FLAILSNAILS Cheaters!

This post is a bit tongue in cheek, as I realize it doesn't matter, but it's something that came up when I was running my Under the Hillfort Ruins game a couple weeks back (and I'm just getting to blog about it now).

In my game the other night, Jeremy was looking for a character he had already rolled up to play, and grabbed one he had used in Justin's Vaults of Ur game. Dean also had used a character he has used a few times before in different game systems, most memorably to me in Justin's "Panoply Sector" Stars Without Number game. The thing is, in other games both of these PCs had died.

Now, don't get me wrong. I was running a play test. I didn't really care where the PCs had been used before, or if they were "still alive" or not. For a play test, it just isn't an issue. But during the course of play, Jeremy mentioned that his fighter, Danyael, should level up because he already had 1000xp from Ur. I reminded him that Danyael had died in Ur (partially my fault, Thidrek ran away rather than risking paralyzation at the hands of ghouls after Danyael and another PC had gone down). So does the character still get to keep its XP for use in other games after death in one campaign?

It made me think about the whole FLAILSNAILS conventions a bit. I'd considered in the past the fact that anyone could show up to a game with a character at level X, with magic items A, B and C, and who's to know if that PC actually earned that or not? Of course, the FLAILSNAILS Conventions give the DM power to nerf anything egregious in any way they wish (all ability scores are 18 and you have a Staff of Wizardry at level 2? Well, you're suffering from a curse in this realm, and you find the staff is nonfunctional at the moment).

Now, I'm not arguing that there should be a FLAILSNAILS police or anything, but shouldn't what happens to a character actually matter? Even if it's just taking your favorite character to another game as a one-shot, if good things happen you wouldn't ret-con them into not happening. Why should we ignore the bad just because we can?  Is that cheating to just pretend your character didn't die, or didn't lose their best magic sword to a rust monster, or whatever?

Is this cheating? Should it be discouraged?

Or is it a case of "What happens in Greyhawk stays in Greyhawk"?

Too many ideas!

I think many of you suffer from this problem. Most gamers are creative types, so we're always coming up with new ideas. Maybe it's a character concept you really want to play. Maybe it's a campaign you'd love to run. Maybe it's an adventure you'd like to develop. It could be your next awesome rule-set. But before you get to it, or just after getting started, you've already got another idea or three knocking around your brain.

I'm at that point big time right now. And since I'm actually starting to prep for my dissertation study, I really have NO TIME for any of it. But just got give you a glimpse of things you may, possibly, some day see from me in a possible future where I suddenly have oodles of time to write gaming stuff, here are some of the ideas I currently have:

Chanbara (of course, that's #1): My OSR with heavy character customization fantasy feudal Japan game. The third (or is if fourth?) draft incarnation of the rules are ready to be tested. I think they'll work better than before. I just need some time to run a few games. Well, that and flesh out the "starting area" for the campaign section of the book.

Presidents of the Apocalypse: Paul's and my take on super silly, super simple super presidential post-apoc gaming. One of these days, Paul and I will agree on a final version of the rules (or agree to make two versions). Then you, too, can be a mutated Founding Father beating the crap out of Ronald McDonald, Mikhael Gorbachev, King George III, Kim Jeong-Il, Justin Bieber, and any other foes of America you can think of, set in a ruined world of the future.

Under the Hillfort Ruins: The adventure module I wrote originally for 3E and have recently revamped for Labyrinth Lord (or whatever classic or OSR game floats your boat). A fairly standard dungeon tomb complex with lots of puzzles and traps, and plenty of loot as well. I just need to make a few edits, add some random encounters for the actual hillfort ruins above the dungeon, write up some hooks and rumors, and then this one will be ready to sell.

Demon Castle Dracula: This one's been on my mind recently, what with Halloween a week away and all. Not that it feels very Halloween-y here in Busan, where most people don't celebrate it. Anyway, this may end up being for LL or for Retro Phaze (the 8-bit OSR RPG) since it's basically the Castlevania games translated to table top. Could I get this Gothic horror-action sandbox ready for sale before next Halloween? Guess it depends on how the dissertation study goes.

Mysterious Seas: The maritime campaign I tried to run about 4 years ago or so. The idea was to mix up Jason and the Argonauts, the Odyssey, Sindbad the Sailor, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and the like into a big nautical sandbox. If I get around to finishing this (I really only had the first map half-way keyed, and there are nine maps), it may have to get broken into separate modules for each sector.

Ghost Castle Hasegawa: The test adventure I created for the previous version of Chanbara. I'm planning to update it to the new version when I get around to play-testing it, so eventually I'll also probably publish it. A castle cursed by its lord when it fell to his enemies, the Hasegawa family would like the curse removed so they can move back in and restore their standing at court.

Oni no Ran: The old 1E/2E Oriental Adventures campaign I ran back in Evansville in the late 90's before going to Japan was building up to a conflict between the Oni King and the PCs' daimyo. It wouldn't be too hard to convert stats to Chanbara (once I decide this draft is final or not) and release this as either a series of linked adventures, or a mega-adventure (again, if somehow time ceases to be an issue).

Of course, if I ever get any of these finished, they'll be for sale from my DrivethruRPG storefront, Hidden Treasure Books. And if I have time to write up modules and game systems, hopefully I'll have time to create more of my paper minis series.

Getting stuff done despite having no time

As usual, academics are taking up a lot of my attention, and what little is left has been mostly devoted to my family, so not much activity on the blog. I haven't been looking over Mentzer's DM book lately, but I'm not planning to abandon that line of posts. People seem to like it. It may stretch out a while, though, and I may give up my plans to continue through the Mentzer Expert, Companion and Master sets. That will depend on how the dissertation goes. [I'm getting my main experiment prepared, and doing a lot of background reading for that. Once I get that sorted out and I commence the experiment, I may have more time for blogging for a while, until it's time to write up everything, at least.]

On the plus side, I managed to squeeze in an impromptu game session last Saturday. I continued running Dean and Jeremy through an old dungeon I'd made for a 3E game and converted to Labyrinth Lord stats. They haven't completed it, but they found the puzzles and challenges to be good but not too difficult, and the combats so far have been hectic but not unwinnable (in the first session over a month ago, Dean and my older boy played through and came close to a TPK but avoided any loss of life, this time Dean and Jeremy each lost one of their two characters). They both feel like this is something I could publish. So I'll try to get one more session in to let them finish the dungeon, then try to find some time to write up some introductory material, rumors, additional information that could be researched, etc. Oh, and a few pre-generated PCs. And some art, maybe, but I'm not that great and I'm on a budget. Then I'll be ready to try selling it through my DrivethruRPG storefront.

Also on the plus side, I've been plugging away at my latest Chanbara draft (#4), and it's almost done. I just need to flesh out a starting area, and add a few things in the appendices. Then I'll be ready to have this thing play tested. Again, I might not have time to play test it myself due to the dissertation, but I'll try and see if anyone else can do it for me and give me some feedback.

So, if I can make good use of my very limited free time over the next month or so, I might get both of those projects completed. And if not by next month, then at least by the end of the year.

In Defense of Maze-Dungeons

Over the summer, I went back to the U.S. for a month to visit the family. While there we took a trip down to Hannibal, MO to visit the historic Mark Twain sites. It's only a 40 minute drive down there. I've of course been there many times before, and my wife had visited on a previous trip. But it was the first time for our boys (although the younger, having just turned 1, is still too small for it to count). Anyway, Flynn (my older boy) and I took the tour of the Mark Twain Cave.

If you've ever read Tom Sawyer, you'll remember the cave. It's a real cave that Sam Clemmens played in as a boy. Here's a map of it.

Notice anything? This is a natural limestone cave, carved by water seeping through cracks in the rocks over centuries. And there are chambers, passages, intersections, multiple ways around, and while the map doesn't show it, some elevation changes as well.

Now, I've heard before people bemoaning the fact that labyrinthine dungeons are unrealistic. "If dwarves or goblins or a wizard were really carving out rock, they wouldn't waste effort making long hallways between rooms," they say. Well, what if nature has already done a lot of the work for them? What if the dungeon started out as a natural cave system like this, and the dwarves or gnomes or orcs or whoever came along and just expanded and finished some of the already existing passages and chambers? Not so much work now, is it?

Money and Treasure in Chanbara

Historical Japanese coinage was a mess. There were different classes of bronze, silver and gold coins, not to mention imported Chinese coins, coins minted by the shogun, coins minted in provinces by individual daimyo... They had lots of types of coins. And the conversions between them were not set, so it was like a foreign currency exchange market in some ways. Add to that the fact that samurai salaries were paid in RICE, and it all becomes a big old non-game-able mess.

photo credit: my personal photo

So for Chanbara, after flirting with the idea of including lots of historical coin types (which can lead to more interesting treasure troves), I've gone back to a simple system of zeni (bronze nickles)*, mon (silver dollars)*, and ryo (gold $50 bills)* plus the occasional kan/oban trade bar (silver/gold $1000 bill)*, because these last ones are used a lot in Japanese period TV shows like Abarenbo Shogun or Mito Komon.

With player-side economics sorted out, I came up with a brilliant idea two nights ago for how to do the treasure tables for monster treasure hoards. Before I share the brilliance, though, I'll explain a bit about the process that led me to it.

Originally, I had devised a system of "treasure by HD" sort of like how 3E does it. If the creature has X hit dice, it will roll for treasure on this table. But that wasn't satisfying because some creatures of X hit dice might not be treasure keeping types. So I then broke it down into columns of incidental treasure/personal treasure/group treasure or something like that, with greater value for creatures of X hit dice that would be likely to keep treasure for their tribe, and a few left-overs of whatever last got eaten for those that don't keep treasure.

Then, I scrapped all of the above, and tried to make a treasure table like the ones in D&D. You know, the big chart of various treasure types, and percentages that each type of coin would be there, and value ranges if it's present. Let me tell you, trying to make one of those is either going to be a bunch of random, or else you need to really over-analyze it (Gygax was an insurance underwriter, wasn't he? I'm guessing he over-analyzed). For copyright reasons, I didn't want to just copy what Gygax had done, or use Labyrinth Lord's rejiggering of it. I wanted my own. But I was stuck, because I wanted it to be useful and not unbalanced, so I didn't want it to be a big old pile of random numbers.

Anyway, the idea hit me the other night, like I mentioned above. Instead of one big old chart, I needed two charts.

The first chart is one that shows ranges of treasure value (in mon, it's the standard coin for the system), and each creature in the book has a treasure type to roll on on this chart. There's only one number, because this just determines the value of the treasure. A lazy GM might just leave it at that.

Treasure Table
Type	Monetary Value	Magic/Unusual
A	1d10 x10 mon	5% 1
B	1d6 x100 mon	10% 1d2
C	1d4 x500 mon	25% 1d3
D	1d6 x1000 mon	15% 1d4
E	1d12 x1000 mon	20% 1d6
F	1d20 x1000 mon	25% 1d6
G	1d4 x10,000 mon	30% 1d8
H	1d6 x10,000 mon	40% 1d10
I	1d10 x10,000 mon	50% 1d12
J	nil	1d4
K	nil	2d6

But the second chart then has some random breakdowns by coin type, listing percentages of the total value that are of this type. With this, it's possible you might roll up a dragon's hoard worth tens of thousands of mon, yet all the coins are zeni. Or it could be all rolled up in a diamond-encrusted royal scepter. Or a mix. Of course, GMs can ignore the second chart and break down treasure as they like, but I think it can add a bit of fun to have a random roll like this. Sometimes, the oddball result can be the most fun.

Treasure Breakdown
d%	Zeni	Mon	Ryo	Other
1-10	100%	–	–	–
11-20	–	100%	–	–
21-30	–	–	100%	–
31-45	50%	50%	–	–
46-50	25%	60%		15%
51-70	10%	50%	30%	10%
71-85	–	20%	50%	30%
86-90	–	10%	40%	50%
91-95	–	–	50%	50%
96-00	–	–	–	100%

*vague impressions by yours truly as to how the coins in the game would be thought of as modern U.S. currency.

Drunk-call of Cthulhu

 Last Sunday, early in the morning, maybe around 3 or 4am, my wife woke up and was fairly disturbed. It was raining fairly hard that night, but she could hear the sound of chanting coming from the mini park just in front of our apartment building.

Why would anyone be out in a little park, in the rain, at that time of night? My first thought was that they must have been drunk, figured the "stars were right" and were trying to summon Cthulhu or Hastur or Nyarlathotep. Them being drunk and unable to see the stars may have saved us all.

My wife, not having read Lovecraft, had the impression that they were summoning a demon or devil, like Satanists in some old 80's movie. Too bad she didn't wake me up to hear it. Instead she just closed the windows and went back to bed.

Either way, weird and potentially worthy of use as a hook in an RPG game some day.

I may not like what you have to say, but I'll defend your right to say it

So, I doubt there's anyone on the OSR blogs/G+ scene that hasn't heard about the DrivethruRPG/Onebookshelf happening. If you're one of the few who hasn't, someone made a module about a rape tournament and people went crazy over its existence.

Now, would I ever purchase something like that? No. It doesn't interest me, and could offend people I might play with to suggest such a game.

Am I likely to purchase something from that author/publisher again? Not if I remember they're the ones that put this thing out.

But do I think it should be banned from DTRPG? Of course not. I'm opposed to banning books in any way. If you want to read/play that sort of thing, it's no business of mine. And it in no way affects me one way or the other for someone else to actually purchase and enjoy the product.

Did I for a moment consider ending my involvement with DrivethruRPG as a customer/vendor (hey, buy my stuff, it's good and wholesome and I actually make attempts at gender/racial inclusivity!) because one disgusting product happens to be sold there? Never for a minute. Not for a second. The fact that I buy and sell stuff on this website is in no way whatsoever connected to the fact that that product is available for sale on the same website. I don't feel tainted by association.

Tim Brannon just posted a social contract on his Other Side blog. I agree to it, and you should too. It's an adult way to handle stuff like this, rather than the immature rush to ban books/publishers whose work is "icky" or "offensive" and the opening up of some sort of "guilty until proven innocent" report button.