Dungeons and Discworld

Posting is probably going to be a bit slow for the next two weeks, as midterms are rearing their ugly heads. So I thought I'd do a post about my recent listening material (going through Disc 7 of Thief of Time right now.)

Some of the chiefest influences in my Motherlode game have been Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. Though I have explored Appendix N as far as I could find through our public library system and swaths of used book stores (not to mention a pretty sweet trade with Scott of Huge Ruined Pile), I keep finding myself coming back to Great A'Tuin and the fantasy world balanced on his back.

First of all, the books are hilarious, not only for fans of fantasy but Anglophiles, cinema buffs and academics alike. I've spent many an hour just laughing at the assorted mottos of the Guilds of Ankh-Morpork and still think that if the BBC were smart, they should start adapting the Night Watch series into seasons of excellent television. But something about them also hits that part of my mind that is inspired by games like Moldvay Basic and Swords and Wizardry, and I think Pratchett explains it best in the introduction to the Art of Discworld:

The twist is that it is taken seriously; not taken seriously as a fantasy, but taken seriously as a world... So Discworld works, more or less. People plow fields, file things, make candles, deliver letters and babies, produce newspapers, perform daily the thousand minor miracles that keep a city fed. Magic has pretty much the same status as nuclear power: under control it is useful, perhaps even essential, but too much reliance on it comes with a disproportionately high price tag, and only a loony would use it to catch fish...

That sort of darkly humorous fantasy ethos just seems to fit with my preconceptions about Basic D&D. Being clever and willing to improvise can be just as important as any martial prowess or arcane power; at Ankh-Morpork's Unseen University, learning how to manipulate magical forces is much less important than learning how not to use them.

Discworld also wears its modern influences on its sleeve, which I very much appreciate. I've never really understood the draw towards a purely medieval fantasy world, probably because I grew up on westerns, Hong Kong action movies and comic books. There should be black powder, even if there aren't guns; clockwork creations even if there's no steam power; a telegraph-esque service even without copper wires and electricity. Familiar elements like that seem to make it easier for players to understand how a fantasy world works, instead of having to approximate a brief history of hamlets in the Middle Ages every time the party wants to go to a tavern.

Hopefully, this influence will be reflected in the game and make Motherlode something a little to the left of a typical fantasy town.

Art by Paul Kidby. Some of the best page-to-picture translations I've ever seen.

Motherlode: A Quick Sketch

In working on the town of Motherlode, I decided to just make a quick sketch of important places that could be expanded upon or added to as I continued developing the idea. Unfortunately, I never got to really flesh out a lot of these ideas, as my friends never really visited most of the locations in town. I'm going to spend some time on the blog expanding these ideas and trying to populate Motherlode a little more.

Taverns and Other Places of Ill Repute
- The Empty Casket
- The Dragon's Hoard
- Fat Tom's
- The Rusty Pickaxe
- Mulligan's
- The Irish Deer
- The Wanton Wench
- The Ravished Ruby

Other Places of Interest
- Looter's Row, where tomb robbers and snake oil salesmen sell uncovered artifacts and forgeries alike. Some people don't know what they really have.
- Pleasant and Co. Explorer's General Store, sells rope, lanterns, iron rations, et al. Everything you need to get lost in a tomb complex.
- The Church of Antra, goddess of underdogs. Fortune favors the bold, and Sister Bradabax takes it to heart. Bit of a drinking/arm wrestling problem.
- Marshal's Office, the only iron-framed building in town, meant to hold even ogres and other giant troublemakers. The Marshal has orders all the way from the City of the Cathedral to keep the peace and does.
- Cathedral Claims Office, where master appraisers let adventurers know just how much that statue is worth before they sell it for booze money.

Hopefully, I'll be able to expand on these ideas in the next few weeks while I'm not working on schoolwork.

Motherlode: Back to Basics

Before I embarked on the initial Motherlode campaign, I'd spent a large chunk of time defining the background of the setting, the different capital cities and their populations, the special things about each race. As time went on, I found myself becoming less and less inspired by the fluff that I had written. So forget Shrapnel and the City of the Cathedral for the time being. In this new imagining, I'm just going to start at Square One: the boomtown of Motherlode.

The initial idea of Motherlode was inspired by the gold rush boomtowns of the Wild West, small towns containing everything that a prospector needed (bunking, a general store for tools and equipment) and wanted (mostly drink and women). Only instead of veins of gold, the inhabitants of Motherlode would be searching for ancient artifacts and treasures. Motherlode is built on the outskirts of a Valley of the Kings-esque buried civilization that has just recently been discovered by university scholars, many of whom will want to hire a group of adventurers for protection in these delves. Or you could always buy a hastily drawn ruin map from a guy at a tavern. It's all up to you

Motherlode can also work as one of the Mummy Towns in the Troll Lands of Uresia: Grave of Heaven (of which I will be posting some more about in the future. Needless to say, it will have to do with some cool conversion-type stuff)

Old School D&D My Way 2: Old School Harder

Posting has unfortunately been a bit sporadic recently, as my girlfriend is visiting for the first time in what seems like months and I try and spend as much time as I reasonably can with her when she's here. Still working over ideas for games with my friends, as I've had impassioned pleas of "When are we going to play some D&D?" to "When are we going to kick off that Feng Shui game that I was excited about?" All this plus ongoing schoolwork and reading 5 books a week for Resources for Young Adults. I'm conflicted. :)

A few of you folks may remember a post that I did before I disappeared off of the face of the earth called Old School D&D My Way, which I think captured a lot of what I've been trying to accomplish with my D&D musings. I was born in the tail end of the 80s and came into gaming well after the majority of people who are revisiting old-school games from their youth. I've become much more exposed to the influences surrounding early edition D&D in recent months, but at the time I thought that immersing myself in thematically appropriate material would help me get old school D&D better than I did.

In retrospect, it was a bad decision.

Though I did add some personal elements to my Swords and Wizardry game, mostly the quasi-Western setting, I really didn't feel like I put enough of myself into it. I just got so inspired by other people's stuff that I thought a patchwork assemblage of their work would somehow result in a great game for me. Now I know that's not the case and I'm going to try my damnedest to put together a D&D game that I feel is mine.

In the coming weeks, I'll probably be using Fistful of Coppers as a public forum to work all of this stuff out. I hope that some of you will find it interesting.

Man, I really want to run some D&D

Like my blogging buddy Barking Alien, I have an awful case of Gamer ADD. When I think I'm set on running a super-cool Feng Shui campaign for my friends, my mind naturally starts to wander. I've been thinking about Uresia, about the aborted 4E campaign that I was going to run at the library, the fantasy novels that I've been reading for my Young Adult class, not to mention all the cool things that I've been reading on people's blogs. The sum total being that they've all got me wanting to run Dungeons and Dragons again.

Fortunately, I've put out the word to my Facebook friends and at least one person has bit. Marcos wants to play D&D SO BAD that I think Harrison may just have to deal. :)

Mixtapes: The Streets of Shrapnel

Mixtapes is a new column that I'm going to try and do every week about the music that inspires my gaming. Many folks on many blogs have gone into great detail about what books, movies and artwork have fueled their campaign worlds and play sessions, but a relative few have discussed music's role in the inspirational process. That's not to say that no one has: early in the history of Playing D&D With Porn Stars, Zak S posted a fantastic list of Songs Useful in D&D Games Renamed To Reflect The Situations Wherein I Have Used Or Plan To Use Said Music, which among other things got me into the Sword, and Christian and Scott, my two favorite guys on the Net, both tend to share my tastes in music and have included choice tracks by Fugazi, the Specials and the Hold Steady in their postings. But music is such an integral part of any campaign or character preparation that I do that it would be amiss for me not to do a column like this. So without further ado...

The Streets of Shrapnel

Soundtrack provided by: Guignol and Mischief Brew - Fight Dirty

Guignol are a punk/Gypsy/klesmer band comprised of members and ex-members of the Hold Steady, the World-Inferno Friendship Society and just about any collaborative musical project in the Tri-State area and have maintained a long and collaborative friendship with Erik Petersen, the frontman and occasionally only member of Philadelphia's Mischief Brew. I occasionally have issues with Petersen's lyrics, as I do with most anarchist songwriters, but I really appreciate his closer kinship towards labor radicalism rather than banal 'smash the state' rhetoric and when he writes a song, he can write a goddamned song. The two groups first collaborated an a song on Mischief Brew's first full-length and finally released a joint record called Fight Dirty, which consists of both Mischief Brew songs backed by Guignol's rhythm section and Guignol songs with Petersen's guitar accompaniment.

When I first started thinking about the Swords and Wizardry game that would later become the Motherlode campaign, the first element that I visualized was the city of Shrapnel. An urban metropolis built on a swamp, Shrapnel was my first fantasy city in the vein of Lankhmar, Sharn and Ankh-Morpork; a place where all sorts of urban adventures involving guilds, taverns and ever-thrumming furnaces underfoot. But it's not just a noir city in fantasy dressing: there's plenty of room for adventure, comedy, class warfare and all sorts of set pieces. It's the kind of city where bodies turn up in interesting places all the time, where you can start your night in a high-end restaurant at the top of the Stairs and end it fighting to the death in an underground gladiatorial fighting ring.

Sugar Park Tavern Death Song was the first song that struck that inspirational spark in me. To me, it conjures up images of dimly lit streets, solitary Chandleresque 'knight errants' smoking short stubby cigarettes and keeping one hand gripped on the long knife strapped to their lower back. The intertwining harmonies of Peter Hess's clarinet and Franz Nicolay's accordion are the backbone of Guignol's sound and they are on full display in this track. I liked the feeling that it gave me, so I kept listening and sure enough, the ideas started coming. Pete Merak has this amazing sleazy klezmer vibe that would be welcome background music in a multi-faceted den of ill repute and Dirty Penny's Pogo sounds like it could be played in a crowded open-air marketplace while people shop, eat and dance.

As I kept Fight Dirty playing during work, trips and walking home, the songs really started to define the feel that I had for Shrapnel. There's a series of about four or five tracks that would make fantastic chase scene music, from the up-tempo Gonzales, The Explosive Chilean to the screaming guitar of Create Destroy to their cover of Iron Maiden's Hallowed Be Thy Name. Even though Shrapnel was a corrupt fantasy city, there were still going to have to be people and organizations unflinching enough to require chase scenes through city streets and buildings, on rooftops, anything that allowed for the kind of manic energy and atmosphere that these songs provided.

I finally settled on the idea of an Arbiter, a 'body of justice' completely independent from the myriad corruptible guilds and councils of the city, much closer to a vigilante organization than a police force. The Arbiter's watchmen and guards are seemingly men on the outside, but that's where all similarity ceases. Their eyes are constantly covered by blank metal visors that don't seem to impair their vision, their speech isn't in any natural cadence and they cannot enter any building or structure unless given specific permission. No one in their right mind would report a crime to them or ask them for help; they enforce justice on the Arbiter's terms, which are utterly unknown to the public, but incredibly dangerous just the same. Thus, taverns, brothels and even temples have become the default locations for dirty dealings and if you do decide to murder someone in a back alleyway, make doubly sure that you're not alone. So characters in Shrapnel have to deal with criminal organizations, corrupt guilds, fickle nobles and on top of all that a nearly unstoppable police force that cannot be bribed or reasoned with. How do they survive?

Fight Dirty.

Motherlode: Five Point Plan

Alright, Scott, you're on.

Since most of the stuff that I've been using for the Motherlode game has come from other blogs that I've read over the past few months and not in-store purchases, I'm going to choose five (5) things to game with from there. As said before, we're using Swords and Wizardry. I really like the streamlined Saving Throws and the way that Ascending AC and To-Hit bonuses are already worked into the text. As someone who started out playing D&D in 3rd Edition and is running a game for people who've all played 3rd Edition, it's a good place to start for that base old-school feeling, but with some tweaks that make it easier for me and my players to accept.

So, without further adieu...

1) Beyond the Black Gate's Thief Class: Probably my favorite iteration of the old-school type thief class. The single Thievery percentile skill both simplifies the classes' multiple skills issue and helps 1st level Thieves feel a bit more useful.

2) Jeff Rients' Deck of Stuff: I love this fucking thing. The random items that they drew helped my players flesh out their character, whether it was giving them a flavor (like the wheel of stinky cheese convincing Joe that his half-elven magic-user was 250lbs.) or was something that they could use in a pinch (Mike's silver dagger, which he hurled into a crossbowman when he realized that he didn't have any other ranged weapons)

3) Jeff Rients' Carousing Rules: Because that's the kind of silly shit that I want to encourage in this game.

4) Tales of the Rambling Bumbler's Super-Simple Combat Maneuvers: Literally, the best way I've ever seen to adjudicate called shots, knock downs and the like.

5) Trollsmyth's Shields Shall Be Splintered: Makes having a shield totally awesome.

And to top it all off, liberal application of my newly acquired copy of the Moldvay Basic box set.

Everything else, from here on out, is going to be pure me.

Old school D&D my way

In the past few months, ever since I started looking at earlier versions of Dungeons and Dragons, I've been immersed in reading the opinions, examples and modifications of dozens of bloggers, forum posters and retroclone authors who all seemed to be having a blast with what they were playing. Having never played an edition of D&D before 2nd, I took all of these examples to heart and tried to make my eventual campaign as much like the games I saw Jeff Rients, Zak S, James Maliszewski and Al Krombach playing.

It didn't go so well and I think I know why. There wasn't enough me in it.

I have still never run a dungeon crawl or a sandbox campaign. I know that for many of my fellow bloggers, these are the types of games that they grew up on and what they associate with D&D. A person who never stopped playing B/X or 1e or an old hand returning to a game that they loved would be able to wing a fun, old-school romp because they know how it goes. They'll remember what they loved about these games, be it the exploration aspect, the fact that death could be around every corner or the game worlds that they almost lived in. When I ended up running it, I tried to play a game that I had never played before like a person who's been playing it for years, if not decades. Needless to say, it didn't feel right.

So what do I like in my role-playing game experiences? I'll have to think on that. The games that I've run with the most success have mostly been westerns, cyberpunk and modern supernatural hunting. I'll have to think on it before deciding anything concrete.

So we played some Swords and Wizardry last weekend

And I'm still not really sure how it went.

I had told my friends at college that I wanted to run a really informal pick-up D&D game for anyone who wanted to play. Last Saturday, I drove up to Oberlin for Labor Day weekend with a bag full of dice, the Deck of Stuff that I'd put together and a half-finished, randomly-generated dungeon map. The following day, I was able to get a nice chunk of folks together for the game, including my girlfriend Jamie, who's been incredibly supportive of this whole D&D kick since I started this summer, my good friends Mike, Ethan and Joe (who all worked with me on the noir radio drama that we did at college) and a new freshman named Daniel who I'd never met before.

Character creation was where we first started having problems. I'd gone for the 3d6 for each stat, can switch scores around method and as a result, a couple of my players were incredibly unsatisfied with their characters (nothing above a 12 and a 6 at the lowest.) I tried the lines of reasoning that I'd heard over this: that stats weren't as important in old-school D&D and that they're not what defines your character, but it still chafed them to feel like their characters were somehow behind the curve. Both of their characters were behind that Raggi Curve (more penalties than bonuses), so I let them reroll to much better results.

However, the resulting characters were hilarious. A fighter with a Constitution of 6 carrying a bizarre assortment of cheap weapons and a mule. An ogre fighter who ended up spending all of his money on a set of ring mail. A 250 lb. Half-Elven magic user (who pulled the 'Wedge of very stinky cheese' from the Deck of Stuff). A dwarven cleric of Granitenose, who entreats his believers to keep what is theirs and acquire more. A goblin thief who was probably the best prepared character I've ever seen in terms of random equipment. We started out in a tavern called the Irish Deer in the mining town of Motherlode, a rough and tumble place filled with what looked like Aragorn stunt doubles. There, the PCs bought a map to the ancient ruins of Myrmidia from a slightly dodgy Cut-me-own-throat Dibbler type and ventured out into the wilderness to find the caves, complete with a passel of 6 henchmen hired by the Magic-User, courtesy of the Meatshields! hireling generator.

Turns out that the only thing the map led to was an ambush courtesy of a group of bandits that the swindler was in cahoots with. In the combat that ensued, one of the Magic-User's men at arms was killed and the dwarven cleric nearly got it with a well-aimed crossbow bolt. However, the party managed to pull one of the bandits off of the cliff by his foot, hurl a warhammer across a chasm into a crossbowman's face and utterly dismember the rest of the bandits, thanks to the ogre's stick full of nails (and ridiculous damage bonuses) and the surviving goblin man at arms, who must have taken a level in badass at some point, because he ended up killing three guys and taking 1 hp's worth of damage in the process.

Naturally, everyone wanted revenge, so they returned to Motherlode in search of Holsten, the snake-oil salesman, eventually chasing him to Looter's Row. The fighter kicked down the door to the house, only to be hit with a crossbow trap that fortunately didn't take much out of him. The group entered the house cautiously It was then that the bugbears came out of hiding, wielding crossbows and doing the standard thug threatening. Once again, combat ensued, with another hireling falling to their death at the bugbear's hands and the Magic-User flinging his Sleep spell over all but one of the goons, who decided that discretion was the better part of valor and fled. The party entered Holsten's basement, where the sneaky little bastard escaped into a hatch in the floor.

The room search went well and it didn't go well. Our ogre fighter smashed open the locked chest next to our forger's workstation and got hit with a poison dart trap. Even with a bonus against poison, he failed his save and started taking damage. He was incredibly upset by this turn of events and particularly at me for putting it there. I honestly didn't know how to react. As the cleric carried him off to the local Church of Antra to help slow the poison, the rest of the team continued the search much more carefully.

Once all of value could be looted from the workroom, everyone made their way down into the hatch, torchbearers first. What they found was the corpse of their erstwhile swindler surrounded by spiders, who attacked first and poisoned the cleric. I don't know why I chose the spiders, given the negative reaction I had just gotten from the poison issue, but it happened anyway. Once the spiders were dealt with, the PCs brought the cleric to the Church of Antra again, where the priestess was decidedly less than happy that two poisoned folks had been brought before her within five minutes and charged them accordingly. And with that, the game was over for the night.

I'll try and post more later tonight on my reactions, but it's been a little difficult dredging up this stuff and I'd like to take a little time to think.