The most recent version of MULRAH (v0.5) is completely redone from the ground up. Instead of being a simplified mash-up of FATE and PDQ, it is now based on Microlite20, so it is fully compatible with the Primary Fantasy SRD rules.

MULRAH’s goal is to incorporate innovative rules from indie games into a system that is compatible with mainstream modules. The primary additions MULRAH brings to Microlite20 are:

1. Rules for “Simple Combat” that allows for zipping through unimportant confrontations to focus on the good stuff.
2. Breaking down the abilities granted by Race and Class into Traits that players can purchase for their characters when they level up or even use to create their characters from the start.
3. Card-based initiative system that provides special effects to lucky players.
4. The option for characters near death to make an awesome “final stand.”
5. Rules for a “reroll” meta-game that rewards story-enhancing decisions and quality role-playing.
6. Introduction to the concept of Keys, which, when developed, will allow for clear, player-driven ways, other than killing monsters and stealing their treasure, to gain XP.

(Image taken from To the Blogmobile!)

RetroRoleplaying and To the Blogmobile! are home to some of the best sources of information on the Web about retro clones of old Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying games.  Be sure to check out the following articles, if you’re interested:

“Old is New Again: A Guide to ‘Retro-Clone’ Roleplaying Games” (To the Blogmobile!)

“Retro-Clones” (RetroRoleplaying)

Microlite11 (download) replaces Microlite20’s standard Race + Class system with a Point-Buy system for creating customized characters and new Races and Classes that remain compatible with the Primary Fantasy SRD.

The main differences from Microlite20 are as follows, in descending order of impact on the game rules:

1. 11 Traits encapsulate all the abilities of the various Races and Classes of Microlite20. Characters have 11 Character Points with which to purchase these traits, or the GM can simply require they select a Race (4 points) and a Class (7 points).
2. Character Points (1 per level) replace the automatic stat increases, additional attack/damage bonuses (Fighters), and increased spell levels (Magi/Clerics). These Character Points can be used in the manner prescribed by a Class or in other ways. For example, the GM could allow a Fighter to gain access to 0th-level Divine Spells instead of the standard +1 attack/damage bonus at 5th level.
3. Rogues are considerably more powerful in Microlite11, without any significant changes to the class itself or permission from the GM to bend class rules. This is because they gain Character Points like other classes, but these are not prescribed for attack/damage bonuses or spells and therefore can be used on additional skills or other traits.
4. Skill Rank multiplies a character’s level by 1/3 of the points she’s invested in the skill. This is a variation of the Alternate Skill Rules posted on the Microlite20 website. If you are using Microlite20’s standard classes, you will notice no change in Skill Rank for skills in which a Class has a +3 bonus. However, all other Skill Ranks will be 0 (1 if Human).
5. Experience Points (XP) can be gained for “frivolous spending,” as per the rules in Microlite74, because of my own personal preference for this old school feel. The XP required to gain a level has been accordingly increased to 20 times the character’s level. Feel free to revert this rule to the Microlite20 default.
6. The Point Trade option for generating stats establishes 11 as the baseline for all stats, which is lower but less risky than the most likely results (13) you’ll get using the standard 4d6-drop-lowest method.

I was at the local mall today doing some Christmas shopping, and was in a combination calendar/board game store (some kind of weird residue left after a Waldenbooks died) and saw the latest D&D boxed starter set there, next to the Apples to Apples, Dirty Mind, and Carcassone.

This brought back fond memories.  I bought my first RPG, Star Frontiers, in a board game store in a mall back in the ’80’s.  I had gone in and bought a little tactical dice-and-chit game called “Attack Force” (I still have it!) made by TSR, where one player is a Death Star-like space station and the other is a squadron of space fighters.  I liked it and its science fiction theme, but it was only diverting for a while, and so was back looking for other stuff along those lines.  There was a bigger box, also with “TSR” on it, also SF themed.  I didn’t know what a “roleplaying game” was, but it said you’d play a human or alien who would become part of the “Galactic Task Force” and “defend the galaxy against ruthless adversaries.”  Deal!

For some reason current RPG industry doctrine says this doesn’t happen.  “People have to be introduced to RPGs by other people, it’s all word of mouth.”  “Boxed sets are bad, mmmkay.”  “Retail distribution blah blah blah.”  But in the end, it’s possible and it works.  Certainly if you’re Hasbro you can have a D&D set next to Monopoly in every single Target if you gave a crap enough to, but even smaller players should be able to get to more venues as well.  A lot of these companies behind the other “boxed sets,” aka board games, in those stores are pretty small.    The RPG guys just need to figure out how to leverage that channel, I guess.  (Ironically, I see Munchkin, a game that is a parody of D&D, in way more book and board game stores than I see D&D in.)   RPGs are pretty “sticky,” so if you can get someone introduced with a basic set that’s going through a more mass market channel you can probably pull them to the more specialized stuff later.

Green Ronin is trying the “D&D basic set” pattern again with their Dragon Age game.  If it’s going to sit in some “RPG/comic” store that only the weirdos go into in the first place, I’m not sure that’ll work, but if it gets to computer game stores, bookstores, big box stores – I think it will.

P.S.  Star Frontiers rules and adventures are available for free and legal download here and has a “remastered” version and thriving fanzine here!

 Think about that though – visually appealing. It dosen’t necessarily mean the most technically advanced, and points regarding the 360/PS3’s differences aside I feel we’re forgetting what made the Final Fantasy series so popular in the first place. The most important aspects of any game like this are the story and gameplay. The design is also an integral part but the fact is a few polygons missing off an otherwise amazingly designed character isn’t going to make me lose any sleep so long as that character is well developed and interesting. I think the Persona games are a good example of this, with a great deal of character development and a visual style that looks great despite being firmly grounded in the previous generation.

Another related issue causing much angst is the fact that the 360 version will almost certainly be released on multiple discs – but really you have to ask why that’s such a problem. If you can’t get off your arse once every 40 hours or so to swap a disc over then you should probably put the whole thing down and get out of the house anyway before your fat fucking rectum becomes fused to the furniture. Besides, consoles have hard drives. Yes you heard, nice big hard drives you can likely install the whole thing onto anyway.

 The same people worrying their little heads about the possibility (and that’s precisely all that it is right now) that a cross platform release will degrade the visual quality of their game are forgetting that the majority of them swear by FFVII as being the greatest game of all time – this, ladies and gentlemen is a game that had field characters with blocks for hands that were bigger than their fucking heads. And don’t tell me it looked good for the PS1 either as we all know graphically speaking FFVIII pissed all over it.

You can't see it here, but Cloud has a massive hard on for those graphics up there.

 So in conclusion, don’t worry your little heads over it, because if Famitsu’s 39/40 review of the japanese release is anything to go by, we’re all in for a treat.

I’d originally thought about doing a Wild Talents review (or continue) going through the Doctor Who game today, but got in an old-school kind of mood.

So continuing from our introductory post, let us take a look at the introduction to the D&D Basic Rules (Mentzer edition).

We get a basic introduction to “What the D&D Game Is All About”.  There is a “mission statement” of sorts embedded within:

In the D&D rules, individuals play the role of characters in a fantasy world where magic is real and heroes venture out on dangerous quests in search of fame and fortune. Characters gain experience by overcoming perils and recovering treasures. As characters gain in experience, they grow in power and ability.

While I certainly games in various styles, that really was the style that always seemed to work best. Not necessarily mercenary type characters, but characters in search of fame and fortune. And forced to choose between the two, fortune would almost always be the preference. That’s not to say our heroes did not do good deeds — it was always fortunate that the treasure-laden dungeons were inhabited by baddies intent on nefarious deeds.

We then get a basic breakdown of how the book is divided. It then tells us how this deals mostly with dungeon adventures and covers characters of 1st through 3rd level and tells us of the other two sets in the game -

• D&D Expert Set covering 4-14th levels and wilderness adventures
• Companion Set, covering 15-36th levels

Technically, the Companion rules as described here never came out. There was another revision of the game, resulting in new Basic and Expert sets followed by 3 more sets -

• Companion Set, covering 15-25th levels as well as rules for dominions, mass combat, tournaments, wrestling, and an introduction to the planes of existence.
• Masters Set, covering 16-36th levels as well as rules for becoming immortal, weapons mastery, and greater details on the planes of existence.
• Immortals Set, covering Immortal PCs.

D&D Basic Rules by Frank Mentzer

I got this new series of sets and enjoyed them, especially since this is the series that I believe introduced the most people to D&D and therefore most people I gamed with were introduced through this series. However, I always liked the Tom Moldvay version of the D&D Rules more. It’s probably more a stylistic/personal preference. In any case, we’ll continue our trip down memory lane focusing on the Mentzer incarnation of the D&D Basic Set.

We get a discussion about the rule booklet being drilled with holes so you could cut the pages apart and arrange them in a three-ring binder, with the suggestion you could rearrange the pages and mix them with corresponding sections from the Expert and Companion Sets.

There is also a discussion that while the booklet is referred to as rules, everything within is changeable, with the purpose of the rules being “to provide guidelines [emphasis theirs] that enable you to play and have fun, so don’t feel absolutely bound to them.” While I think the 3rd and later editions of D&D did a lot of good things, one unfortunate thing was having a rule for everything. One thing I discovered when trying to houserule D&D 3.0 is everything is pretty tightly linked together – making one change quickly causes a ripple effect.

We then have “Definitions of Standard D&D Terms. It introduces some terms which are still very familiar such as DM, PC, NPC, and party. There are also some terms whose definitions I found interesting. The rulebook refers to the setting as a dungeon, reasonable enough. It then refers to a purchased dungeon, called a “dungeon module”. This is a term which has fallen somewhat into disuse in gaming circles though it still appears. I’m fond of it for some reason.

The definition for adventure struck me as interesting -

Each game session is called an adventure. An adventure lasts for as long as the players and DM agree to play. An adventure begins when the party enters a dungeon and ends when the party has left the dungeon and divided up treasure.

We never used that definition – I have fond memories, both as a player and a DM, of setting up camp in the Caves of Chaos, especially in cleared out lairs.

We also have definitions for certain special players. We have the mapper, the player who is responsible for drawing the maps based on the DM’s descriptions. This is something of a lost art in gaming I think – I know for my 4e game I used the Maptools application and gradually revealed the dungeon as the players explored it. We also have the caller who is responsible for being the primary interface between the DM and the players – kind of the spokesman for the players. To be honest, even back in the 80s we never made use of a caller and rarely used a mapper. It might be interesting to try out some time.

We then move to a definition of monsters.

As details of the dungeon are revealed, the player characters will meet “monsters” which they have to avoid, talk to, or fight. A monster is any animal, person, or supernatural creature that is not a player character. A monster may be a ferocious dragon or a humble merchant.

Here lies another thing which I think has been lost in newer RPGs – the idea of avoiding monsters. In the 3rd and 4th editions of D&D encounters are designed to be carefully balanced against the party of adventurers. Some of my fondest gaming memories are of encounters with foes that did not involve a fight. The wandering monster you run into when you are trying to get out of the dungeon, are low on hit points and out of spells. I recall my brother, his 2nd or 3rd level magic-user encountering goblins he was not prepared to fight, bluffing his way out of the encounter. “I am… the Wizard.” He then pulled out a jar with a spell component – probably a live spider for spider climb (this was AD&D) – and claimed it was a goblin he had polymorphed for failing to obey him. Excellent times. I think those older rules, with less balance, encouraged that behavior far more.  If you are a 1st level party going through the dungeon and you encounter a minotaur, you would be well-advised not to fight it head-on. The odds of your victory are low and if you do win, you will certainly suffer massive casualties.

We then reach a discussion of encounters, used to describe a meeting between PCs and monsters. Encounters may lead to a fight, often called a melee. I’d like to thank D&D for adding the word melee to my vocabulary at such a young age.

Next up is a section entitled “Use of the Word ‘Level’”. They did a pretty good job defining this, as I never had difficulty distinguishing between levels of experience, monsters, spells. and dungeon. As characters rose in level I was uncertain if that meant that all dungeons were supposed to begin with 1st level dungeons (i.e. with mainly 1 Hit Die monsters) even as characters advanced – that seemed silly early on, though the rules seemed to at least suggest that. I think that system would work best when playing in a “megadungeon” — some gargantuan, deep dungeon, like the famous Greyhawk Castle Dungeon.

How To Use the Dice

Following this is a section on “How To Use the Dice”. This section was so vital for us new gamers faced with these oddly shaped dice in our basic set – made of cheap plastic with a wax crayon to fill in the etchings on the dice. I remember it being hard to get ahold of these funky dice so it was important to take good care of the dice the Basic (and later Expert) sets gave you. Imagine my surprise when I found a hobby shop in my hometown with loads and loads of dice – and games beyond D&D – and even beyond A&D…

The final section is “How To ‘Win’”. This section states that the DM and players do not play against each other, despite the DM running the opposition. It also says that the game is not even “lost” if a PC dies, as it is a simple matter to roll up a new PC. The goal is for everyone to have a good time. And as a DM I learned that’s a tough balance to maintain. You didn’t want to make things too easy for the players but being the killer DM wasn’t the best option either. But fumbling about the same time the other players were learning their roles was so much fun.

This is a detailed Session Report of a run through Goodman Games’ DCC#59: Mists of Madness.  This is the companion session report that accompanies the recent review of the adventure in my last post (and is also posted on RPG Geek.

CAUTION: This report includes spoilers! If you plan to play a PC in this adventure, you should NOT read this review.  If you are planning on DMing this module, then by all means, read on!

———-

I started the players at level 2 and told them that their PCs already know each other and have been adventuring together for a year or so.  I let them generate their own PCs for this module.

Player:PC Name:PC Description

Jeremy: Puyet Grigri, female ½ orc barbarian (striker)

John: Lukan Silverwood, male elf cleric (leader)

Allen: Joe the Swordmage, male genasi swordmage (defender)

Alex: Kulrath, male human rogue (striker)

———-

Introduction (~25 min)

The adventure provides several simple hooks to get the players involved:  I chose to use one of them: The party is gambling in a local tavern and the rogue (Kulrath) is winning a lot of coin and various trinkets.  He gambles late into the night and, in the end, has won a large bag of goodies.  When he awakes the next morning, he discovers that the skin on his right hand and lower forearm has become green and mottled, and his fingers have become webbed like a frog, having grown fleshy membranes between them during the night.

Kulrath has become subject to the Curse of Skoulos.  Side Note: One of the things I liked about the module when I flipped through it in the store was the curse table.  Every hour or extended rest, an afflicted PC must roll a saving throw against the curse.  If the PC fails the throw, he rolls a d12 and suffers the effects of the curse listed on the table next to the die roll he made.  The cool thing is that some of these effects are beneficial to the PC or his allies.

Kulrath touches his hand and realizes that he still retains feeling through the skin, like he did through his normal skin.  He decides to go to the cleric (Lukan) for advice.  He upends his bag of winnings, dumping everything onto the floor in Lukan’s room.  Lukan, based on his heal check, cannot tell much about the skin, but knows that the transformation and webbing is not due to an infection.  Kulrath becomes more agitated and Joe the Swordmage and Grigri come to Lukan’s room to see what is going on.  Grigri notices that one of the totems in Kulrath’s winnings appears to be cursed.

Concluding that the hand affliction is due to the cursed totem, but not remembering from whom Kulrath won the totem, the group decides to split up and try to find out any information from the townsfolk.  Based on their streetwise skill checks, the group hears a few bits of useful information, which mostly boils down to this:

1. Old Skoulos the Undying was a sorcerer-king that has a tomb in the black swamp

2. The swamp folk, who have bred with the frog-things, practice unholy rituals

3. Malakai the Mad has been trained in dark arts and worships bad things

Putting together all of the information they learned from the locals, they decide to set out for the tomb.  They approach the swamp and see the top of a spire in the distance.

———-

Encounter 1: Player Beginning (~35 min)

As they get to the edge of the swamp, they stumble into encounter 1 (player beginning).  As written, the encounter is a level 1 (EL1), 500 XP battle, which consists of 4 swamp crocodiles.

As the group approaches the edge, the party sees makeshift fallen-tree bridges stretching across the bog at various places leading into the swamp.  They hear distant drums and Kulrath and Joe notice that there are 4 large forms floating in the water, just below the waterline.  Joe the Swordmage decides to walk across one of the rickety bridges, gets near the middle and is attacked by one of the crocodiles.  A battle ensues.

**In the image above you get to see my solution to a lack of crocodile miniatures, which led to the use of plastic beetles and lizards in place of actual crocs. I think they worked out pretty well.

A horrible initiative roll by the DM, in combination with a couple of backdoor criticals allowed the party to make quick work of the four level 2 crocs.  The flow of this battle caused me to mentally re-evaluate the next two encounters and make a note to add a couple of extra creatures.  I had the option of extending the crocodile encounter, simply by virtue of just adding a couple of more crocs at the water’s edge.  In the interest of time, I chose to forgo the extra crocs and move along.  I think that this first encounter would have been more difficult had the party actually been first level, but if they had the fifth PC, maybe it would have been comparable to how it actually played out for us.

———-

Area S-1: The Ruined Moathouse (~8 min)

The players take a short rest to replenish their encounter powers and heal up.  They then make their way to the next area.  The ruined moathouse consists of a ruined wall and gatehouse that has been slowly sinking into the swamp for many years.  The group hears the drumming louder as they approach the gatehouse and blue mist begins to swirl at their feet.  They see a black spire looming in the background.

The party discerns that they can either 1) climb the wall, 2) walk under the gate-arch, or 3) go around the corner of the wall and see if there is another way into the area beyond.  While it is foggy and they cannot see much of the courtyard beyond the gate/wall, they hear the drumming much louder as they approach the gate.

———-

Area S-2, Encounter 2: The Gate of Hopping Doom (~70 min)

This was written as an EL2 encounter worth 625 XP.  Given the ease with which the party dispatched the crocodiles, I added some extra frogs to this encounter; it was written with 5 total and I had the party fight 8 total, which brought the total XP up to 1000.

As Kulrath starts to climb over the wall, the other players pass beneath the sunken gatehouse.   Kulrath suddenly sees a large, sticky frog tongue flop over the side, smack into the wall right next to him, and then retract back up to its owner on top of the gatehouse.  Kulrath peers above the top of the wall and sees several giant frogs atop the gatehouse.

As Joe, Lukan, and Grigri pass beneath the gate, the frogs try, with sticky tongues, to grab them through holes in the roof of the gatehouse.  Grigri and Joe the Swordmage attempt to grab the tongues and ride them up to the top of the gatehouse.  Joe succeeds in grabbing the tongue and is transported to the top of the gatehouse and right into the mouth of one of the giant frogs! Grigri did not succeed, but, upon hearing Joe yell, decides not to attempt it again.

As Lukan and Grigri get to the other side of the gatehouse, they see a largish grassy courtyard.  Toward the far end of the courtyard an evil rite is being performed, complete with dancing worshippers and a sacrificial ritual in progress.  Turning back to the battle, Lukan gives Grigri a boost up and she quickly pounds on a frog on top of the gatehouse.  Lukan goes to an area where the wall has sunken far into the ground and climb up to the top of the gatehouse.  Once all of the party members were atop the gatehouse, they were able to dispose of the frogs effectively.

**In the picture below, you will see the frogs at the gatehouse attacking the players, all of the minis represent frogs, I just didn’t have enough!

This encounter was a lot of fun to run.  Just the idea of the frogs grabbing payers with their tongues was entertaining.  And the surprised Joe the Swordmage being transported into a frog mouth when he grabbed on and took a ride was extremely amusing.  The frogs have great leaping abilities, allowing them to shift 4 squares and giving the players a hard time controlling the battlefield.  The frogs have very low defenses, making them easy to hit, but they also didn’t have very high HP.  This is a bit disconcerting since they are categorized as brutes, which should have high HP by definition.  In hindsight, I would probably tweak the encounter to add more HP to each individual frog, rather than adding new opponents for the party to overcome.  Theoretically, this would shorten the length of the battle while, at the same time, allowing the frogs to stay alive long enough to effectively challenge the players.

———-

Area S-4, Encounter 3: Overgrown Courtyard (~45 min)

As written, this is an EL3 encounter worth 722 XP.  This encounter consists of the Priestess (Ursula the Befouled), her companion (Hiatha the Half-Ogre), and a bunch of human cultists (12 minions).  I added 2 extra minions to the encounter, so that brings the XP available to 784.  Other than those changes, I ran the encounter as written.

After killing the frogs, a quick search of the gatehouse turns up 22 silver arrows and a potion of healing.  The party then sees that there is a young female elf on the sacrificial table across the courtyard.  As they advance toward the ritual site, they notice that the drumming is picking up pace and the dancing is more frantic.  The party rushes to interrupt the ritual.

The battle began swiftly, thanks to Kulrath throwing a dagger at the half-ogre, causing it to drop its bone drumsticks and charge Grigri.  Grigri commenced to battle the half-ogre on her own and fought hard, taking and dealing a lot of damage.  She was injured and became bloodied, but ultimately won the fight and felled the big ogre.  Meanwhile, Ursula was diligently attempting to complete the ritual, and only broke her concentration when her companion and their minions seemed to be losing the battle.  She then tried to curse the party members, but failed miserably.

When she finally got around to performing a substantial attack, I rolled badly (a natural 1, D’oh) and she went down soon after.  Right before she was slain, Ursula did finally succeed in cursing Lukan.  Shortly thereafter, Lukan became beset with flies, which lay eggs under his skin causing extreme itching and irritation.  After the next short rest, the hatchlings could be seen moving under his skin at the infestation site.

This chain of bad luck rolls made the priestess seem very weak and, with the knowledge of hindsight, I would have played her very differently.  I played her as the adventure describes, with her being more interested in completing the ritual than fighting the party.  By the time she got around to joining the battle, Joe the Swordmage had taken out most of the minions and so one of her encounter powers was completely useless (it bolstered her minion followers).   Her inattention to the battle works well with the story, but makes this level 3 encounter relatively easy – this one should probably be rated lower based on the tactics of the principle target.

———-

Area S-6, Encounter 4: Perilous Shades (~40 min)

The Party discovers that the sacrifice victim is indeed dead and they perform proper funeral rites, including a flaming pyre.  They then turn their attention to the ramshackle scaffolding that leads to an opening in the wall of rock making up the black spire.  As they climb the scaffolding, they find themselves enveloped in an acrid blue mist that burns the lungs (but does no HP damage and has no disease track).  Upon reaching the opening and entering the cave, they find themselves in a narrow hall that widens into a larger cavern.

Set in the middle of the cavern is a large censer, glowing with eerie light and secreting foul blue fumes into the room.  The smoky fumes fall to the ground and cover the floor, creating a 2 foot thick blanket of fog on the floor and creating weird cascading shadows along the walls.

Lukan and Joe the Swordmage determine that the censor is a warder of some type.  They know that it is magical, but the extent of its powers eludes them.  Kulrath sets off to search the room.  As he walked near the censer, a faint, sparkly, shadowy, blue aura sucked off of him and melted into the shadowy corners.  The rest of the party saw this and noticed that he no longer cast a shadow.  Kulrath, feeling no different and not noticing that his shadow detached, goes about his business and finds a backpack in one corner and a secret door in another corner of the cavern.  He returns to the group to show them what he’s found, and they are looking at him with surprise on their faces.

The group concludes that moving past the censor causes their shadows to detach.  Unable to determine if their shadows are malevolent, and noting that Kulrath’s shadow form did not immediately attack him, they decide to go past the censor one at a time.  Kulrath decides that he is going to stand very close to where Joe the Swordmage is passing by and attack Joe’s shadow as soon as it detaches.   Upon hearing this plan, Grigri and Lukan decide to step back and brace themselves for battle.  As Joe passes by the censor, his shadow begins to melt off of him and Kulrath attempts to stab it with a dagger.

The ensuing battle, while interesting and packed with possibilities, was not given its full glory because we were running short on time.  I ran the encounter slightly different than the adventure recommended, but I had to make a choice to run it differently or not-at-all. My changes included the following:

1) Instead of having all shadows detach as soon as the fog hit them, I had the shadows detach only when the PC walked by the censor.

2) The module says that the shadows should come looking for their mortal counterparts 1d12 minutes after the time of detachment and recommends having them show up at a time that would be… inopportune for the party.  My change had the shadows acting as benign beings (unless attacked) which would simply fade away and the PCs would have no shadow.  Since this was intended as a one-shot with characters we weren’t likely to revisit, I didn’t have to worry about how they would get their shadows back.  If it had been part of my regular campaign this would also have worked since I could have made it a whole new quest for them to find and keep their shadows.  Also note that the rogue thought not having a shadow would be great and should add a bonus to his stealth check (cheeky, but creative, bastard!).

3) The adventure recommends running the shades with all the powers of the PC from which it had detached plus some small changes to their defenses (increases) and a teleportation movement power; I axed those and ran the shade with attributes identical to the PC.

4) I only had the shades attack a PC that had already attacked it.  Two of the party members abstained from the fight, so when their shades detached, they were not attacked.

All of this to save time.  In actuality, I was hoping that no-one would succeed on the perception roll and therefore would not notice the detachment or lack of casting shadows until after they had left the room.  They did, however, and so I ran a full encounter.

After Kulrath and Joe defeated their shades (and, notably, did not regain their shadows), kulrath showed the group the secret door he found and they went through the backback he found.  The backpack contained various coinage and gems, two silvered daggers, and a scrollcase.  Inside the scrollcase they found an ancient parchment note alluding to all manner of horrible curse effects and a look inside the mind of Malakai the Mad.  The group pushed on through the secret door (area S-8) and descended 40 feet down a wide, square spiral staircase.

———-

Area S-9, Encounter 5: False Tomb (~20 min)

As the party gets to the bottom of the stairs, they push into a room with a low ceiling.  After they pass a certain point, the pathway behind them becomes blocked by a sliding rock wall.  The find themselves in a room looking at two large animal/demon heads on the far wall.  In this area the PCs have to find a way to open one of two portals (the demon heads) as the ceiling begins to descend and threaten to crush them.

Despite its flaw, this encounter played relatively well and was a lot of fun to run the players through.  I am a DM that likes to have some mystery, puzzles, and traps in the games that I run, allowing for players to have to actually think rather than just hack and slash.  I originally thought this room offered just that opportunity and I played it pretty much exactly as written.  And as it was playing out, I stumbled upon an unsavory snag in the writing that I missed (how, I don’t know) upon my first reading.

This encounter is an EL1 trap/puzzle encounter worth 500 XP.  The flaw in the encounter is that there is no opportunity for the rogue (or anyone else in the party) to detect any trap in the room, disarm any trap elements, or even act in a way that makes thievery, stealth, or perception worth any value.  The encounter is also not written in the standard trap stat block format, so along with the rogue’s skills being useless, there are no countermeasures available for any other PC to attempt.  In other words, this is a railroad encounter masquerading as a puzzle/trap encounter.

The whole point of the room is to force the players to quickly pick one of the portals to go through.  It works by the nature of the ceiling descending (and taking only 4 rounds to do so) as soon as anyone picks or uses a key on the portal locks.  I think the intention was to create an extremely tense experience in which the players must quickly find a way to open one of the portals and get through before being smashed.  Unfortunately it left my players feeling like they had no choices, no options, and no way to counteract the things put into motion.

I think the intention was genuine and this may work well in a different group.  The problem is that my DMing style usually includes a large dose of “what do you do?” in it, where I give my players a lot of leeway in determining their own actions and the possibilities are wide open.  This encounter has the illusion of offering that, while in actuality, it forced their hands and didn’t work well with my group.

To be fair, if I had realized this on my first reading, I would have adjusted this to fit my playing style.  This wasn’t really a puzzle, it was just: find a key to the lock (or pick it), when you attempt picking or using the key on a lock, the ceiling starts to descend and you must quickly exit the room.  It’s fine to make a trap that the players may not detect, but designing it so that it is unknowable from the outset is not my style, but it is how this room is written.

———-

Area S-9b, Encounter 6: Path of Air (~15 min)

After going through the portal, the players find themselves looking at a 20 foot drop into a deep room.  Flat-topped stalagmites, are visible at various places throughout the room, forming a path across the room.  Upon close inspection, the party sees thin, shallow cuts running across the dungeon floor at 5-foot intervals.  Lukan also notices that there are corresponding slits in the ceiling, which he recognized as Scything blade guides.

The party commences using their perception (for timing the blades) and athletics (to jump to the stalagmites) skills to cross the chasm.  Lukan, feeling he is unable to perform such physical feats, decides to climb down and cross the room by foot.  As he descends, a swarm of rats comes out of the corner to attack.  The group works together to defeat them and haul Lukan up to the top of the Stalagmite.  Eventually, they make it across the room and move on.

This was relatively easy, as it should be since it was only worth 175 XP.  It felt like it took an inordinate amount of time for what it was.

———-

Area S-10, Encounter 7: The Greedy Maw (~5 min)

This encounter houses the second flaw in the writing of the adventure.  This is listed as an EL3 trap encounter worth 750 XP.  My question upon first reading it was, “What for?!?”

The players approach a room with a floor mosaic of a snarling demon with an open maw.  Most of the PCs see a giant, valuable sapphire floating above the demon, while the player with the most accumulated curse effects (or barring that, with the lowest will defense) sees a huge powerful magic sword floating above the demon maw (Handouts B & C in the back of the module show drawings of this scene so that you can show the players what they are seeing).  The player that sees the sword also hears whispering voices tempting him with power if he wields the sword.

The gem and sword are illusions designed to get a greedy PC to move within 5 feet of the demon mosaic.  When someone does go within 5 feet, the maw is triggered and becomes a roaring, sucking void attempting to swallow everything in the room! Any character within 20 feet must make a DC 25 strength check to avoid being drawn into the maw.  PCs drawn into the void get teleported, without their weapons and equipment, to area S-11b.

Now, back to my original question: Why is this encounter worth 750 XP? There is no test here.  Yes, they have to make a DC 25 strength check, but so what?  If they don’t make it, they get to continue on in the adventure.  If they do make it, there is nowhere for them to go anyway, and they have to re-trigger the maw and go through.  That’s right, remember when they entered area S-9 and the rock wall slid into place, blocking their egress?  That thing is still in place – they can’t go backwards.  So basically this is an unavoidable teleportation mechanism that gives you 750 bonus XP if you roll a strength check over DC 25?  It’s out of place and mostly pointless.  I get the cinematic quality of it and I think [i][b]that[/b][/i] has its place, but make this a non-encounter and let it dress up the story without having to be a challenge.  This is [b]NOT[/b] an EL3 encounter, plain and simple.

———-

Area S-11b: Treachery’s Revenge

The party, having been sucked into the Maw in area S-10, find themselves teleported to this room.  It’s simply a long hallway with a portal at one end.  When the characters step through the portal, they find themselves in Skoulos’ Tomb.

———-

Area S-12, Encounter 8: The Undying Throne

I described this final encounter in detail in my review of this adventure, found in my last post on this very blog!  Both the review in my previous post and this session report are also posted at the RPG Geek Website!

Unfortunately, due to time constraints, my players didn’t actually go through the encounter.  Instead, in the interest of time, I narrated the events for them.  They were pretty burnt out by the time they reached this last encounter.  The prior two major encounters (S-9 and S-9b) playing out somewhat stilted and railroad-y, and did not allow them to play in their natural way, which really weighed down the session here toward the end.  By the time they walked into this room, they were ready to be done.  One player also had to leave in no more than 15 minutes, so we wouldn’t have had time to finish the encounter had we truly started it.

———-

Final Analysis:

In the end, the PCs would have received a total of 4109 XP for the encounters they participated in (this includes the 750 for area S-10, but not the 450 for area S-12).  Divided up, they would each receive ~1027 XP.  If they had started at first level, this would be enough to level them up, but since they started at 2nd level, this only brings them about half of the 2250 they need to reach 3rd level.

There were some problems with the way the adventure played out, and some things that I hadn’t properly prepared for, but overall it was a great deal of fun.  For me, a session has to be really, really bad for it to not bring me vast amounts of enjoyment, so my thoughts/feelings about the adventure are tempered by my own positive attitude about gaming.

The session took 263 minutes = 4 hours and 23 minutes

In the end, I think this adventure actually went down in rating after running it.  I rated it a 7/10 after reading it, but now that I have run it I am downgrading it just a bit to a 6.5/10.  Still a great deal given the price and production value, but given the amount of changes I would make if I ran it again, it no longer rates a 7.

———-

A special thanks goes out to my awesome players for allowing me to run games for them every chance I get!

That’s all for now, until next time, I wish you good gaming!

~DM Samuel

Whoo! After a 20 hour train ride, I’m finally home for the holidays. Though this week’s Act II update is still forthcoming, I’ve got something else for you in the meantime. I’m starting up an Act I character poll, where you vote for your favorite male and female characters.

Once Act II has been out, a follow-up poll will be held and it should be fun to see if certain characters go up or down in the rankings. Without further adieu, here’s the character list:

Male
Rayonne de Bellemont
Zaqris jaGrane
Vastale/Michael Ranksmith
Weapon
Blaise Tearson

Female
Auria Edith
Serijala Racorie
Sandarga
Auria’s Mom
Fiora

Submit your vote either by response by email by comment or email (blue.oblivion@gmail.com) or whatever method of communication you feel like and I’ll add it to the tally. I’ll post again next Saturday with the results.

There is always a lot of advice about how you never want PCs to actually come into physical conflict with other PCs, how that will ruin your game and you should take any meta-game action necessary to prevent it.

Well, that’s complete and utter crap. Here’s a gaming anecdote about some awesome PC-on-PC violence from an old AD&D 2e Forgotten Realms game I ran.

Bad Neighbors

SPOILER WARNING – this is full of spoilers for the 2e Forgotten Realms adventure “Bad Neighbor Policy” from “Four From Cormyr.”

In general I prefer gritty, low magic campaigns like Greyhawk or even Warhammer Fantasy. But for a change, our group said “Let’s play a high level high magic game!”  This clearly meant the Forgotten Realms, and since I was a crazed D&D DM I had every product put out in the 1e/2e days, so the PCs munchkinned themselves out with high level (10 or 12 or something) powerz and magic items and everything and I prepped a Realms game, which though it went off track, ended up a thing of beauty.

We ran something else forgettable first, but soon began “Bad Neighbor Policy,” in which the PCs are travelling to the Orvaskyte Ruins out in the swamp for one reason or another.  But first, there’s a random interesting location on the way – the “Inn of the Undead,” an inn run by two hot women.  The first, the scenario claims, is “a voluptuous blonde” and the other is a “tall, attractive woman with a luxurious, tousled mane of fiery red hair.”  They are also vampires, as it turns out, and there’s a 12th level necromancer who hangs out with them.

One of the PCs decides, true to form, that he’d “seduce that hot blonde chick who owns the place!”  She says, “Okay…  Come upstairs after closing  and we’ll take a bath together.”  “Well that was easy,” he thinks.  The PC comes upstairs with her, doffs all his armor and weapons and gear and gets in the bath.  Then the other woman, the redhead, comes in too, and the blonde says “I thought I’d ask my sister to join us, if that’s all right.”  The player, nursing a woody by this point no doubt, is all like “Woo, threesome, I win!!!”  They disrobe, get into the bath with him, and and then the fangs come out and ENERGY DRAIN ENERGY DRAIN ENERGY DRAIN ENERGY DRAIN the poor bastard is a vampire himself.  I laughed and laughed and laughed.  It’s scenes like that which make all the BS you have to deal with for being a DM worthwhile.

But it gets better. The necromancer’s there for no stated reason except an “alliance” with the vampires.  So I decide they’re doing some experimentation trying to make the ever-popular vampire that can walk during the day.  There was some spell they published around that time, I think it might have been in the Spell Compendium, where if cast on a vampire, their powers wax and wane over the course of the day but the sun doesn’t kill them.  So the dead PC gets that spell permanenced on them by the necromancer as part of his undead rebirth.  I also decide that the PC has to rest in water not in earth because of the circumstances of his death.  Success, a new weird variety of vampire!

Anyway, the PC wake up as a daywalking water-sleeping vampire and doesn’t let on that anything’s wrong.  “I’m evil now right?  I’m gonna turn them all into vampires!”   The party, upon hearing that he looks “pale and drained” the next morning, just responds “Yeah, I bet.  Let’s get going.”  The PCs travel out through a day or two of swampland to the Orvaskyte Ruins, where they really have a hard time of it what with dragons and cornugons and whatnot.  Half of the PCs are unconscious or otherwise disabled after the final fight – so of course the vampire PC picks that time to strike, paralyzes one PC and drags another off into the swamp for vampirification. The frozen PC gets free and drags the other PCs into the convenient shrine that undead can’t enter in the ruined keep.  (That shrine is actually in the adventure; I didn’t plan any of this.)

So then what unfolds is pure beauty. No hold barred combat between the vampire PCs and the living PCs. For three weeks the players come over and eagerly take seats in separate rooms, and I scuttle back and forth as they try to outsmart and overcome each other.

The living PCs didn’t understand how things were working exactly with the vampires being active in the day - even without their vampire powers, they were still 10+th level Forgotten Realms characters and put down quite a whupping!  The PCs try to hole up in the shrine, but the vampires snipe at them and summon critters to go in and disrupt their sleep, so they’re not getting spells back.  They try to escape through the swamp, but the vampires catch up and attack and they have to retreat back into the shrine.

My favorite part was when the living PCs ventured out during the day and used spells to track down the dead PC the vampires had carted off and stuck under some roots in an icky swamp pond to turn.  One of the vampires is lurking nearby in a tree and summons a bunch of giant crocodiles into the pond.  The PCs come up and one, thinking for some reason that they’re safe during the day, dives right into the muck without a second glance.  All those crocs latched right on and started spinnin’.  “OH JESUS NO!!!” he was screaming as his hit points disappeared.  I had to devise a quick hit location chart to determine what part of him a given croc was attached to.  The rest of the PCs panicked and Lightning Bolted the entire pond killing everything; all the crocs and the PC floated to the top and they pulled him out to see if they were in time to heal him but he was gone below the torso.   Everyone screams.  Retreat to shrine, cast Raise Dead.  The living PCs had one Raise Dead a day which was very helpful.  Sometimes the vampires would catch a living guy and turn them; sometimes the living guys would catch a vampire and Raise Dead them.   They kept this up for hour after hour, session after session.

Finally after a couple sessions of this the remaining living PCs made a successful break for it, but the vampires were faster and got back to that inn first.  One of the PCs, a monk, was suspicious of the inn as “That’s where all the trouble started!” and stayed outside, clinging to the roof to peer into windows.  Another was disgusted by the whole thing and just marched in to get a room.  When he went upstairs and closed the door to his room, the initial vampire PC was standing behind it with bared broadsword.  The monk peeped down just in time to see the inside of the room’s window suddenly become completely coated with blood.  More screams.  In the end, a couple living PCs retreated under cover of magically created fog while the vampires plotted a daywalking vampire apocalypse to take over Sembia.

The campaign ended there (it was supposed to be short anyway), but everyone had a grand time.  People fight hard against DM-run monsters.  But they fight HARD against other PCs.  It was a very meaningful test of abilities for everyone – the DM couldn’t pull a punch if he wanted to, and each opponent wasn’t one of many faceless critters being multitasked by the DM, each one was backed by a clever and bloodthirsty player’s undivided attention.  Each session, I kept asking “Do ya’ll want me to wrap this up?”  But each time, they were excited to get there and continue one of the most exhilarating fights for their lives they had seen in a game.  I was surprised with how long it went, I would have expected one side to get a numerical advantage and then just roll over the other.  But each side could safely retreat and when things started getting bad they fought harder – using one-use magic items, desperate tactics, and more to avoid being wiped out.  I was really proud at some of the stuff “my players” came up with when the chips were down, I saw balls to the wall crazy kickass things happen I hadn’t seen before or since.  It was really a memorable experience for everyone.

Lesson Learned

After that, I would often bring in a “guest star” – some other gamer not in a given campaign – to run a major villain at the climax of an adventure.  “Here, you’re this guy, here’s what you know, you have free rein to defeat them any way you can.”   You could tell by the “Oh, shit” looks on the PCs’ faces that they realized they needed to step their game way up when that happened.  The villains were always extra clever and brutal and self-preserving (and therefore realistic) when they had a dedicated brain behind them.

And sure, the simple “PCs shouldn’t hit each other” advice is all well and good for the 13-year-olds and emotionally maladjusted out there, where people are just acting disruptively or whatnot.  But in a game for grownups, it has its place.

The holidays are always a particularly busy time for me, between work and hosting the family gathering (both of which can only be described as inevitable).  I’m glad I got through the last of Skaven miniatures before then.  Those skaven were actually some of the odd miniatures that were part of the large lot my wargaming club liquidated a while back.  Having sold most of the really valuable pieces, I was left with the odd bits to do as I please.  So I have sprues of skaven and skellies and Mordheim mercenaries kicking around the worktable right now.

So while my worktable is covered in wrapping paper and gaming sessions get bumped by family dinners, here’s where my hobby brain is, at least.

I sometimes talk about the three-point-switch of hobbies with me: terrain, miniatures, roleplaying games and how I really only seem to work on one of those things at a time.  Right now the switch is set on “miniatures.”

It’s my turn to put together the next Warhammer Fantasy Battles campaign for my gaming group.  Last campaign was sparsely attended, but we seem to have a few more people coming back into the fold.  I’ve been looking at the “1999 point” campaign rules that the RTT did last year.  1999 points means you get a regular-sized army but without the Lord and Special options you would have at 2000.  That means more basic troop types, which always appeals to me.

My D&D campaign has grinded to a halt, which always happens around the holidays.  Hopefully it’ll get back up to speed in January.  I still peck away at my One Page Dungeon, although not having a group to run it is not inspiring.

As I said earlier, my hobby switch is currently set on miniatures.  I’m lacking the space for building terrain right now, and I’ve got a pretty good reason not to.  I haven’t talked about it much here (for several reasons) but there’s at least a chance that I could be moving in the next year or so.  My place of employment is under a financial crunch (like so many other places) and I have to realistically be looking for work elsewhere.  As usual my timing stinks; I didn’t move when it was easy to sell a house, and now I’m thinking of moving when it is hard to.  But that’s the way it goes.  As a result, I don’t really feel like adding to my terrain lot because most of that stuff probably won’t come with me in the move: it’s large and heavy and fragile and frankly easy to replicate.

Instead I’m pulling out old miniatures or stuff that is left over from the lot my gaming group liquidated, like the Skaven, and painting them instead.  The writer of the “Pokeminis” blog on the blogroll is from the DakkaDakka boards and his goal has been to paint all the miniatures he owns.  I don’t know if that is realistic for me, since I mostly paint in 60-90 minute batches every evening or so, but I think I’ve found a painting style that works for me and allows me to make decent headway without getting discouraged.  In addition I’m doing that “frugal” thing (and after Dave dropped “a Year of Frugal  Gaming” someone has to take up that standard).

So I think for now you’re going to see more painting miniatures, mostly me bopping around from project to project, and the occasional After Action Report for Warhammer in 2010.

Hello to everyone out there in RPG-land and welcome to DM Samuel’s RPG Musings.  This week’s post is a review of a one-shot adventure I ran a few weeks ago for my usual gaming group.  I’m going to start by giving you my overall impressions after reading the adventure, and then there will be a follow-up post describing the actual play session in detail, with my comments interspersed throughout.  Caution – there will be spoilers in this review, so if you are going to play this adventure, you shouldn’t read this until afterwards.  And now, without further ado, I bring you…

A Review: Dungeon Crawl Classics #59: Mists of Madness

A 4e compatible adventure for character level 1

by Harley Stroh

Price: The price of this module is unbeatable!  This is the classic $2.00 adventure – I kid you not, two dollars, it’s right on the front cover (see below).  Goodman Games did a great job getting one of the first 4e published adventures out there (in fact, they published the module under the 3.5 edition OGL, before Wizards of the Coast announced that 4e would not be published under an open license…  Whoops!  Sorry for the digression) this adventure cost me $2.16 out the door – it was awesome!  (5 out of 5 stars)

Quality: 32 pages, bound well with saddle staples, a nice sheen on the cover (printed on thick stock cardboard), and good print quality on the pages all add up to a high quality product.  It has so-so internal art, a decent layout, and nice black and white maps and player handouts.  Given the price paid, this is exceptional quality and value. (4.5 out of 5 stars)

Does it plays well as a stand alone or in a series? I DMed this as a stand alone one-off session for my group and it worked relatively well.  While this particular DCC is not part of an official series of adventures, I can see it working better as a springboard module to get your group set-up together, with this being the first adventure in a long campaign.  Since this adventure takes place South of Punjar, it could easily be added as the beginning of a Punjar focused campaign (using DCC #53, #56, and #60) or as a side quest during that story arc.  It is also flexible enough to be plopped down into any world that the DM chooses to outline for his/her players. (4 out of 5 stars)

Ease of integration into your own system/world: As stated above, rather than making this occur near Punjar, any DM could easily port it to their own world and make it a side quest (or a major digression for the party, depending on how the DM worked it in).  To be more specific, other than naming the ArchLich and giving a short background for him, the adventure doesn’t presume any particular pantheon of gods/goddesses or any specific type of government or legal system, or any type of professions or races that may exist in the world in which this module will be run.  That makes it completely portable to any world or campaign.  At the same time, if you do not already have an historic reference point for the adventure, the author provides a two page background story for you to get acquainted with.  Either way, the module works, just about the only requirement that it has is for your world to have a swampy or boggy place for the action to occur.  (5 out of 5 stars)

Writing Quality and Organization: Good clarity, few typos, easily understood flow of information.  The only thing this adventure suffers from, in terms of organization, is the thing that they all suffer from… a map in the back that the DM must keep flipping to in order to see exactly what the next area will be, and the need to find different pages where information describing different areas is written.  It’s not too bad in this adventure, but it is still there, as it is in all published modules (this is something that, in my mind, is unavoidable).  (4 out of 5 stars)

Map(s): For the most part, they were well designed and easy to understand.  A couple of pages of pretty good black-and-white renditions of the area being explored, with very good gridding so that I could tell exactly how big an area was supposed to be.  This was important since I was improvising my dungeon tiles to try and make them fit the maps as much as possible.  Unfortunately, the module didn’t come with a larger fold out battlemap to use with miniatures.  The one major drawback was that the maps were not easily removed from the binding.  To take the map page out I would have had to either A) remove the saddle staples and then replace them, or B) cut the maps out as close to the spine as possible.  Neither of those options appealed to me, so I left the map page in the book and flipped back and forth when needed. (3 out of 5 stars)

Propensity for railroading: High, but this is the case for most published adventures.  Unless this module is run as a part of a greater campaign, there is really no way to NOT railroad the players.  If it was part of a greater campaign, and the players weren’t interested in pursuing this particular plot or side quest, then the DM could just let them move on to other places or quests.  That’s easy in their own overarching story arc or campaign, but not so easy when running this as a spur of the moment one-off.   This adventure does about average in these terms.  (3 out of 5 stars)

Plot in a Nutshell: A cultist group is performing strange rights and threatening a small hamlet.  The PCs are dispatched across a black swamp, towards a crumbling black spire, to put an end to the rituals.  While doing this, they discover that the leader of the cult is a foolish warlock who hopes to awaken an ancient, powerful archlich and gain its power. (3 out of 5 stars)

And now for the Crunch – possibly the most important thing for the DM to know:

Are the encounters well designed? Yes and No.  Yes because they fit the story-line impeccably.  There are swamp crocodiles, half-naked human cultists doing a worship dance while a half-ogre uses large bones to beat a drum and a priestess prepares to sacrifice a female elf (see above picture).  There are giant swamp frogs that reach down and grab unsuspecting humanoids with their long sticky tongues, plenty of cavern traps (including scythes and pits) and, as the players get further into the tomb, shambling creatures made of creepy crawlies, decrepit skeletons, and shadowy warders.  So, this is just the sort of thing you would expect from a haunted tomb in the middle of a swamp. (3 out of 5 stars)

So yes, the encounters fit the scene, but are they all well designed?  Not exactly.  I think the problem may partially be one of scaling.  The module is really made for a party of 5 first level PCs.  There are scaling instructions on page 3 that suggest (if you have a weaker party, of fewer than 5 PCs) taking out a creature here and there (the author gives specific encounters) and changing one of the encounters so that the cultists don’t get timely reinforcements.  It also suggests that, if you have a stronger party (6 or more PCs or higher than first level) you should increase the number of creatures in certain encounters.

This sounds very reasonable and I thought it would be fine, but I don’t like taking creatures out of an encounter.  I had only 4 players, so I had a weaker party than the recommended 5.  To counter this without removing creatures from the game, I had them make 2^nd level PCs.  You will see how that turned out in my next post, which will outline the actual session and my thoughts about the adventure during and after running it.

The encounter breakdown in this module is as follows:

7 encounters at encounter level 1

2 encounters at encounter level 2

3 encounters at encounter level 3

1 encounter at encounter level 5

This is set up so that all of the level 3 and above encounters, save one, happen at the end of the adventure.  This makes for a very lopsided session.  The party will have 11 easy encounters and then suddenly run up against some very difficult adversaries.  So it didn’t seem balanced and that made me feel like the encounters weren’t well designed.  Most of the level 1 and 2 encounters turn out to be rated easy under the 4e system (less than 500 XP).  The level 3 encounters turned out to be standard difficulty for a 1^st level party of 5, except the party can only realistically encounter two of them.

Part of this poor weighting of encounters may be due to the fact that they put this out very quickly after the official 4e release and was written before the core rulebooks were readily available (remember, it was written under the 3.5 OGL).  So maybe they didn’t have a lot of guidance in generating encounters for the new system, but I think part of it was by design.  If a party of 5 first level PCs finished every encounter (except killing Skoulos; see below) and received maximum XP for each one, it would still only net each player 1150 XP – barely to level 2!  That fits with a party leveling every 10-12 encounters and I think that is what they were going for.  In this way it sounds balanced, but when you look at the range of encounters and encounter levels, there are too many easy ones at the beginning and then the party gets hit with a couple of really difficult ones at the end.

For me, here’s the problem with the imbalance… as I was reading through this adventure, I got the feeling that they wanted the party to have several easy encounters and then suddenly enter the black spire tomb and be forced to switch gears and increase their intensity very quickly.  This isn’t a bad thing in itself, but it doesn’t work well with my DMing style, and especially not in a one-shot game that we intended to complete in one 5 hour session.  The PCs were taking a short rest after every encounter, but not taking any long rests.  This means they would have to save their dailies for the climactic final, which means they are a little hobbled in the two rapidly occurring, relatively more difficult encounters right before the final conflict.

Lets talk about the final encounter for a moment… Depending upon how it goes, it could be a hard encounter or a nearly impossible one.  The author even states “If Malakai is permitted to awaken [the ArchLich] Skoulos, the encounter will most certainly end in a bloody slaughter.” (page 18) This is because Skoulos is a level 14 elite controller with defenses that a level 1 party would be unlikely to even get close to hitting. Still, this in itself is not necessarily a bad thing if it is set up correctly, but let me set the scene for you:

The PCs have gotten to the ruined temple area via a portal that teleported them to specific spots on the outskirts of the map.  They see Malakai the Mad (the foolish leader of the cult) ascending a stepped pyramid that leads to a sarcophagus.  Malakai starts the encounter at the bottom of the stairs and has a movement of 6, since the pyramid is only 20 feet high Malakai only needs one turn to climb the stairs and get to the top.  It then takes him 5 turns to awaken Skoulos.  So the PCs get a total of 6 turns to get to Malakai and stop the ritual.  Not so difficult huh?  Ahhh, but there is a problem you see, the PCs start the encounter atop mounds of sloping scree in the corners of the encounter area.  The scree makes the terrain difficult if they try and cross a slope, but increases their movement if they succeed on a DC 15 acrobatics check and they are moving towards the bottom of the slope, which is supposed to simulate them slipping down the slope.

To make matters worse, when they teleport into the area, Malakai immediately summons 8 skeletons (+1d6 skeletons per round, not to exceed 30 total).  Each PC has been teleported to a different corner of the area, and each is between 16 and 20 squares away from the top of the pyramid.  One-third of that area could be considered difficult terrain because of the scree.  Being teleported into a dispersed pattern makes it more difficult for the PCs to use typical tactics since the combatants, and their allies, are all spread around.

If the closest PC succeeds on their acrobatics checks, and they have a movement of 6, they can make it to the top of the pyramid in 3 turns, less of they do a double move or run.  Unfortunately they will likely be over-run with skeletons, which will probably slow them down.  They have a choice of running by the skeletons and being subject to attacks of opportunity, or stopping to fight the skeletons, in which case they probably won’t stop Malakai in time.

Now, if the players entered the portal from one encounter area, then they still have their weapons and equipment, but if they entered from the other encounter area they have no weapons and no equipment (it was teleported to a place atop the sarcophagus).  This could make the encounter difficult, especially since there is a 20% chance that any weapon they pick up is weak and will break after one use.  If a PC gets to Malakai, he must defeat him (with or without weapons) and destroy the phylactery that contains Skoulos’ soul.  If that is done they can loot the tomb and leave via the portals in which they arrived.  They must do it quickly, however, since the destruction of the phylactery causes the weakened pillars (you know, the ones holding up the ceiling) to start to collapse and the roof is going to cave in within 5 rounds.

I admit this is an exciting scenario and it sounds like an exhilarating thing to run.  If Malakai succeeds in awakening Skoulos, it takes the ArchLich only 3 rounds to rend Malakai limb from limb and then he turns his attention on the party.  The only way to escape is to topple the pillars in the giant chamber in an attempt to make the ceiling collapse, and then run to the teleport entry point and escape at the last second.  Very dramatic!  It sounded great the first time I read it…

My opinion of the encounter may be colored by the fact that I was running the adventure as a one-shot, one-session game, and so didn’t have time to really give this last encounter the place it deserved.  I could see this as a climactic end to a two or three session story arc in which the players all banded together and learned the whole history of Skoulos and the legends surrounding him, along with killing cultists and finding out who Malakai is and what he is about… but in a one-shot that stuff just doesn’t get enough time.

My poor planning is partly to blame since I should have cut out two or three of the earlier encounters and skipped some things to get to the end sooner.  To be fair to myself, though, many of the encounters were needed so that the PCs could find tidbits of information and figure out that they had to destroy the phylactery before Malakai woke up Skoulos.

Does it play better or worse than it reads? For this you will have to read part two of the review, in which I describe the actual play session and comment on certain aspects of the adventure. There were a couple of encounters that made the session extremely fun, but I can’t tell you about those yet…

Main Pros: price, quality, easy integration into existing campaign

Main Cons: encounters need to be revised before running, maps need to be copied before use

Final Rating: Based on my initial reading, and my review here, the module would get an average of 3.9 stars out of 5.  Overall, taking synergy into account and ignoring mathematics, I would give this adventure 4.25 out of 5 stars.  It garners this great rating partially because the price is just so fantastic.  But much of the module really does warrant a high rating.  You will have to read part 2 of this review to see if my opinion of the module gets better or worse based on the actual play session.

Hopefully you will come back in a couple of days and see what I have to say about running the adventure.

Until next time, I wish you good gaming.

~DM Samuel

For more information on the Dungeon Crawl Classics line of adventures, please visit Goodman Games at:

www.goodman-games.com

Dungeon Crawl Classics #59 Mists of Madness is copyright © 2008 Goodman Games and was written under version 1.0 of the open gaming license copyright 2000 by Wizards of the Coast.  Retail Price: $2.00 (USD) Item # GMG5058, ISBN # 978-0-9816663-2-7

I firmly believe that immersion should be the primary artistic goal of a roleplaying game.  It is an eminently achievable goal which creates a rich experience that one that can rightfully claim to be more than “just a game.”  Sadly, few people even understand what immersion is, let alone try to reproduce it in their RPGs.

What Is Immersion?

Well, that’s a good question.  There’s a recent really good RPG.net column entry, “On The Nature Of Immersion,” which got me started down this train of thought, that talks about five different things one might mean by “immersion.” For purposes of this discussion, I will define immersion as the process of trying, to the degree it’s really possible of course, to holistically take on your character’s mindset, and to try to experience the game world and events through that mindset.  Metagame factors should be eliminated ruthlessly.  Back in the day (the early ’90’s) we just called this “in-character roleplay.”

Theory and History

Though I’ve seen people play “in character” since the early days of the hobby, Immersion ™ was strongly promulgated as a concept by the “Turku School” of Finnish larpers and their humorously boldly worded Manifesto, in which they delineate four types of gaming – gamist, simulationist, dramatist, and “eläytyjist”, which I will call “immersivist” from here on out because I’m on a low reindeer-meat diet. They say the point of an RPG is to immerse yourself into your character’s consciousness and interact with its surroundings, and that furthermore this is how RPGing can become art.  And this is 100% correct in my opinion.

It’s instructive to see the difference between immersion and other styles.  Some other theorists confuse immersion with “acting,” but this is actually one of the major anathematic stances to them.  The Turku School’s “Larper’s Vow of Chastity” starts with: “1. When playing a character and immersing myself in it, my foremost goal shall be to simulate what happens inside the character’s head, and how it affects his behavior. Hollow pretence I leave for the actors.”  Good stuff in general, though there’s an off undercurrent of “I lick the gamemaster’s boots!” running through it.

The Nordic LARPers later came out with an interesting clarifying paper, Autonomous Identities, which is good reading if you understand words like “diegesis” and don’t mind people quoting Aristotle.  It clarifies how in some ways simulation can be an immersion substitute – “The theory is that the immersionist experiences what the character experiences, while the simulationist only pretends to, logically deducing what the character would do next.”  Eventually  the Nordic scene stepped back from immersion a little in favor of a story/dramatist approach, as you can see in the new loosely-defined but Diana Jones award-winning Jeepform style of LARPing.

Unfortunately, all this stayed largely confined to the Nordic LARPer community, even though immersive concepts are equally (if not more) applicable to tabletop play.

In the American/British mainstream RPG theorist tradition, they pretty much ignore immersion.  The GNS/Forge “indie games” tradition recognizes only the three non-immersive types, and in general the Ron Edwards-driven FORGE group of indie RPG makers have moved from their historically more dramatist/narrativist approach to strongly favor a strange gamist/dramatist mix (We’re telling a story, but with more and more tokens and cards and miniatures and crap!)  that even the more mainstream games like D&D 4e and WFRP 3e have started to adopt in part.  Most of the indie RPG community’s theory work has become ghettoized into being dependent on Edwards and therefore has been pretty much sitting unchanged for a while.  The “Big Model,” his newest approach, might theoretically allow for immersion as part of “character exploration” but its very weakly represented, if at all, in his description of creative agendas.

Outside the FORGE, the earliest RPG “theory” book I know of, Gary Gygax’s “Role Playing Mastery,” (yes, I have a copy, I’m a freak) is unabashedly about tactical (gamist) mastery, even though it does begin by noting that role-playing is half born of the historical minis wargamers and half of “clinical and academic role assumption and role-playing exercises “.

Robin Laws’ “Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering” mentions a variety of player types including the “method actor.”  Its definition is reasonably immersivist – “The method actor bases his decisions on his understanding of his character’s psychology” – but in name and in some of the turns of phrase threatens to confuse immersive with the dramatist’s surface “actor” stance which is in reality totally opposed to real immersion.  But if one has an accurate understanding of what pure method acting is supposed to be, it’s a good term.  Immersion and method acting can use some of the same techniques, like affective memory and substitution, but immersion is arguably purer because there is no external audience to please which requires classical acting techniques to be admixed.  Many “method actors” really mix traditional acting with the more immersive method acting techniques, so for RP theory purposes I don’t like using “actor” anywhere near “immersion” because it causes confusion.

Greg Stolze’s “How To Play Roleplaying Games” at least promulgates “setting logic” (aka simulationism) and notes that role-playing “can go deeper and have a more profound impact” by confronting characters with challenging issues.  But then it goes more to the basics like “show up to the game, pay attention, and don’t be a disruptive prick.”  Sadly, and I’m not saying it’s not needed, most “how to” RPG documents tend to turn into a list of stuff you should have learned in elementary school.  I’m not criticizing Stolze on this point; my interaction with the larger RPG community through the RPGA indicates that a lot of people need that.

Anyway, clearly game theory outside the ice-bearing countries doesn’t get into immersion much, but then again it’s largely either mired in basics or enslaved to Ron Edwards.

Why Immersion Via Tabletop And Not LARP?

Some of the folks reading this may be Nordic LARPer types.  I had a discussion with a couple after the inciting RPG.net column, and they tend to feel that immersion is easier in or more relevant to LARPing than tabletop.  I actually disagree pretty strongly with that.  Let me start with a pretty brutally worded analogy.

Q: Which is more immersive, a book or a movie?

A: A movie if you’re stupid, or a book if you’re smart.

After saying “Oh, snap,” think about that for a minute and we’ll proceed.

I would say that LARPing can probably be more immersive that tabletop when:

a) It is very well done, with realistic scenery and props

b) The characters are very close to the players in physical makeup

But that’s a big “if.”  It creates a lot more jarring things that block immersion in many other cases.  Some guy carrying an orange “please don’t shoot me, cops” gun is frankly less convincing than just being at a table imagining a guy with a gun.  And if all my characters are out of shape thirtysomethings that’s great, but wandering around the Dragon*Con hotel or campsite needing to take a dump doesn’t make me feel more like a robotic killing machine from Mars.

Even if one could get to the ideal “holodeck” type solution to address a), you would still have trouble until you got “Avatar” type solutions for b)…  At the current tech level and the current level of sophistication of LARPs I personally have seen around, I strongly prefer a completely imagination-based field to promote immersion.

It’s the same reason I find books to be more immersive in many cases than movies.  Haven’t we all been disappointed with a movie adaptation of a book because “that’s not how I imagined that would look?”  Or where one really crappy CGI shot breaks you right out of the suspension of disbelief?

Furthermore, In a LARP with props, there is the promulgation of one “objective” truth of how things behave.  But there is little value to that and more value to each player’s separate subjective diegesis.  And the more you force the subjective diegeses to collide, the more likely you are to shake someone out of their immersion.  It reminds me of the GM advice in Robin Laws’ excellent game Feng Shui, to not use tactical maps.  “Revealing your map locks you into a precise conception of the area…”

Anyway, I’m not saying you can’t LARP immersively, but I am saying that there is little reason to believe immersion as a concept is inherently LARP-focused (except for the historical accident that the only folks that seem to be really into immersion are also Scandinavians who are really into LARP) and that there are good reasons to even prefer tabletop for immersion in many circumstances.

The Immersive Tabletop Game

All this isn’t just theory.  I’ve run and played in immersive games, and those groups have found them to be immensely rewarding.  I had one game that had the explicit goal of character immersion run for five years in the mid-1990s.  I’ll ping my players from that game for insights from their point of view, but for me at least it really hit the heart of what it is I wanted out of role-playing.  For many years I’d had fitful stabs at it with “normal”
casual RP games but I knew it could be so much more than that.

And it’s not really all that hard.  Though there are helpful techniques, 80% of the work is just getting a group of people to sit down and say “Yes.  In this game I am going to try to get into my character’s brain and look at the world through their eyes.”  Mainly you just need everyone to agree with that goal and for the GM to be trying to facilitate it (like any style, when different players are heading for different agendas, you end up with the least common denominator).  The players have to be emotionally unstunted enough to emote a little bit and the GM needs to keep his “in world” viewpoint going strong so that he can allow the PCs to get along with0ut making metagame decisions.  With a little practice, that’s really not very hard.  You can start out as simulationist and let things develop from there, and sim is a good fallback point that doesn’t “ruin things for everyone else” at times you can’t immerse well.

Give it a try!  I don’t have a lot of sympathy with people that have the “one way” they like to roleplay.  Maybe it’s a well kept secret, but you can play one game sim, the next gamist, the next focus on story, and the next try immersion.  Broaden your horizons.  I don’t like certain games or styles, but I play them when my gaming group wants to.

Future Topics

If anyone’s interested, I can go into:

• How to run an immersive tabletop game
• How to play in an immersive tabletop game
• Simulation as a gateway to immersion
• Isn’t immersion bad?  Aka Bleed, or “Isn’t that how that Egbert guy went nuts?  And that Elfstar bitch?”
• But immersion makes me “uncomfortable,” aka George McFly syndrome

Okay, anyone that has been listening to Here Be Gamers! will be aware that I have really been looking forward to the release of the Dragon Age RPG from Green Ronin. This virtual box set consists of the Players Guide, Game Masters Guide, and a map of the campaign setting. Both books are 66 pages and cover everything you need to know to get started roleplaying in the Dragon Age setting.

The Player’s Guide has two pages explaining what roleplaying is all about, plus an example of play and a very brief overview of the rules. The game runs on a 3d6 +Stat system and you can get a ood run down of how it works on the Dragon Age RPG site. The really cool thing about the task resolution system is the use of “stunts” which can be performed when doubles are rolled – a simple but very exciting addition to the system. The book then moves on to eight pages of setting information, then character generation. Character gen is very simple, requiring players to make choices that then lead to random rolls. You start by deciding on a character concepts (a child of the forest; a refugee) then roll for stats. Stats are rated from -4 to +4 and when you have randomly determined them you can switch any two – this allows you a little bit of customisation. Next, players choose a background from a list of seven. A character’s background determines your race and what classes you can pick (there are only two backgrounds that let you be a mage). You also roll on a chart for a bonus granted by your background. Finally, you pick you class – Mage, Rogue or Warrior. Each class tells you what abilities are important, your starting health, weapons groups you can use and what powers you get at each level. You get to pick focuses (specialties) for some of your abilities, and talents which are natural aptitudes and special abilities. You round out your character by giving them a name and some goals and ties with other characters. You end up with a competent character with some specific areas of expertise. The random elements an ability to choose focuses and talents mean that characters are not all cookie-cutter, even though there are only three classes.

Yes, I said level back there. This is a level based game. Some people will like this, some will hate it and many won’t care. It is very true to the computer game it is based on though, and to the origins of the RPG industry that both the computer and tabeltop games are trying to evoke. I must say, as I read this book I was very much reminded of the old red box D&D from back in the day. There are only a few class options and backgrounds available, but you as a player can build on these and develop your character in whatever way you want. Unlike D&D 4E, where every kind of character type has its own class, this goes right back to basics giving you the core and then letting you define the rest through roleplaying and the application of you own imagination.

Magic is also straightforward. Mages start knowing three spells and there are a variety of types of magic, so you can choose to specialise as an attacker, healer or support mage. It costs mana points to cast a spell and if the mage is wearing armour they have to pay extra mana. Casting a spell is a roll like any other ability check, made against a spell’s target number. If doubles are rolled a mage can use special spell stunts, just as a warrior might in combat which makes spell casting dynamic and exciting. There are only eighteen spells, but as you only start with three that seems like plenty. Overall, character generation and game play are straightforward, but have enough random elements (such as the dragon die and stunts) to stop it from being predictable.

The Game Master’s Guide covers “the Art of GMing”, “Creating Adventures”, “Styles of Play” as well as information on planning campaigns, being flexible with the rules and roleplaying NPC’s. It has a chapter on adversaries, with each entry including a brief description and all the relevent stats. There are 17 adversaries, some of which have “sub species”, which is probably more than enough to get characters through their first few adventures. As a big fan of monsters, I would have liked to see more, but those provided do cover all the obvious stuff including undead, wild animals, brigands and darkspawn. The next chapter is all about rewarding characters and covers experience points and treasure. The Game Master’s Guide is rounded out with a complete adventure. The adventure has lots of information and advice for a new GM, along with NPC and monster stats making it a great intro for players and GM alike. The book is rounded out with some play aids and a quick reference guide.

Both the Players Guide and Game Master’s Guide have excellent indexes, though neither has a table of contents. They are well laid out, with clear legible font and bold headings that make it easy to find information. As PDF documents they are easy to read and while they are full colour they do not have background images or patterns that will suck up printer ink. The beautiful art, however, will! Both documents are bookmarked, but that is the extent of the PDF technology used (no hyperlinks in the index or the like).

I really like this game. The moment I began reading the Player’s Guide I was overcome with a sense of nostalgia, finding within the virtual covers the kind of game I have been hoping for. There has been a lot of talk about “retro clone” games in recent years and many of these games (Labyrinth Lord, OSRIC, etc) attempt to retro-fit the D20 rules to evoke a sense of roleplaying games from the eighties. The Dragon Age RPG reminds me of the simple games that I first learnt to roleplay with, without any of the odd, redundant or strange mechanisms that the infancy of roleplaying was sometimes afflicted with. This is a sleek, modern RPG that makes me want to delve into a dungeon to kill skeletons, just like I did when I was twelve years old. In fact, I am looking forward to running my twelve-year-old nephews through their first adventure these holidays, and they will be doing it in the Dragon Age.

Go get yourself a copy – preorder the box set from Green Ronin and you get the PDF for free. That’s what I did.

So the world has been inundated with all kinds of RPG coolness, just in time for Christmas. Dragon Age, The Dr Who RPG and the new Warhammer Fantasy Role Play games have landed on my virtual desk. What is really cool is that all three of these games are released as boxed sets – which really makes me feel warm inside. It’s just like the good old days! Another really initeresting feature of all three games is that they are designed to be entry-level products, for people that may not have roleplayed before. Now, I have only just recieved these games so this will only a a short “first look” kind of review. I am hoping to do one review every few days and have them complete before the new year.

All three games that I am talking about are PDF copies. Without any further ado, lets crack open the boxes!

Last time, I explained why I like random encounter tables and feel like they add to both the “realism/simulation” factor but also add to the story by being bellwethers of the players’ interest.  Now, I’ll talk about how I create and use them.

Scope

The Pathfinder Bestiary has some generic random encounter tables in the back, but obviously in most cases you’ll want something tailored to the place you are.  The Paizo APs do a pretty good job of providing basic random encounter tables for the various cities and regions in which they take place.  You’ll want to put work into these tables proportionally to how long the PCs will be there.

More specific is always better, it’s just a matter of how much work you want to put into it.  The good part is, if you do this right the work you put into it is heavily reusable from campaign to campaign.

1. City Random Encounter Table Template – consider putting some meta-thought into this so you can use it to build other charts easily.  “01-05, Wimpy Local Monster 1″, for example.
2. Generic City Random Encounter Table – to use anywhere when you don’t have anything more specific on hand.  Some are provided in the Pathfinder Bestiary.
3. Chelaxian-type City Random Encounter Table  – you can use this in a broad swath of locations – Cheliax, Magnimar, Korvosa, etc.   If you have a couple of these ready to cover the most likely sectors, you are ready for a lot.  “Port City Random Encounter Chart,” with maybe some entries that say “City Guard (lawful city)/Pirate Press Gang (pirate city)”  would cover a lot too.
4. City of Korvosa Random Encounter Table – use in Korvosa.  Often there’ll be one of these provided in an adventure or AP you can modify for use.
5. City of Korvosa Sewers Random Encounter Table – use in the sewers.  You might have a Generic City Sewer Random Encounter Chart that this inherits from too.   Sometimes an AP will publish tables down to this level of detail.
6. City of Korvosa Midland District Random Encounter Table, During the Troubles – you can vary the charts by time as well.  If the city is under martial law, you’d expect the encounters to be pretty different.
7. Gold Goblin Gaming Hall Random Encounter Table – don’t be shy about making charts that are very very specific to a small location, as long as the PCs are spending a lot of time there.  In the Second Darkness AP, it’s likely the PCs will end up running a gambling establishment and will be working in it a lot.  That might merit a very specific “who wanders in and/or causes trouble on a given night” chart just for that one building.

Scaling

There are two philosophies of encounters in D&D.  The first is to always scale encounters to the PCs.  The other is to allow for the entire range of realistically possible encounters without regard for the PCs’ abilities.  The latter, though nice from a realism/sandbox play point of view, can be a little dangerous.

I thought the Scarred Lands products from Sword & Sorcery had an elegant solution to that problem that well served both realism and scaling needs.  They assigned CRs to actual locations that reflected the average CR of encounters there.  Then PCs should, with a modicum of care, be able to find out how dangerous a region is.

• “Foundling’s Green?  A naked virgin with a sack of gold could wander the cornfields safely there.  Someone thought they saw a goblin 5 years ago and the Count sent troops; turns out it was just a real ugly sheep.”  CR1/2.
• “The Schwartzwald?  Well, you wouldn’t want to wander around in it alone, there’s some dangerous things in there, but groups of loggers work those woods.  One group like that went missing six months back, though.”  CR3.
• “The Forest of Screaming Skulls?  No one has ever entered it and returned.  The Hellknight Order of the Dragon sent in a hundred knights to pacify it; none came back out, but their mothers all died of heart attacks that very day.”  CR 16.

You can vary CRs by smaller scale, of course – the Bowery has a higher CR than the Merchant District.  Of course in most normal human cities, even “rough” areas aren’t going to have super high CRs, or else people’d get wiped out.  The crime-riddled streets of Riddleport only have an average CR of 1 on their encounter table.  This advice mostly applies to hostile/monster encounters; there may be EL5 bands of city guards about, of course, or by crossing the street and going into the Collegium you can probably toss a rock and hit a CR8 wizard, but they are not (usually) eating peasants.

I’d like to give a shout out to “Wilderness & Wasteland – Scarred Lands Encounters,” a Sword & Sorcery supplement all about building encounter tables.  It’s worth picking up.

Anyway, once areas have average CRs, PCs know where they can go safely and what’s risky, and  your campaign flavor is backed by the rules.  It allows scaling by self-selection, in the same way that World of Warcraft does with its zones.

Type

Similarly, there are two philosophies on random encounter tables.  One, the “hostile encounter” theory, holds that they are only for monsters or people likely to provoke random encounters.  These consist solely of entries like “Bandits, bulette, owlbear, King’s Guards, orc warband.”

The other holds that they should also include “friendly” encounters, events, and other stuff. “Crying orphan, dead soldier, abandoned shrine, loose horse…”  These can be used as hooks or just to provide flavor – this example list communicates “war-torn countryside”, for example.

I personally prefer the latter, though the former require less work, as they’re a subset of the larger, more inclusive ones.

The main thing to keep in mind is that you want the frequency of encounters to be lower if you’re using an all-hostile encounter table; you can ramp up the frequency the more other stuff is on them.

Populating the Table

What, besides monsters, can go on a random encounter table?

• Normal animals or plants – threatening, tasty, valuable, or entertaining
• Natural phenomena or events like sandstorms, stampedes, marching strikers, or an overturned dung collection cart
• Traps like bear traps or pungi stakes
• Diseases like malaria or yellow fever
• Largely friendly people like traveling merchants, con men, pilgrims, or prostitutes
• Largely unfriendly people like city guards, roving berserkers, or bloodthirsty natives
• Local features like totem poles or caves
• Happy treats like ivory, an outcropping that contains valuable metals, or a dropped coin purse
• Specific people the PCs know
• Pretty much whatever else you could think of

Now, I will say that more isn’t always better.  Especially if you evolve your tables over time, you can easily get 100 different things on a given table.  But this runs the risk of cognitive sprawl – it’s hard to work up 100 encounters ahead of time and so they are more off the cuff, and it’s less likely to have anything recur – and from both a story and a game point of view, you want some recurrence.  Recurring threats help show theme more strongly than totally different ones every time and may become a plot element, and also PCs like to get better at fighting things.  The first time your party encounters a yellow musk creeper, it may take them a while to figure out there’s a plant behind all the zombie business.  So the second time, they can know what’s going on, target the plant, and feel proud in showing off what they’ve learned.

It’s easy enough to have a big long list of random encounters and cross ones off.  So if you have your big jungle encounter table, for a given trek through the Mwangi you might cross off a bunch of it and use a subset, just so  you can prep some of them a little, allow for recurrence, or even just not have to carry ten different books with monster stats in them to the game.  And if you’ve added a cool new monster or NPC it’s more likely to come up, and if there’s just monsters you feel more like running this week and ones you don’t…  If you have your table stored in Excel then it’s easy to cut, paste, and remove/alter entries to taste in very short order.

Chance of Encounter

Historically in D&D this has been a fixed rate; “x% per hour” or other time increment.  (Bizarrely, in Pathfinder they seem to not have addressed chance of encounter at all.)  I kinda prefer to make it dependent on the PCs’ skills.  Someone with a good Survival check (or, in the city, Diplomacy/Gather Information) should be able to avoid a lot of encounters with their knowledge of the ways of the wild/city.  In addition, the chance should probably be lower if the party’s staying still and higher if they’re romping through the underbrush.  It’d also be nice to take into account the scenario where the PCs want to provoke random encounters, for whatever demented reason happens to be at hand.  (You could argue PCs acting as a highly motivated city guard and looking to enforce the law could be simulated by provoking random encounters.)

Cautious: If you’re staying in one place or otherwise trying to avoid encounters, you check once every twelve hours.  You can travel overland  cautiously by moving at half speed.

Normal: If you’re moving about normally, you check once every six hours.

Aggressive: If you are looking for trouble deliberately, or otherwise moving about in an intrusive manner (searching the wilderness for a dungeon entrance, foraging, checking every inn in town for someone) you check once every three hours.

The DM may also modify the frequency of checks based on what’s going on – if there’s an active battle in the vicinity, it’s reasonable to say that the area is hot enough that there’s random encounter checks every hour.

Use skill checks to determine random encounters.  In the wilderness, use Survival, and in the city, use Diplomacy.  The DC to avoid an encounter is 10+the CR of the location.  So for example, in a CR3 location, a Survival check of 13+ avoids an encounter during that time period.  Feel free and combine this with other rolls of this skill; for example overland travel usually provokes Survival checks.  If someone’s rolling their Survival check to avoid getting lost, you can just compare that roll against the encounter DC and have it serve double duty.  You can always deliberately “pull” this check if you’re looking for trouble and “take zero,” so to speak.

Optionally, you can do a little more granular work and roll on the encounter table first and then check against the CR of the specific random encounter rolled.  Then you can let Knowledge checks be used to assist – if the encounter rolled is a bear, then PCs with Knowledge: Nature could roll to assist the Survival roll to avoid (or provoke) the encounter.    This rewards domain specific knowledge, which is always a plus.  It also allows for some discretion in “looking for trouble”.

Example

Let’s say the PCs are out looking for magical beasts to capture for some dude in town that’s paying well for them, but would like to otherwise avoid pointless fights.  The PCs decide they’re looking aggressively during the day (one check every 3 hours) but taking it easy at night (one check every 12 hours).  During the day, they decide to “take zero” and provoke an encounter on a d20 roll under 10+ the encounter EL.  If you roll an encounter with orcs, for example, which they don’t want to deal with, let them make Knowledge: Nature checks to “assist” the Survival roll in the direction they want.   Let’s say two of them have Knowledge: Nature and make their DC10 assist rolls, meaning a total d20+4 on their check to avoid the encounter.  If they might encounter an owlbear according to the chart, the same Knowledge: Nature assist rolls would let them subtract two from their roll, so if both make their assist they would roll d20-4 versus the same encounter.

Bringing It All Together

Here’s what an encounter table might look like.  Let’s say it’s this party’s first trek into the Mwangi Expanse, Golarion’s equivalent to Africa.  I have a giant jungle encounter table including all the entries in the table in the back of the Bestiary.  I decide that I want to stress the more “mundane” threats that the jungle has to offer for this first outing, so I focus on the inhabitants, animals, and diseases of the Mwangi more than supernatural or monstrous threats; on later journeys I’ll crank up those and have the mundane stuff stay there but become a  smaller piece of the pie.

They’re going to be inland only three days or so, therefore probably a dozen or so entries will allow for enough variation with some chance of recurrence.

Kaava Lands, Mwangi Expanse Random Encounter Table (CR 5)

1. Bonecrusher Fever Fort DC 12 (CR1)
2. Sleeping Sickness Fort DC 14 (CR2)
3. Javelin Trap (CR2)
4. Enteric Fever Fort DC 15 (CR3)
5. 2d6 Mwangi Tribesmen Warrior L1 (CR3)
6. 2d6 Jungle Elves Warrior L1 (CR3)
7. 2d10 Aspis Consortium slavers (CR4)
8. 1 army ant swarm (CR 5)
9. 2d4 gorillas (CR6)
10. 1 dire tiger (CR8)
11. Location (roll d6):
    1-3: Mwangi village – 10 warriors, about 30 souls total, starting attitude of indifferent
    4-5: Mwangi village – burned to the ground, no survivors
    6: Mwangi sacred site – any Mwangi with the party will refuse to enter the area, causing two hours of lost time maneuvering around it, and any PC taking any of the fierce little carved masks hanging from trees in the place will get a hostile reaction from any Mwangi seeing them later on.
12. Person (roll d4):
    1-2:  That crazy explorer they met in Bloodcove
    3-4: That hottie that works for the Aspis Consortium they’re all trying to impress

This table carries out my theme for the adventure – it’s more about discovering the area than hacking on wildlife.

Other things to put in your table besides the encounter name and CR – I would have done it above but WordPress is awful at tables, sadly – put the source and page reference, like Paizo does.  A lot of their cooler new monsters are from articles in the APs, and even now I have a dickens of a time hunting down where a monster is.  Writing it down in the table once will save you much flipping later.  Also, consider putting in starting attitudes (friendly, indifferent, hostile), especially useful for people-heavy tables.  There’s a big difference between a friendly “come join us!” merchant caravan and a “don’t come within 200 feet or we fire these crossbows” merchant caravan.

Here’s a more city-focused encounter chart that I might use in my current campaign.  It uses the Riddleport Random Encounters Table from Second Darkness: Shadow in the Sky p.79 as a base, but I’ve added specifics.  The AP says  “con artist,” I’ve come up with some specific hustles and also have some specific con men added in from random places, like Mungo and his Amazing Monkeys from a Freeport supplement.   And the table completely omits certain things that seem obvious, like Riddleport Gendarmes.   Plus, as their intrigue among the city’s inhabitants heats up, I’m adding more specific people and/or spies for specific people.  CR is less meaningful as more of these aren’t (necessarily) combat encounters.

Riddleport Wharf District Random Encounter Table (CR 1)

• 1 monkey (Avg CR 1/6, MM p.276)
• Con artist pretending to be a shanghaied princess (CR 1/2, see notes)
• Con artist – Mungo and his Amazing Monkeys (CR 7, Denizens of Freeport p. 65)
• 1 leper (Avg CR 1/2, SitS p.79)
• 1d4+1 Gendarmes, reasonably honest (Avg CR 2, use Riddleport Thug stats)
• 1d4+1 Gendarmes, looking for trouble and/or bribes (Avg CR 2, use Riddleport Thug stats)
• Harlot, quickwife (CR 1/2)
• Harlot, easyboy (CR 1/2)
• Harlot, Selene (CR 2, Maiden Voyage p.XX)
• Harlot, Lavender Lil in disguise (CR 7)
• Drug dealer, connected to Avery Slyeg (CR 1/2)
• Drug dealer, unaffiliated (CR 1/2)
• Drug dealer, the one Sindawe likes to beat up and take drugs from (CR 1/2)
• Homeless person from St. Casperian’s (CR 1/4)
• 1d8 Drunken pirates Ftr1/Rog1 (Avg CR 3, see notes)
• Street vendor, spy for Clegg Zincher (CR 1/2, see notes)
• Splithog Pauper, in disguise (CR classified, SitS p.66)
• 1 goblin snake (CR1, Pathfinder #1)
• 1d4 Small monstrous centipedes (CR 1, MM p.276)
• …

Conclusion

Random encounters can be fun and useful, and are for way more that just monsters.  Customization is your friend, and it can be done without requiring a lot of work all the time – some upfront work to make some basic tables then lets you do minimal per-session work to customize them.

My introduction to D&D was in 5th grade on a snow day. Our next-door neighbor had gotten the D&D Basic Set for Christmas and no one could make head or tails of the rules. This was the Tom Moldvay version of the rules, pictured in this post.

I managed to get my own copy of the rules and thought it was amazingly cool. It was hard as hell to understand, but it screamed geeky coolness. It was also a gateway for friendships with like minded geeks, something whic led to friendships with some people I’m still in touch with through the magic of Facebook nearly thirty years later. Excuse me while I stare at that number.

There’s something of an “Old School Renaissance” movement going on right now, rediscovering the history of fantasy gaming. A lot of it centers around the creation of “retroclones” – using the Open Gaming License (OGL), developed by Wizards of the Coast for the 3rd edition of D&D to allow for licensing of D&D rules and terms, to backport to older versions of the games. The ones I’m familiar with include:

• Swords & Wizardry – inspired by the original edition of the game that evolved from the fantasy wargame “Chainmail”. It is available in two versions, the main rules and the “white box” rules, which is a more stripped down version of the rules.
• Labyrinth Lord – inspired by the D&D Basic and Expert sets with add-ons to capture the feel of the original edition and AD&D (the latter forthcoming at the time of this writing).
• OSRIC (Old School Reference and Index Compilation) – Inspired by the 1st edition of AD&D, I believe this is the first of the retro-clones.
• Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game – This one feels a bit like D&D Basic/Expert rules with features from AD&D and D&D 3e sneaking in.

These retro-clones have become more important to old-school gamers given that Wizards of the Coast, earlier this year, pulled all their pdf reprints from online shops like rpgnow.com. I think that’s unfortunate, especially regarding the older editions. I read one of their concerns was finding pirated pdfs of new books online. I can appreciate that concern, especially given the importance of getting the initial sales from a new book, but I’m not certain of what advantage it was pulling the older games. That said, the Tom Molvay version of the D&D Basic and Expert rules was never made available in any case.

Last night I was flipping through my copy of the Moldvay Basic rules (not my original, which vanished somewhere in various trips to college and moving to Massachusetts a few years after graduating from UConn). And that gave me the idea of doing a gradual review as I reread the rules in detail, trying to forget things I’ve taken for granted for years and years. It probably won’t become the main focus of this blog – I’ve got an active Wild Talents game that will probably consume a lot of my time. I’m also not a hardcore old-schooler – I like old and new games. I had a lot of fun playing D&D 4th edition – more fun than I did in the 3rd edition, which I also enjoyed.

—

So we’ll start our review with the Erol Otus cover. Erol Otus’s illustrations appeared in many of the classic D&D products of the 70s and 80s. In this cover you’ve got our heroes descending into a water-covered level of a dungeon to fight a green dragon – I’ve never understood why dungeons and dragons so rarely appear on the covers of Dungeons & Dragons products… Though I think we can give a pass for the original 1st edition AD&D covers, especially demon idol on the Players’ Handbook. The Basic Rules indicate it is for 3 or more adults, ages 10 and up – an odd definition of adults. I was 10 when I started playing and felt all mature and adult. Not from playing D&D, just from feeling all mature and adult at the age of 10. I believe this trend would continue until adulthood, upon which you discover how little you know.

The foreward starts off with Tom Moldvay talking about an encounter with a dragon to set the mood. He then talks a little about the history of the D&D rules – how they were originally designed for people with a background in gaming and of the numerous questions the TSR staff answered since its release. He does indicate how he’s tried to stay true to those earlier versions but make this set more understandable. Having obtained both the previous Basic rules (by Eric Holmes) and the original “white box” version of D&D I’d have to say, though this version was tough (but fun) for my ten-year old brain, it was a vast improvement in terms of comprehensibility.

—

And we’ll end with that. I think I’ll be able to cover more in future installments, but I wanted to also set the stage for what I was intending. Though I also intend on working my way further through the new Doctor Who game and work on my Wild Talents game. And some posts to my political blog, so this may take a while…

Doctor Who RPG

My first encounter with Doctor Who was in the 80s. I was in High School and kept seeing FASA’s Doctor Who RPG at Waldenbooks. I was curious about it but wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. My father mentioned to me he’d seen the tv show on PBS.

Being über-cool in High School, one Saturday night I was home and happened to see Doctor Who on Connecticut’s Channel 49. I remember the episode – it was Meglos, featuring time loops and an evil cactus monster. I didn’t quite follow it but it was sure neat. A few weeks later I caught it again and they’d begun running the 5th Doctor episodes. Most people have a Doctor who is their personal Doctor. For me, it is the 5th incarnation, as portrayed by Peter Davison.

My brother and I played the FASA game quite a bit — one of the really neat things about Doctor Who is it really lends itself well to small groups. I thought the  FASA game was pretty neat — it was basically the Star Trek RPG modified somewhat from a percentile system to a 2d6 ability vs. difficulty (via resolution table) system. Looking back, I have to say the system really wasn’t quite right for Doctor Who. It was very tactical and not well-suited to lots of improvisation — indeed there were no rules to even attempt something unskilled. That didn’t stop us form having a lot of fun with the game. The supplements were pretty neat — they get criticized a bit now for violating canon with some of its assumptions. For example, they posited that the Meddling Monk was an early incarnation of the Master. And the adventures were pretty neat. They reminded me of the GDW adventures of the day, especially Twilight: 2000 — a basic adventure outline, lots of details on NPCs, maps, expected events, etc. They seemed incredibly loose at the time.

After the FASA license ended there was a one-off Timelord RPG. I believe it came out around 1993 or 1994 — I know I picked it up in summer of ‘94. This being the start of my post-college gaming hiatus, I never had the opportunity to play it but it seemed like a reasonable adaptation. It was more stylistically similar to the television show than the FASA game, with a fairly simple task resolution system. The authors have released the game for free – you can download it from scribd or here. (Be warned that the latter site greets you with a screeching TARDIS sound – I hate web pages that greet you with sounds…)

The newest incarnation of the game is made by Cubicle 7. I’ve been very impressed with their output over the last year or so. They also make the Starblazer RPG, based off the British comic book. I’ve never read the comic book, but the RPG is perfectly suited for generic space opera. They also make the Victoriana RPG which  has proved to be an excellent resource for my 19th century Wild Talents/Kerberos Club campaign.

I’ve not fully read through the newest incarnation of the Doctor Who RPG, having just received it yesterday and having given it a preliminary scan and begun working my way through the players book. Below are some random impressions I’ve taken from it:

• First of all, this is an expensive RPG. In the US it has a cover price of $60.00, though I got it for much less at Who North America.
• Going against the grain of modern RPGs, the new Doctor Who RPG is a boxed set. I’d forgotten how neat boxed sets were and Cubicle 7 makes the most of the format. Player, GM, and Adventure books. Also character sheets, gadget sheets, etc. And it comes with dice!
• The production values are good, quite similar (no doubt deliberately) in style with much of the officially licensed Doctor Who non-fiction of the past few years. Glossy color, lots of pictures from the series (all images are, I believe, of the adventures of the 10th Doctor).
• To try to balance things out, more powerful characters have a lower maximum of story points, which, I believe, can be used to modify reality in the player’s favor. This makes it easier to model a campaign with a Timelord and his companions.
• The rules don’t make much an assumption as to what sort of game you’ll run. It suggests the Doctor and companions (old or new) or characters of your own creation. The rules make it possible to make new Timelords, aliens, etc.
• One of my favorite things is the game encourages the use of words vs. guns, very much in keeping with Doctor Who. In action scenes characters who talk act first, followed by those who run, perform non-offensive actions, and finally those who fight. Also, non-combat skills can be used vs. combat skills. An example in the rules features Mickey using his Convince skill in a quick contest against a Cyberman who is using Marksmanship. Basically the Cyberman is intending on shooting him while Mickey is trying to convince it to take him alive. I really like this idea a lot — too often games say they discourage violence but I see lots of instances where this new game gives the tools to do so. I started a thread about this on rpg.net and hey – it’s four pages now. That’s a first for me… (My rpg.net handle is Breschau of Livonia.)

I’m stil working my way through the game, so I might post more impressions. That said, I think this’d be a blast to run. I’d probably have a ton of fun with the the time travel aspect of it, especially to the past, as I love history. Maybe after our current Wild Talents game runs its course. So many games, so little time…

In my last Life In The Big City installment, I was asked about my random encounter tables.  In that article I describe one way in which I use random encounter tables, which is that PCs going out into the city to gather information or perform other tasks can provoke them.

I am a believer in random encounters.  Some people aren’t, and only run pre-selected, or “scripted,” encounters.  While that’s fine, I have learned over some 20 years of gaming to “trust the dice”.  As a DM, you can get predictable.  Much of the time, the things that players really get into are things you didn’t intend.  That’s worth a brief aside.  So NEXT time, I’ll get to random encounters.  This time, I’m going to talk about the philosophy of mixing simulation with player interest.

Cue Off Your Players

One of the best ways to make sure your players enjoy your game is to cue off the things they like.  Throw stuff out there and see what sticks.  Sometimes, players will be proactive enough to let  you know what they like; you as the DM can also do some things to elicit that feedback.  But analysis fades before experience.

Here’s an example.  I was running a low level game where the PCs were wandering around some loosely settled farmland.  It started to rain (I also use random weather generation, because if I don’t I frankly forget to make the weather vary, unless it’s important to the plot, in which case players start to see weather as a sign of an impending screwjob…) and the PCs took cover in a nearby abandoned barn.  “Is there anywhere we can get out of the rain?”  “Uh, there’s an abandoned barn about a half mile off…”  Being PCs, they decided to search it.  Rather than say “Come on man, I’m just making this up as I go along,” I tossed out some details.  “There’s moldy hay, the ladder up to the loft is ruined, there’s a frayed rope hanging over the center beam…”  The busybodies start rooting through the hay, looking for stuff.  Thinking “You can just say we wait till the rain stops and get back underway, you know,” I said “You find an… old human skull under the hay.” Just to make something up besides “dirt, you goons!”

Well you would have thought I tasered them all in the nutsacks.  An episode of CSI: Greyhawk broke out as they frantically tried to unravel the mystery.  They determined the person must have hung themselves over the center beam.  One PC clambered up and went all over the ruined hayloft, finding an old rusty dagger stuck into the frame of the hayloft door.  I looked around at all of them and realized they were really, really into this.  Slightly creeped out, highly engaged.

When something comes up in your game, you can pretty easily determine what your reaction as a DM should be.

1.  Players not interested- worthless color, forget it.

2.  Players moderately interested – build it up into a one off.

3.  Players fascinated – it’s totally related to the overall plot, or will be once you figure out how yourself.

In this case, I led this into a mini-horror adventure I largely made up off the cuff that I ended up making central to the overall core plot of the campaign.

Random encounters, random NPCs, etc. all work this way.   If – and this is a big if – you are making your game world somewhat realistic.  If PCs believe that there may be a legitimate reason behind the way things are, then they’ll react to it as if it were, and look for the “why” behind events.  If the “why” is that the dice or the story say so, they lose interest.  Of course, it could be that the dice or story did say so, but your job as a DM is to build out behind that.

There’s a random encounter of an owlbear.  Maybe the PCs kill it and move on without a second thought.  Maybe they take an interest instead.  “Hey, we’re mighty close to that village for a roving owlbear to be attacking people, maybe we should go check in with them.”  Maybe it’s the second owlbear encounter and they go nuts.  “The evil wizard must be creating them to destabilize the region!  I take favored enemy: magical beasts with my next ranger level!”  That doesn’t have to be the actual explanation, but it is a cue to you to make the owlbears more than just two random rolls in a row.

Same deal with NPCs, or locations.  I like random NPC generators, for sure.  But the same principle holds if things aren’t randomly generated.

In my current campaign, the PCs are on the mean streets of Riddleport.  There are some NPCs the Paizo Second Darkness Adventure Path I’m using say are important, others it just mentions, and some that I’ve made up or brought in from other random adventures I’m weaving in.  There’s some that they have really taken to, and others that have been inflicted on them against their will.  You can’t turn every beggar they take an interest in into a ninja in the employ of the BBEG (Big Bad Evil Guy), but you can definitely add some depth to them and consider how they might play a part on the larger story.

Rumors are great for this too.  I give out bunches of them, some false.  The PCs fell in love with a false one – that there was treasure hidden below a local homeless shelter.  They went all over that place with a fine toothed comb and flushed out and killed the criminal gang hiding there before  I had actually planned on incorporating them.  Though I’m not going to put in a hidden treasure just because they went there, the PCs themselves started brainstorming.  “That’s a good rumor to plant if you want some rubes to go wipe out a rival gang!”  Hmmm… Yes.  Yes, it is.

I did not get to play many videogames over the weekend because, well, I was a little busy getting engaged. Didn’t even turn my Nintendo DS on once! How about that? Caaaaah-razy, I know.

But I did manage to make some more time last night for Fallout 3. Still trying to finish up some achievements and good karma-focused quests before I start over with a new, evil weasel of a character. After sneaking around for an hour and more or less getting nowhere (found one more bobblehead in Vault 108), I did the worst thing ever:

Cheated.

Well, took advantage of a glitch to be more specific. See, I was sitting at around 43 successful speech attempts, and you need 50 to unlock the following achievement:

Silver-Tongued Devil (20G): Won 50 Speech Challenges

Basically, if you go to Little Lamplight, there’s a kid sheriff there named Knock-Knock. Ask him to tell you a joke, use your intelligence to guess the answer, and then select the [Speech 100%] response. Rinse and repeat. You can do this as many times as you need to. Something, perhaps, Bethesda should have caught.

So I did it six more times until I heard that infamous ping, the very same ping that echoed in my head as I tried to sleep last night. It just doesn’t feel right, “achieving” what I did, but I was worried that I’d run out of proper speech options at this point, and I didn’t want to have my evildoer being all talky in my next playthrough. His/her speech success is most likely going to involve a rocket launcher to the face.

Not terribly proud of this, but I guess in the end it doesn’t matter.

Brief Summary

The session opened in December of 1864 at the Kerberos Club. Fellow member of the club, Bryan Quinn, Member of Parliament, asked the characters to accompany him to a reception for the visiting vice-president of the Confederate States of America, Alexander Stephens. MP Quinn explained that the Club had reason to believe Stephens was up to something in London – he’d been funding research that Professor Ian Greenfield of Exeter College at Oxford University had been performing.

The reception had Vice-President Stephens, Confederate ambassador James Murray Mason, and Professor Greenfield. As Quinn suspected, hosting two members of the Kerberos Club of African descent was somewhat disconcerting for many of the guests, serving to loosen tongues. Our heroes learned a variety of facts:

• Professor Greenfield had been purchasing controlling shares in various organizations that were performing much of the excavation for gas lines, underground railways, etc. in the interests of making archeological discoveries as a side-effect of all the digging.
• Professor Greenfield was not independently wealthy but was, as the Club suspected, getting financial support from Stephens.
• Professor Greenfield was the son of American Loyalists who relocated to England after the American Revolution.
• There was some sort of commotion during an audience Stephens had with Her Majesty, Queen Victoria. She expressed her disapproval of the Confederacy’s peculiar institution.

As the evening went on, a pair of waifs, one large and one small, entered the hall. They needed to speak with the Professor. Luthor chatted with them and discovered they were brother and sister, known as Big Hand and Little Hand. He took them to the professor where Little Hand explained how Ben Bell was not happy with the digging and needed to stop. Greenfield took a cab to deal with the matter with our heroes graciously accompanying him (though he did not seem to appreciative).

As they approached the dig sight at Leadenhall there was a big explosion – the sound of a gasline exploding. They saw the site of some digging, either for a railway or sewer, partially collapsed. The bottom was still on fire with the smell of cooking flesh and a moaning sound. John Henry stayed at the edge while Luthor jumped down. He dragged the severely burned man at the bottom to John Henry who pulled him up. They saw the burned man had been covering up a shaft. Out of the shaft emerged a trio of horrific figures, clad in clothing centuries out of date and appearing vaguely human but… transformed somehow… into beings with no curves, but all angles. They raked at Luthor with horrific claws dripping of a greenish ichor, nearly severing both his arms. The rest of the team ran to assist him (some faster than others), with much teleporting, summoned ancestors, and swinging of big hammers before they finally destroyed the creatures.

A prostitute, Polly, who had been holding up a wall at the time of the explosion explained how some… dog thing… had emerged first and fought with the burned man – a man who they could see was rapidly healing. The hound appeared much like angular beings, also dripping a nasty ichor.

Notes

This session was largely an exercise in getting used to Wild Talents again after a long hiatus. It went pretty well, we definitely seemed to have a better grasp of the rules this time around. Some of the players will be making tweaks to their characters as a result of the first session. John Henry was initially generated as a strong, but normal, human. He’ll likely be changing to have at least one wild die in his Body stat, meaning when rolling his dice pool he will be guaranteed of at least one success in Body-related tests. Mbizi wants to make certain his character gets a chance to be  inspirational in pursuit of his causes so he’ll be adding to his social skills.

The creatures in the first session are inspired by the Cthulhu-Mythos tale The Hounds of Tindalos by Frank Belknap. The humanoid variants weren’t too tough an opponent. The hound itself will likely be appearing in the future, probably the very short-term…

In true open gaming form, Paizo has put out all six new classes that are going into their Pathfinder RPG Advanced Player’s Guide for comment.  You can download them for free:

• Cavalier and Oracle
• Summoner and Witch
• Alchemist and Inquisitor

In my opinion, Paizo has knocked another one out of the park.  I was prepared to be underwhelmed – most new non-core classes in D&D 3.5e were clearly just there to be weird collections of rules and not represent meaningful iconic archetypes.  “Ooo ooo, I’ve always wanted to be a Hulking Hurler!”  “And I always wanted to be a Master of the Unseen Hand!  Or maybe a Spellwarp Sniper!”  It feels like you may as well just say “DURRRR” out loud after announcing your chosen class.

The Cavalier is the prototypical knight.  He belongs to a specific knightly order, takes oaths, challenges enemies, and has a mighty mount.  Trap avoided: making the class *too* dependent on mounted combat. Remaining weak point: the oaths are kinda lame in implementation and the knightly orders fall into that weird “made kinda generic but still hard to fit into your campaign world” area.

The Oracle is filled with divine force, but less from a specific deity and more of a powerful archetype.  Besides clerical spells, the oracle gets powers appropriate to their divine focus, and suffer from a curse like being haunted, blind, or lame – but the curse turns into powers of its own with level!  Trap avoided: when I read the class name I thought, “Ah, a lame diviner class suitable for NPCs.”  Remaining weak point: the curses are the main thing that seems different about the Oracle and her foci from a normal cleric and her domains; a focus feels just kinda like a “double strength domain.”

The Summoner is what we call a “pet class.”  He has a persistent customizable critter called an eidolon; plus he can summon monsters pretty well and toss other conjurations and enchantments off a custom spell list.  It’s the first time D&D has really been able to do the “Pokemon Master” or “WoW Warlock” thing effectively.  Trap avoided: this class already got nerfed from the playtest doc where he could cast a large number of 1 minute/level Summon Monster SLAs and could easily boost his eidolon’s AC to the 50s without breaking a sweat.  Remaining weak point: The eidolon rules are complicated and probably open to a lot of exploits.  And why the hell does he have d8 HD and decent BAB?

The Witch is the most witchy witch class in the history of D&D witch classes.  It’s brilliant.  It can cast hexes, have a cauldron, join a coven, cackle, lay the evil eye on you…  And she learns spells (off a custom spell list that has enchants, conjures, and even heals)  from her familiar.   Trap avoided: being lame.  Remaining weak point: the covens are weak and should be more interesting, but that’s a minor nit in an otherwise very nicely designed class.

The Alchemist makes potion-like extracts made from formulae, bombs, and self-transforming mutagens.  Very flavorful – taking some of the alchemist schtick (like the bomb throwing) from WoW and other computer games.  They had to cop out a little to explain the limited number of uses in a day – the concoctions are powered by the alchemist’s “magical aura,” so if you’re looking for the scientific angle here you’re out of luck.  Trap avoided: being godawful complicated like the Artificer from Eberron.  Remaining weak point: They don’t get many bombs per day and their extracts and mutagens are pretty weak otherwise – I think they’ll have trouble being useful over the adventuring day.  The mutagens do physical boosts, but it’s not going to sufficiently make up for the BAB/HD discrepancy and turn them into a useful fighter even for the limited duration.

The Inquisitor brings to mind Warhammer 40k, but upon reading it…  This class is an odd mishmash.  It has a cleric’s HD and BAB and invokes judgements upon the naughty; it has a little ranger to it in the “vampire hunter” kind of vein.  But then it gets tactical/teamwork feats.  I’m not really sure what it is trying to be – a paladin of any alignment?  A Buffy?  A marshal?  Mostly a Buffy I think.  Trap avoided:  none.  Remaining weak point: falling too close to what other classes are or can do.  I’d think you could build something like this as a cleric/ranger or pally/ranger.

Anyway, I think they’ve done a great job of taking truly iconic mythical archetypes and making them solid playable classes.  Check them out yourself!

Once you start running an urban campaign, you start seeing the gaps in the existing rules on a lot of points.  In our case, we had a good number of times where PCs needed to go out into the city and hunt down some piece of information or person.  When we started working through it, I realized there were a lot of gaps that needed filling to make a satisfying play experience.

The rules components you have to work with from the Pathfinder core book and the APs are:

1.  A random encounter table for a given city (with no instruction as to when to roll a random encounter). Maybe I’ve missed it in poring over the Pathfinder RPG and Bestiary, but despite there being random encounter tables, I can find no place where they assign a chance of a random encounter happening.

2.  The Diplomacy skill has replaced Gather Information from 3.5e.  Information on using the skill in this way is light, just saying it’s a variable DC to find out something about a “topic or individual.”  As is traditional, there’s an unclear overlap between this skill and Knowledge: Local when it comes to the practical work of finding a nearby fence for your stolen goods.  Furthermore, there’s no accounting for a check being opposed by someone trying to hide or conceal information.

3.  The “Urban Adventures” part of Chapter 13: Environment in the Pathfinder RPG (p.433) has some other details that may be helpful – kinda.  But not really in this case.

4.  Rumors.  Every AP has a load and every DM loves having a bunch of rumors to pass out, but their incorporation is always an adventure-specific hack.

These are the ingredients, but a recipe is lacking, especially once you hit the intrigue-laden bits of any city campaign.  I wanted to bring all these things – gathering information, random encounters, rumors – into one easy to use system.  Here’s how I put them together.

Goals

When the PCs hit the streets, they may have a variety of different goals in mind.  Sometimes they are looking for a specific fact or person.  Sometimes they just want the “word on the street” about what’s going on.  In certain cases they want something else specific to happen – to spread the word about a particular rumor themselves, maybe to provoke or mislead someone.

As a result, someone seeking a specific goal will use a different skill check depending on what they’re trying to find.  Diplomacy/Gather Information is the clear choice for traditional finding stuff out, for example, but you could use Bluff instead to spread a false rumor.  Or Perform to get the peasants all singing a catchy yet treasonous little ditty.  There’s a lot of possibilities here.  Consider rewarding relevant Craft and Profession skills by letting them be used instead when relevant; if you’re looking for someone you hear is a blacksmith, then a relevant Craft or Profession check would be a great way of tracking them down by talking to other smiths, checking at places smiths would tend to buy supplies, etc.  If you are trying to find out when the Midnight Mermaid is setting sail, Profession: Sailor would be appropriate.

In many cases you’ll want to call for a complex skill check for tasks taking more than a cursory amount of time.  Each attempt would usually reflect a half day of asking around, staking out places, fending off streetwalkers and beggars, etc.  You can reflect each success with some kind of in-game description of how they’re getting closer.  “You find someone who says they’ve seen two guys with mustaches like that hanging out around the Wharf District – you can focus your search there.”  If there’s an extenuating factor like “find them before they leave town” or “figure out the cult’s leader before they sacrifice that victim” then the check should be of the “X successes before Y failures” model.

If the goal being sought is simple – a fact or public personality – then the DM simply sets the DC, with perhaps more knowledge available at higher DCs.

“I’m looking for a high quality weaponsmith!”

• Natural 1 – “Your mother’s a weaponsmith!  She can bang on my sword anytime!”
• DC 5 – A random blacksmith’s name, probably makes simple weapons only.
• DC 10 -A decent weaponsmith’s name who has a selection of martial weapons.
• DC 15 – Otto the retired adventurer reliably makes masterwork blades.
• DC 20 – Otto hates elves, don’t take your buddy with you if you’re going there, he’ll refuse to help you.
• Natural 20 – “Oh, I know Otto, tell him Grey sent you and he’ll cut you a deal.”

Sometimes, however, the PCs are trying to track someone down who’s actively trying to conceal themselves.  Or, they need to lay low and thwart other people’s attempts to track them down using these rules!

If someone is just trying passively to stay hidden or hide an item, place, or bit of information, they make a check using a plausible skill to set the seekers’ DC.  If you’re hiding out, you can try Stealth or even Disguise.  If you are in a friendly ethnic enclave, you can try Diplomacy to convince people not to help snoopers.  If you’re going by a fake name, use Bluff.  The DM should see fit to add on bonuses or penalties based on the circumstances.

Keep in mind the quarry may not know specifically that anyone’s looking for them.  Many criminals or other underground figures will routinely be trying to stay somewhat off the public’s radar as part of their daily routine.

Stay flexible and use common sense.  If the PCs are trying to place a false rumor to flush someone out of hiding, their seeker checks might be opposed by the target’s Sense Motive, for example.

Random Encounters

Let’s get an important distinction out of the way first.  There are several different kinds of random encounter charts, derived from different unspoken philosophies of what an encounter should consist of.

The first, which I’ll call the “normal” encounter table, includes a bunch of stuff a PC might come across in a locale, whether it’s a “hostile monster” or not.  These kinds of charts contain everything from peasants to hookers to “Event: someone empties their chamberpot out of a second floor window as you walk by” to real threats.  The first edition AD&D DMG was a great example of this theory of random encounter design, what with the random harlot table.

The second, the “hostile” encounter table, limits itself only to likely combat situations.  A city encounter chart with only “Muggers, press gangs, stirges, and vampires” is a hostile encounter chart.  This kind of chart has become more popular over time as D&D groups who “just want to kill something” don’t want to bother with chatting up some “rich panderer”.

It should be obvious why you need to understand what kind of chart you have in hand – if it’s the former, the chance of encounter should be higher, but if it’s the latter, it should be much lower.

Traditionally in D&D, there’s a flat random chance of having a random encounter.  But there’s a reason native New Yorkers run afoul of trouble less than visiting tourists; an innate knowledge for an area leads to instinctively safer behavior.  You avoid “that street,” know to ignore certain voices calling “Hey Mister!”, et cetera.  Therefore it would seem to me that Knowledge: Local is perhaps a relevant factor. It feels about right to say the chance of encounter in a normal city is when you roll a DC 5 or less for a “hostile” table and DC 10 or less for a “normal” table.  You’d manipulate these chances for special places or times – if the city is wracked by revolution or martial law reigns, crank the DCs up.  (Consider using Survival in the same way in the wilderness.)

Pro tip – consider customizing your encounter table over time.  Have 91-100 be “someone who the party knows” and keep a list of likely people.  PCs love running across people they know, it adds to their sense of belonging in the game world.

Rumors

Rumors.  The lifeblood of any campaign.  You can always rely on the PCs to spend a bunch of time interacting with your lovingly crafted setting and NPCs if you feed them random information that they think might be amusing to follow up on.  It turns setting information from something you inflict on them using boxed text to something more akin to “treasure I found!” which is innately more motivating.

As with random encounters, there are a couple schools of thought on rumor creation, largely depending on how much work the DM wants to put into it.  Some create a small number of mostly valid and/or important rumors, or even customize them to individual PCs.  Some create a vast host of rumors of varying importance and accuracy.  In this case you want to divvy them up by DC (crappy false rumors=DC 5, etc.).

As the PCs roll their seeker checks, you can give them rumors according to your chosen DCs.  I usually do the “small number of good rumors” approach and give one out on a DC 15, plus an additional rumor for every 5 points of success.  You’d select DC 10 or DC 5 if you had a lot more rumors of varying provenance.

Make sure and hand out rumors you really want them to have first and then hand out the random stuff.

Keeping It Quiet

In some cases, the PCs want to track someone or something down without other people getting wind of it.

If you’re actively seeking but want to keep it quiet, you need choose a skill designed for misdirection to use as you ferret out information.  This could be Bluff (I tell people I’m a merchant from some other city who owes the guy money) to Stealth (I try to overhear conversations more than actually precipitate them) to whatever’s plausible given the circumstance.  Seeking “quietly” doubles the time required to make each seeker check.  The DC for the quarry to detect the seekers’ activity is set at 10+the selected skill bonus.  The seekers can deliberately take a penalty on their seeker checks and add that as a bonus to their keeping quiet check.

The quarry (or other interested third parties) can make seeker checks of their own to determine if someone’s looking for something or someone.

For example, the PCs are looking for a jumpy guy who owes them money.  They decide to take it easy and send a seeker group that has a good Bluff skill of +10 out to find him.  The seeker group searches at the rate of one check per day, and the jumpy guy asks around every other day to see if anyone’s after him – a DC 20 on his Diplomacy check would indicate yes, there’s some guys asking around after him.

Hitting the Streets

All of this boils down to a reasonably simple system for urban information warfare.  The various participants break up into teams as they desire.

1.  Setup

The DM sets the random encounter DC and chooses a random encounter chart, and decides the success DC, how many successes are required, and what those successes mean.

2.  Hide

If there’s an active opposition, the “hiders” roll their check first to set the DC for the “seekers” (if the hider’s an NPC it’s easiest to just take 10 on this check).  If there isn’t, the DM sets the DC based on the availability of the knowledge or whatever is being sought.

3. Seek

Each seeker team makes a DC 10 Knowledge: Local check, the team member with the best score leading and any others assisting.  Rolling below the random encounter DC  indicates a random encounter.  Success indicates that the seeker team has used their knowledge of the city to find a good audience or locale for whatever it is they’re trying to do.  Success gives a +2 bonus to subsequent checks, with an additional +2 for each 5 points by which the team beats the DC.  Each seeker team decides whether they are keeping the search quiet or not, and makes a relevant skill check to seek out their goal.  Time spent and successes are noted and rumors are handed out.

4.  Cover Up

The hider can take time to do their own seeker check against the DC of the seekers’ chosen mode of sneakiness if they want to know if anyone’s looking for them.

Repeat steps 3-4 as necessary.

Playtest: Guerilla Marketing

In this case, the PCs were looking to go out on the mean streets to promote an upcoming animal fight they were arranging; they weren’t specifically looking for information in the traditional sense.  No problem, these rules handle that.  They divided up into solo teams of one to cover the most ground and were not trying to be subtle in any way, confident that the crooked town guard would not care one bit about all this.  I gave them their choice of social skill to use – Diplomacy (“Come see the awesome matchup!”),  Bluff (“You’ll win big if you bet on the bear!”), or Intimidate (“You punks can’t handle carnage like you’re gonna see at this fight!”).  They disperse throughout the city and promote their fight.

Since this was a fairly diffuse goal, it doesn’t have a clear success or failure criteria.  The locals are, in general, all about a semi-legal animal fight.  Therefore I set the base DC at 10, with each increment of 5 above that indicating that more people would hear about the match and come. Each attempt would reflect a half day of work.  They could do as many checks as they wanted to spend the time on until fight night.

The encounter table I was using has both “normal” encounters and “hostile” encounters so I set the encounter DC level to 10.  If any PC rolled below the base DC of 10 while conducting their marketing, it would generate an encounter.

I had prepared a small number (7) of fairly juicy rumors, so set a base DC of 15 to get a rumor, with an extra for every 5 points above.

All the DCs were set, so each PC made their skill check.  1-9 indicated an encounter, 10-14 indicated limited success, 15-19 indicated moderate success and a rumor, 20-24 was good success and two rumors, and so on.

Because most of this group lacks meaningful social skills, they started provoking random encounters, and since they were alone, those encounters didn’t go well.  One PC, trying to drum up business outside the competition’s gambling halls, got beaten insensible by some goons and had his cash stolen.    One got bitten by a monstrous centipede as he sat down to rest outside an alley.  One had a nice chat with a friendly lady who owns a fruit stand (later destroyed by the PCs in the commission of a chase, that’ll show her).  After a day of that they decided to leave off; they got an OK crowd in at the fight night.

Playtest: Manhunt

In this scenario, the PCs had killed off a criminal gang but the leader, the Splithog Pauper, got away.  They decided to hunt him down (and by decided, I mean another crime lord made them an offer they couldn’t refuse and told them to).

The goal was pretty concrete – find him!   He was very much trying not to be found.  His main skill is Disguise at +11, which would normally mean a pretty hardcore DC of 21 for the seekers.  However, when they raided his gang’s headquarters the PCs got an encoded list of various IOUs to various petty criminals and business associates.  Since the Pauper was staying in town and trying to rebuild, this was an extremely relevant leverage point and I gave them a huge +5 bonus for having it in hand.  Also, they got a description of two thugs that may or may not have been affiliated with the Pauper (turns out they were).

The PCs learned their lesson about running around the streets solo.  They split into two teams, one of which was following up on the list of associates and the other of which was talking to various prostitutes and homeless people they associated with to track down the thugs.

They were rolling well, and since each team had several assists they stayed well out of random encounter DC territory, sad to say.  It took them a day and a half to get the five successes I figured were needed to track him down.  They had not been subtle in their inquiries, however, and he knew someone was looking for him, so when they went to the inn he was laying low in, he was disguised and had a bunch of thugs nearby ready to ambush intruders.

My Reavers on the Seas of Fate campaign is well underway and the PCs are all over the mean streets of Riddleport.  There’s some common scenarios that come up in urban adventures that I wanted to streamline; here’s my current efforts for your edification and comment!  They’re Pathfinder based but very easily adapted to anything d20-ish.  First, we have chase rules!

Chase Rules

Exciting chase scenes, the staple of action movies everywhere, are very hard by default in D&D because though every other part of the rules has variance built in – from stats to skills to damage – movement has always been completely static.  “30 feet a round whether you need it or not!”

I got Adamant Entertainment’s Tome of Secrets for Pathfinder when it came out, and it has chase rules, but those rules are like a lot of chase rules I’ve seen in RPGs over time – way too complicated.  They’re 40 damn pages of specific maneuvers and all.  The entire Combat chapter in the Pathfinder RPG is only 25 pages.  I wanted something that could be run without everyone having to do homework; in my opinion if a new bolt-on special case ruleset is more than about 2 pages then “you’re doing it wrong.”

So here’s what I came up with.  It was hard to balance it out but after a couple playtest chases in the real campaign I think they are pretty light and easy to use, fair, and keep the PCs engaged.

The Movement Check

A character’s Move check is +2 per 5′ of base speed.  For an unencumbered human that moves 30′, that’s +12.  In a self-powered race like a footrace, you can add your STR bonus to this in a given round but then have to make a DC 15 Fort save to not become fatigued from the exertion.   Use this same formula for other movement types (riding, swimming) because it takes differing speeds into account well.  (as a bonus, this means you can have a chase where various participants are using different modes of movement).

The Chase Track

Rather than keeping up with specific distances, a chase has distance represented by an arbitrary condition track.  It’s defined relative to whoever’s in the lead, and has six levels -

1. Close Contact – within melee range of leader.  Subject to all obstacles the leader has to deal with.
2. Point Blank – close range (all those “within 30 feet” powers proc here).  Take leader’s obstacles or take an alternate path at DC 20.
3. Short – Take leader’s obstacles or an alternate path at DC 15.  -2 on ranged attacks.
4. Medium – From this far back, it’s usually easy to avoid obstacles.  -4 on ranged attacks.
5. Long – -6 on ranged attacks.
6. Lost – you done lost ‘em.   If you have allies still in the chase and you can still run (not fatigued or just giving up) you can run after them sufficiently to at least arrive on the scene once it’s all over, but you can’t get back into the actual chase.

For each 5 points by which you beat the leader’s movement check,  you close by one category on the track; similarly you slip back by one for each 5 points by which you miss their check.

Chase participants start at a chase level that makes sense – if they are right there with the leader and take off after them when they take off, they can start at point blank.  If they’re a round of movement away, or pause to shoot or take another action before they get going, start them at medium range.

Obstacles

In a chase, there’s a bunch of different kinds of obstacles and complications that can come up.  Here’s a sample but not comprehensive list.  In general the checks to pass these obstacles are DC 15.  If you fail the check, you drop back one level on the chase track; if you miss by 5 you take 1d6 nonlethal damage from a collision or similar mishap.  This is an urban specific list.  In a crowded urban environment, each round has a 1 in 3 chance of bringing a mandatory obstacle, or the leader can deliberately head towards obstacles as desired.  Roll 1d8 for what type, or choose one:

1. Simple (Acrobatics, attack an object) – barrels, gate, street vendor’s blanket, etc.
2. Barrier (Acrobatics) – fruit cart, unexpected turn
3. Wall (Climb) – traditional “end of alley” wall, fence
4. Gap (Acrobatics/Jump) – ditch, open manhole, pit
5. Traffic (Acrobatics/Overrun) – pedestrians, mule team, orc pirates
6. Squeeze (Escape Artist) – crawlspace, hole in wall
7. Water (Swim) – river, wharf, pool, fountain
8. Terrain (Acrobatics) – gravel, mud bank, slick cobblestones

Chase participants farther back on the chase track can choose whether or not to hit the same obstacle.  Chasers in close contact have to negotiate the same obstacles as the leader.  Chasers in point blank can take the obstacle or make an alternate check at DC 20 to avoid it – for example, “I can’t swim, I’m going to run around the reflecting pool instead.”  Chasers at short range can take the obstacle or an alternate check at DC 15.  Chasers farther back can generally avoid routine obstacles, but the DM can require them if it’s logically necessary (the leader swam across the river, for example).

You’d choose different obstacles and skills for other kinds of chase – a horseback chase would use Ride instead of Acrobatics, and a chase in the country would have trees and hedges instead of crates and alleys.

Actions

Anyone in close contact with the leader can conduct melee attacks on them.  Whoever wins initiative gets to determine if attacks or Movement checks happen first.

A character can take a missile attack but automatically drops back one level on the chase track when they do.

If the chase goes a number of rounds equal to anyone’s CON score they have to make DC 20 Fort saves each round or become fatigued, and effectively drop out.

Chase Playtest

Our PCs ranged from halflings and humans in encumbering armor (Move +8) to barbarians and monks (Move +16).

In their first chase, they went after the Splithog Pauper, a skilled rogue.  He had a normal Move (+12) but high Acrobatics, Climb, and Escape Artist checks.

The chase was pretty long.  Everyone managed to stay in the chase; as the slower guys dropped back they benefitted from not having to negotiate as many obstacles.  The Pauper wasn’t rolling well on his movement checks and deliberately hit a lot of obstacles to try to shake the faster guys – the barbarian stayed with him, but he managed to push the rest of them back with this tactic. The cleric was the only one with a ranged attack; he shot an icicle at him a couple times but to limited effect.

There was a cool obstacle moment that everyone thought was very “parkour,” where the Pauper ran and dash vaulted through a fruit stand; one PC followed through the gap with his own leap but the next didn’t quite make it and busted, spraying fruit everywhere.  The barbarian caught up with him legitimately and was stabbing him with his boarding pike (after a pretty bad string of misses he finally was connecting); the cleric used an Infamy Point to find a shortcut to head him off and gave him a good clotheslining; at that point we dropped out of chase mode and the two PCs cut him down before he could maneuver away from them.

The next chase was interestingly different.  This was the party trying to follow a guy through the tenements, but he spotted them and ran.  He was just a level 1 expert, nothing special, but he rolled really well and lost most of the party except for the tracker (the rest of the party was staying an increment behind the tracker to avoid detection).  But the fleeing guy totally sucked at obstacles, and after a couple slowed him, the tracker got into close contact and dragged him to the ground for a good cuffing and stuffing.

In the end these rules rewarded faster Speeds and higher relevant skills without being overwhelming – in an earlier draft I was using the Acrobatics skill as the Movement check but it made that skill too much of a “whoever has it wins and whoever doesn’t loses” power.   The quarries had a good chance to get away in both situations but after a good hard run they got them.  The chases were long enough they were interesting but went quickly enough and were dynamic enough that they held interest.

These rules work well for a “one on many” chase; it’s not clear how they’d work for a complex many-on-many chase (e.g. horde of zombies vs. party of PCs).