The village

The each had their own houses…

Riley's house ... she was the witch with a cat

Quinn's house ... no surprise he's the one with a sword!

They told a little bit about all the characters and places, but I didn’t catch all of it.

This must be the watering hole

Some farms…

These were the 'farmerboys'

More famers. These were the only guys who like...

…the “mean girl”

I dunno. She looks pretty nice.

The king was in a castle.

It's good to be the king.

For some reason the blacksmith had a tower too.

Aw lookout… this guy’s up to no good.

They also introduced one scary girl as “Weird Lisa”

No, not a reference to Riley's Aunt Lisa, although she is weird.

Did not ask why the apothecary is a smoking dwarf, but it fits.

Smoking will stunt your growth, you know.

Some dude singing in the ruined church…

After that they asked for cardboard to build their own buildings, and Parker & Cameron also made a few fairies out of crafting scraps to inhabit the unfinished houses.

Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.

Waste not want not.

It was getting pretty late by then, and we didn’t have time to assemble their fairy houses, although Parker & Cameron also made some fairies out of craft supplies.

The younger kids were getting along so well they petitioned for an impromptu sleepover.  I am not so sure Cameron was as interested in that but again she took one for the team.  I have no idea how late they stayed up, but the younger kids were all up by 7:30 or 8, and after pancakes we played some more; Riley and Quinn built a dungeon using components from Descent and guarded it against my monsters with a few characters, in a kind of ‘reverse dungeon’.  Then we played a game Zombies!!! at Quinn’s request; I just left out the cards since he & Riley can’t really read that well and the pictures on the cards are kind of frightening.  Quinn was zombie-killing machine!

Super glue for two broken Man o War ships … 99 cents

Cleaning up the table, putting things away, and sweeping … 1 hour

Gettin’ my nerd on with the kids … Priceless!

According to my cookies at work, Google guesses I’m a male, aged 55-64, interested in horror films, social issues & advocacy, biology, ancestry & genealogy, architecture, and museums and libraries.  So at work apparently I’m 15-24 years older than I am at home. (Actually, I can guess why most of these come up — I do read the news at work, and use the Social Security Death Index and other biographical databases for work, and look stuff up … I’m a librarian, after all.)  My home PC has a more accurate cookie, and adds stuff like RPGs, politics, and so on.

Check out what Google “knows” about you here: LINK.

If you use more than one browser, try the link in each one … you will probably get slightly different results.  You can apparently remove anything that is not a real interest of yours, and even opt out entirely, but I haven’t messed with that yet.  I kind of like seeing ads for WotC and Skyrim when I’m reading the news…

1. If you had to pick a single invention in a game you were most proud of what would it be?

As a DM, I’m much less of an inventor than an outright thief.  My players love some of the stuff I’ve stolen. The stuff I’ve invented is kind of iffy, but my favorites would be the random tables for thrones, barrels, and such.

As a player, once in a while I think of something good.  I doubt I invented the idea, but I ushered in an era of using an auger to cut peep holes in doors that has become part of the standard dungeoneering operating procedure in our group.

21. What’s a real life experience you’ve translated into game terms?

The party leaps into action, ascertaining that the kidnapping took place last night, and that the goblins likely headed back to the old town’s main plaza.

Skara Brae has seen much better times. The northern third of the small city is still patrolled by the Fireguard and, at least during daylight hours, relatively safe. A dozen streets are barricaded against the rest of of the ruined city, which is inhabited by goblins, bandits, and worse.  The old central plaza, once the hub of the city, is now controlled by goblins. So the locals told the party the goblins would likely have taken the babe to the central plaza.  The party immediately set off for the nearest barricade, with plan, “Kill the goblins, rescue the baby.”  They were fairly sure the goblins were actually going to eat it.

I guess this is where things went a little off track. I imagined the party would have questions about the “turning it into a goblin” part, and the implication that at least some goblins were once human.  In my mind I had begun to develop an idea that goblins in Telengard would be something more out of fairy tales and old fantasy literature, rather than the Monster Manual (small orcs/generic bad guys).  Goblins had not appeared at all in the first Telengard campaign, so they were a blank slate. I thought.

In the ‘bad’ part of town, beyond the barricade, the party found an old tavern that showed some signs of life.  The rogue and ranger climbed up to the second floor and entered a window, while the rest of the party waited at the street level, watching the house.  Upstairs, the rogue and ranger found a ghoul, and quickly dispatched it.  I think the fact that I was using a different figure for the ghoul than I usually do threw them off a little and might even have made them more ready to stay and fight it.  But hey, first level, first adventure, I don’t have to tell the players things their PCs just wouldn’t know.  So I used this mini and describedit as ‘pale, with ape-like arms, jagged teeth, and yellow, glowing eyes.’

While the ranger was giving a “thumbs up” to the party from the window, the rogue went to check out another door and out popped another ghoul. The fighting went a lot worse for the party from here on out. The ghoul paralyzed the ranger, and the rest of the party at street level — a cleric, fighter, and dwarf — were surprised by half a dozen goblins who burst out from the building across the street.  The cleric went down almost immediately, and the fighter was reduced to one hit point, as I rolled 19 after 19 on my d20. Things were looking grim.

In fact they never let up.  The dwarf managed to slay the goblins by backing into a narrow alley, but meanwhile the fighter was downed, and upstairs the rogue was paralyzed too. The dwarf managed to staunch the bleeding of the cleric and fighter, and even rushed to rescue the rogue (the ranger had died already), when he too was paralyzed, and things went dark.

TPKs are never* fun, and this is the first time I DMed one.  The party might have done some things differently (not split up, for one thing; asked a few questions about the goblins, for another, as they’d have found out that parlaying and even trading is an option).  The fighter player realized he’d forgotten to add his damage and to-hit bonuses throughout the fight, but honestly with the abysmal rolls on the party’s part, it might not have made much difference.  Really it was the dice more than anything that caused the TPK in my estimation, and while that sucks, I don’t see fudging a whole encounter’s worth of dice  rolls as an option.   If I start that, why bother rolling?  The fact was, the goblins got great to-hit rolls, great morale rolls, and a high damage rolls (several 5′s and 6′s).  Even with max hit points, the PCs were screwed.

But that’s part of the game.  And really if there’s going to be a TPK, the first session is probably the time for it.  The players learn how deadly the game is, and losing newly minted characters is a lot easier than losing mid-level characters you’ve been playing for months.

Anyway the party was reasonably cool with starting new characters.  (I had even planned how defeat by the goblins would lead to the party being captured rather than dead, but defeat by ghouls can only mean one thing…so, TPK)

They agreed to all use something as different as possible from their usual types, which made me wonder if they were expecting another TPK.  I’d feel bad that they made the PCs they wanted to play and now have to play something else…but it was their choice what to make for the second outing. So now the party consists of a Rogue, Assassin, Paladin, Elf, and Barbarian. (Chad who missed this week is playing a bard, which I guess makes him the sole survivor.)

In a brief postscript, the party slew six more goblins, the remaining ghoul (I did not have the heart to throw ghouls of the rogue, ranger, and dwarf at them), and a goblin shaman who was in the middle of transforming two children into goblins. Unfortunately the two children were mistaken for goblins in the melee and slain as well.  It was a dark basement, and they were dressed and made up as goblins, so it was an honest mistake.  And hey, now the Paladin has a side quest to seek redemption for the killings.  He hasn’t lost his powers, but being a paladin, he feels compelled to seek some sort of atonement.

Feedback wanted:

GMs: Ever TPK a party in the first session?  Did it torpedo the whole campaign or did they bounce back like my players did?

Players: Would a first-session TPK put you off a DM, a campaign, a rule set?

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*Well, sometimes they can be a little fun.  Once things reach the ”point of no return,’ TPKs can be kind of hilarious.  And once in a while, even at the ‘point of no return,’ luck can still turn things around.  In the last campaign, the magic-user defeated two or three troglodytes in melee, while the fighter and paladin were ‘held’ by the trog shaman’s spells.  That was completely unexpected, hilarious, and the stuff of legends.

I blacked out the blog yesterday as part of the ‘protest’ against SOPA/PIPA and what happens?

Spike in site hits.  Oi.

Zingazar:The sword of Welleran::Terry Brooks:Tolkien

The longer review is:

This story is somewhat amusing, and I’d think it very clever if I’d never read the original story by Lord Dunsany.  I came across the story in the compilation New worlds for old, edited by Lin Carter, who very humbly included only two of his own stories (the other authors featured each get only one story or poem… Clark Ashton Smith, Edgar Allen Poe, R. E. Howard, Lord Dunsany, George MacDonald, Oscar Wilde, Mervyn Peake, C.L. Moore, George Sterling … you get the idea).  Someone commented once that Carter is a much better editor than writer and this really makes me understand why they’d say that. New worlds for old has a lot of great stuff, some of it very unusual or obscure, and most of it it well worth reading.  (I skipped the poems, though.)

Carter’s story “Zingazar” basically steals the plot, and even some of the style, of Dunsany, and creates a story that is reasonably competent but so derivative that I have to ask, why would someone bother to even write this?  Carter changes the story a bit, of course (spoilers ahead!).  Instead of the ghosts of heroes alerting a once-mighty but sleeping city to an immanent invasion, we have the actual weapons and armor of heroes alerting a once-mighty but sleeping city to an immanent invasion. No, seriously.  Rather bizarrely, one of the items — a shield — is described as being of bronze that “is old and eaten by time.”  I was under the impression that bronze does not really corrode, and that archaeologists keep digging up bronze items from 2000+ years ago because once the outer crust of oxide forms, the rest of the bronze is undamaged by time and elements.  So stuff like that kind of irks me.  I don’t mind the somewhat silly image of a succession of spears, helmets, bows, etc. shattering themselves in order to make noise and awaken the curator of the museum/mausoleum they are housed in, but time-eaten bronze just doesn’t make any sense.

There is also a nice passage about a nearby forest dreaming about overrunning the city with its roots and obliterating it.

Overall, though, just … meh.  Not  such a waste of time that I regret reading it, but bad enough that it’s completely forgettable.

The problem with the original bogey table in my opinion was that there were an inordinate number of sexual traits — you might roll bisexual, homosexual, fetishes, etc.  I guess I’d just rather leave sex out of the game, or at least not encourage a player to make their character’s sexual preferences a defining trait for roleplaying.  So I mostly took them out.  There are also bogeys like heretic/atheist/Jewish/Muslim … which I can understand being a major thing in a medieval game but for fantasy, I’d rather avoid that kind of stuff too.

So my bogey table made a lot of changes, and I took GURPS’ advantages and disadvantages for more inspiration, and came up with this chart.

I think in hindsight, there are way too many “choice” results, and I should either use two d30 tables, or revert 1-32 to “Nothing”s.  Or add 30 more results.  That seems like the kind of thing that would make a good crowdsource/Gygaxian democracy project.  So hey — if you can think of some more traits that would fall in line with these, drop ‘em in the comments. Generally speaking, if there is any kind of mechanical effect, they should be a plus or minus one to certain rolls, nothing too major. I just copied the table from my document, which used two columns, so all the odd are first and then the evens.  I’ll fix it in the final version if I can get some more entries.  you’ll notice hald-elf and half-orc are bogeys, as I am using race-as-class and assume that half-humans just use human classes.

01-32: even, player’s choice; odd, DM’s choice

33. Ugliness, -1 Cha

35. One eye/one hand/no nose etc.

37. Poor sight. Can’t read or -1 to hit with missiles

39. Hard of hearing

41. Stammer

43. Limp, base move 25′ (15′ if dwarf)

45. Asthma/Allergy, -1 Con

47. Belligerent

49. Gullible, -1 Int

51. Insomnia

53. Hypochondria

55. Alcoholism/Addiction

57. Gluttony

59. Compulsive gambler, can’t refuse a bet

61. Spendthrift

63. Miserly

65. Depression

67. Paranoia

69. Distrustful

71. Kleptomania

73. Absent-minded, -1 Wis

75. Phobia (pick one)

77. Half-orc, -1 Cha

79. Hunchback, -1 Str

81. Superstition (pick one)

83. Sense of duty

85. Vow

87. Overconfidence

89. Fanatic

91. Cowardice

93. Overweight

95. Color blind

97. Albinism

99. Dwarfism/Giantism

34. Beautiful. +1 Cha

36. Presence of mind, +1 save vs. fear

38. Critical thinker, +1 Int

40. Gift of sleep, can sleep anywhere, +1 Con

42. Iron stomach, +1 save vs. poison

44. High pain threshold, +1 hp/HD

46. High alcohol tolerance

48. Keen eyesight, +1 to hit with missiles

50. Keen hearing

52. Keen smell

54. Animal empathy

56. Green thumb

58. Born swimmer (x 1.5 rate)

60. Born climber (x 1.5 rate)

62. Sense of location

64. Empathy

66. Good luck (reroll any die once/session)

68. Gift of tongues, +2 starting languages

70. Half-elf, +1 Cha

72. Hot blooded, -1/die damage from cold

74. Ambidextrous

76. Common sense (one Mulligan/session)

78. Artistic talent (choose 2 arts)

80. Double-jointed

82. Tremendous lung capacity

84. Honest face (people believe you)

86. Mechanical genius

88. Graceful, +1 Dex

90. Strong willed, +1 to Will saves

92. Alert, +1 Wis

94. Barrel chested, +1 Str

96. Lightning reflexes, +1 to Reflexes saves

98. Inconspicuous, +2 to stealth checks

00. Visions (1 in 6 chance of prophetic dreams)

Right before that, I had the group ‘roll up’ their PCs for Telengard 2.0, which will run on a simplified C&C, basically eliminating “primes” and changing the saving throws to the three ones in 3e, which will be based not on attributes but level.   Also demihumans are classes.  So really a B/X-C&C hybrid.  They chose a Bard, Ranger, Cleric, Rogue, Fighter, and I think a Dwarf (Tom was going back and forth on that or a Wizard).   I had them use the “Iron Heroes” stat arrays rather than rolling, and max HP at level one, since there are some crybabies players who like to start out more heroic.  Then they got to roll on the Bogey chart, lifted from Fantasy Wargaming but minus a lot of the sexual fetishes and with a number of GURPS advantages and disadvantages added. I’ll post that later. Some “Bogeys” had mechanical effects, and some are just for role-playing.  I think I put in too many “DM’s choice” and “Player’s choice” results…either should have had them pick, or made no choices. Oh well.   I gave a three sentence or so explanation of the setting (I was kind of scattered) but said I’d send out some more background by email.

Since I wrote up this long-ass email anyway, I might as well put it on the blog too for reference.  I sent this to the players to give them some frame reference of what the ‘known adventure areas’ are in the setting.  There are some in-jokes, mainly garbling the old PC’s names, because it’s funny, and to maybe add an unwritten goal of achieving lasting fame…the last group just kept having their just glory denied them.

email follows … I edited out some types etc.

Most of you played in the first  Telengard campaign, but Chad and Aaron did not, so for their benefit here’s a very brief outline, before moving on to the situation as the new campaign begins (everyone else can skip the next paragraph if you want):

 There was a small, bustling city called Skara Brae at the foot of a mountain range, the nearest and tallest mountain being called Mt. Telengard. Mt. Telengard was the site of numerous ancient mining operations. The culture is similar to the Vikings, but with later medieval technology and a medieval-style church — The Norse Catholic Church (Imagine Odin = the Father, Thor = the Son, & Yggdrasil the World Tree = the Holy Spirit, with the other Norse gods as saints, and giants, trolls, etc. as devils). Several hundred years ago, humans arrived and established Skara Brae, and about that time the dwarves disappeared, possibly due to some sort of conflict between the humans and dwarves. Some time later the mining operations were reopened, and at the time the last campaign began, a mine intersected with a some ancient underground passages — in fact an underworld filled with monsters and magic, a dungeon which was also called Telengard. A band of adventurers (the party) explored part of Telengard, and some of the other old mines and tombs dug into Mt. Telengard. They explored two and a half levels of Telengard, two other mine complexes on the mountain (the Ancient Copper Mine and the Haunted Mine), part of the Ancient Crypts, and also a cavern lair that erupted from the face of Mt. Telengard overnight. There was also a vast open pit mine on the side of the mountain, and the party explored part of that. They had a few adventures in the city and surrounding countryside as well, slaying ogres that preyed on a halfling village, clearing a tavern’s basement of a rat-cult, exploring a sunken pond, looting the Alabaster Tower that appears only during certain phases of the moon, entering and destroying a vast demon (no, really), excavating some dwarven ruins beneath the city, and finally getting involved in defending the city from an invasion of pirates and humanoids. The last adventure involved saving a gnomish community from a family of fire giants. Along the way a number of PCs and hirelings died, some being raised, and one being reincarnated as a hobgoblin, who became an NPC. I ran out of steam and put the game campaign “on hiatus” with a lot of loose threads.

So, picking up the campaign, I decided to move forward about 500 years. Skara Brae has fallen to invaders (the Vulking Empire* to the west), but these invaders eventually left when the Vulking Empire collapsed. All that remains of the Vulkings is their religion: the region has adopted the Lords of Light as their gods. The Lords of Light are a pantheon of a dozen or score of deities, each of whom assumes various names, so that Thor and Baldur from the Norse Church are accepted as Lords of Light, smoothing over the transition. Skara Brae has fallen into ruin and was mostly abandoned, as a Vulking city was built on the site of the old Porttown to the south. Puddington, the halfling village, survived the years of chaos by fortifying their village and establishing a disciplined militia under the reforms of “Quincy”. Gnomestead, the gnomish village, has dwindled to a few huts in the woods. The old heroes of Skara Brae are all but forgotten. They are said to have disappeared on a flying ship, pursuing a vampire called Swindle or Swingo. All that remains of their legacy are some statues in Skara Brae’s ruined plaza. The locals still hope that “The battle leader Stonefoot, and his companions Maxim, Little Cam, Orroz, Quincy, Charmin, and their captain, Mr. Growley” will return some day in Skara Barae’s hour of need.

A number of towers have appeared on the landscape — some overnight — dark and ominous but silent and impenetrable. The legendary Alabaster Tower, absent for hundred of years, has reappeared on the shore, stained green and draped with seaweed. Skara Brae has a few diehard holdouts living in it, but much of the old city has been overrun with goblins, morlocks, serpentfolk, and other undesirables, and is walled off. The once proud Adventurer’s Guild was bought out long ago by the Hireling’s Guild, which in turn was dissolved when the dungeon-looting industry fell into recession. The old dungeons of Telengard have not been entered for many years, and most people believe they are empty, trap-laden tombs.

As if the appearance of the towers were not portentous enough, lately a series of comets or shooting stars were observed over Mt. Telengard, and the sages say this can mean nothing good. But lo! A band of promising young scalawags has gathered at the Goodly Mead Inn, and perhaps they will turn the tides of chaos and ruin?

[then I closed with an oft-cited passage from Perdido Street Station:]

“There were three of them. They were immediately and absolutely recognizable as adventurers; rogues who wandered the Ragamoll and the Cymek and Fellid and probably the whole of Bas-Lag. They were hardy and dangerous, lawless, stripped of allegiance or morality, living off their wits, stealing and killing, hiring themselves out to whoever and whatever came. They were inspired by dubious virtues. A few performed useful services: research, cartography, and the like. Most were nothing but tomb raiders. They were scum who died violent deaths, hanging on to a certain cachet among the impressionable through their undeniable bravery and their occasionally impressive exploits.”–China Mieville, Perdido Street Station

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*The Vulkings were on the map in the last campaign, but never came into play.  Completely ripped off from The well of the unicorn.

They also released a much more ambitious system, Knights & Magick, which I’ve only seen in bits — getting a used copy of the boxed rules booklets will cost you something between treasure type G and H.  My brother got one of the “Paint ‘n’ Play” sets associated with it (Knights of King Arthur, which pitted Arthur and some knights vs. Mordred and his) so we probably saw a brief explanation of the rules there, but for some reason never tried them out — come to think of it, I think we had an incomplete set, lacking the rules, based on some stuff that I’ve seen online.  There was also a Merlin game with some simple magic rules for a game dueling wizards: Morgana La Fey and Merlin could cast spells at each other, and summon various servitors, to duke it out.  The rules of both of these have been scanned here or there online, and I guess you could reconstruct the core mechanics from those two samples (authored by Arnold Hendricks and Greg Sanford) although apparently the Knights & Magick  boxed set was stuffed full of awesome, and sounds like exactly the sort of game I’d like to run some time.  But those rules are are in a sort of limbo; no-one seems to know who owns the rights to them any more.

A pair of knights from the Knights & Magick line; the axeman's axe is a replacement. I love the simple but dramatic poses of the figures in this line.

They also released a series of mini-games,  some of which included plastic miniatures (!).  These included Woman Warrior and Cleric’s Quest; I’m not sure if there were others. The rules for these may have been based on their Swordbearer RPG.  The rules were credited to B. Dennis Sustare.

Another set of rules Heritage released was much less ambitious – Wizards & Heroes.  Coming in at just four pages, I was able to find the complete rules at a Yahoo group.  They are numbered “8210″ and priced 25 cents … I am pretty sure they either came with a catalog, or could be ordered for $.25 and a SASE.  The rules are extremely simple and designed to run fast skirmish-sized battles — perhaps a dozen minis to a side, although in principle you could also rune mass battles with the rules, if you come up with some rules for units moving in groups.

Each figure has three stats — fighting, armor, and missiles.  These are rated 1-5, and you hit (or save in the case of armor) by rolling equal to or under the stat’s number.  The turn has four phases:

1. player one moves, player two shoots;
2. both sides melee;
3. player two moves, player one shoots;
4. both sides melee

You roll at at the start of the game for who will be player one and two (high roll is player one).  Some figures might be Heroes or Wizards, and these have some extra powers — Heroes get two attacks in melee, and wizards can cast spells instead of taking another action in any phase.  Wizards can be level 1-4, and can cast one spell per level per turn (a level 4 wizard would have to forgo moving, missiles, and both both melee phases to cast four spells).  A neat idea in the rules is that wizards gain levels only by surviving battles, and start as level one, so you have to keep your wizard alive three battles in a row to make it to fourth level!  The spell list is very similar to the ones in the Paint ‘n’ Play games. There is also a rudimentary points system to buy troops, and optional rules for morale, parrying & wounds (so a hero might take more than one hit) and monsters (which basically use spell-like powers and are statted out like regular troops).  The rules, like most of the miniatures rules from Heritage, were designed by Arnold Hendrick, and they certainly resemble the presentation and ideas of the other sets. They were published in 1980, and remind me of the ‘free’ simple rules you’d find in Prince August catalogs and the Ral Partha “Rules According to Ral” — there is no question the rules exist mainly to sell miniatures, but they are so rules-light that I am tempted to use them the next time my gaming group gets together but for whatever reason we don’t play D&D.  The only problem is that the version I found is a pretty poor scan and in jpeg format to I’d really need to retype them for reference.

Given their simplicity, and expandability, they might be a good basis for the Dark Tower game I’ve been thinking about — begin with a hero, who builds up a band of followers, searches tombs and ruins for gold and relics, and eventually besiege the Dark Tower, ideally all on one table with maybe a side table for the dungeon crawls, Crypt of the Sorcerer style.  That could a day or two of epic gaming…

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*I am not sure if the “Famous Monsters“** and Superhero sets made it into the catalogs too but I think they must have, since they were an even more mainstream theme.  Unfortunately neither of those sets is very well documented online.  The two fantasy sets are available as scans at the Heritage Reference Yahoo group (my “Dungeon Delvers” rules are based on them too) — and of course Scottsz is still hard at work creating what I think of as an “Advanced” version, Sorcerers of Doom, which from what I’ve seen is a really awesome sort of combination of the original rules, plus a well thought out system to keep it DM-less while running more complex adventures than the random-table-driven originals…one could even run an old TSR module solo using these rules with a few tweaks.

**Apparently there was once an effort to re-publish this game, with Reaper minis back when they were recasting some Heritage minis, but the announcement page (link goes to Wayback machine capture) seems to have come & gone in a flash. Copyright/trademark issues?