My Summer was Full of Games

 I realize I haven't posted on here in a hell of a long time! My Summer was a glorious mix of in-real-life and in-game adventures.

Brier Island North lighhouse,
taken from the deck of the Mega Nova

IRL I took a family roadtrip that put nearly 3,000km on the Mazda, and along the way I attended art festivals, live concerts, joyous family functions, long days on the beach, and a whale watching tour where I got to see nine individual humpback whales and a few minke whales.

I also produced a pile of episodes of my solo RPG podcast Swords Against Madness, following my heroes getting themselves in pretty deep in their gonzo sword-and-planet weirdness, played in Swords & Wizardry.

It wasn't my only solo-gaming time spent. I took a couple of days of lazy relaxing to play through a massive chunk of Jason Sholtis' Operation Unfathomable and Odious Uplands, and had an absolute blast! 

These modules are the best example of making 1st level awesome that I have ever had the pleasure to experience. I have both a review upcoming and possible a few bonus episodes of Swords Against Madness summarizing my playthrough... with all of the running and screaming involved.

Making Best Use of Downtime

Many of my players don't like downtime. They want a fast-paced adventure where they know danger is around every corner. They prefer the kind of pacing that you see in modern Dungeons & Dragons play. Downtime for them is like a montage. And for many years, because I know my audience, that was how I played. Downtime only existed between acts or when the PCs decided to- and the unfolding events allowed them to- take a break.

The Evolution of Timekeeping Advice in D&D

As a kid, I missed reading the 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide, I missed out on its advice for keeping time and running the game (I went from playing with the Mentzer "red box" Basic Dungeons & Dragons to using Mentzer Dungeon Master's Rulebook and the AD&D Player's Handbook, to using AD&D2nd edition. Thus, I missed the best resource ever written on running a D&D campaign. The AD&D2e Dungeon Master's Guide buried its advice a somewhat in favour of optional rules and setting design, and skipped some of the best options. Bu the time they decided to expand it in DMGR1: The Campaign Sourcebook and Catacombs Guide, the developers at TSR had very much moved away from Gygax. Here is the meat of their description of how to manage pacing of a campaign in DMGR1:

Podcasting Your Campaign Notes

I am, generally speaking, awful about keeping notes as a DM. When I run  a game, I am so deep in the flow moat times that writing things down doesn't occur to me. Three days later, I can usually tell you exactly what happened without referring to my scant in-game notes. But by the time a week has gone by, I am stuck in the position of sometimes having to ask, "What was that NPC's name again?"

It really isn't the best way to do things and has been the source of a few jarring moments in otherwise great game flow. I've started making quick audio notes after sessions so that I can have a quick refresher before the session begins.

For the sake of building some enthusiasm,  honing my craft, and having a little fun with my friends, it occurred to me that I could turn these into a podcast with a tiny and very specific audience. Although, once it is in full swing it might be interesting to other players who want to see how those older 1970s style rules and 1:1 time play out in an actual game.

Once the 5-10 minutes of audio notes are recorded, I also realized that I could also record some of the lore about the campaign setting in a fun delivery package that helps me avoid lore dumps in the game. "Here's 5 minutes of stuff you might want to know and might be interesting, but isn't game critical - and you can skip!" seems like a winning formula. Especially as it is as much about me as them.

If you are curious, here are my first to proper session versions of the micro-podcast:

Silver Gull - Episode 2

Silver Gull - Episode 3

Silver Gull - Episode 4

Returning to Xen

This is another article to file under "I don't know who this will interest":

I am returning to the Silver Gull Campaign after a hiatus. I find coming up with material for it so much easier than the CHV Natani game.

It has been awhile, and my players  were asking for a reminder of the events of the game so far. Moreover, I am looking to onboard a new player. So every was asking for a summary, if I could put something together.

Because I am trying to get into the podcast production and editing biz, I decided to take this as an opportunity to practice my podcast design and mastering. It is about half an hour, covers an overview of the campaign, and a summary that covers around 70 sessions, that is pretty condensed.

 Listen to it here

If you are interested... or want to see what I can do, check it out above.

How I Used One-to-One Time in the Silver Gull Campaign.

Time Magician's Academy
Generated with Unstable Diffusion

One-to-One time is making the rounds again on Twitter, so I decided that it was time I gave a concrete example of how it worked for me in my Silver Gull Campaign. 

You can see reports about and articles inspired by my campaign here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.

Silver Gull is part of my Xen: Weird Fantasy setting, and I played it with a mix of Swords & Wizardry and Deathtrap Lite. (and supplemented with AD&D1e) Xen is a world with an eight-day week and a fairly elaborate calendar you can read about in my setting document. This document also contains a summary of two months of downtime activity.

My rule was that, barring my own ill health, every week of real time was eight days of time in Xen. So, after each Monday night session, my players had seven days of downtime before the next session. I would advance the date in Xen seven days after the last date that passed in the session.

The Silver Gull Campaign: Fiends in Mirrors

Zeelagur character portrait made w/ Stable Diffusion
and ethically sourced image libraries by her player.
©️2023 D. Westfal

 My players have finally closed a major chapter in the Silver Gull Swords & Wizardry Campaign over the last handful of sessions:

March 20th: Obliteration

Returning from the Fae with a rescued cleric in tow, the PCs all went to the cloning lab Reine discovered and beat the Echthroi flashcrafter there to a pulp, forcing him to tell them where to find the gear they left behind. And discovered that a replicant of Zee had been sent to take the 'Gull.

"Give that guy a raise!" Hirelings and Henchmen

 In my Swords & Wizardry campaign, my players were led through a planar portal in the bottom of a dungeon. They left their airship moored in the desert a mile away, attended by their crew of NPC hirelings and henchmen.

While the PCs were fighting for their life in a ruin in the Faerie, a squadron of  the monsters that lived there assaulted the airship, hoping to take it for themselves. These monsters, the Echthroi, had:

• 8 flying "Moths" 1 HD cyborgs that spit poison darts
• 24 "Skulkers", 2 HD humanoids whose bionic limbs allow them to stitch a victim's limbs to their torso.
• 1 "Knight", a 4 HD armored cyborg that makes multiple attacks with spiked chains each level.
• 1 "Mimic", a 3 HD construct that can be made to look and sound like others, and, in a laboratory, can consume a brain to gain its memories and skills. Disguised as Zeelagur, that party Monk-Machinist.

You can find the stats for most of those in my Xen Campaign Book, which has been recently updated.

The crew of the Silver Gull includes a number of named and unnamed NPCs:

• Corwyn - First Mate, a 5th level N human Fighter henchman.
• Assani, a 4th level L human Fighter henchwoman
• Barani, a 5th level L human Magic-User henchwoman
• Joone,-ibn-Orhan, a 3rd level L human Cleric henchman
• Cyndryl, a 3rd level C human Assassin henchwoman
• Milosh, a 1st level L human Fighter henchman
• One-Armed Harl, a 1st level L human Fighter hireling
• Tarl, a 1st level C human Thief hireling
• Kassin a normal man hireling
• Kazmir, a 1st level N human Thief henchman
• Baroo, a 5 HD vampire ally
• 8 normal man crewmen.

This stood to be a pretty intense battle; I decided to run it in the background between sessions.

Silver Gull Campaign Update: Dungeon Hopping

Silver Gull Campaign as Final Fantasy Characters
Achaieria art based on image from the 1981 Fiend Folio
Backround from Final Fantasy VI
Sprites made with Universal LPC Sprite Maker

 It has been awhile since I have updated you all on my Swords & Wizardry campaign, The Silver Gull. The campaign is now in its second year and set in my Xen campaign setting.

My players have been trying to clear any remaining entanglements left over in the city of Tarvaad before moving on to Pamuk to face the Demon Mirdon who has a lein on their souls. 

After that, the plan appears to be to try and infiltrate the Tower of Silence, the home of the greatest magi in the empire, and last bastion of Imperial culture in the now-frozen province of Umbra. There, they hope to free the imprisoned goddess Irielle.

Jan. 9th - Infestation

Faced with a lich that could wake up at any second, they PCs decided to consult with local experts. They knew that Tarvaad was once ground zero of a Jahi cult: a cult led by a person possessed by a depraved undead spirit created by obsession and desire - purging these cults was the reason for the original war that created the Empire of Xen. They wondered how the Jahi had been contained.

Live Adventure Design

 The Lair of the Echthroi

Lair of the Echthroi Map, made with Dungeon Alchemist and Adobe Photoshop ©2023 Brian Rideout

Today, I am going to prepare my Swords & Wizardry adventure notes for my game tonight here on the 'blog just for fun. I will update the blog with every substantive change in information. I will be commenting on my decision choices as I go, as well. I will be watching Twitter if you have comments as I go

Silver Gull Campaign Update: "Fleshcrafting: Not Even Once!"

 

One of the things I love about my Xen campaign is that its history is so big and vague that I can put anything in  from the darker, stranger eras of the game, and as long as I bury them right, and give a context of which horrible age of the Empire's past it comes from, the players will find it all perfectly sensible.

For this round, I decided to use some bizarre monsters from the Creature Compendium by Richard J. LeBlanc. It worked wonders to freak my players out.

Updated Xen Documentation

 If you are following my Xen campaign stuff, I wanted to post two updates.

Maps

First, I have a new map that shows actual rivers, rather than common water travel routes. So it doesn't look like the Empire carved insane canals across the continent. With special thanks to Ben Milton and his map drawing tutorials so that I felt confident actually drawing these maps.

©2022 Brian C. Rideout

Setting Document

And I have updated the campaign document with maps, better editing, and an appendix of the Deities of Xen. Shared on Google Drive.

Silver Gull Campaign Update: Dungeons & Dentistry

 It's been a while since I have done an update on the Silver Gull campaign, but it is still going strong at 34 sessions since late January.

September 12th

After my players made a deal with a blue dragon to defend the Town of Orhan for a usurious fee, they decided to bail before the townsfolk really understood the deal. They took off in the Silver Gull and headed West towards the town where the campaign had begun.

While in the air, the players got to know the new crew members that their henchmen and hired. Among them was Linna, a new player character. Linna is a bard. I adapted the class at the players request from the Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy version. Liina was intended to be a replacement for Reine who has gone into semi-retirement as she's maxed her level.

During their flight, the airship was attacked by a group of harpies who threatened to lure crewman off of the ship to plummet to their dooms unless they were paid a sum of 3,000 gold pieces.

With a new mid-level bard in the party, the harpies' song was easy to overcome. They even managed to charm one and get it to land of the deck after they killed a couple of the harpies and forced the others to land due to damage from their artillery... A fire breathing Zardoz head mounted on the bow of the ship.

Silver Gull Campaign Update: Dickering with Dragons

The Blue Book cover to the Holmes
version of Basic Dungeons & Dragons
C 1978 TSR Inc. Art by David C. Sutherland

 I have no idea if anyone reads these, but I'm sure enjoying writing them.

As I wrote about in a previous article, the dice led to the generation of a rival group of NPC adventurers in the town of Orhan, which have been picking up the slack where the player characters have been ignoring local concerns. These adventurers managed to put themselves to the cusp of fourth level before they went into a ruin and woke a dragon.  Three of these NPCs were killed, two captured, and only one managed to escape the dragon. This dragon, Arenax, is the focal point of my two most recent sessions.

August 22nd

Having slain the Demons of the Oracle of Inkandus, the PCs returned to the holy Mesa where cactus people draw on the Water of Life to gain visions. They are warned by the talking Crow, which serves as the guardian to many local holy sites, that they have come at a bad time: The Behir that guards the Mesa is hunting. The PCs get under cover just in time, as the Behir wanders into the entrance to the mesa. The Crow lies to it it says it is not seen any humans.

The PCs wait for the creature to leave, and then ask the Crow some questions. First about the Djinni that guards the oracle, and whether it can be trusted to allow the PCS to pass now that they have done as it instructed. She answered "yes" to those questions, but with warnings to watch for wordplay.

They also asked the Crow about herself. They already knew that she was a polymorphed and immortal sorceress, but the rest of the details were hazy. She introduced herself as Razia, a sorceress who lived in the earliest days of the Empire, and who had been variously friend, enemy, lover, and rival to another wizard they had encountered from that same era, Sandivh. Razia had done something so wicked and sinful that she had been cursed by a group of demigods from the region. She was polymorphed into a crow and forced to eternally protect the sites of the Cult of Malek from fools and fell sorcerers until such time as the evil of the city of Imran was no longer a threat.

Having discovered a bottle that turns any creature into a human when properly prepared in the demonic liquor cellar of Inkandus, Finch offered to turn her back into a human. They suggested that perhaps the gods had arrayed things so that the PCs could purge the oracle, slay some of the Achaierai, and drive off other monsters left over from the era of Imran. That they, in fact, had fulfilled the conditions of the curse, and have the means to lift it by holy design.

The Rivals: One-to-one Time and Random Campaign Development

Promotional art for the Dungeons &Dragons cartoon
©️1983 D&D Entertainment

Let me tell you about how my campaign started running itself  through a curious set of random rolls inspired by my rumor chart and one-to-one time.

My Xen campaign uses a modified version of the one-to-one time tracking that Stephen Smith uses in the Wierth campaign. When my players are in the middle of a dungeon, and we have to intercession, we pause and pick up where we left off. I keep track of the turns that have passed, and occasionally tell the players approximately how long they have been in the dungeon.

When we end outside of a dungeon, I handle the player characters' return to base myself. Rolling for random encounters if necessary, and handling combat in an abstract way if they should run into danger.

Given that my Player Characters got hold of a functional ornithopter, and kept it studiously repaired and fueled (until it was stolen,) I have not had much to do that regard.

How I Handle Time Between Sessions

Between sessions, I ration one week on Xen for downtime, which is 8 days 

I have set a 1-in-6 chance that something will happen during that time.

Xen Maps

 I recently picked up Campaign Cartographer 3 and have been teaching myself how to use it, so that I have an easier way to make maps for the adventure modules I like to put out into the world that I don't have to worry endlessly about the license for.

As an experiment I decided to do two maps for my Xen campaign.

Silver Gull Update: Kaboom!

August 8th

Sneaking ahead, Reine discovered a room with cages and gates holding the hollow-eyed and tormented husks of the damned, manes, kept pennned for The Librarian's experiments. She made it only partway through the room before they all turned as one to gaze at her. Reine swiftly backed up to the party.

In whispered voices, they got their bound Succubus to explain what they were. But the explanation was cut short by the squeak of a metal gate. The PCs turned to see an army of the damned shuffling towards them.

Finch waded in, slaying four in a flurry of blows, giving Zee room to run up and brace herself to use the fully automatic mode on her automatic crossbow.

The Crossbow emptied an entire 6 pound drum of bolts, killing another 19 manes, leaving one startled creature left, which Reine promptly killed with a spear throw.

Sometimes, you have to give your PCs a mountain of 1HD mooks just to let them feel badass.

Tools for Creating Gossip

‘He took his place once more on the
bench at the inn-door’
by Arthur Rackham c.1910

If you are running an Open Sandbox style of campaign, you need three things to start: a small area to explore stocked with a few adventure sites, a town or village for a first home base, and information that helps the PCs find the adventure sites from the home base.

That last one can take a number of forms: strange lights or smoke on the horizon, a job from a local patron, the site visible from a distance, someone staggering into the wilderness pleading for help... there are dozens of ways to seed information into your town, but one of the most valuable ways is by having gossip that the players can pick up around town.

Twitter user @SivorKhalid mentioned in response to my article on using gossip as a campaign tracking tool that he has trouble coming up with rumors, so I thought I would try to create a helpful resource. 

Silver Gull Campaign Update: A Litte "Julius Ceasar"

  I found my original hex map drawn for the region around town of Orhan that became the Imrani Waste as my "Silver Gull" Swords & Wizardry campaign advanced.  

It is stunning to me that this A5 page of notes managed to spur 21 sessions of my campaign (the first two were set in a dungeon hundreds of miles away.

Campaign Update

Some of my readers asked me to keep them posted about the events of the Silver Gull campaign, so I wanted to post a quick one here.

July 25th

On the eve of the Fall Equinox, the PCs flew to the mouth of the Oracle of inkandus, armed with clockwork horrors, alchemical mortars, and magic weapons. They instructed their succubus minion, Delgradia, to help them put the host at ease.

The host, once summoned with a sacrifice of prickly pear wine, led them through the upper floor of the Oracle to an ancient theatre. Finch took the stage and begane doing a comedic routine to amuse the demon that ended with the party's go-word for violence: "pineapples"

How I Use Rumor Tables to Create a Living Campaign

I wanted to share a tool I used to keep 1:1 (ish) time running and my Silver Gull Swords & Wizardry campaign a living thing: My rumor charts. these were posted every game day that the players were not starting in a dungeon, to give them something to do. (Finch's player has established that he would carouse once a week at least to keep the table fresh.)

The Reproductive Cycle of Dungeons

 

Unkeyed map of the Imrani Waste
as explored by my players so far
Created with Hextml

A few days ago, I posted a summary of my "Silver Gulls" campaign to date. (Although I forgot a Ffve-room dungeon.) And I wanted to share something I discovered.

When the PCs stepped into the Teleportation Booth all together and started mashing buttons, I knew that they would wind up in the middle of the desert 20-ish miles from a town and 500 miles away. I drew a hex-bloom of desert landscape around them and roughed-in several locations.

The Facts About Xen

I didn't know much about the region but I had some truisms about the campaign:

• The Empire of Xen has collapsed four times over 4,200 years, but claims to be the same nation (a dubious claim)
• Each Collapse has left ruins, often buried and forgotten.
• The Empire doesn't know its own history very well. 80% of it's cultural past is forgotten.
• Many of my past campaigns are ancient pre-Imperial history.

With that in mind, I put an oracle tended by cactus-men, a temple surrounded by a perilous cactus forest, a prison colony that is haunted by its inmates and built over a cavern that leads to an underground river and sunken ruins. And an old smuggler camp that once supplied the convicts with contraband. I also knew that there was an oasis to the north of the town.

I also decided that the town would be on a petrified forest and have human petrification problems related to evil in a nearby dungeon.

That was actually a lot for an area they might choose to leave right away. I left details scant.