On OGL, ORC, and an Attempt at a Timeline

It’s been over a year since I’ve last posted here. It was a hell of a year.

They’re saying blogs are poised to make a comeback. It would be nice. While I greatly appreciate a well-made video essay, a badly made one is unbearable, and it takes way more time and resources to churn out one of those than just a written text, the latter of which is also way better for disseminating detailed information, like I am about to.

It’s also been a hell of a couple of weeks. I thought I would compile a post to clarify at least to myself what has been going on, because these things tend to be remembered very differently after a while, and digging through Facebook groups, Twitter, and various forums in a couple of years’ time would be a pain in the ass, especially since some of those forums have decided to disallow the posting of certain major outlets.

I am not going to engage in any legal speculation or commentary. I’m from Finland, where we have a civil law system. Wizards of the Coast is based in the United States, where they have three precedents in a trenchcoat and a council of tribal elders. There will be a lot of links, most of them to verified sources such as interviews and news articles. When rumour is included for the sake of completeness, it is marked as such.

Oh, this post is about the Open Gaming License. OGL 1.0a is a document of about 900 words that’s the single most significant page of text for the modern role-playing game industry. It was released along with the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons in 2000. Together with the D20 System License, it allowed companies other than Wizards of the Coast, then a subsidiary of Hasbro, to publish material compatible with D&D and advertise it as such.

Now, it has been recently argued by such eminences as Cory Doctorow and Devin Stone of LegalEagle that the Open Gaming License was unnecessary, and as game mechanics cannot be copyrighted, the companies could have been doing that anyway with far more liberty. While this may or may not be true, it does skip over a lot of context. None of this exists in a vacuum.

For one thing, Wizards of the Coast had recently bought the original publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, TSR Inc., who were famously litigious. They went after competitors, they sent cease & desist letters to online fan sites on GeoCities, they threatened legal action at the drop of a hat. It was joked that TSR stood for “They Sue Regularly” (actually “Tactical Studies Rules”, but that’s neither here nor there). The Open Gaming License was Wizards of the Coast’s way of promising they were not going to do that. See, while you could have possibly gone to court with TSR and won, that takes lawyers and lawyers are not cheap, and this is the tabletop role-playing game industry. WotC’s founder Peter Adkison is often quoted as saying “If you want to make a little money in the RPG industry, start out with a lot of money”. Going to court against the market leader was not a promising proposition for pretty much anyone.

Secondly, who the hell would’ve even thought of trying to make D&D supplements under fair use doctrine? The idea is outré. How would you advertise? Where would you have sold them? The PDF market didn’t exist in 2000 and it’s likely game stores would’ve looked askance at such a product.

No, the Open Gaming License was necessary. It allowed a publishing ecosystem to form, where these third-party publishers working off the base of D&D 3E’s D20 System created new material and borrowed from each others’ work. The threshold to create your own stuff and enter the market was lowered, especially once RPGNow opened and selling your game as PDF became a thing in 2001. Those early days of the OGL were a heady, booming era. Some of the companies founded on D20 that survived the bursting of the bubble are still players in the industry – Mongoose Publishing, Green Ronin Publishing, Paizo Publishing, Troll Lord Games, Goodman Games, Privateer Press, and more. It gave rise to hundreds, if not thousands, of RPG outfits, from actual companies with offices and staff to lone designers doing everything themselves. It was a flourishing era. In time, even some non-D&D games adopted the OGL. It was huge. Three editions of a Star Wars role-playing game were released under the OGL — the same ruleset that powers the Knights of the Old Republic video games. To date, there’s been a Call of Cthulhu D20, two different Lord of the Rings games, a Doctor Who game. Babylon 5. World of Warcraft. Even, I kid thee not, an EverQuest tabletop role-playing game based on the D20 System.

This could happen because of trust. The OGL 1.0a was supposed to be permanent. Eternal. Irrevocable. Wizards of the Coast has repeatedly pressed this point in the past, and it was and remains the stated intention of the idea’s father, Ryan Dancey. Even in 2008, when WotC rolled out a new edition of D&D and its sinister Game System License, which in turn led to the creation of the competitor Pathfinder RPG, they did not attempt anything so asinine as to try pulling the OGL. In cutting themselves off from the OGL ecosystem, they abandoned any hope of D&D 4E being successful even if the strength of their brand could’ve otherwise overcome the product’s own shortcomings.

D&D 5E returned to using the OGL, a new third-party ecosystem was born, and with a couple of lucky breaks called Critical Role and Stranger Things, it started making grown-up money.

Of course, we should remember that the dragon is a metaphor for greed.

On December 21st, 2022, the D&D Beyond blog posted an FAQ about the upcoming OGL 1.1, an update to the license. It included some worrisome language about royalty payments, but also the reassurance that “the OGL is not going away”. And then, on January 4th, 2023, someone leaked the OGL 1.1. It appears the YouTube channel Roll for Combat was the first to break the news, receiving the leaked document in the middle of a scheduled stream, which feels like a bit of a coincidence. The leak deemed real after a Gizmodo article by Linda Codega on January 5th. The leaked document was a whole lot of legalese interspersed with somewhat snide commentary. It was later posted online and I am happy to provide it here.

open-game-license-1-1-leakDownload

The most objectionable bits about it were language about claiming royalties for revenue — not profit, revenue — above $750,000; demanding reporting of income over $50,000; claiming a sublicense on all of the licensee’s content; and seeking to deauthorize OGL 1.0a. None of this was deemed acceptable by the gaming public, let alone the people whose entire livelihoods are tied to the OGL. It is a direct attack against third-party publishers.

And by the way, whoever leaked this is a hero. Also, I know I’ve dunked on Knights of the Dinner Table in the past, but this 2009 strip was downright prescient.

Wizards of the Coast, of course, reacted promptly and quickly to the PR disaster of the cen— just kidding, they kept silent for almost a week. Then, on January 10th, the D&D Beyond Twitter account broke the silence: “We know you have questions about the OGL and we will be sharing more soon. Thank you for your patience.”

At this point, I was almost as angry at them for being this bad at crisis communications as I was for them threatening my friends’ livelihoods and my hobby. Note that I do not play D&D 5E. I already swore off Wizards of the Coast’s products in 2008 with the GSL travesty. While I cannot claim to have maintained a perfect boycott for 15 years, it’s been pretty solid. And still this threatens to directly affect me.

Of course, it’s not entirely settled whether OGL 1.0a can be revoked. Myriad people with a variety of law degrees ranging from alleged to actual, hailing from a variety of jurisdictions, have weighed in on the matter on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and various forums. From reading their learned takes on the matter I have determined that nobody actually knows until the gavel comes down. Nobody is particularly keen on suing WotC because, again, lawyers are expensive.

During most of this time, as the gaming internet was aflame, the silence from not only WotC but also some major players in the industry was deafening. Among the first to make big announcements was Kobold Press, who on the 10th announced Project Black Flag, an open system of their own. Kobold Press has been a major third-party publisher of the 5E era, and for them to break ranks was a big deal. Then, Wolfgang Baur learned the lesson about WotC 15 years ago.

On January 12th, the Twitter account DnD_Shorts posted an alleged leak from a D&D Beyond employee, exhorting people to cancel their subscriptions and delete their accounts because money is the only thing that the executives understand (for some fairly basic and limited values of “understand”, I suppose). True or not, it checks out — deciding to boycott the next D&D book is visible in months, but website subscriptions you can see falling in real time. And fall they did. Allegedly, they even tried hiding the unsubscribe button. No actual numbers have been released, of course, but the hunch is that they’re high.

That date, D&D Beyond also cancelled a scheduled Twitch stream. There have been claims it was supposed to be some kind of announcement but to my eye it looks like a regularly scheduled weekly stream, and cancelling it rather than putting unprepared people in the line of fire was the wisest course of action. Apart from the part where over a week after the leak they still did not have their act together.

Also on the 12th, Paizo Publishing, the second-largest OGL publisher in the market (okay, actually I think they are not, but that is because the French board game giant Asmodee releases the Midnight role-playing game under the OGL), broke their silence in a big way, announcing the Open RPG Creative License, or ORC. Paizo and a group of other major OGL publishers — at the time of writing I think it’s almost everyone who’s anyone except Darrington Press (Critical Role), MCDM (Matt Colville), Fria Ligan (Lord of the Rings), Asmodee (Midnight), and EDGE Studios (Adventures in Rokugan) — banded together to hammer out a new open license for their games, to be given into the stewardship of first their law firm and ultimately some kind of open culture foundation. Nobody seems keen on signing on to WotC’s racket.

On the 13th, the date that the leaked OGL 1.1 said was the cutoff, WotC finally made a more substantial announcement. It was unsigned and has been characterized as passive aggressive gaslighting. The text’s tone is deeply unprofessional, and if anything, it fanned the flames against WotC even further.

On January 17th, the Twitter account @DungeonScribe posted an alleged leak that D&D Beyond membership would go up to $30/month for players, AI DMs would be implemented, and base subscriber tiers would have stripped-down gameplay. These were widely reported on, but though verification was promised, none has been forthcoming as of this writing. D&D Beyond’s Twitter account issued a clear denial on the 19th. Personally, I am inclined to think the report false, but it is a part of the larger narrative so I include it here. D&D Twitter’s signal-to-noise ratio has been exceptionally poor even by Twitter standards, and at this point I would wait for Gizmodo’s Linda Codega, who has been doing exceptional work, to verify any further leaks.

By the time that on January 18th, WotC managed to piece together something resembling a human response, they had wasted a full two weeks. It is not public knowledge how they spent that time, but I expect a fair bit of fruitless witch hunting may have gone on, because it is the stupidest thing a corporation can focus on in a situation like this. Godspeed, good witch.

On the 19th, they turned out a draft of OGL 1.2 for feedback. The feedback survey is here. Bits of the D&D System Reference Document 5.1 are also to be placed under a Creative Commons license, which is nice but also meaningless since it is mostly just basic mechanics and procedures which were not copyrightable in the first place, and the experience table. This version of the OGL walks back on the royalty demands of the previous one and removes the sublicense clause. OGL 1.2 is also unacceptable in its attempt to revoke OGL 1.0a. This is explained as a defense against “harmful, discriminatory, or illegal content”. Indeed, the draft includes a morality clause, which is also unacceptable.

No Hateful Content or Conduct. You will not include content in Your Licensed Works that is harmful, discriminatory, illegal, obscene, or harassing, or engage in conduct that is harmful, discriminatory, illegal, obscene, or harassing. We have the sole right to decide what conduct or content is hateful, and you covenant that you will not contest any such determination via any suit or other legal action.

OGL1.2 draft, section 6 (f)

Sure, it feels nice and high-minded to ban bad things. Make them go away, not exist. However, someone has to make the call and those are not well-defined criteria. Even “illegal” is fuzzy. Illegal where? Russia? Saudi Arabia? China, maybe, where WotC prints its books? Or the United States, where the senile council of elders is in the process of enacting a rollback of human rights and Florida Man just banned the teaching of Black history at schools? J.K. Rowling would argue that trans rights are a hateful concept. Hell, I readily admit that if the Lamentations of the Flame Princess adventure Towers Two, which I did Pathfinder design on, is not obscene then I do not know what the hell is. And then there is that whole thing about “conduct”. As written, it would allow the license to be pulled for jaywalking. But that’s a spurious example. How about someone getting their license pulled as a side effect of being cancelled on Twitter. “Obscene conduct”? Without even going into all the sinister history that phrase evokes, I don’t want the state in my bedroom and I sure as hell don’t want WotC in there. This section of the license looks like Pat Pulling won.

And let’s face it, this is Wizards of the Coast. If the last couple of weeks have shown us anything, it’s that they’re not your friend. This merely reiterates a lesson many of us learned in 2008. Examples of their shining moral leadership include the mistreatment of freelancer Orion D. Black, pulling LGBT content off DM’s Guild, the entire mess with Graeme Barber and the grippli, and actually releasing Tomb of Annihilation. Moreover, they’ve recently been embroiled in two different lawsuits, against Gale Force Nine and the author duo Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, where the crux of the matter was a malicious literal interpretation of contract terms against its spirit. And hey, we’ve also seen that they will cave to public pressure as well. These are not people I would hand the right to pull the plug on my work.

The argument has been presented that it is a shield against nuTSR’s Nazi bullshit, which in fact has nothing to do with OGL materials and is a pure copyright dispute. Even the outfit’s blatant racism and gross transphobia is incidental to the fact they’re claiming to own WotC’s intellectual property on the rough legal basis of “I licked it so it’s mine”.

There things now stand, and we wait. WotC’s survey has two weeks on the clock, but really, it is of academic interest. They have broken the trust of third-party publishers, burned away the goodwill of their audience and in general made a right mess of it. At this point, I think signing on to ORC is essentially the only way for them to salvage the situation. And ORC is the actually interesting thing here. As of last report, over 1,500 publishers have signed on. According to an interview with Erik Mona on Roll for Combat, an initial draft can be expected maybe around February.

If you’ve read this far, you deserve a reward. Here’s a cat on some game books.

Hell’s Vengeance Review, Part 3/3

And here we go, the last of the series, covering the campaign’s concluding volumes, Scourge of the Godclaw and Hell Comes to Westcrown, as well as a lot of other… stuff.

Here there be SPOILERS.

Scourge of the Godclaw

In Scourge of the Godclaw, the agents are dispatched to gather plot coupons to make a magical weapon of mass destruction. In the process, they will retake Citadel Dinyar from the Glorious Revolution, desecrate a sacred spring, kill a village’s worth of people, and burn a library.

I’m not a fan, but that’s because I have a dislike for blatant plot coupons. Like, in something like The Rod of Seven Parts or the Extinction Curse adventure path they work, because it’s baked into the structure of the campaign. That’s what you do, and they’re also the excuse to see new places, meet interesting people, and kill them. In Scourge of the Godclaw, the coupon hunt is dropped upon the agents mid-campaign and while it does take them across the width and breadth of Cheliax, there’s no consideration for travel and the presentation ends up being a series of disconnected encounters.

Anyway, before Her Infernal Majestrix had time to send the party off to storm the castle, they had some time for shopping. Of course, even a bustling metropolis like Egorian doesn’t have everything a well-to-do adventurer might need, and thus the agents, like in so many previous campaigns, turned their gaze to the planes.

As a Planescape fan, I have a personal dislike of players treating the planes like a shopping mall. I also just straight use Planescape instead of Pathfinder’s interpretation. And so, when they stumbled through a portal to Sig- uh, I mean, Axis, and headed off to buy new magical gear, I was ready, and the poor sods ended up accidentally stumbling through a portal into the events of The Deva Spark. The module, of course, is one where a deva relinquishes his angelic spark to go undercover in the Lower Planes, and the spark ends up in a bebilith demon, who then becomes very confused and has an identity crisis, and the party needs to herd it through one of the Upper Planes without getting it killed so the situation can be resolved. It’s a lovely adventure because it genuinely presents alternative solutions to the issue and does not (strongly) assume that the PCs side with the cosmic good. Which, of course, they didn’t.

The Citadel Dinyar sequence is the best part of Scourge of the Godclaw. It’s somewhat open-ended and rather organic in how the defenders react to the party’s assault or infiltration. There are ways to shortcut encounters, paladins to turn, prisoners to rescue and rearm, and officers to eliminate. And, of course, a golden dragon to slay.

In the middle of the module, I snuck in another adventure from Dungeon, the infamous “Porphyry House Horror”, a D&D 3.0 scenario written for use with the Book of Vile Darkness. To raise hype, it was printed with sealed pages that you had to cut open yourself. It was good for two sessions. In writing the conversion, I changed the proprietors of Porphyry House from yuan-ti – not a Pathfinder creature – into reptilians. For the orlath demon at the end, I used a conversion from The Creature Chronicle, which is an invaluable resource when utilizing stuff from older editions. The adventure is silly splatter comedy and juvenile sexuality all the way through, and we had great fun with it. It, also, kinda had the issue that that it assumed the party is a force for good, but I figured that what the hell, I’ll probably never run another Pathfinder campaign where those themes are appropriate.

After the party has concluded the last part of making their WMD, the focus of which is that golden dragon’s severed head, they will have to fight the dragon’s ghost. It’s a bit of a questionable encounter. First of all, there is no foreshadowing and it’s likely the party will do it immediately after clearing out a monastery full of Geryon’s monks and wiping out a minor Hellknight order, without resting in between. Second, the creature is not only tough but also potentially rule-breaking, depending on how one views the compatibility of Vital Strike with a ghost’s corrupting touch, for an impressive 34d6 points of damage. My party did rest, but then they chose to head off to Arabelle’s personal demiplane to actually perform the ritual, and the thing about really tiny demiplanes is that an enemy with enough reach can effectively threaten your whole world.

Hell Comes to Westcrown

In Hell Comes to Westcrown, the agents start off by blowing up an army of the Glorious Revolution with the tathlum, magical nuke that they just spent a book creating, and then infiltrate the paladin-occupied Westcrown, take out key targets, reclaim the Asmoedan cathedral, and finally fight Alexeara Cansellarion, the Big Good Boss of Hell’s Vengeance.

Our interpretation started off innocently enough, with the deployment of the WMD, which in my opinion is kind of a whiff after just spending an entire book on making the bloody thing. There’s not enough build-up for the army or its leadership to actually have any emotional stakes to it. But at least you can have a fight between nightwalkers and paladin troops.

Then they infiltrated Westcrown, and everything went off the rails. Partly this was planned, partly not. See, we’d played Council of Thieves mostly for the purpose of fleshing out Westcrown in preparation for this. There were former PCs and their henchmen waiting for them. The old Westcrown resistance had been levelled up and in some cases given really interesting classes, like the Talent from the grievously unbalanced d20 ruleset at the back of Godlike, or the classes from Book of Nine Swords, with a few slight tweaks to make them more Pathfinder-compatible. The party had a few clashes with them, took out a few, got Vesper’s henchman captured by basically Chelaxian Superman, and took the cathedral. Then, they decided to shortcut the scenario. While the plan presented in the book is one of peeling an onion, taking out the leaders of the rebellion one by one, these chuckleheads decided to head straight at Cansellarion, bypass most of her guardians by using adamantine weapons to enter through the roof, and then engage her in a session-long fight that saw a succession of really big hitters they had neglected to kill show up to kick ass. What happened then… well, I believe I covered that back in the first post of the series.

I honestly cannot form an objective opinion about Hell Comes to Westcrown. I can conclusively say that I think the first act, functioning as the actual climax of the previous book, is a let-down. However, the rest of the book we completely deformed with my strange Westcrown Avengers and their skipping of a good chunk of the adventure’s content. We had fun, but I cannot see a meaningful relationship between the text of the adventure and the events at the table.

And that’s a wrap for Hell’s Vengeance. Now, I am running The Enemy Within for Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play 4E and Extinction Curse for Pathfinder 2E. We will see which one finishes first and if I have anything to say about it then.

Hell’s Vengeance Review, Part 2/3

Continuing my reviews of the Hell’s Vengeance adventure path, we come to books three and four, The Inferno Gate and For Queen & Empire. Here, I really headed down the path to madness.

SPOILER warning is in effect.

The Inferno Gate

In The Inferno Gate, the party heads to paladin-occupied Senara and then into the dark Whisperwood to find the Inferno Gate, a stable conduit into the Nine Hells that can be used to summon an army of devils. Of course, their boss Archbaron Fex backstabs them, and is in fact the final enemy of the book.

The thing about The Inferno Gate is that one chapter of the book is a hexcrawl. The problem with that hexcrawl, however, is that it does not adhere to Pathfinder’s rules about hexcrawls. The hexes in The Inferno Gate are 25-mile hexes, while the game rules assume 12-mile hexes. 25-mile hexes, incidentally, are larger than the city of New York. So, I’d just bought Campaign Cartographer off HumbleBundle, and I figured I’d redraw the map in the right scale.

The more mathematically inclined among you will see where this is going.

From 43 hexes, I went to around 200 hexes. I had to go to a print shop to get the map printed in A3 size. Of course, when one has around 160 more hexes than one started with, one needs to populate them. First, I emptied the random encounter tables from the module into the hexes. This helped a bit. Then I placed a couple of known landmarks from Cheliax, the Infernal Empire, and their surroundings, like the Pillar of Palamia, and constructed loose encounters around them.

Then I started getting desperate. I placed a few side trek encounters from Wizards.com, where you can still access their old 3E pages if you know where to look. In a fit of madness, I grabbed the old Fighting Fantasy book The Forest of Doom, mapped it out, and placed the encounters and subplot from that into my hexmap. I stole a chunk of Reverse Dungeon. In the end, I never populated the entire map, but I did do most of it, and then moved stuff around as the party explored the forest.

It did make The Inferno Gate very different from what it was, since most of the play time was spent in the forest – I think we had four complete sessions of that. Here, I also chose to fix what I perceive as the biggest shortcoming of Hell’s Vengeance. It’s missing one obvious adventure concept, the reverse dungeon. In my opinion, there should’ve been at least a chapter in one of the volumes where the party needs to defend a dungeon against encroaching paladins or whatever. So I did it here. For the final session of The Inferno Gate, after they’d slain the perfidious Archbaron Fex and claimed the Inferno Gate for their own, I broke out my old Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures rules.

Obviously, we used the first-edition rules.

Back when D&D Miniatures was a thing, I was an avid and active player. It also marks one of the few instances of a skill-based game where I was actually good on a competitive level. I still have my collection, and all the stat cards, so we calculated the commander stats for each member of the party, I whipped them up warbands and four enemy warbands – one was led by the Savage Mistress of Beasts, another was Glorious Revolution paladins, one I think was dwarves from The Forest of Doom, and one was just a bunch of do-gooder adventurers. The DDM Guild, a fan group keeping the game alive, was an invaluable resource in building the warbands.

Then I quickly taught my players the rules and we all played a couple of one-on-one matches, as the agents of Thrune summoned fiends from the Inferno Gate and defended Fort Arego against encroaching foes. Fun was had.

Arguably what I ran was not really The Inferno Gate, though most of its material did still survive to see the table. The thieves’ guild of Senara even killed Cimri Staelish. She was buried in a shallow grave at the edge of town. She did not feature in the campaign after that, though it was accepted among the group that she rose as some kind of vengeful undead.

Still, it’s hard for me to actually evaluate the text since my experience with it is so different. One thing I did not particularly like was the structuring of the final chapter, where first the party has to fight its way through a besieging force so that they themselves can assault Fort Arego, which feels a bit confused. Still, fun was had.

Whisperwood, in all its glorious greenness.

For Queen & Empire

This ended up being the shortest adventure in practice, and though I modified a lot, I did not add much. I did fix a major inconsistency that I perceived, however. At the start of For Queen & Empire, the House of Thrune calls all of their agents to Egorian to find someone who can do a major job for the Queen, but none of these other agents are featured in the module. If the agents have to queue for hours, as they do, the city would have to be teeming with high-ranking agents of Thrune. So, I added them in. The party ended up in the same inn with all the rest of the pre-generated characters from the adventure path, and kept running into colourful characters who were ostensibly on the same side. I tried to present Emil Kovkorin & co. as fellow agents who were going through exactly the same kind of crap that the party was.

In For Queen & Empire, the agents must navigate the intrigues of Egorian and pick a side from between two nobles vying for the Queen’s favour. The other one they must take into a grove in Barrowood and sacrifice to the Nine Hells to renew House Thrune’s contract. The contestants here are a duke whose wealth is based on breeding fiendish pigs, to whom he also feeds his enemies, and a countess whose husbands keep dying mysteriously. Also at the sacrifice there’s an end fight against a turncoat cleric of Asmodeus with no foreshadowing, which is a total asspull. Fortunately, as I described in the last post, I’d set up Lazzero Dalvera as the party’s foil, and could utilise him as a replacement.

Another thing I did was keep track of the calendar throughout the campaign, which bore some fruit in For Queen & Empire, as they ended up arriving in Egorian just in time for the last big gladiator tournament of the year, Dies Irae. They could not fight, of course, but they were invited to the stands by their other noble contact.

I like the setup of the adventure. The two NPCs are very juicy and interesting to roleplay, and the module also features one of the obligatory story beats for a villain campaign in Cheliax, crushing a cell of the Bellflower Network, which is basically a halfling underground railroad. However, I feel the adventure doesn’t lean enough into the courtly intrigue theme that’s right there and everything ends up being a fight. Go to a ball? There’s a fight. Sabotage a pig farm? There’s a fight. Try to prove the countess’s boyfriend is cheating on her? Dude’s also a high-level monk so I hope you put on your fighting trousers this morning. If I had had more time, I probably would have removed half the combat and rewritten the book as a more social adventure, but we were playing weekly at the time, and there are only so many hours in a day. Obviously, your mileage may vary and not every party is suited for it, but in my party, the lowest Charisma was 14.

For Queen & Empire has a solid core, but it feels like it doesn’t dare to venture too far from the combat-centred gameplay assumption, even though the game explicitly has tools and subsystems to handle courtly intrigue.

Hell’s Vengeance Review, Part 1/3

This one has been a while in coming, but here we go. To recap, earlier this year I finished running the Hell’s Vengeance adventure path for Pathfinder RPG. Because reasons cleared everyone’s schedules and we got to play on a nearly weekly basis, what I’d intended to be maybe two, three years of leisurely play ended up as 41 sessions in 20 months and now I’m running The Enemy Within because I had to take a break from Pathfinder after that.

The first two books of Hell’s Vengeance, then, are The Hellfire Compact and Wrath of Thrune, and they thematically mirror each other so it makes sense to discuss them together. Also, this discussion will be rife with SPOILERS. I will also be making notes on what I changed or added, which in some cases was a lot. This was not necessarily because I found the scenarios somehow defective – though obviously nothing is perfect – but often just because I wanted to fiddle with the material myself.

Also of note is that though with past campaigns I’ve found the Paizo AP forums very helpful, in the case of Hell’s Vengeance they were rather on the quiet side. The villain campaign is not everybody’s or even most anybody’s cup of tea and seems to have been a fair bit less popular, so less help there.

The Hellfire Compact

The first book of the campaign introduces the town of Longacre, ruled by the aloof Archbaron Fex, who will early on have the party’s reprobates assigned as the sheriffs. There’s a rebellion in the nation, and Longacre is full of disgruntled war veterans. The big church in town is Iomedae, not Asmodeus, which is a problem when the rebellion is led by Iomedaean fanatics. And there are revolutionaries hiding in the Whisperwood, which is a terrible place.

I liked The Hellfire Compact very much. It presents a lovingly detailed town with lots of NPCs to keep track of, but with a bit of work and time it can come to life in the best tradition of Our Town or Emmerdale or whatever your cultural touchstone for that kind of small town life is. And then the jackbooted thugs that are the PCs will stomp all over it. I made a two-page printout with all the townsfolk’s faces and names on it and stuck it on the player-facing side of my GM screen so they could keep track of folk. Whenever someone died, their manner of demise would be written over the face. Out of the NPCs in the book, very few lived. The physician Gerya Rohalendi and the young girl Jemmy Kemmaino – whom one of the agents was actually paying to be his informant while she was also distributing revolutionary pamphlets – skipped town under the cover of night, the alchemist Elish Odmer was sentenced to community service to take care of the hospice after Rohalendi fled, and Ingoe Zoags the harbormaster stayed on their good side, but pretty much everyone else of note was executed, murdered, or slain in combat.

I wanted a slow burn for the start of the campaign, so I utilized all of the optional encounters presented in the book, to good effect. I also allowed the party to putter around town and explore to their heart’s content. The hobgoblin Zaggar from one of the minor events actually became a longtime NPC companion of the party. Zaggar and Cimri Staelish tagged along with them for a very long time. In the final battle they were also accompanied by Razelago’s krenshar Gaurig, but it was killed by the Angel Knight. These allies were very important in the final assault on the Court of Spears, because it is one of the most dangerous sequences of combat encounters in the whole adventure path.

Another thing I did was lift the pre-generated character, the cleric of Asmodeus Lazzero Dalvera, into NPC status as the direct superior of the party’s Asmodean priestess Arabelle and the antipaladin Nemanja. Dalvero and Arabelle had a strongly adversarial relationship and I spent time building him up as a potential enemy until finally replacing the final adversary in the fourth book with Lazzero Dalvera.

After the adventure proper, I ran two sessions of interludes. In the first, the agents asserted their control over the pacified Longacre and they were also sent a trio of Asmodean priests from the capital to take over and reconsecrate the cathedral of Iomedae. One was a lawful evil cleric, one was a neutral evil inquisitor and one was a lawful neutral warpriest, and they had to figure out who would be the best for the job. There was also a theatre troupe in town, the Royal Chelaxian Re-Enactment Society, telling only state-approved historical yarns. This was an old Living Greyhawk adventure that I’d wanted to run and then adapted for the campaign.

In a lot of cases, adapting adventures from outside the campaign was a lot more trouble than it would have been in pretty much any other case, since everything else is written with the assumption of heroic player characters. Of course, I did it more in this campaign than any other PF campaign I’ve run.

Overall, I enjoyed running The Hellfire Compact very much. It is a lovely sandbox.

Wrath of Thrune

And then there’s its thematic flipside. Where the first book has the agents play the authority in town and crush the resistance, in the second they are sent to infiltrate the rebel-occupied town of Kantaria. I spent an entire session on their travel to Kantaria, which is not actually anywhere near Longacre. There was no real adventure in the session, just puttering about the countryside, meeting interesting people, and visiting the town of Dekarium which I fleshed out a bit. I was also laying groundwork for a B plot about the Hellknight Order of the Vice and their ruined Citadel Darvhage, but that in the end went nowhere. I did get good use out of the material in Wayfinder #11, which is the fanzine’s Cheliax issue.

I approached Kantaria much the same way as I did Longacre. I took the time, kept track of all the NPCs, and used all the suggested material. Here, though, we had what we like to call emergent content. The agents decided that to do one nightly sabotage thing they’d planned they would wait for bad weather. Okay, I thought, let’s start rolling for weather. After two clear nights, the random weather table produced us… a blizzard. The town of Kantaria received all the snow of the winter several weeks ahead of schedule, and the rest of the adventure was spent snowed in, with low temperatures, very difficult terrain, and no tracking rolls needed, which changed the character of the infiltration mission crucially.

Also noted in the module is that Oppian Nevilindor, the cleric of Iomedae in charge of Kantaria, has a crush on Loredana Viorica, the innkeeper who’s also the agents’ contact in town. So in the morning after the blizzard, he rumbled through the snowdrifts to check up on her, bringing with him warm delicacies he had made that very morning.

I must admit that I still do not quite understand s’mores.

In Kantaria, the party also picked up another companion, the ukobach devil Brextur. He was mostly a liability rather than an asset, but along with Zaggar, one of the two NPC companions they had who lived through the campaign.

I also liked Wrath of Thrune very much, though it was perhaps a bit more constrained in its sandboxiness than The Hellfire Compact. One thing to keep an eye on is the combat encounters at Valor’s Fastness. The church grim in the courtyard can be extremely dangerous. Also, it is likely that the agents will not clear the entire complex in one go, and it pays to consider how the defenders react – can someone try to flee, is counterattacking an option, and how will they bolster their defences? In my game, the innkeeper Jana Holdus got out while the going was good.

Post-Wrath of Thrune, I ran an old Dungeon adventure named “Fiendish Footprints” by Tito Leati as they were returning to Longacre from Kantaria. The module’s hobgoblin villain ended up actually being Gwalur’s former boss and they hired the whole company after fighting a very dangerous combat with a bunch of elves. Again, the perils of converting stuff meant for heroes. Another thing was that an evil-aligned party doesn’t necessarily have the tools for dealing with supernatural evil adversaries that a good-aligned party would have. As the antipaladin’s player noted, “When you pit us against evil enemies, I’m a fighter with no feats”. The scenario’s macguffin ended up being connected to Socothbenoth, Vesper’s patron, though he didn’t know where his powers were coming from yet.

Next time, The Inferno Gate and For Queen & Empire.

Serpent’s Skull Review and Retrospective, Part III

We come to the final installment of my look into what the hell we were doing for the last 27 sessions.

The final two modules of the adventure path mostly take place in the subterranean city of Ilmurea, built by the serpentfolk millennia ago in the caverns of the Darklands. Saventh-Yhi was eventually built above Ilmurea, first as a staging point for an assault upon the serpentfolk and then as a monument to the heroine Saavith, who first defeated the serpent god Ydersius.

The Thousand Fangs Below

In the fifth part, the party has just reclaimed the crystals that allow them to activate the portal to enter Ilmurea in order to find and rescue the Pathfinder Eando Kline who can tell them about the serpentfolk’s plans to resurrect Ydersius. The city of Ilmurea is an interesting place. There are a number of power groups in there. The first the party will likely stumble upon are the morlocks, who are chaotic evil but revere Eando Kline as a god, because the Pathfinder Society doesn’t come equipped with the Prime Directive. With the help of Juliver or any Pathfinders of their own, the party can leverage this to get the little bastards on their side.

Then there are the urdefhan. They’re also evil, a species of Darklands-dwellers related to daemons. They also sort of occupy a similar niche as the githyanki do in brand-name D&D and wield very strange swords with two-pronged blades, like a humongous fork. They’re scheming bastards who want the party to take out a defector who’s lairing with the serpentfolk. This is a way to get them on your side.

There are also some drow hanging about and a neothelid that the party can run into if they’re too nosy. Mine was. Curiosity killed the half-elf oracle, who was replaced by an elf fighter disguised as a half-orc.

Finally, the main event of the adventure is a serpentfolk stronghold where Eando Kline is held captive. It is a good dungeon – presents a variety of foes while remaining logical, interacts with itself and reacts to the player characters if they figure out they’re under assault. Importantly, it’s also manageable in size and length. There are also a bunch of very challenging enemies whose tactics are effective, make sense, and take all sorts of contingencies into account. The BBEG of the adventure ended up being a torturer in the deep dungeons whom the party could not take out and opted instead to flee. First time for everything.

So yeah, I like The Thousand Fangs Below. It’s not perfect, since I think it’s sort of a middle part where the entire plot is about the party doing something in order to be able to do something else instead of doing it because it must be done. To put it in terms of philosophy, their primary goal has a primarily instrumental value instead of an intrinsic value, which I think is also one of the problems in Vaults of Madness. Same goes for Sins of the Saviours in Rise of the Runelords, really. While such an adventure can be fun, I’d prefer each part of an adventure path to be more meaningful than that.

Your mileage may vary, of course. If your players are familiar with the Eando Kline stories from the first three adventure paths, they may be keen indeed on rescuing him, but for my players (and me) he was just some guy out there. Personally, I remember having read them but cannot for the life of me remember what happened. At least he’s not as annoying as Drizzt was.

Sanctum of the Serpent God

It may actually be fruitful to think of The Thousand Fangs Below and Sanctum of the Serpent God as the two halves of the same adventure. They blend together pretty well, seeing as all the really interesting stuff you get to do in The Thousand Fangs Below actually has its payback in Sanctum of the Serpent God. Befriended the morlocks? Good, you now have underground infantry for your army. Get along well with the urdefhans? You’ll have their sword. It’s time to march against some serpentfolk.

In Sanctum of the Serpent God, the party finally has enough information to know what to do and the allies to make it happen. Out of the different factions and tribes still left in Saventh-Yhi and the different power groups that are not directly hostile to them down in Ilmurea, they shall build an army, and drop the spears of Saventh-Yhi through the very bedrock of Mwangi itself, deep into the Darklands, to penetrate Ilmurea’s ceiling and give their troops a way to invade en masse. While the army draws out most of the serpentfolk from their main fortress, the party does the commando thing, goes in through a side door and takes out the officer corps, the high priest, and the god.

Well, it’s not quite that straightforward. There’s first a dungeon crawl where they take out a bunch of urdefhans and daemons to rescue a cyclops general who has spent the last ten millennia in stasis, because he’s the only one who knows what the damn spears are for. There’s also a series of assassination attempts on the party that I ended up skipping since I was rather tired of it all at this point and with the stable of one-trick ponies I had, half to three quarters of the party would have died.

The final dungeon is not quite as nifty as in The Thousand Fangs Below, but the endboss, avatar of Ydersius himself, makes up for it. He’s a legitimately tough solo adversary. Usually, a single enemy in Pathfinder RPG gets screwed over by action economy. Four heroes against one enemy means four times more actions directed against the bad guy than the bad guy can wield against the heroes. Simple math. Karzoug the Claimer, back in the 3.5 version of Rise of the Runelords, was victim to this and went down quickly. However, Ydersius is tough. He can withstand a lot of punishment, is immune to a whole lot of interesting tricks and has ways of removing heroes from the field for a few rounds at a time. The final combat was challenging and tense. At the end, the heroes triumphed and cut off the serpent god’s head, but it was close.

In Conclusion

Would I recommend the Serpent’s Skull adventure path? No. Not as the whole it is now, and not as written. Adventures two through four have a number of issues and little to make up for their flaws, The Thousand Fangs Below is uninteresting plot-wise, and at the end the whole campaign just feels like it is overstaying its welcome. Much like some its adventures feel more like ways to pass the time until the PCs are high-enough level to take on the next big adversary, the whole campaign feels like it mainly exists to be a traditional campaign between the nation-building sandbox of Kingmaker and the horror extravaganza that is Carrion Crown.

It is not, I must hasten to add, a total loss. Souls for Smuggler’s Shiv is one of the best published adventures I’ve ever seen. The campaign itself, with some heavy rewriting, can be made into a pretty great work. The potential is all there, it’s just the execution that’s wanting. Add a local Mwangi faction, perhaps as a replacement for the Free Captains (the devil are they doing inland, anyway?), squeeze The City of Seven Spears and Vaults of Madness together, add some heavier foreshadowing of Sanctum of the Serpent God into The Thousand Fangs Below to make it feel less like a keycard hunt, and you’re golden.

Of course, the amount of work involved in all that probably defeats the purpose of using a pre-written adventure path in the first place, but it is my hope that after reading this and the preceding installments, you should be equipped to decide on your own whether it’s worth it for you.

Serpent’s Skull Review and Retrospective, Part II

Last weekend, I discussed the first two parts of the Serpent’s Skull adventure path. In those, the party finds some clues on a deserted island and follows them into the deep jungles of the Mwangi Expanse, in search of the lost city of Saventh-Yhi, preserved and hidden by Azlanti magic for these past ten thousand years.

The next two scenarios of the adventure path take place in Saventh-Yhi, as the party first explores and tames the city in The City of the Seven Spears and then roots out its secrets with a purpose in Vaults of Madness.

Before I delve into the details of these works, I should note a few things that I neglected to mention in the previous post. As with other adventure paths, there is a wealth of third-party and fan-created content created to support the campaign. One that I made much use of was the line of paper miniatures. I love the work done on the Serpent’s Skull line, which includes a miniature set for each of the adventure modules and one more for the compiled bestiaries of the series. The art has character, and I especially like the vivid use of colour. Excellent work, there.

Another thing I’d like to point out is Wayfinder #4, a compilation of fan-created game articles and fiction. The fourth issue’s theme was the Mwangi, making it useful for GMs running Serpent’s Skull or Skull & Shackles. I must confess that I did not actually utilize any of the material in it, but there’s a lot of it and someone else might find stuff more to their liking.

There are also a couple of Paizo-produced things appropriate for use with the adventure path. The most obvious ones are the sourcebook on the Mwangi Expanse, Heart of the Jungle, and the player-oriented sourcebook on the colony of Sargava, named Sargava, the Lost Colony. There’s also one thing I used in Vaults of Madness from the Rival Guide, a Mwangi-based party of evil adventurers (complete with an awakened dire ape antipaladin!) that was good for one challenging and interesting combat encounter.

Finally, here there be SPOILERS.

The City of Seven Spears

The City of Seven Spears has an interesting story. No, not in the module – it’s a practically plotless sandbox. The story is about how the module came to look like it does.

Unfortunately, I don’t know all the particulars, but as far as I can tell, someone didn’t quite deliver and some other people were called in for rescue and that’s why there are three names on the cover and not much interesting between them. The problem with Saventh-Yhi is that it’s a huge city with seven distinct, discrete districts that have all their own hotspots and plot points, and all this has been crammed into about 50 pages. The party is not given a lot of guidance on what they should do besides “explore”. There are some tools for managing conflict between the different expeditions (because regardless of whom the PCs picked as their backer, the other four will also show up eventually), but not much. The emphasis is on the city and its encounters – and boy are there a lot of those, for a city supposedly lost for ten thousand years.

Saventh-Yhi is an old Azlanti city, so the underlying concept of magic operates on a system similar to the sin magic of ancient Thassilon (which was a corruption of the Azlanti system). This may seem familiar to those who have played Rise of the Runelords or Shattered Star. Each of the seven districts is dedicated to one of the Azlanti virtues of rule (which in Thassilon were corrupted into the sins), and has a purpose in accordance with that virtue. The military district is dedicated to righteous anger, the government district is dedicated to honest pride, and so forth. This is all relevant, because each of the districts also has a Spear, a tall obelisk atop a ziggurat, which has a magical aura that it spreads over its district. With a specific ritual, the spears can also be activated to grant an empowered aura.

To get to do any of these rituals, the party should also do something about the tribe occupying the district. Six of the seven are occupied by tribes. Charau-ka in the military district, degenerate serpentfolk ruled over by a rakshasa in the government district, and so on. Most of them are hostile from the beginning and from the kind of monstrous races that the PCs will probably set about exterminating from the start, but there’s a tribe of Garundi humans who may be negotiated with. Actually, one of the possible conditions for “conquering” a district is killing a crapload of the local mooks. Who, I ask of you, has the time or the inclination to run combats against 100 mook vegepygmies who are not quite mooky enough that you can just handwave their deaths? It really gets my goat that there are a lot of combat encounters in here, such as practically all of the patrol encounters, which present no threat or challenge whatsoever to the party, yet are still there to take up space with their stats.

The adventure picks up with plot again once the PCs hit level 10. In our game, this took seven sessions and frankly, we were starting to get bored. Also, the level limit on the final event of the book highlights what the exploration of Saventh-Yhi essentially is – grinding for XP. It could have been made interesting, but I think it would have taken a smaller city so there’d have been more material to make it interesting and to run the archaeology and exploration stuff.

Anyway, at the end there’s a feebleminded Pathfinder who shows up through a portal, with an undead serpentfolk necromancer and his cronies in pursuit. There is a fight and once she’s cured of her affliction, she will a tale unfold that will harrow up thy very soul – the next adventure is also about exploring Saventh-Yhi.

Vaults of Madness

Yeah, you heard that right. The Pathfinder, Juliver, came to Saventh-Yhi through a portal from the serpentfolk city of Ilmurea, which has been slumbering for as long as Saventh-Yhi, except now it’s stirring in its sleep. She was part of an expedition led by the disgraced Pathfinder Eando Kline (hero of the short fiction pieces in the first three adventure paths). The rest of the party were captured by serpentfolk and only Juliver managed to get away. The portal required these crystals to activate, and she broke the crystals on the portal she came through in order to deter pursuit.

So now it falls to the party to scour the city for more crystals so they can activate the portal and head into Ilmurea to rescue Eando Kline.

They need six crystals, of course, so counting the vault with the portal in it, that makes for seven vaults. There’s once in each district, naturally. For some reason, they are not mentioned in The City of Seven Spears, so the party will likely not be aware of their existence regardless of how careful about mapping they have been.

And why are they called the vaults of madness? They’re all infected with a madness-inducing fungal spore, which was good for some role-playing. Of course, once the party figures out what’s up, they take the appropriate precautions and the affliction can be safely forgotten. The vaults are a series of seven mini-dungeons. One of them is flooded, one of them is the battleground between two tribes of evil humanoids, and so on. They’re not, honestly, the interesting thing in this adventure. The interesting thing is that there’s actual plot! There are events! There’s stuff to do besides go down a hole in the ground and kick someone’s undead ass!

One of these is a battle against the Aspis Consortium, whose boss gets taken over by an intellect devourer. The intellect devourers, incidentally, occupy much the same niche in Pathfinder RPG as the WotC-product-identity mind flayers do in brand-name D&D. Then there’s the centrepiece of the adventure, the visit from Ruthazek, the Gorilla King of Usaro. He is one of the more interesting NPCs around, and he’s there with his retinue to find out about the city and the heroes and to test them. There’s a feast, which I’ve written more extensively about before, and if done well, the encounter can be one of the most memorable in the campaign. He’s also evil and powerful enough to stand a chance of taking out the entire party all by himself.

By this time, I was so thoroughly fed up with the vaults and the endless grind that I also had Ruthazek award the party the last crystal they needed, having dug it up himself from the vault.

Fixing Saventh-Yhi

So, what could have been done differently?

I think the entire premise of having two scenarios, meant to be played back-to-back, in the same area and relying largely on exploration and sandbox-play, is faulty. You’re going over the same ground twice, which is not interesting and the verisimilitude suffers when suddenly there are these vaults that are honestly not hidden well enough that they wouldn’t have stumbled upon one before the plot dictated that they could.

There’s also the issue that The City of Seven Spears has no proper motivation for the party beyond the acquisition of treasure, which is in conflict with the serpentfolk plotline introduced in the previous parts and pretty weak on its own. There are elements of plot present in these two books and Vaults of Madness is quite good about it, but the third module of the campaign is nearly void of it. The campaign is in danger of stalling, here.

So, what I suggest as the solution is to combine the two adventures into one. This would require some significant rewriting of stuff for the appropriate levels, but moving the introduction of Juliver forward and dropping the vaults in where the PCs may stumble upon them from day one would do a lot to make the adventures more interesting. Another aspect that could do with more writing are the factions themselves and the faction conflict. I’m afraid there’s not a terrible lot of material on that beyond what’s suggested on the forums, but highlighting that the PCs are not alone in their exploration and giving the other expeditions a more active part in the adventures as rivals, not necessarily enemies, would make for more interesting gaming. The adventure would also benefit from a system to determine what the other expeditions are up to and how their explorations and conquests are going.

Yeah, it’d be a crapload of work. I am not convinced it’s less work than writing something from scratch, but there is cool stuff in here, and it’s no use throwing out the baby with the bathwater, so my first instinct would be to fix what is broken instead of scrap whole modules.

Next time, the grand finale.

Serpent’s Skull – An Autopsy of a Campaign

Almost exactly two years after I did it the first time, I pulled it off again. I finished a Paizo adventure path.

This time, it was the postcolonially suspicious Serpent’s Skull, six chapters of lost cities, ape kings, deserted islands, pirates and serpentfolk. From January 16th, 2011, to November 11th, 2012, it took us 27 sessions to get from the intro of Souls for Smuggler’s Shiv to the conclusion of The Sanctum of the Serpent God. Along the way, some characters died and others left the team to be replaced by others. It was a fun ride. Along the way, there were sonnets written and hearts consumed. This post, by the way, shall contain SPOILERS by the bushel.

A mere 27 sessions over nearly two years of play may not sound like a lot, but we’re students and not all of us live permanently in Tampere when school’s out, so we basically have no games between May and August. When you have a break that long, incidentally, a proper campaign website like we had really shows its worth.

Compared with the Rise of the Runelords, Serpent’s Skull was rather uneven in quality, and especially in the middle parts we hit something of a lull. The extended sandboxy-dungeoncrawly nature of the third and fourth parts robbed the campaign of a lot of its momentum and we ended up dawdling a total of ten sessions in those two. More on that in the later posts, however. When Serpent’s Skull was good, though, it was really good. I name Souls for Smuggler’s Shiv among my personal adventure module top ten, and believe me, I know adventure modules. Also, I felt the final fight, the epic end battle against the serpent god Ydersius, was better than its counterpart in The Spires of Xin-Shalast.

It was fun, but I am feeling a bit of fatigue with Pathfinder RPG. Much like in its predecessor, high-level play gets mathematically intensive and rather tedious. For my next long campaign, I will switch rulesets. I am a Pathfinder Society Venture-Captain, so I’ll continue to get my regular PF fix, but for now, I need a change of pace.

Before I kick the next campaign into high gear, however, this one deserves a proper send-off. Let’s meet the team.

The Heroes

Niero Brandt

Some of you may remember Niero from the Rise of the Runelords recap, two years back. He originally saw light as a PC in that campaign, until dying at the end of the first adventure. Fast-forward over a year of game time, and the follow-up character, Michiell “Dawn” Grellson, dug him up, raised him from the dead, and sent him off to Sargava on the Jenivere, whose wreck started off Serpent’s Skull. Along the way, he switched careers from locksmithing and archaeology to alchemy. He was cynical, complained a lot and there are suspicions he was not entirely sane. He very nearly developed a split personality disorder, spent a goodly while paranoid of the rest of the group, and after somewhat stabilizing, grew a tumor familiar. Despite not being good-aligned, strangely enough he was the closest the party had to a moral compass, being motivated by an interest in ancient history and arcane lore rather than mere filthy lucre. He was also the chronicler of the group and most of the session recaps were written from his point of view.

Kailn

Kailn was the obligatory sex bomb of the group. The former halfling manservant and slave of another group member (the oracle Malje, who got killed by a neothelid in the ruins of Ilmurea), Kailn was also a sorcerer with suspicious ancestry and a serpentine bloodline. He was also responsible for an epidemic of the Taldan disease aboard the Jenivere. The half-pint Lothario found himself in great trouble as the adventures took the party into the lost city of Saventh-Yhi and onwards into Ilmurea, as increasing numbers of adversaries were utterly immune to his charms. This forced to rethink his approach to problem-solving, which led to a far more diverse spell selection. After the defeat of Ydersius, Kailn stole off in the night with the god’s skull in one hand and the high priest’s staff in another, apparently to found a cell of resistance fighters somewhere in Cheliax to wage the war for abolition.

Tiikki

Tiikki was a late addition to the group, after the Chelaxian noblewoman Malje bit the dust, though even more they were a replacement for the archer Sujiu. Tiikki was also an archer, and a member of the Pathfinder Society who had come to check up on the expedition in Saventh-Yhi and seeing if they could find an artifact or two on the trip. Tiikki was also angling for a seat on the Decemvirate. Additionally, they ended up replacing Niero as the party chronicler after the alchemist got too unstable to continue.

Kuros Ackler

The party’s pacifist cleric of Milani, who replaced Sujiu after he was torn apart by an angry chemosit. During his stay in the group, he never raised a hand against an enemy, focusing instead on keeping the party patched up. This led to a great deal of delay actions and had interesting implications for action economy.

Mogashi

The big brute was not there to fight Ydersius, as his player moved away and could not continue in the campaign, but I would be remiss if I ignored one of the great characters of the team. Mogashi was the native guide, whose father was unknown but were speculated at different times to have been an ape, a bear, an ape bear, a bar-lgura daemon, Angazhan himself, or perhaps Ruthazek the Gorilla King. Yes, Mogashi was a tiefling. His knowledge of the bush and the local customs kept the team alive when the going was difficult, especially during their stay on Smuggler’s Shiv. Later on, his inhuman capacity to take and dish out truly staggering amounts of punishment saved the party’s bacon more than once. He was the big bruiser, the anti-hero and in it mostly for the gold. His relationship with the Gorilla King is still unclear, and the King himself kept addressing Mogashi as “son”… Either way, the tiefling’s travels with the group came to an end when he left Saventh-Yhi to follow the Gorilla King – whether to join him or slay him, we do not yet know.

Games Every Game Designer Should Play

Inspired by Antti Lax’s post at LOKI (which in turn was inspired by Ryan Macklin’s post at his own blog), Sami Koponen from Efemeros challenged the rest of the Finnish gaming blogosphere to list the three games that we think every role-playing game designer should be familiar with.

Of course, in any such listing, the real challenge is condensation. I mean, I can easily rattle off a dozen games that are or were, in their own ways, innovative. There are innovations in rules, setting, even presentation, that are worthy of emulation and imitation and challenge traditional notions of how roleplaying games should be done. Note that I am not claiming that these are the only true way to do these things, or even necessarily the best ways. They are, however, pretty good ways of doing it, and should provoke thought, perhaps even inspiration. Being well-read is also valuable so you do not end up reinventing the wheel by accident. Most of the time, when someone is touting their new RPG with words like “revolutionary” or “unbeforeseen”, in practice they end up producing something straight out of 1988…

Note that I am leaving D&D off the list, firstly because it’s obvious and secondly, when you run into a role-playing game whose designer clearly was not too well-read, it’s generally pretty obvious that the gap in their education was not D&D. (If, on the other hand, you see yourself as a game designer and are not familiar with D&D, I recommend familiarizing yourself with at least the Mentzer red box Dungeons & Dragons [1983], Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 [2003] or Pathfinder RPG [2009] and Dungeons & Dragons 4E [2008] to familiarize yourself with the three major strains.)

The list will also reflect my own background. I’m from the traditionalist school of big, heavy rulebooks, GM authority and lots of dice. Though I am acquainted, and have occasionally even worked on or played things like Forge-style indie games or the school of Nordic roleplaying that sometimes eradicates the line between larp and tabletop games, I started with Middle-Earth Role-Play, continued with Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play and my present go-to game is Pathfinder RPG, after playing its two direct forebears for the previous decade. That’s my background, deep in the dungeon.

So, in no particular order…

Pendragon

Any edition, pretty much. The thing that makes Pendragon special is how its ruleset and specifically the Traits and Passions can efficiently and non-intrusively direct the game to genre emulation. The knights of Le Morte d’Arthur frequently acted obviously against their own interest because of a rigid honour code that is alien to modern thought. Not only is their behaviour rather unlike the heroics of your average D&D campaign or modern fantasy film, it is also sufficiently removed from our way of thinking that its role-playing doesn’t come naturally unless you are very familiar with the source material. Pendragon, then, has Traits that operate on a sliding scale between two extremes, such as Chaste/Lustful or Pious/Worldly. The characters have a number value in each Trait, and the total of every Trait’s two extremes must equal 20. Whenever a situation arises where one of these Traits would come into play (in a dramatically appropriate fashion, of course), you roll against the Trait and successes or failures can limit your actions in the situation. In action, it leads to the player characters falling passionately in love with the damsel they’ve rescued, finding the inner reserves of strength to vanquish the dragon, and killing their fellow knights because of honour. A system like this could be adapted, I think, to any game where the player characters are expected to act according to a rigid code, cultural values or morality that goes against their self-interest. The obvious example is a samurai game.

The second thing that Pendragon does well is the generation game. The game is designed explicitly for a campaign encompassing the entire rise and fall of the Round Table. The Great Pendragon campaign takes 81 years from start to finish. That means you need more than one player character, and more often than not, it’s your player character’s job to make more wee potential PCs. Your character, like in most RPGs, will steadily get better as they adventure. Then, inevitably, they will die. Hopefully, they will do this in a heroic and/or tragic fashion that minstrels will sing of for ages to come and you get to bore your friends with over a pint. Their offspring, then, will not be quite as good as daddy was in his best days, but they will get an inheritance of Glory, titles, land, and generally better gear than papa had (weapons tech develops at a pretty respectable clip during the Enchantment of Britain). The foundation for this is laid out in character creation (at least in the 5th edition), where you start by rolling up the lifepaths of your first knight’s father and grandfather (both inevitably dead).

All in all, I think Pendragon is an excellent example of how to model a very specific genre in a traditional tabletop role-playing game.

Stalker

As the translator, I am probably biased, but then, this entire post is about my opinion on something, so hear me out. Stalker does a clever thing (actually, it does quite a few clever things) in how it handles combat. There is no separate combat mechanic or subsystem. Kicking someone’s, or even several someones’, ass is the same mechanical process as is used to see if the characters manage to fix a car engine or browbeat their dealer into giving them a better price. If you have more than one adversary, the extras are defeated in the margins of success. If any are still left after the first bout is resolved, then you look at how the scene has changed and see how the numbers stack this time around. Stalker is not interested in the process of combat, the blow-by-blow take that many (I’m tempted to say “most”) RPGs go for. Stalker is interested in the end result. How, precisely, that is reached is the players’ and the GM’s job to figure out. The rules are just there to help. The system encourages – nay, enforces – roleplaying and tactics beyond “I shoot him with my gun”, and rewards both. It is also impossible to break, save by bribing the GM. (Just so you know, I’m partial to Johnnie Walker Black.) This is relevant because, well, for one thing, it shows you that even a traditional game (and despite being diceless, I think Stalker is pretty traditional, with its long equipment lists, full-page character sheet and whatnot) can be designed without separate combat rules.

There’s a load of other things that make it worthwhile to have a look at Stalker. Player characters have no Intelligence attribute; the character’s wits are those of the player’s. This removes the issue of a player squirming because he figured out the puzzle immediately but his character, IQ turnip, never could. The Flow system is diceless, yet doesn’t include the usual pack of narrative rules elements like shared narration or negotiating outcomes. It is elegant yet robust, which is pretty much everything I can ask for in a roleplaying game system. It is also sufficiently lightweight that if one so wishes, they can easily adapt it to run whatever game or genre they want by merely rewriting one or two skill lists. Indeed, if our hypothetical designer padawan is more interested in writing the setting and the meat of the game (much like I) instead of designing a ruleset, Flow can be licenced under terms that are not only generous but also rather entertaining.

Finally, the rulebook also contains some damn fine GM advice, but that should not be limited to the perusal of putative designers.

Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play

The first two editions, at least. I am not familiar with the third edition and do not know if it retains the features I speak of. In any case, Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play strikes an elegant balance between the classless and the class-based with its career system. Characters can start off as rat catchers and camp followers and over time, having fulfilled the requirements of their career, move on to other careers, accumulating experience and skills (possibly also gear, though that tends to be transitory) along the way, from rat catcher to cat burglar to vagabond to thief to rogue to demagogue to politician to crime lord to outlaw chief, or perhaps along some entirely different path. This allows the character a natural, organic development while retaining game effectiveness (both breaking the game and creating a completely useless character are rather tricky, especially in the second edition where they fixed the Naked Dwarf loophole). The characters are not nailed down to specific advancement paths, even if their starting careers were randomly determined.

The careers also tell you something important about the characters and the world; this is low fantasy, and the characters are not great heroes from the get-go. They’re not just rootless adventurers who roam the land performing feats of derring-do. They’re just people, who need to work to put food on the table, except half of them are too poor to own a table. It roots them into the setting. Switching careers is also a strong narrative element, such as when the peasant decides he has had enough of toil and sweat under a weary life and becomes an outlaw, or the outlaw figures that the injustices that led him to a life of crime are because of inequality in the deep structures of the society and becomes a demagogue to speak against those who misuse power. The career mechanic is flavourful enough to act as story seeds in and of themselves, but sufficiently flexible to serve the needs of the campaign.

Additionally, WFRP is not afraid to rain shit upon the characters. It’s not overly lethal, and player characters stand a good chance of seeing ripe old age, but getting there will hurt. There’s madness. There’s mutation. Using magic causes both. Critical hits can and will cause limb loss. The PC is not sacrosanct and both violence and meddling with things man was not meant to know will have consequences. The webzine Critical Miss did a series of three articles on the theme and style, a long time ago. They are here: How James Wallis Ruined My Character’s Life, Yes I Sank Your Barge, and Wolfgang’s Guide to Screwing Your Fellow Players. Read them in order.

Red in Beak and Claw at the LotFP Grand Adventure Campaign!

It has begun! Possibly the craziest thing I’ve seen James do yet (and I’ve known him for some years), the July Grand Adventure Campaign gathers together 19 adventure writers from diverse backgrounds to write modules for Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Weird Fantasy Role-Playing. I am one of them, and if the $6,000 funding goal is met, my adventure Red in Beak and Claw shall be unleashed upon the world, and with art by Jason Rainville!

Red in Beak and Claw, as you can probably figure out from the blurb, is informed by Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. I, for one, have never seen an adventure module inspired by the film, but in case someone’s already done it, I’ll have to do it better. There may also be some Children of the Corn in there somewhere.

The campaign itself is megalomaniacal in its scale. There is a terrible beauty to the sheer size and variety of its contributors. There are indie game designers, a Nordic larpwright, a rock star, bloggers, OSR writers, veterans of D&Ds classic and modern alike. It is a testament to the lightness and flexibility of oldDungeons & Dragons that game designers from such diverse backgrounds can pick up the ruleset with little prior experience and feel comfortable working with it.

Apart from me, there are three other Finns in the lineup: first of all, there’s Ville Vuorela of Burger Games, for whom I translated Stalker. The art for The Dreaming Plague will incidentally be done by Juha Makkonen, I who I worked with on Roolipelikirja. Then there’s Mike Pohjola, Emmy Award -winning author, larpwright, game designer and I can’t even remember what else, with his adventure I Hate Myself for What I Must Do. This is also the man who wrote a roleplaying game using fortune cookies instead of dice, and I advise you to expect the unexpected. Last but not least, there’s Juhani Seppälä, of the blog Blowing Smoke, with his module Normal for Norfolk, that started out as a campaign he ran for James that James has been pestering him to write up ever since.

This is also my chance to get that Richard Pett adventure I was so cruelly denied last time around. Get to it, people. Just… fund me first, okay? At the moment, to my great perturbation, I seem to be in the lead, too…

My Opinion on D&D Next

Someone recently asked my opinion on D&D Next. I’ve studied the playtest material but haven’t yet had the opportunity to see it in action. So far, the following sums up my position perfectly.

A more nuanced opinion will be forthcoming once I have actually played the damn thing.