The Fearless DM

In my upcoming Labyrinth Lord campaign, magic is known to be a warping and destabilizing influence. Each time a spellcaster casts, he rolls a 1d20, and on a critical fail (a roll of 1) the spellcaster will begin to develop a mutation of some kind.

These mutations are not powers! They also don’t happen immediately. The only immediate manifestation will be a nosebleed (or something similar).

Within a few days the PC will change- sometimes subtly, and sometimes in more extreme ways. Eye color (in one or both eyes) might change as a subtle effect.. warts or carbuncles could appear. At the far end of the spectrum (high level spells might cause more dramatic effects) the wizard grows more monstrous, developing an extra eye, or even growing eyestalks or feathers, or becoming grossly fat. The highest level wizards learn to polymorph, and the most evil are able to transfer their infirmities into the bodies of a captured victim, or their minds into new bodies.

Therefore, it’s not a “low-magic” setting, but it is a setting where magic is not treated lightly… and nobody trusts a magic user.

So, I was wrong.

I had suggested to some guys earlier that the Robe of Eyes was probably based on Argos (the many eyed giant servant of Hera, the greek myth about peacock feathers, etc).

Instead, it’s actually an item that appears in The Dying Earth, by Jack Vance.

I have been reading a lot of Jack Vance lately, and to explain the item I have to kind of explain that the Dying Earth is a bit unlike the other two books in the “trilogy” of Cugels Saga and Rhialto the Marvelous. It is an earlier effort, and it is rougher.. I’ve been reading Jack Vance books since college, but I had never found the Dying Earth (it’s a 1950 novel) until recently. Two things I never realized: the “Dying Earth” really is supposed to be a reference to earth, like, our earth. I assumed the world of the dying earth was it’s own sort of fantasy world. Second, the cover of the book shows a massive space station floating over the planet. Oh, I never thought of it this way.

It has the same PG Wodehousian dialogue- the comedy of manners is probably my favorite detail of Vance’s prose.

However, the Dying Earth is unique in several ways- especially n the way it skips around from character to character. It was written much more like the way Lyonesse (a later series by the same author) was written the way it follows a tale for a while, then drops it, then picks it up again later.

In this particular tale, there’s a particularly detestable character called Liane the Wayfarer- he’s a murdering amoral scum, but he has beautiful golden eyes. He’s not amoral or scoundrelly in a fun way (like Cugel). No, he’s an ass.. I literally hated him by the second page he appeared. Anyhow, Liane wants to possess (I think a fancy word for rape) a beautiful witch named Lith, but she defends herself and says instead that if he can go get the second half of a magic tapestry, she will willingly be with him. So Liane sets off, and (murdering a few people along the way) eventually finds the tapestry which is guarded by Chun the unavoidable. He tries to use his magic ring and his trickery to get it, long story short.. Chun is wearing a Robe of Eyes, and kills Liane.

And here’s the brilliant part: Chun shows up at the witchs door and gives her two threads for her tapestry to account for Liane’s eyes.

So the implied story is that Lith sends victims to Chun, who takes their eyes, and  in return he gradually supplies threads from his golden tapestry to Lith. 

I was blown away by this story, and I was really impressed by the style of it all.

This is continuing my campaign-out-loud series. I’ve come up with character options, a pantheon, I’m in the process of a dungeon… and just one town to start.

So most games start in the one town, and then the structure of a game will be whatever the players want to do, probably involving forays to the dungeon (which is currently 3 levels deep with a surface map).I’m borrowing advice from Philotomy.com’s “Mythic Underworld” advice.

I’ll get to the dungeon next.This is about the town.

The town needs the following things:

An Inn. Thats where the players might live between adventures. They might live elsewhere too- a cleric might live at the temple, or a player might somehow have a house. But we have to have a default residence. 

A Tavern. This is where rumors are discovered, and 1000 sorties into the dungeon are launched.  

A Temple Open to All. So I love real world mythologies and I also love massive nonsensical D&D pantheons (not everyone loves them but I do). But I am starting small, and I want a temple where anyone can get healed regardless of affiliation. In this case, I am going with a Chapel of Helias, dedicated to a local saint, the Lady of Perpetual Sunshine. You can buy cures and get curses removed, etc. Occaisionally they will have healing potions for sale.

A Place to Buy Gear. Two places, really- a blacksmith (for armor and weapons) and a general goods store for..other stuff.

A Place to Sell Stuff. Treasure won’t just be pure coin. There’s going to be a shady dealer that takes  stuff and converts it to coin, though. Also, a major source of lowbie treasure is scavenged items (armor and weaponry from enemies). This stuff gets sold back to the blacksmith as scrap.

Itinerant Magic Peddler. I just like the idea of a guy who shows up X% of the time that has a few potions or scrolls for sale.

A Mayor’s Office or some kind of town ruler guy, and his associated buildings.

A City Guard Tower, including prison, barracks, guard captain, etc.

Now, the less obvious:Each of the above paces, also has at least one, and possibly several NPCs. And each place also has some secondary jobs, some of which overlap. For example, the temple can also serve as a selling place, and the shady dealer could be a guy that gives out missions. The Temple might have a library where arcane spell research takes place.. or anything else. I think this is a good start.

I emailed off an offer to volunteer to help in future organized play efforts for 5e, but just as soon, the doubts started to pile up, and I had this conversation with a friend via email:

> > I bet you five bucks there will be no living campaign this time around.
> > All Encounters, all the time.

For about a microsecond I was taken aback and then I suddenly realized he was right. He was dead right. And I told him so.

On Mon, Jan 09, 2012 at 12:52:50PM -0500, Peter Seckler wrote:
> 
>    The more I think about this, the more I think you are right, and that living
>    campaigns may have actually contributed to the end of the edition.
>    Hmmmmmmm
>    ============================================
>    Peter Seckler

And he elucidated further:

» I am totally right about that. LFR (and more so LG) was a contributor
» to the idea that every GM had to interpret the rules exactly the same
» way all the time. There should be no single D&D; each table should have
» a different one. But living campaigns push towards monolithic rules.
»This is also Gygax’s most pernicious legacy, even if a lot of the OSR
»would like to pretend he didn’t think it was the way things should be.

A pause… and then this brilliant thing:

»Oh, and WotC should not have a charop board for 5e.

Yes, absolutely true!

For a long time I have been struggling with this, the huge potential of organized play- it’s a social potential- and it is ruined (my opinion I guess) in servitude to my least favored audience- the ones who see the entire game as primarily a matter of builds and carefully considered strategy.

But what we get wrapped around the axle is on procedure and conformity and standards, and it’s impossible to fight “the powers that be” (of which there are no shortage) on a big campaign level. And yet, by contrast, Encounters is local. There’s no expectation of maintaining a single experience- it’s an acknowledgement of the DM as an individual arbiter. I Dm’d two entire seasons of Encounters- unlike my usual gleeful subversion of Living Realms as a Faerun that actually engaged players on a personal level, I didn’t even think about what anyone else thought of what I was doing. It was just D&D. Thats all it should have been.

As a side note: The reason this blog is called the Fearless DM is because i wanted to promote that exact subversive take to others- in a sense i was saying the only “powers that be” are the ones you have in attendance at your table on game night.

I still do find the Encounters format a bit short-form, though. Hm.

In my previous post I have been talking about opening up character options slowly.Each player starts with fighter and thief and gets one additional option.

Similarly, I am working on a megadungeon style conceit for the campaign — same concept- I just have three levels and a surface area for the dungeon mapped out, and I’m going to detail it outwards as it expands.

The Pantheon of the campaign will work the same way: I’m going to start with four  gods and open it up slowly.You will notice that there’s no cleric option for one of my gods.

First my general philosophy of fictional gods: Mythology already did everything pretty well. So I like real world mythological gods, just renamed, possibly mashed up and re-flavored a bit.

Aeon, depicted as a lion-headed man seated on a throne, bearing two keys. Aeon is after the mythical figure of Mithras combined with Zeus. He’ll be the chief deity of this campaign world, with the most powerful, most legitimate priesthood.  He is lawful, and his followers will be the most influential. If I have to give him portfolios or powers, it will be “the universe” and then things like lightning and order, etc. But generally a god of power and rulership itself. I will also create a more subversive mystery cult of Aeon later. His clerics are known as Blackcoats and tend to involve themselves in politics. 

Helia, Queen of the Sun, depicted as a beautiful woman, and the manifestation/personification of the sun itself. Helia is a mashup of Amaterasu (japanese myth) and Helios (greek myth). Helia is also lawful and good-aligned. Her religion will have a split off group of more primal followers, so there will be two branches: a civilized branch and a more primal one. Clerics of Helias are called Lightbringers.

The Nine are the original Nine Lords of Aedorea. This is my unaligned religion that is representative of a campaign mystery: The Nine are originally (in the prehistoric past) a group of giant-sized humanoid aliens that settled the campaign world, and genetically manipulated the various species of the world to foster the sentient races. Most of the Nine are now either dead or undead. Clerics of the Nine actually get their powers from lost technology but don’t really realize it.  Some of the Nine are opposed to others, and some (as I mentioned) are actually just dead. Clerics are known as Confessors. The Nine will also have certain cultists dedicated just to a single member of the Nine, and alignments might range from unaligned to evil.

The fourth deity is not listed yet as a character option, but will eventually be there as well: The Court of Queen Mab and King Prospero (Which are general mashups of a variety of local Shakespearean fey demigods, including Oberon and Titania), will be stand-ins for a lowly rustic set of folk beliefs that make up the primal “druidic” way. They will not have actual clerics, although druids, witches,  and certain wild-dwelling people might honor them as influences. I have not yet come to a decision about wilderness areas in the campaign. These decision will be related.

(Next Post is about the town, which will have to be expanded outwards as well- it will begin with the bare minimum of a tavern, inn, armorer, general store, temples, and someplace where hirelings and mercenaries can be employed- it too, will expand).

I’m working on setting up a Labyrinth Lord campaign for 2012. My original plan was AD&D (which is also somewhat driven by laziness- I know AD&D very well), but there are certain elements I wanted to not include.. eventually it became clear that if I started more stripped down I could form things up from scratch a bit easier.

Two things that I really like from 4th Edition are the wide range of races (everything from Deva to Minotaur) and the wide range of classes. The Invoker and the Runepriest classes from 4th Edition, for example, are both favorites of mine, because of how they differ from just a cleric. BUT I don’t like how some other players treat races and classes in 4e. I don’t think they do it maliciously- but I think there’s a very “stat first” mentality that some people have. Here I am trying to build cultures and world details, using those classes and races to support details. I know, right.

So I want something that allows me to bring in details like that- in practical terms- kits. I am less interested in mechanical complexity (although a token is nice)  than I am in detail.

I also know that there’s a human element, a psychology to this. You can’t just put out 90 options and say “pick one” because players will either just pick the perceived best, or the weirdest, or the most familiar, in accordance with that players personality and whims, and they will all be played the same regardless, at least at first, because there’s a learning stage that happens at the beginning of every campaign. In any case, how can I include an option that says , say “Runepriest”, without really introducing what runepriests (for example) do in this setting?

And issue #2, old standbys like elves and dwarves, everyone always knows (or think they know) exactly how those work, so I end up stuck with world details I didn’t intend. I’m not talking radical changes, but for example, I want my elves to have tribes. i want my dwarves to know a bit about dwarven lore. 

So here’s my idea:

All players start out with Humans only, and only the following classes available: fighter, thief.

No, not even clerics. Because clerics are the first way to form a campaign- the cleric has a god, and the god becomes an ingrained detail of the history of your campaign. However, clerics (of ordained gods of the campaign pantheon) will be available right away, at the first session. 

To explain: I will create a deck of index cards- or perhaps just a written ledger— that is going to unlock certain details of the campaign as player options. Every player starts with a card, (even at the beginning of their first character creation) so they will have one additional option. And I think I may make special cards available as rewards or ‘after game specials’.Each player thus maintains a collection of personal unlocked details, and these can be used as character options.

Labyrinth Lord is going to have player and character turnover, plus it should not be too unusual to maintain 2 or 3 PCs at once, even in the same game, plus round out a party with henchmen.So the unlocks will be something I expect people to use. Also, I want the unlocks to each come with a sort of mini-history-lesson for that thing.

So what I think will make this fun (maybe I’m horribly wrong..) is that each player will have a personal collection of unlocks, some of which may be unique. And in certain cases, the players can even choose to pursue quests because they know what the unlock is.

The first game unlocks (every player gets 1 of the following, and can choose to use it immediately or just keep it in his collection) will include:

• Barbarian of the Wandering Fens: +4 AC when not wearing any armor, +1 with spears
• Knight of the Western Reaches: Honorable title, Free platemail at level 1
• Harrowpath Bandit: +1 to hit with shortbows or scimitars
• Lightbringer of Helia, Queen of the Sun- good aligned clerics of light, warmth, and purity
• Blackcoat of Aeon, the Universe- lawful clerics dedicated to order, the stars, lightning
• Confessor of the Nine- neutral clerics dedicated to preserving the traditions of the Original Nine Lords of Aedorea
• Kithkin (the reclusive halfling race of my campaign- Kithkin have tails)
• Student of Bilario, Wizard of the Western Reaches
• Student of Miim, Wizardess of Harrowpath
• Student of Dame Yaga, Witch of the Wandering Fens

So as you can see, you can’t learn magic unless you learn from someone who knows it. Now- the list will grow over time. Eventually there will be other wizard mentors, other races, other gods and goddesses and mysteries introduced, but the point is they come in a bit at a time, and the players get to understand them first before they get to take them over. Bilario, Miim, and Dame yaga will also be established NPCs before the campaign even starts- they will be amongst the most important NPcs in the campaign.

Itt’s great and there were a million contributors!

10 MB Download!

(I painted the cover! and a few other parts.. ;)

I ran an adventure last night- that was meant to be a dry run for one of the adventures I’m running at DDXP. This one ended up being cut from my schedule (it was supposed to have run in slot 12, but my flight is leaving out of Indianapolis too early for me to squeeze in this last game)

So I get to tell you about it here:

I wrote a 2-part series about characters that ended up shipwrecked on the Isle of Dread, actually on an outlying island. The original X1 Isle of Dread is big- it’s really big enough for a significant chapter of a campaign on it’s own, possibly an entire Heroic Tier of adventure.

But in this case, I just need to fill a 4 hour slot without going over time. So in this adventure, the PCs are shipwrecked survivors (along with a few civilians) who  encounter a sea witch named Kallisti. While the PCs are diverted on another encounter figuring out how to get rescued, she kidnaps the remaining survivors of the expedition, enchants them , and drives them underwater. The survivors are held hostage, and the PCs are given demands.

Her ultimate goal is she wants the PCs to lure a rescue expedition, which she plans on also attacking. But her real goal is she wrecks their ship with her pet kraken, and she turns the humanoid survivors into Sea-devils. She plans on creating an army of them. 

The players, of course, mount a rescue of their own. They first run across Kalisti and her sea devils driving their hapless victims (other survivors of the PCs expedition) into the ocean. (I have to come up with a way that keeps the players from stopping this happening.. in my run last night, I set it up so that the party was split, and only two PCs were there to witness this. Those two PCs successfully killed 5 out of 7 sea-devils before I had the bad-guys take the last of the victims underwater).

Then the party reunites, they discuss their situation, gather clues, they meet some merfolk (I used watersoul genasi as my merfolk), and find out what the deal is. They get the water-breathing ability as a gift of the merfolk.

They get a brief, then..assault on Kallisti’s underwater lair.

In the backstory of the lair, the merfolk once inhabited the coral caves where Kallisti lives now, and once controlled a gargantuan kraken. Kallisti the sea-witch has taken over, kidnapped the merfolk princess as a hostage, and has now united her personal sea-devil guards, as well as a tribe of ixitchitl and some sharks. Just..anything bad you can find underwater.

The kraken’s cave originally had a “fail-safe” device (built by the Mer) to collapse the caves if the beast ever got out of control. Kallisti has of course taken over the Kraken, and has re-keyed the fail-safe and turned it into a puzzle.

What followed was fairly straightforward- they chose to assault the back entrance, through the kelp forest. They got the drop on an Ixitchitl patrol in the kelp forest and fought them.. then moved into the lair. They found their survivors, still awaiting transformation into sea-devil.They found the frozen mer princess.. and they found Kalisti herself..fighting her in the coral halls of her lair.

Finally, the puzzle.

Here it is:

Puzzle: The Six Demon Names

The original version was a stone and coral disc, with colored gems arranged in a circle, which you had to choose two, and once you pressed them, it either set off the fail safe, or (if you chose wrong)  it shocked you for 2d12 damage.

Kallisti bound the trap with the names of six demons:

The gem colors are :

brown - Red - orange - yellow - green - blue- indigo - violet- sepia

The demon names are

• Oni
• Raven
• _(blank)_
• Nalfashni
• Gog
• Etrigano

(As you can see, the third name has fallen off the disc.)

There were a number of other demon names on the floor nearby, and each nameplate fit perfectly into the third slot, but only one was correct. Those names were

Abaddon, Balefire, Archimond, Slaanesk, Mordikul, Cemest, Rakdos, Vulgrim, Korvalg, and Hulgur.

How would you approach the trap? I also left it open ended, the players could have abandoned the trap and allowed the Kraken to live. But they would have paid for that later, I suppose.

First, the fundamental question of the web. Why Wasn’t I Consulted?

Ok, you read that?, good.

Here’s my guilty confession. I think someone should actually listen to me about DMing, because I’ve been hammering away at it for a while. And I also think a lot of people are doing things wrong (not a crime), but then you’d have two wrong people get together and validate each other.. and suddenly they are speaking as if knowledgeable, giving bad advice on the internet..  and then everyone wonders why nothing seems to work as advertised.. wow. But there’s your problem, right there.

The conversation about DMing is one I really care about, and Organized play in general, one I’m really involved in, but you know what it’s really about? Cred. I ain’t got none, and I’m probably not getting any, any time soon. I’m probably getting whatever the opposite of cred is, stacked up like lumps of coal.

On the one hand, I’m ok with that, because it’s not really about cred, is it? It is not.  On the other hand, Cred means people pay attention, and I think people are paying attention to all of the wrong things. 

Point: We have “expert” DMs in LFR, for example, who can’t actually finish a slot, because they take so much time trying to follow each and every rule, and wargame their turns out. I’ve mentioned this before.This creates an extremely poor playing experience. This screws our users over, turns them off before they even get started. If you end up with the wrong DM for an LFR slot, it won’t actually be a game at all. You will sit there while a guy mumbles and pushes some miniatures around on a board for an hour, and then tells you that you should have chosen better feats. Thats what LFR will be to you.

I was disappointed to have this conversation with Dave “the game” Chalker on Twitter. He mentioned he was playing the Battle Interactive at DDXP, but only at 1st level, because he has no LFR characters. What? But he lives in Maryland! We have tons of good LFR gaming going on out here.Because here, as I said, we are different.

He confesses he doesn’t care for LFR, like..at all.

So first off: I can’t blame him, (like I said, we have some crap DMs in the program- I’ve played with them).  But I should also point out, this guy has never been at a gameday or a meetup where I have been involved that I know of, and I have been going out of my way to make sure our meetups and gamedays have been different, that show an alternative, more natural, more productive way to do things. We were amongst the first to really go off and create entire campaigns out of MyRealms, some of the greatest and most unusual campaign arcs. Our programs (I ‘m specifically thinking of Games & Stuff, and the one on Monday night that I have recently started to take part in) are great, and I can honestly say that if you get one of the core DMs from Games & Stuff, for example, that you are going to have fun. Some of our best DMs have moved away- I was thinking of Alan Morse and Bryant Durrell, but they were a treat every single time. Yet we are haunted by the shadow of bad DMs. We are haunted by the shadow of people who wanted to turn our campaign into a mini-game about comparing builds, and stacking bonuses. This shit is happening, I guess, but elsewhere, not here. (Ohio? I blame you for most of the worst DMing in the country). I am just a lone voice in the wilderness, but if you pick me as a DM I will not let you down.

Anyhow, this really sucks, because there’s a guy out there, who for whatever reason, has tons of the mysterious cred, and he’s local, and yet he won’t even try our campaign.

How do we address this?

(ok, the Ohio thing was a joke..)

I see a lot of this:

DM presents a situation..which could be anything.

Players look at how they can use their highest skill to apply it. They roll history at pit traps. They roll arcana against a lock. They roll athletics against a math problem. 

Stop the madness.

Obviously, the solution (as in most solutions) lies with the DM to handle, but here’s an easy way to think of it:

The Talented Amateur Principle

You have PCs and they have skills that (in 4E at least) are actually pretty well distributed. Nobody can be great at everything n 4E. It’s also hard to pump a few skills through the roof.. That’s a good thing.

Now look at the skills on any PC, and especially look at the ones that hover around the +4 mark. +4 is a “talented amateur” rank of skill- it is literally what you get for having an 18 attribute but no training.

Higher than that number, in multiples of 4, are how much better than a talented amateur you are. So a +12 in athletics means someone about 3x as good as a talented amateur. He’s got training and experience. 

Ok, got all that? Now take away the mechanics and say it descriptively.Create a paragraph summary of a characters skills.

Once you’ve done that, the next time you place a character in a situation (let’s say they’ve fallen into a pit, 20’ deep, dug out of craggy stone..remember to be descriptive), and a character says “What, do I just roll athletics?

Pretend for a moment that you don’t even have a skill system, but you do have this paragraph description. The character in the pit is as good as a talented amateur in pit climbing- you could just describe struggling to climb out.. maybe getting torn up a bit in the process and being exhausted by the climb- and maybe he really does have to roll a dice.. And the guy that has 3x the skill of an amateur making it out pretty quickly. And of course engaging the rest of the group to take on the problem (“we throw a rope”, or “Maybe I can use my Tensers floating disc?” or whatever other plan.)

You never have to roll a dice unless it really is a deal where you want to roll a dice. AND this also gives you a clue about where to set the DC.

Now- this also means that once a character has reached 8th-9th level (the pinnacle of the heroic tier, keep in mind) that they are- across the board- pretty much as good as a talented amateur at everything. That’s how they are supposed to be. They should wade through petty pit traps and simple lockpicking and the simplest of magical conundrums..even if they aren’t trained in athletics or thievery or arcana. They should have the ability to figure them out- even if they aren’t the right class. Many “skill checks” should not even require rolls, just a reference of that paragraph. 

You only roll when it matters.