from Kingsbridge.  This prompted me to put together a map of the local area; I added several features, including another town and several dungeons from back issues of White Dwarf.

At the end of a year of adventuring, I found that my bricolage approach towards campaign construction had worked fairly well.  What was missing was a "larger view" of the campaign, or so it seemed to me.  There wasn't much I could do to add to the campaign on a larger scale without breaking out of the purely local framework I had started with.  With that in mind, I decided to shift the party from this setting to something intentionally built on a larger scale: my new campaign, named Aldwyr.

More to follow....

Pluses and Minuses

Life's been something of a roller-coaster.  On the plus side:

• Madison Traditional Gaming has gotten rather successful.  We will be celebrating our one year anniversary in September, with a special Meetup.  There might even be door prizes!
• My Tuesday Night OD&D game is going well; I have six regular players and that seems to be about the right size.  The Big Switch to Aldwyr is planned for later in September.
• Work on the Tekumel Foundation continues apace, with some interesting projects in the works.
• And besides gaming, an offer of work at Madison College this fall.  Adjunct, but that's okay.

On the minus side, however:

• Could not afford to go to Gen Con.  Too many auto repairs and unforeseen living expenses.
• TARGA remains inactive.  Simply have not had time to focus on it, and with a lack of enthusiasm on the part of others, it's likely to stay as it is for now.
• Haven't had time to get to various creative projects, including but not limited to: The Wilderness Architect, Microlite Post-Apocalypse, Wanderer, a supplement for X-plorers, and an OD&D-kinda-sorta parallel for spies and modern adventure.
• Besides gaming, have had a very close friend in hospital for the past week, who needed my support.  Fortunately, he's getting out today.

 Think I'm busy.  Oh, right!  I have a blog, too! ;)