A World-Building Experiment: Heroes & Homelands (pt. 3)

 Over the past two weeks I have created a simple D&D retro-clone called Heroes & Homelands that is intended to be easily copy/pasted and edited to make new bespoke games as I need them. You can get the current version of it in .PDF here, or in .PDF, .html, .odt, and .docx formats in a PWYW bundle on itch.io.

Then I sat down and brainstormed a campaign I called "Into the Mistlands", a surreal magical adventure into something like a weird psychocosm. Here is the pich:

Tailoring a Campaign: My Player Resource for Running Hot Springs Island

I am in the process of setting up for my Summer game of Hot Springs Island. One of the first things I wanted to do aside from sending out the pitch document that I shared with you last week, was to write a guide for the players. This guide had to tackle some basic tasks:

1. Cover how to make a character
2. Reiterate at least some of the house rules in the pitch document.
3. Expand on the information in the pitch for players who have bought in.
4. Add in any new content relevant to the players.

So I started by reiterating my character generation process. I added in firearm rules cribbed from Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and a gear list that brings the characters into the 17th century, including some era-appropriate armour and equipment.

Why I Don't Often Review Modules (Trying Something New)

 You know, I've built up a pretty big stock of adventure modules over the last few years. Thanks to Humble Bundle, Bundle of Holding, Itch.io jams, and that absolutely bodacious sale Jim Raggi put on last year, I probably have enough to keep me in review content for years without breaking a sweat or spending another dime.

The fact is though, I only discuss modules for the most part when they also do something interesting mechanically or culturally:

The Hill Cantons Quartet had the incredible Chaos Index tool, weird monsters and a sense of humor that made it a joy to play. It was the quartet of creations that put The Hydra Cooperative on everyone's map.

Sailors on the Starless Sea helped redefine a genre and set the unique tone of the most popular OSR game ever made.

Cha'alt and its companions have an innovative game woven into its pages, and tons of mechanics for things like mutations, capricious gods, and a totally different way of approaching magic. Not to mention being a prime example of gonzo style play.

Islands of the Purple Haunted Putrescence for its sheer scope as a hexcrawl, and willingness to toss genre an pop culture into a  lender and set it to frappé. 

Into the Demon Idol is a favorite example of a one-page dungeon.

Frostbitten & Mutilated with its dice scatter tables, clever handling of time travel, dark and twisted character classes, and serving as a prime example of the unique design principles of Lamentations of the Flame Princess. 

Hot Springs Island a massive, stylish  system-neutral hexcrawl that exemplifies setting design, and has a truly amazing way of presenting NPCs.

The Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City, is a book that is beautiful and supremely imaginitive. It takes the concept of the pilgrimage and makes it into a rich and surreal experience.

Arête is a great example of mythic D&D at its best. And I used it to experiment in solo play.

DNGN Issue #1 was an interesting experiment in presentation. 

The Winds of Madness was sent to me by a reader and was an absolutely stunning romp through the Far Plane with Githyanki and Spelljammer ships that did a better job of the Spelljammer setting than WotC did. It is also a great case study in the differences between the way adventures are designed in OSR and 5e cultures.

The Abandoned Estate of Moonweaver Hall I reviewed mostly because I wanted to encourage a first-time writer who was being dogpiked by asshokes on Twitter who didn't  care for his cover. I  thought a little honest feedback might help him out and keep him from being driven out by cancel-culture asses.

Each review was there because the module was an exemplar, a talking point, or a tool for developing my ideas, as much as it was a review of the product itself. I wanted to explore something that the specific setting had to offer.

I also have played most of them. Some of them twice.

My collection, which includes around forty DCC RPG adventures, a dozen Lamentations of the Flame Princess modules, a modest collection of classic D&D adventures, a shocking number of Blue Rose books, the Alpha Blue THOT trilogy, most of the early Necrotic Gnome OSE modules, Rappan Athuk, Highfell, The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg, Nevin Pendlebrook's Perilous Pantry, Warhammer Fantasy RPG 1e's Enemy Within series pretty much the entire 1st and early 2nd edition PARANOIA libraries is brimming with adventures good, bad, and extremely weird. I have a lot of thoughts I could share on almost all of them.

But I really hesitate to do so. For a simple reason:

There's just too many ways to use them.

I have run quite a few modules over the years exactly as written. Others, I have stolen the map and a few treasure hoards, or maybe I grab some useful mechanical ideas, monsters, or traps. How you use your module will make some modules more valuable than others. If you are looking for a traditional campaign to run, Hot Springs Island, The Temple of Elemental Evil (especially combined with the Giants and Underdark series) are probably the best bets. If you want to run a long game that doesn't fit that traditional mold, you might be better off considering The Ultaviolet Grasslands and Black City or Cha'alt. If you are just looking for a few good ideas to pillage, the Hill Cantons quartet is a fertile ground for plunder. If you want a very finite game that will liast seven sessions or so, A Red and Pleasant Land or The Islands of Purple Haunted Putrescence are great. Need some ideas for your PCs after they took a sip from a hag's cauldron? Grab Narcosa or Sounds of the Mushroom Kingdom. Need something you can run right now? The One Page Dungeon Compendium or almost any level-appropriate DCC module will do the job. Looking for good fodder for a solo crawl? Rappan Athuk, all the way!

I can definitely give a good factual rundown of a module's properties and major strengths and weaknesses. But I am not sure it would make for interesting reading.

Honestly, the best way to review modules is probbaly something like the best way of reviewing movies: you need to cultivate a persona that grabs one audience, and then  recommend books to that audience. Bryce Lynch over at 10ft. Pole, for example has perfected the angry, disaffected GenX DM who just wants to run the game, not spend all day planning shit. His audience are GMs who want to run something without tweaks, as written, and not spend their time or energy on something unless it has a twist.

Which isn't me. I love prep. A module has to be really special for me to want to run it "as is" out of the box. I'd do it again for Hot Springs Island or Highfell, and one day I would love to run Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City. But, on a whole, I want to plunder a  module for good ideas. 

Often I want something I can put somewhere on my sandbox after modifying it to suit my needs, like I did for Into the Demon Idol in my article on how to use one-page dungeons. This may well be my favorite way to use modules. And because of it, I suspect that adventures that would be poorly reviewed on 10ft, Pole as humdrum or underdeveloped might receieve a kinder review here. And some of the modules he finds interesting hold little appeal to me, as they are not really compatible with my style of play.

There is another issue as well:

While Modules are fun to read, collect, and plunder, I prefer to home-brew.

Modules are a frippery. You don't need them. Most of the ones I have collected, I have done so purely because I am a fan of the module, or I am curious about the module after seeing it teased out on a YouTube channel like Questing Beast. Or it is in a bundle along with a game that I really want to review.

At the end of the day, if you want to be the best GM possible, learning to plan efficiently is one of the most important skills you can hone.

But...

As I have thought long and hard on this topic lately, I find myself wondering: would my sandbox-play and rules-hacking approach be valuable if I started adding more modules to my rotation?

Or could I develop a more casual structure to share my thoughts on some of the cool modules in my collection that doesn't take me ages to write as I do when reviewing a game? It bears some experiementation...

Over the month, I am going to compose a few different styles of short article to discuss some of my favourite modules. I hope one of them might land with my readers. Please let me know when one does.

The OSR: Aesthetic and Impulse

 In 2018 I became very frustrated with how little gaming i was getting in at game-time. D&D5e and SR5 are just too slow and too fiddly for my needs. Between the wife's 60-hour work weeks and the kids, sitting down together on Firday nights for a 3-hour game just wasn't cutting it. We often got only one or two encounters done a night, and maybe four total over a week.

I wanted more game in my gametime. I missed how fast you could play D&D when I was a kid. I started looking into lighter and faster TRPG options to fill our time. I had been vaguely aware of the OSR existing, but this was the first time I really decided to look into it. With G+ gone, however, I had missed the boat on the easy way to get into the OSR.

I quickly found YouTube had a handful of reviewers and philosophers who really broke it down well. Ben Milton of Questing Beast, Professor Dungeon Master of Dungeoncraft, and Hankerin Ferinale from Drunkards & Dragons (now RUNEHAMMER), all served as a great gateway into the weird and wonderous culture that had grown up around the OSR.

Year 3 (and a bit) in Review

 There years! I have been writing and creating through Welcome to the Deathtrap for over three years now, and I am very proud of what I have created.

And I am going to start this review by saying how much I appreciate my readers. You have kept me excited to sit down and write every single day.

Classy World Building (pt. 3)

 So this time, I am going to dive into the classes I am working on with only two prefaces:

Milieu

First, this is a world where a group of mystics slew the God of Law, and the world was subsequently flooded by the tears of the Goddess of Wisdom, leading to a howling emptiness and a land full of lost hold in sunken ruins.

Greed for a Reason 

One of the first things I wanted to set up in The Drowned World was a race with a really good reason for being greedy and miserly. A replacement for the dwarves that are less encumbered by the mythic symbolism of dwarves from Norse mythology.

(If you're interested, the dwarves in the Prose Edda tend to represent small-mindedness, uninterest in the divine, materialism, and obsession with work, three things that come together. We are in a dwarf age in many respects.)

One of my favorite adventures in the original Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim was one in which you had to raise $40,000 gold pieces in 40 days in order to pay off a demonic debt interred by your character's late mother.

You don't have to really know what the demon wants with the gold. Theoretically, it shouldn't need gold at all. It is likely that it simply wants the gold to promote greed, or to stir up conflicts and generates sin. After all, The quickest way to win  mission is to build a strong thieves guild,  and invite debauched elves to build casinos and "lounges", then gamble like crazy while taxing the life out of the local vice peddlers.

This inspired my idea for the Oblik: A race struggling under a generational debt to a powerful demon. They celebrate Ambition, greed, miserliness on the one hand, but also see each member of their society as needing to help foot a massive burden on the other. They accept no slackers.

Easter Egg Guide to Deathtrap Lite

 

I know it's a bit cornball, but I put a lot of Easter Eggs regarding indie RPGs in my adventure game Deathtrap Lite. In places, they get to a stupid level per page. I thought I might list them out for anyone who wants to see how many they caught.

Consider each a love letter of sorts to someone I admire in indie gaming or pop culture.

Game Review: Machinations of the Space Princess

Machinations of the Space Princess
Cover Art by Satine Phoenix
©2018 Postmortem Studios

Author: "Grim" Jim Desborough
Publisher: Postmortem Studios
Engine: B/X D&D / Lamentations of the Flame Princess 
Marketplace: DrivethruRPG

The Usual Disclamer: This is a product that has a lot of adult themes. it is not for children. And neither is my review of it; whatever age they may actually be.

A Note on Controversy

"Grim" Jim Desborough and Satine Phoenix are both at the centres of controversies in the tabletop role-playing game community. As usual, I leave it to others to sort out what they think about either the author or the artist. I am not interested in repeating gossip. Nor do I care to discuss it further here. Although I will say that when people become the target of a Witch Hunt has "Grim" Jim repeatedly has, it makes me want to see what they're about even more. And I rarely find that the gossip is even close to the Truth.

Overview

Machinations of the Space Princess was one of a handful of games I bought myself as a Christmas present. It's being sitting on my shelf waiting to be reviewed for months now. While I have not been able to entice my players into a science fiction game other than my own Eternal Ocean, I have been able to experiment with the key features of MotSP enough that I finally feel like I can give it a thorough review.

Image from "Heavy Metal"
©1981 Columbia Pictures

Machinations of the Space Princess is a sleazy Sci-fi roll playing game. Player Characters start down-and-out and looking for a break in a cosmos where, despite advanced technology only the elite can live lives that are free from hard work and danger. Most people live a few paychecks away from poverty. Work such as theft, espionage, bounty hunting, salvage, treasure hunting, and smuggling seem like the best ways for player characters to get ahead.

Engine

MotSP is based on Lamentations of the Flame Princess. That is to say, it starts with a B/X Base and borrows many of LotFP's innovations.  In a few places, "Grim" Jim has taken James Raggi's ideas and brought them to a natural conclusion. For example, all skills are built along the lines of the specialist class from LotFP. That is to say, skills are on a pip system, where characters begin with either a zero in six or one in six chance of successfully executing any given skill. 

Level 1 Should be Awesome

Choking down the fear and hurt, the young priestess gripped her mace tight and swung at the boy who had been her friend just a few hours before. One of the five would saved her life. She'd felt safe with the Bright blades, it would only be a few days since they saved her life, but they were family. Only now, they were tying up the princess of Dravanna, and she couldn't let them do it. She was ashamed they had tricked her. Now, even though it was agony, she could not let them take Lady Ruvelia.

⚔️

The young tomb raiders ducked and wove under the whipping nooses of the horrid, spidery monsters clinging to the orrery above them. The machine turned revealing secrets of the universe with every gyration. One false step, and would be all it took to get a noose around their neck, and those secrets of the universe would haul them to the ceiling and snap their necks. They were being paid handsomely to uncover the lost lore of teleportation magic. They weren't about to let these things stand in their way. Little did they know the wizard behind them was already sealing the door. They would make a great human sacrifice...

⚔️

The two tieflings looked over the imperial camp. Down there, they were wanted criminals, Dimo would be hung in an instant if they were caught. If the soldiers were disciplined Nysha might be lucky enough to join him... The barbarians on the glacier above might treat them even worse, if they didn't have something to offer. They held their breath together as they thought. Dimo heard the groan of the frozen waterfall next to the ancient stairwell. He put his hand against The Rock and felt the potential energy rumble through the stone. "Sister," he grinned, "I have an idea. But we will have to place the charges very carefully...." Within a few minutes the camp was crushed by a god's fist of ice and water.

⚔️

My Top 5 OSR and Non-OSR Indie RPG Roundup

 Friday night while chatting with my wife (who's has avid a gamer as I am,) I ended up discussing what I like about my favorite OSR systems, and my favorite NON-OSR Indie and small developer systems. It turned into kind of a "round up," and I thought I would share it here in a slightly more polished form.

This article isn't as objective as the reviews I usually offer. It's very much subject to my own taste. But, I hope it might help you find games you enjoy if you're anything like me.

The Gaming Bucket List

The Player's Bucket List

Some years ago I asked my players what their gaming "bucket list" was. I wanted to know what experiences they would love to have in a TTRPG to help me think up adventure ideas. Mine looked something like this:

• Have a character who built a castle in a couple of nights using stone shape, wall of stone, and fabricate.
• Command an epic Star Trek style space battle.
• Build a frontier Dominion into a mighty kingdom.
• Set off a Supernova
• Play a Barbarian that takes a crown by slaying a king.
• Play a character that invents multiple spells.
• Play a computer hacker that destroys a war ship or space station with a computer.

Its an exercise I recommend considering with almost any role-playing group. If you are going to play with these players lo g enough, putting the things they are looking for somewhwee in your world can pay off...  So long as you are willing to make them work at least a little to make it happen. 

The GM Bucket List

It was also an exercise I did at a time when I was really frustrated that no one else was stepping up to GM. It was built on wistful "Forever-DM" energy.

Since then I have moved in a very different direction in my gaming. First, I found some online groups where people were willing to take turns running the game. And second, I started looking at the OSR and indie games for something lighter and faster to play.

New School Adventures, Old School Game

Coming to you from the glamorous 
Mother-in-Law's Basement Studio
(Vacation gaming is awesome!) 

Tuesday night was my first full-length session playing a Candlekeep Mysteries adventure using Lamentations of The Flame Princess for my podcast. I found it quite revealing about the assumptions made between different editions of D&D 

(Spoilers ahead for "The Joy of Extradimensional Spaces" ) 

Now, keep in mind Lamentations of The Flame Princess is not a perfect analog to Basic and Expert Dungeons & Dragons. The classes have been tweaked somewhat. Elves cannot see in the dark, for example. And only fighters get better at hitting things.

At its core, however, it is still B/X with a Cannibal Corpse album sleeve painted on the cover. I feel safe in stating that playing it is close enough to B /X D&D to count for the purposes of this discussion.

One of the first things you know is that combat is assumed to be way more often in Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition . Rather than relying on things like reaction rolls, most monsters in the adventure entitled "The Joy of Extradimensional Spaces" attack automatically. Some to defend their owners property, some as a prank (nonsensically), some out of hunger. Even creatures with no reason to hang around and murder player characters attempt to do so.

And there are a lot of monsters. For a first level dungeon, this adventure included an imp, a quasif, two flying swords, one mimic, two fairy dragons, four crawling hands, one powerful animated library, and one swarm of animated books. I was rightly concerned that this could lead to a TPK with the average soft first level BD&D characters.

Candlekeep Mysteries cover Art
By Clint Cearly;
©2021 Wizards of the Coast

This adventure includes monsters that can only be hurt by magic, and assumes 1st level PCs have access to an infinite supply of attack Cantrips. It is assumes that there's going to be some healing available for the player characters. Neither are guarantees in older editions of D&D. My party had no healing available. While my players were lucky and rolled relatively tough characters that was no guarantee either. D&D5e is in essence a game that allows for players to charge in and overcome fairly tough foes without too much difficulty.

This is also reflected in the way the adventure rewards the PCs. If PCs are awarded experience for killing monsters primarily and level 1 requires only 300xp, then this monster a-go-go dungeon will have you half-way to level 3. On the other hand, if you are being rewarded for finding treasure, and fighting monsters is designed to have a low reward:risk ratio, and level 1 is meant to be a challenge, not a formality, this dungeon offers a pittance that doesn't even take a Thief close to the 1,700 they need for level 2.

This is well discussed osr OSR and not really news. But there is a flipside to this I had to see played out to understand.

Modules written for modern Dungeons & Dragons don't assume cautious, strategic play at all.