Mining the D&D Anti-Canon

This month the RPG Blog Carnival is all about Cabals and Congregations - which got me thinking about the organisations and factions we use (or rather don't use) in our games.

When I play D&D particularly, I get the feeling there's a whole load of built-in backstory that often gets ignored because it's not used going forward, especially in published adventures. I'm fully in agreement with Luka Rejec on canon and anti-canon and that I'd rather do this stuff at the table to make our own world than spend days reading and remembering details of someone else's world.

None of our PCs exist in a vacuum; explicitly Bards have Colleges, Druids have Circles, Rangers have favoured enemies, Sorcerers have Bloodlines - these are all potential factions to draw into our stories, and more are implied for all classes.

Since Dungeon World and Stars Without Number* helped change my DM worldview I've been keen to try to build the story round the PCs, not push the PCs into the story. 

Here's some session zero thoughts to bring these background factions to the foreground, e.g:

• Barbarian - who are your tribe? Who are their enemies and allies? Who else roams your lands?
• Bard - where did you train? Are/were you part of a troupe? Who have you worked for?
• Cleric (also Druid) - do you belong to an order? Who are the enemies of your god/religion? What are your holy gathering places?
• Fighter - where did you train / who did you train under? Is there a local fighter's or mercenary's guild (and what's your relationship with them)?
• Monk - where is your monastery and what are its rites and rituals? Who threatens or empowers your way of life?
• Paladin - draw from Fighter and/or Cleric, but also: what organisations are aligned with / opposed to your Oath?
• Ranger - who else lives outside of the points of light (and what is your relationship with them)? Who of your favoured enemy do you have history with / are currently active locally?
• Sorcerer - who shares your bloodline and how do they live among other people? What organisations seek to regulate or exploit your magic?
• Warlock - are you part of a cult to your patron? Who are the enemies (or allies) of your patron?
• Wizard - where did you train/learn? Who is/are the largest/wisest holder(s) of arcane knowledge in the region?

I've talked before about how I like to use factions to help generate plot threads and story arcs and (I think) making the movers and shakers relevant to the PCs helps to tie the characters to the world.

The above are version-independent ideas, but if 5e is your D&D flavour  there's also backgrounds to mine (as well as them being bags of proficiencies)! 

• "Guild" backgrounds aside - Acolytes, Entertainers, Gladiators, Sages, Soldiers all probably belong to some sort of professional organisation
• Charlatans, Criminals and Urchins surely must have had run-ins with (or been members of) underworld organisations
• Folk Heros need a folk to be the hero of!
• Sailors have crews, Knights have orders, Nobles have houses... Outlanders have people back home
• Even Hermits have people, even if it's just the ones they are pointedly avoiding!

These low hanging fruit are often overlooked, but I'll be making a point to try to remember them in my future games. How do you go about creating and using factions?

For more information on the RPG Blog Carnival, or to check out the archive (going back more than a decade) make sure to check out the link - you can sign up to host here too.  Thanks to Gonz for hosting this month!

* I'd forgotten, but I started working on something similar for SWN a few years back too!

An exploration of travelling in TTRPGs

A new month rolls around already and June brings with it the topic of "Travels, by Wave, Cloud, or Portal" from Seed of Worlds for the RPG blog carnival.

Exploration is something I love about TTRPGs and something I want to play more of (and get better at) but I always found the rules for it lacking in modern D&D editions.  The hexcrawl-traversal procedures of the old school I find too heavy - I'm more narrativist than simulationist I feel - although not as heavy as the time I played Barbarian Prince...

Image credit: ThemeFinland

So, between these poles of "nothing" and "too much" what is there? I decided to go through my RPG book collection with a lens on the theme of "travel"...

It's hard for me to think about travel-based games without mentioning the hot-mess science-fantasy-wagon-train pointcrawl that is Ultraviolet Grasslands.  The places, people, and art are inspiring - but in a game that is ostensibly about travelling, how do we travel?

A destination is chosen, a known number of days away, and the caravan departs. There's a roll to see how ill fated the journey is, and one to see what is encountered. Time and resources are adjusted (there is caravan management and good-old OSR resource-management) and you've arrived. You could flesh the whole thing out into a multi-scene session, or a single montage.

I talked a while back about Skycrawl/Downcrawl and how much I love the procedures therein, it's literally a game (setting?) built around exploring and discovering new things (for the GM too with all the generation tables).

Travel in these games is heavily procedurised but pretty rules-light; the "difficulty" of the journey is set out in how-many-boxes-do-we-need-to-check-off style and the players go about checking off the boxes.  Each day they can press on (checking the boxes), rest, or retreat - with opportunities to gain and spend a meta-currency called "Tack" which prevents them from getting lost.

There are moves for players to be able to expand the map or add detail to it, which I personally think is wonderful.

Side note: I keep meaning to talk about The Wildsea - which is another game I own which is pretty much about exploration.  There needs to be more hours in the day, or perhaps just fewer working hours.  Travelling the rustling waves feels conceptually similar to Downcrawl; 

Wildsea travel similarly involves setting a track (boxes to tick off) and, similar to the starship combat in Stars Without Number, allocating the PCs to their stations. Rolls are made to see if the ship makes progress, the crew encounters anything notable, the cartographer maps the area/route, and so on. When the track is filled, the party arrives.

I think these are what I like.  I'd like the journey from one place to the next to fit nicely into a session (sometimes) - but this is something I need to explore more.  The journey forms the scenes of the narrative, which I like, but the number of scenes is unknown (due to different levels of success ticking different numbers of boxes) which isn't helpful in this context...

Interestingly, if you crossed these systems with the traditional hexcrawl you would probably get something like Yochai Gal's wilderness rules for Cairn v2...

On a very different tack, I purchased a bundle on itch.io purely out of curiosity about Wanderhome.  It's not my usual cup of tea but it's about travelling, which I have mechanical interest in, and a while back I got hooked into Patrick Stuart's musings on "soft", Ghibli-esque D&D.  This is a much more narrativist game, with places along the road created and fleshed out in play by the players.  It's pretty much all about the journey - but I can't say I fully understand, from reading it through, how it's supposed to be played.

I do like some of its ideas and especially on how to build places, essentially by combining templates, which is something to file away for inspiration...  Of course, every game has something you can steal to make your other games better.  

So, what are your favourite travel mechanics or systems that I can steal from?

PSA: The RPG Blog Carnival is looking for hosts for 2023, you can find out more and sign up here (it's incredibly easy and actually quite fun). Thanks to Seed of Worlds for hosting this one!

#dungeon23 update. How it started vs how it's going

I switched to using a diary last week; prior to that I had been trying for more of a "one page dungeon" but I got lost in trying to make the flow work around the rooms I was writing, and how to make the rooms fit in the flow I had created.

I thought it would help, but it didn't.

Using a diary (yes I know that was the idea all along) I'm finding that I fill the space with notes, and then stop, and I'm feeling less constrained by the map:

My dungeon23 megadungeon, week 3

I'm still trying to work to the rough proportions from last week but if I can't make it fit then I'm not worrying too much.

On #dungeon23 and losing myself in old school dungeon stocking tables

As I have been working on this megadungeon I have been increasingly interested in the old school ways of dungeon generation.  I'm building a location not an "adventuring day". A heavy amount of research has led me to trying to make this first (sub)level 18 rooms large:

Progress on level one of my megadungeon

There's differences between systems and authors but an easy generalisation, looking particularly at OD&D and B/X, seems to be that probabilities are something like this: (please do correct or enlighten me in the comments!)

• 2/6 chance of there being an encounter room (note that in those days, as in my mind, this could mean combat or social encounters) and 3/6 chance there is treasure
• 1/6 chance of tricks and traps in this room and 2/6 chance there is treasure
• 1/6 chance of this being a "special room"
• 2/6 chance of this being an empty room and 1/6 chance there is treasure

This is obviously easily applied to 6, 12, 18, 24 and 30 (and so on) room dungeons, and there were enough people proposing that 18 was a reasonable size for a dungeon level (or here, sub level) that I thought I could aim to fit 18 on the page and see how it went!

How it went was ... OK.  Not as well as I had hoped because I think I have been too focused on making things fit in the context of the map (i.e. "finishing") than getting ideas down on paper (which is more akin to the "beginning" I was aiming to focus on last time!)

However; back to the drawing board and armed with a week-to-page planner/diary I now have a modified plan going forward.  I'm going to stick to the original proposition of just writing rooms but at least I can feel confident that each week long spread of 7 rooms should/could (on average) contain:

• 2 rooms with encounters, that could be played out by combat or roleplay (best: either)
• 2 "special" rooms with puzzles or traps or some sort of set-piece
• 2 empty rooms - although hopefully these will still contain enough dressing to be interesting or relevant
• 1 wildcard (any of the above, it's just guidance after all)

Generally, 1/4 to 1/3 of these rooms should have treasure (so say two, on average) and this treasure is generally most likely to be "guarded" (by an encounter or a trap) than "unguarded" - but searching empty rooms should prove to be rewarding sometimes!

I'm happy with my progress and what I've learnt so far, how's everyone else getting on?

Running 5e as OSR: Monsters by HD not CR

Some of my friends love 5e, only play 5e, only will play 5e. I find 5e unwieldy and time consuming to prep and run, whereas I love the flow of OSR and PBTA games. But 5e has been around for nearly a decade and apparently isn't going away soon either.

What I want to know is whether I can run 5e for them, RAW or RAW-ish, in a way that means I a) don't have to bog myself down in encounter building and all that crap and b) can use all the cool OSR stuff I have lying around.

Encounter building is painful; it sucks all the joy out of running a game for me. However, embracing "Combat as War, not Sport" I'm sacking off encounter building for good so I don't need CR. What I could do with, however, is an idea of general stats against Hit Dice in 5e so I can use OSR resources or eyeball stats in play.

Indie RPGs saved my relationship (and they can save yours too)

I was, on reflection, probably too busy with the other elements in my life to dedicate the time and the attention she needed. She was inflexible, demanding, frustrating, a source of great joy that left me burnt out and miserable.

D&D is a harsh mistress. We had a difficult relationship for many years, through 4e and 5e and variations on 3e, and it took something new to change that. Indie games turned my relationship with gaming right around, so a big thanks to their creators and to the November RPG Blog Carnival for prompting me to get out of my rut and blog about how much I love them!

My collection so far

I have said it before: the moment I read and played Stars Without Number and Dungeon World it was like a light went on in my head. Suddenly I saw so many other, better, ways of doing things in my games. Better ways of prepping, organising, running, and playing games. Better mechanics and frameworks, better tools, better abstractions.

Your characters, your stories, your worlds

This is the round-up for the January 2021 RPG Blog Carnival.

First off, a big thank you to Rising Phoenix Games for such a nice handover from last month's carnival.

Campaign Mastery considers the impact of the current global pandemic on future stories and characters in our games:

"You can’t discuss a character of the 1930s or 40s without considering the impact of the Great Depression. You can’t talk about the 1940s (even if someone was a child at the time) without considering the impact of World War 2 on their lives..."

The Other Side shares the process of building a Basic D&D witch, inspired by Moldvay, as part of the #charactercreationchallenge:

"The witch class I am pairing with this is the one from Dragon Magazine #43 and using the guidelines set out by Tom Moldvay on what a witch should be..."

The Sea of Stars looks at the stories and characters in a novella through the lens of roleplaying game adventures.

"I think this is a good model for single character campaigns, the primary character has to be competent because there is just them at the core of it, I think this should be leaned into..."

Take On Rules takes us through an adventure design process somewhat similar to mine, although I am intrigued by the use of index cards and may well try it out sometime - if I can reduce things down from a page of A4!

"The end result of this preparation process wasn’t a fleshed out adventure. Instead, I filled my head and notes with ideas, images, and touchstones to draw upon during play..."

Shuttered Room presents a table of interesting reasons to be stumbling on newly rolled party members, ranging from "Solo Adventurer" etc. to the likes of "You were the doppelganger" and "Lovecraftian Resurrection":

"Either get yourself raised from the dead, or roll 2d6/d66 to see how a new character can be introduced mid-session, seamlessly or with a great thump of deus ex machina..."

Image (cc) toon13

Rising Phoenix promotes a narrative approach to character development, and the idea of levelling up more than just mechanically:

"Leveling up in D&D or Pathfinder type games could, with a few rules tweaks, be more meaningful. We won’t even throw out the core rules, I promise..."

Codex Anathema looks at the complex relationship between character building, world building, and the stories we build from the interaction between the two, in the context of current campaigns:

"When creating a new character, for me it’s essential to talk with my DM about his ideas regarding the campaign storyline ... I can suggest what I’d like to hapen to my character, and he can plan ahead and try his best to incorporate such ideas to his own..."

Roll4 outlines some simple rules for creating memorable NPCs by sketching them with defining features to be fleshed out over time:

"I’ve found if there is too much information, then the character’s don’t have room to grow. Too little, and they’re boring..."

Campaign Mastery returns with a deeper process for developing NPCs - or even characters - with interesting subtleties:

"Baggage. History. Everyone has it. Sometimes, you can use it, as in the above example, to make a dull process seem more real AND more interesting, to make a player feel like their character is really there, even if – as in this case – there is limited interaction required..."

Another second post, from Sea of Stars, continues this theme with questions for developing player characters and their connection to the world:

"Inspired by Judd the Librarian’s questions, I decided to write up a few questions to help people think about their characters..."

Roleplay Geek takes us through node design for a point-crawl adventure in Mega City 1:

"When designing the scenario from scratch you may go through this process multiple times as you focus in on what is important for each session. In fact having a node map at the macro level is useful..."

Full Moon Storytelling shares some tips for character names, and a second mystery post...

"Your naming conventions should embrace the fact that the peoples travel extensively..."

Of Dice And Dragons promotes the argument - that I very much agree with - that characters should be more than just stats, with some helpful links too:

"Building a character should be more than just selecting stats and the best weapon based on those stats. You should be considering the why..."

What a great start to 2021, let's keep the momentum going! February's carnival is hosted by Sea of Stars - where the theme is Gifts of the Gods.

Massive thanks, of course, to Scot Newbury for all the work maintaining the RPG Blog Carnival - and the RPG Blog Alliance network too.

One-Roll Random D&D 5e Characters

I have been working on a procedural character generator for 5e, as I find the system isn't necessarily built around making characters interesting, but it's involving learning a new language so is taking a while.  I'll post it when it's done!

Image (cc) Mikeypetrov

SO! Here's a quick generator you can use now, with a reason to take non-minmaxed stats and a life event to add some inspiration for background colour.

Why not grab a set of polyhedrals or use the button at the bottom to generate someone interesting?

The d8 - Race

1. Human
2. Elf
3. Dwarf
4. Halfling
5. Dragonborn
6. Tiefling
7. Gnome
8. Half Elf or Half Orc

On DMing, or How I Learned to Let Go and Embrace the Chaos

Image (cc) Kridily

Dungeons & Dragons is a bad game.*  Bad naughty.  It's irresponsible in that it doesn't show us how to be Dungeon Masters - my favourite term for which is Apocalypse World's "MC" as we are, after all, Master of Ceremonies above all else.

D&D teaches us to build encounters, but not how to build stories and worlds.  It teaches us to think in terms of probabilities and not stakes.  I learnt to DM on 4e and I've spent maybe a decade unlearning how it was presented to me then.  It took Stars Without Number and Dungeon World to open my eyes to how a game could be run.

One Roll Weapons of Destiny for D&D 5e

Image (cc) Blazbaros

I'm always toying with ways to tie the PCs, the world, and the story together.  These are weapons that can be found and used by starting characters but are in some way destined for the end game, and requiring the completion of a mid-tier quest arc.  Roll a set of polyhedrals (or use the button at the bottom of the post) to discover your destined weapon!

The d20 - Crafted long ago by...

1. Dwarves, from rare minerals and alloys
2. Gnomes, from fine silver woven with spells
3. Elves, from a branch of the oldest tree
4. Drow, from darkness made tangible
5. Angels, from a fragment of a star
6. Elementals, from distilled elemental energy
7. Fey, sung into shape from some organic matter
8. Merfolk, from the horn of a narwhal
9. Slaadi, from the remains of a dead Modron
10. Mind flayers, from psychically infused iron
11. Devils, and was forged in the fires of the Hells
12. Demons, from solidified corruption
13. Centaurs, from finest polished bronze
14. Yuan-Ti, from the bones of a Naga
15. A vampire, and was forged and cooled in blood
16. A lich, by corrupting a hero's weapon
17. A banshee, and lost by her in death
18. Lizardfolk, from the bones of a gargantuan beast
19. A sphinx, from a treasure of the gods
20. Orcs, by melting down the weapons of their foes

Making Skill Checks More PBTA

Image (cc) oxpal

One thing I loved when reading Dungeon World was how all the moves fall into the same basic pattern:

• 10+ (on 2d6 plus modifiers) means clean success
• 7-9 means success, but with a cost or limitation
• 6 or less means failure and the DM moves the story along

It's an easy change from pass/fail and it runs right through all "Powered by the Apocalypse" games.  Note how there's no DC. I like this. So often my players roll skill checks and announce the result before I decide the DC that I end up just eyeballing it - so why not get rid of it? This is all about stakes and not about difficulty.

Character - Marigold Silvereyes

I'm playing in a 5e campaign from next week, and I find 5e can be dull and uninspired. So I left it to this generator for my 5th level starting character...

Marigold Silvereyes is a halfling barbarian, a war orphan who was good with her hands and left empty and angry by the war.

I rolled 16, 13, 12, 10, 7, 7 and decided to put the 16 in STR and use her halfling bonuses to bump DEX and CON to 14s. Not too shabby, but still with two dump stats to assign I decided to take CHA as the better one as I already had Persuasion from Guild Artificer and thought Intimidate might be fun from the Barbarian skill list.  Tough cookie.  I also took Athletics so I could run, jump, and climb trees as well as bully monsters.

Rollin' with it: Piratical feats 'n' treats

Image (cc) Joriel "Joz" Jimenez via Flickr

Yarr!  My Freeport game for Pathfinder is gathering speed - in my head at least.  I've been reading through the Pirate's Guide and getting a handle on the wheels rolling behind the setting.

E6 games need feats, so I got some Combat, Subterfuge and Immediate Action feats from Genuis Guide to keep my players (and NPCs) up to speed.  The "Immediate Action" feats are pretty cool, essentially providing more options for Attacks of Opportunity - throwing weapons and all sorts.

Rollin' with it: A place to call home...

First decision made:  I'll be running Pathfinder in Epic 6 mode because at least I know what I'm doing and I know my players like the system.

I'll also be going miniatureless - which is unusual for me, but worked well in Alternity and saves a lot of mini-and-map-related hassle!  Go go Gadget imagination.

Second decison made:  We'll be playing in Freeport, for multiple reasons:

Alignment: Blurring the lines

We didn't get to play in last night's gaming session, but I did get to thrash out some ideas for house rules with David - and he made a very valid point about the dullness of "Neutral" characters(1). With that in mind, I've been considering replacing the nine alignments with nine overlapping blocks of four:

Pathfinder campaign planning

Firstly, Pathfinder is amazing. However, that's not what I'm blogging about today - campaign planning is.

Firstly, I don't have a lot of time. I've been looking for tools to help and frankly the NPC, settlement and campaign planning sheets from the Pathfinder GameMastery book are a great start - I'd recommend reading it to fantasy DMs using any system.

I've tried TiddlyWiki in the past with mixed success - for this campaign I'm moving on to Obsidian Portal as it offers worldbuilding, character profiling, session reporting and so much more straight off the bat. I'm toying with the idea of posting photos of character minis for those that have them, and making HeroMachine characters for those who don't.

With Obsidian Portal letting me wikify everything that'sgoing on in the world - please don't ask me to think in straight lines! - I was looking for some inspiration for building the world. Enter an amazing idea courtesy of welshpiper.com: quick and dirty map generation tools, with the ability to roll "encounters" for each major hex, let me approach the world from both top-down and bottom-up perspectives at once. Let's hope I can resist the urge to try to generate the whole world!

Using the welshpiper templates for Hexographer, I'm generating a simple map that can be whacked into Obsidian Portal's Google-Maps-powered map tool to put the locations in the right place when I get round to wikifying them. Now I just need to build, or find, an adventure/encounter to go with each location and I'm about set up. Enter the GameMastery Guide's acres of tables...

Once I get a system down, I'll give a more structured breakdown. Anyone interested, or got any tips??

Back to the Table

Last week Tom started his Pathfinder campaign and it really is a superb game, it brings back that Dungeons and Dragons feel that I thought was lacking in 4e. Everything in the Pathfinder rules is to my liking starting with the obviously high production values of the book, its streamlined 3e rules and new rule additions, core races and classes make it feel like a continuation of the legacy of D&D not a new game.

As I have read the rules and we have played our fist game I am struck by my own enthusiasm to play and really hate that I am away on "Stupid Holiday" next week and can not play in the game session. Amazing how after all the years and all those games its D&D that I still love to play above all others.

I have made a Human Fighter for my first character and whilst I like him a lot I have the urge to play a Half Elf Druid in these rules as the Druid really rocks! We have a Dwarf Ranger played by Nathan and a Gnome Rogue made by Mark with an Npc Cleric to be added to the group. Our group is down on numbers and we really need to find some fresh blood to bring into the game or attract some past gamers back out of retirement and back to the table, I would like two more players but more the merrier really.

That's all I have got to say for a little while as I am on Holiday for the next week or two. And Nathan and Mark if you read this hope everything goes well in next weeks game and please, please look after my character.

On crunch, fluff, and system necromancy

We're starting playing RPGs again this week - and I for one can't wait! It seems I've been handed the reins, although Dave has FantasyCraft ready to roll "whenever," but I've been struck by a thought:

My group likes crunch. We love rules, and stats, and rolling on tables. This may well be why the rules-light games (PDQ# etc) we've played have tailed off. I think this could also be why people don't seem too keen on Savage Worlds...

Getting it (back) together

It's been a while - sorry, but not much to report back on.

Plenty to be reading though - Tourq's got me thinking about modifying DnD to make it more like the epic fantasy we know and love, great ideas for zombies in Savage Worlds in Wrath Of Zombie by... um... WrathOfZombie, and this has got me all fired up for more Deadlands - when anyone turns up, that is...

Fleet's almost assembled, ready to play Starmada - just need to get some ships statted up.

Thoughts on 4e

I've been reading through NewbieDM's thoughts on helping your players in 4e, and it ties in quite nicely with my thoughts for fleshing it out a bit.

My group went way off 4e, mainly because of perceived power creep, lack of "depth", the generic nature of powers and the counterintuitiveness of skill challenges. If that's a word.

Maybe we were playing it wrong - I think a lot of bad feeling bubbled up from the progressively weirder race/class combinations being thrown in by a couple of players, simply as ways to max damage. Powers had cool names, but were never described. Skill challenges went wrong because players either a) has no skills as they'd maxed out for combat, or b) declared "I'm using my History skill to..." which just feels weird.

It does sound like things have changed, and maybe we were too harsh on 4e. In addition to reminding players of the things NewbieDM mentions, I'm considering:

* Limiting PCs to a maximum of 16 in any stat before racial modifiers?

* Getting players to describe their powers. "My sword bursts into green flames as I strike down the closest bugbear," rather than, "I use my Green Flame Blade on bugbear 3 - it is number 3 that's bloodied, right?"

* Giving generic XP rewards for any successful skill check in a skill challenge - making it a less formal process?

4e was the first tabletop RPG I ran - or indeed played - so I guess with hindsight we could have done things a little differently... Any thoughts?