52 Pages at Canterbury (UK) Gaming Con

 For my followers who can easily get to Canterbury in the southern UK on August 8-10, the local game shop is hosting a convention on the University of Kent campus and I will be running multiple sessions of Jennell Jaquays' Thracia using 52 Pages rules and pregen characters, including classes from the Next 52 expansion.

Register for the convention here. For my sessions, you can sign up using Warhorn here.

That is all, carry on!

Dragonmeet 2015: Carry the Lantern High

Dragonmeet, London's one-day gaming convention, is coming up on the 5th December and unlike last year I can actually attend. It is my tradition to run an adventure from the one page dungeon contest, using the 52 Pages system, and name it after a rock song. This year is no exception, as I run Michael Prescott's winning adventure.

In which you have to get to that octahedron in the sky and wrestle forth its secrets. And now the theme will extend to the pre-generated characters, viz.

Well, there isn't much of a schedule visible yet because hey, Dragonmeet. But I am looking forward to it!

The Satanic Rules of the Con

As you may know, the Satanists have their Eleven Rules of the Earth. These were written in 1967 by Anton LaVey, excusing them from the charge that they just wanted to make the Commandments "go to 11"  (Spinal Tap, 1984).

Being that Satanism is mostly run by Nietzschean atheists, I can fully believe that the Rules were dreamed up just to give the ACLU something to post up in Boss Hogg's courtroom. Indeed, they present a loophole-riddled life morality that only a Cormac McCarthy villain trying to write a parole statement would mistake for the real thing.

But ... at the same time they're a nearly ideal set of rules for behavior at gaming conventions, substituting "game" for "home" and "munchkinism" for "magic". They come with an anti-harassment policy (#5), an anti-theft policy (#6), and a solution to the strolling bard problem (#11).

What, I ask you, does this say about gaming cons?

Convention Game Sharkpocalypse

The Dragonmeet session was a lot of fun. I've found that a good formula for a one-shot game is to make sure that you have some sort of ticking bomb, relentless final guardian, or monsterpocalypse at the end of a fairly short adventure. Without the slow build that a campaign gives, you do well to build fun off the cheap heat, with CLIMAX written in broad strokes and bright colors.

With that in mind, I framed the original one-page adventure by Daniel O' Donnell thus: the Crown Prince of Crime in the town of Ushralec hired the party to sack the Fane of Drowned Men, sacred to the demon-gods Dagon and Charybdis, ostensibly because of a grudge he had long held before recently coming to power. There were some very subtle clues to his ultimate intent - through a crack in the door, Alinor the sea elf saw some minions of crime pouring barrels of salt water into a big vat, tapping the floor below in some sort of code and receiving taps from below in turn. The Crown Prince's audience room, also, had been stripped of all furniture and valuables.

Anyway, heedless of this, the party -- a rogue, a brawling sailor, a prophet of hoary Nodens, the sea elf, a somewhat out-of-place dwarf, and of course Gnaro the multidimensional gnome -- set off in a longboat at high tide to make a beeline for the back end of the shrine. Through incredible luck and bad rolls by the defenders they were not spotted by any of the people doing business at the front of the shrine or on the causeway.  Floating right over the deep-submerged tethered zombies, they were soon on the roof, interrupting a treasure donation ritual with arrows, spears and a Sleep spell cast through a grating.

After the high priest fought back with a successful hold person, the fight soon moved to the front of the shrine, where the sea elf cast a net to trap some of the defenders. The high priest, escaping the net, backed into the rogue's waiting stab around the corner, and having been the target of much of the previous damage, soon expired, cursing his fate to die on land.

Meanwhile, some of the surviving acolytes inside the shrine had wakened their sleeping companions and were ready to defend the doorway. But the resourceful sea elf had meantime clad himself in the high priest's sharkskin robe and triple-shark-mouth tiara, and using a Disguise spell, convinced the acolytes that he had sent these invaders to test them and that they had all better surrender. The one acolyte who had saved and disbelieved the disguise was bludgeoned to death by the others at the orders of the fake high-priest.

That out of the way, the explorers noticed a dark line on the horizon and an ominous rushing sound. The sailor recognized it as a tsunami and estimated that they had little more than an hour before it hit. Looting the fane, which consisted of a few cabins of a shipwreck atop a rocky islet pierced by a well, they came away with the jewelry of a nobleman preserved in a cask of sherry and some valuable books. But the same high tide that had eased their passage over the drowned zombies now filled up the well and access to the passages below, filled with the donations of the faithful. Gnaro threw some gnomish sausage into the water and quickly attracted one of the guardian seawolves, who provided enough deterrent for the party to gather up their spoils and head for the hills. A wise move, for when the tidal wave hit it was ridden by a giant sharktopus, unholy spawn of Dagon and Charybdis.

In the aftermath of the disaster, the party heard some strange stories circulating. Merchants and jewelers who had rushed back to their strongholds in the city, ahead of anyone else, had found emptied cellars and strongrooms they thought secure, their broken doors not wholly convincing as tsunami damage. Could the party have been set up to trigger the wrath of Dagon, God of Tides, King of Watery Death, as part of some larger, astoundingly callous caper? Best not to think about it, or the treasures you left behind in the passages underneath the Fane ...

In the afternoon we played a fun, short scenario in Paolo's Cthonic Codex world, with themes of goats, moss, and a ghost dragon whose fossilized ribcage was a bridge in a canyon. The AFG system is about as simple as it gets and I recommend it for anyone who wants to prioritize ideas and creativity over rules and process, plus it has one of the coolest magic systems out there. Paolo and I then played in a demo of Lords of War, a card-battling game with simple rules but very deep strategic play.

Dragonmeet lives up to the second part of its compound. It is a great place to meet people with all kinds of ad-hoc gaming going on, and you tend to run into a lot of people you know from the gaming scene if you have lived in Southeast England for a while. This time it continued till 11 with open gaming, which was a great improvement, even though I had to get dinner with some old L5R cronies and run off to catch the last train.

Dragonmeet 2013

This coming Saturday I'll be at Dragonmeet 2013 in London, running the below adventure in the morning and most likely playing in Paolo's game in the afternoon.

Dragonmeet is a very enjoyable one-day convention with more punch than you'd think, in terms of attendant luminaries. The adventure will be run in 52 Pages rules and is basically an adaptation (with some twists) of a recent One Page Dungeon Contest winner, so if you're coming down, don't delve into the spoilers...

And yes, I am continuing the tradition of prog-rock/metal influence after last year's Heart of the Sunrise.

Oh, one more thing. Here's part of the town map I'm using, adapted from one of Dyson Logos' creations.

Considerations of the One-Shot Dungeon

Justin Alexander's blog posts about "Jaquaying the dungeon" are often cited in support of building non-linear pathways into an adventure location. I've found one case where things need to proceed a little differently, though: the one-shot adventure, meant to be played in the four hours or so allotted in a convention slot or a gaming club meeting, with no campaign following through.

The one-shot adventure adds the following two considerations:

1. At most, you have four to eight chunks of significant interaction to work with before the adventure is over, which can be combats, exploration problems to overcome, or rooms that invite deep exploration.

2. It's desirable to have the party be able to reach some kind of goal or climax, with skillful play, by the end of the adventure. Note that "skillful play" part; I've seen DMs in tournament modules fudge dice rolls to help the party reach the end, but there has to be some sense of earning it, or the reward is hollow.

Thing is, the campaign has all the time in the world. If the party spends their four to eight chunks noodling around the insignificant halls of the dungeon, they can make it up next time. If they never reach the climax now, they can wait to reach it later. But if the one-shot party misses, they get no more chances. If they miss, it should be because of something they did, not because they took the wrong random turning somewhere. This suggests a couple of different approaches ...

White Pluming it. In the manner of TSR's S2, where a forking hallway early on leads the party into one of three mostly self-contained adventure paths. There's something not quite satisfying about this. I mean, they might as well have been going through the wilderness and choosing between separate adventures.

Jaquaying with signposts. The dungeon architecture is porous, but clues lead the players to the climactic area or areas, with distractions to tempt the unwary. This could work.

Forget Jaquaying. Does the sense of player choice have to come from changes in the direction of travel? Could it be choosing instead what to try, what to look into, what to disturb and what not to, what to take and what to leave? Although Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan is sometimes lambasted as a "railroad," its design is really a sensible choice for a one-shot tournament module. The players really have to think about what to get involved with and what to leave alone; just as time is the players' ally in letting them stretch their exploration across the sessions of an extended campaign, it's their enemy in the one-shot, which can add to the challenge instead of subtracting.

Next post: The experience that sparked these musings - running The Lichway after midnight at GenCon!

What's Up at Gencon?

So yeah, summer is turning out to be a worse not better time for RPG and blogging... but I feel the need to make this post, though lazy it may be.

I'm going to Gencon (pictured above) in about 4 weeks time, and as in years past will be running a private game in the Hilton (likely an old Judges Guild module, thinking of Dark Tower with high level 52 pages characters, or maybe the legendary ... Glory Hole Dwarven Mine??), but I also want to know of any similar casual or speakeasy games that are going on. Also, my beloved spouse is going to be there at last - and a fair bet she'll want some part of the old school action too.

I always think "wow I should signup for DCC or Next or something" and then second-thought it with "wow, but that would mean playing with 5 random Gencon inmates" and the worst case scenarios just start oozing out.

So hit me up in the comments or on G+ - what's on as far as seminars, booth action, or pickup games?

Considerations of a Con Game

A little more aftermath from Dragonmeet:

1. The players felt the lethal fury as I made all rolls in the open (except for sensing rolls) and fudged nothing dangerous about the adventure. However, as I had stocked it there was one puzzle-trick involving a massive sliding block intervening between them and the climactic encounter. With less than 30 minutes to go in the session I decided to remove the block trick and show a straight path to the climax. I strongly believe that at a con game, fun takes precedent. Challenge is part of that fun - so no fudging combat - but having a memorable and dangerous climax is also part of that fun.

The trick was not super-dangerous, although the previous lot of players had found it quite anxiety-provoking. Look at area 9 on Dyson's map. Now imagine a 10' stone cube that starts in the north-east niche. It moves at the equivalent of a 30' /round move according to these rules:

* If no living thing is in any square of room 9 it makes its way back to its niche.
* If a living thing is in room 9 it focuses on the northernmost of these, then the westernmost of these if there is a tie. It will try to move immediately to the north of its focus first, stopped only by a wall. If it cannot move any further to the north, it will try to move to the west of its focus. This means, for example, that it will appear to "chase" a character in the top two squares of the room, and will crush anyone who stays there. If he or she darts by and stands by the south door, it will move down but stop just short of crushing.
* Being crushed against a wall is not pleasant; it does 2d6 damage a round with no saving throw.
* If you are particularly cruel, all doors to the room open inwards.
* Behind the cube is a niche with a small purple worm tooth inside, worth 250 $ to the right buyer.

2. I was considering a reward system for the con that would add a competitive element without tedious and gamesmanlike point-scoring. I didn't implement it, but offer it here for your consideration.

Arranged below from lowest to highest, like poker hands, is a series of individual outcome goals for your character. Each player secretly selects a goal before the game begins. After the game, see who achieved their goal. The one(s) who achieved the highest ranking goal win(s).

* Survive, with a share of loot worth at least 250$.
* Survive with a share of loot worth at least 250$ without being incapacitated at the end (having gone to 0 or fewer hp but not dead).
* Gaze on the Heart of the Sunrise (the gem in area 11).
* Survive, having gazed on the Heart of the Sunrise.
* Survive, having gazed on the Heart of the Sunrise without being incapacitated at the end.
* Alive or dead, ensure that the party eventually carries forth the Heart of the Sunrise from the dungeon successfully.
* Survive, as part of a party that carries forth the Heart of the Sunrise from the dungeon successfully.
* Survive without being incapacitated at the end, as part of a party that carries forth the Heart of the Sunrise from the dungeon successfully.
* Be the surviving, non-incapacitated, hero who personally carries forth the Heart from the dungeon!

Having written this all out I now keenly want to put this kind of goal setting in action for the next one-shot I run.

3. For the information of the players: The haul of xp from monster killing is 608, and from sale of treasure brought in on the back of Bill the Mountain Camel, who had fled and was only located after an arduous search (dwarven mail shirts and mirror frame) is 458; total then is 1066. If you are not a spellcaster and have INT or WIS > 12, add 10%, so you get 1173. The gnome and rogue also get 300 xp each for cooperating to get the gem out of the dungeon. It would have been more if you had been able to sell it, but ...

Gnarro the Gnome knew that he had only one hour until the pixie dust ran out, and guessed that the elemental could only track the giant gem if he touched the ground. He put the gem in a waterskin, tied it to the rock and float it in a nearby mountain stream. Unfortunately, the elemental was capable of following the tenuous scent  from the rock, through the rope, through the leather, to the gem.  When Gnarro returned to the scene he found only a large, hemispherical hole in the river bed....

Dragonmeet 2012: Heart of the Sunrise

Dragonmeet is a one-day small gaming con that's held in London around this time each year. Having been there as a player last year, this year I vowed to return as a gamemaster.

The table ended up filled with fans of the blog, including two folks from the L5R days and Paolo of Tsojcanth fame. Paolo brought his 52 Pages gnome, Gnaro, who had last been sighted in Mittellus-Prime and had somehow moved sideways in time to Mittellus-15087, which featured an alternate, rebooted version of the dungeon I had restocked using Dyson Logo's Purple Worm's Gullet map.

Memorable events in this run, entitled Heart of the Sunrise in true prognard fashion, included:

The party tarrying to collect the valuable claws of the hopping piercers not far inside the gullet, and interrupted by the appearance of the wyvern who had been nesting above the dungeon entrance. It wasn't long before the wyvern fell victim to an astounding series of events. It fumbled with its stinger (natural 1, 1/20 chance), went on to roll a fumble of 5 on the lower of 2d6, hit self for 1/2 damage (1/12 chance, increasing the odds to 1/240), lost my 50-50 determination roll of whether it was immune to its own poison (1/480), failed the first save vs. incapacitation I give victims of poison, which it would have made on a d20 8+ (1/1200) and the second save against death (1/3000) - both by one point, rolling a 7! So the wyvern arched around and, being clumsy in such confined quarters, stung itself in the eye and expired on the spot ......

Losing 3 party members to incapacitation and maiming. Tip: When making jokes about two suspicious-looking lizard statues possibly coming to life, interpose someone solid between them and the squishy characters!

An encounter with a mirror hidden in the room under the vertically rotating door under the dwarf youth hostel, which the Mittellus-Prime party had missed. This one will deserve a post of its own - the mirror was a special creation and it played out really well.

The final encounter with the shrine of the titular glowing ruby. The Band of Iron, being campaign characters with something to lose, were content to merely revere the fabulous gem. Not so these one-shot scoundrels! The party rogue used his Oil of Invisibility, lassoed the gem successfully, and then the altar turned into this and all hell broke loose:

What followed was the first time I have used the new chase rules and they worked like a charm. The rogue and gnome, who used pixie dust from a previous campaign to fly,  could double the creature's speed ... but they had to thread the dungeon, while it could move through stone at no penalty. It cut them off and the rogue only barely slipped past with a lucky roll of 2 from a quite-likely-to-hit rockhead. Still, a grim pursuit from a relentless, untiring opponent who seemed an infallible tracker seemed likely, so the rogue threw the gem to the flying gnome ... and the rock-thing stopped in confusion.

How long can our "garden-variety gnome" hero keep the gem aloft and away from the senses of the elemental guardian? That, alas, must await another chapter of his dimension-hopping saga. I want to thank all my excellent players for a truly memorable game with a rousing climax!

GenCon This Year

I'll be going back to GenCon Indy this year. Because I'm affiliated with a company there and may need to keep time free to consult or help out, I can't tie down to anything specific, so signing up for on-the-grid games is right out. Which is too bad, seeing how space is tight in just about every old school event I would want to play in.

Still, I want to run a game off the schedule like I did in 2010, for a combination of Five Rings friends and Old School folks. I'd also like to play in a couple of off-the-grid games. And I'm definitely going to stop by the Old school Renaissance booth.

So - is anyone going and interested? And can anyone point me to forum threads and the like where informal gaming arrangements are being made?

AGS Con Saturday

For people in southeast England, I will be running a session at the University of Kent at Canterbury's adventure games society con (AGS Game Con) Saturday 10:00-12:30 (NOTE TIME CHANGE), Woolf College at the University, room 1. Location and schedule info are in the link, it's a very informal one-day con with all kinds of gaming and fandom.

System: Homebrew old school (TSR Basic D&D meets 3rd ed*.)
Characters: Pregenerated, or use yours from previous games I ran this year.

Now that the bandits have been ousted from the upper works, the entrance to the Cellars of the Castle of the Mad Archmage lies open. A mysterious collector wants you to bring back a bottle of Cuvee du Sorcier Fou, preferably the tart MY 1321 vintage. Will you succeed in your quest, or just blunder around the Cellars aimlessly, getting into trouble? The choice is yours!

* Blog readers will know this as the 52 Pages System. I'll be using my own version of the Cellar level for castle of the Mad Archmage, but am prepared to go as deep as level 3 if people find the stairs ...

Went to Dragonmeet

In which I:

* Played in an AD&D game in the morning, run by a fellow who had clearly put some 20 years of work into the background of his campaign, with great maps and handouts. The adventure was a kobold hunt. The final challenge was certainly among the weirdest, toughest, and old-schooliest way to get a handsome kobold skull. There was a bit of fudging and nudging to get there, but we had a great time. AD&D was not at all cumbersome in this DM's hands, with plenty of stat checks in lieu of complicated procedures.

* Had a few words with James Raggi at his booth, picked up Vornheim and the Purple Worm Graveyard. He's more laid-back in real life than he is on his blog ... but then again, aren't we all?

* Also picked up a book of adventures for the Dying Earth system, which I've always wanted to run a one-shot in.

* Met up with my friend from the L5R CCG scene, who is now a 4th edition D&D player, and we played in a Castles & Crusades session. The adventure was a fun expedition to investigate a malfunctioning lighthouse, if a little on the easy side. My friend and I found the C&C system to play really well, a mix of AD&D with 3rd edition logic. I don't personally use it because its character generation doesn't fit my tastes, but with pre-generated characters that flaw went unnoticed. Old school made another convert that day...

Dragonmeet is a nice one-day con with no possibility of the fatigue that haunts longer events. One thing I did notice was a definite lack of miniatures, on sale or in games. This is too bad, as I do like using figures, and wanted to pick up some, or at least get some paints from another supplier than the Evil Empire of Nottingham. But I had to admit that the games I played in ran fine without figures.