Research, Research, Research

I’m a pretty big believer in research.

My favorite fiction writers—currently I’m into the scribblings of Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child—are usually good about doing their homework, and it shows in their work. Details and some healthy realism, even in fantasy, spin a web that can ensnare the unsuspecting reader … and once you’ve got them it’s too late.

My little source bookshelf is currently overburdened with reference material, and I’m adding more all the time. Some material has proved elusive, but there are many books about fantasy topics—medieval clothing, castles, etc. All grain for the mill. Most fantasy RPGs are set in a semi-medieval world, so one must pick and choose information, but there is still plenty to be had. Raiding the Barnes & Noble Sale Annex for large picture books on different cultures has become a regular pastime for me.

Often the little details aren’t individually noticeable, but I like to think that together they blend and make for a good final product. My Goodman Games adventure The Scaly God, for instance, incorporated a lot of weird research: research on lizards for the troglodytes, hours of research on caves and natural cavern formations, and castle research including Roman mountainside fortifications. I also studied Gygax’s Giant series (G2 and G3 specifically) in an attempt to give the third level cave layout an “old school” sense of flow.

Again, sometimes you must know when to “push the rules” a bit; real caves are often extremely tight and narrow to the point of claustrophobia—I choose the larger scale tunnels, but I did retain some natural formations and details.

Real life experiences, as I’ve mentioned previously in this blog, also shape my work heavily. I’ve walked through a good number of European medieval-age structures, and a summer spend studying abroad allowed me first-hand visits to Stonehenge and Warwick Castle. Later ramblings got me to Cardiff Castle in Wales and Urquhart Castle at Loch Ness. (And no, I didn’t see Nessie, but I was so knackered by the time I reached the loch that I was half-asleep on the boat! Sadly, Nessie would have had to bit my rump for me to take notice at that point.)
Whitefang Stronghold has a goodly share of those trips in it; I mentally threw several structures into the blender and liked what emerged. (None the Wiser, whose awesome and inspiring work I mention here, did note my lack of proper ceiling support or spiral stair construction in places—I guess engineering isn’t my strong suit! I did find his observation about having arrowslits on a staircase privately ironic—he is totally right, having them there really doesn’t make much sense, yet I put them there after, you guessed it, seeing similarly placed arrowloops in an Italian fortification!) One maze-like section of the third level caves was even inspired by a childhood memory of exploring Injun's Joe's Cave on Disneyland's Tom Sawyer Island, of all places!


For me, part of doing the research is that it makes me believe in what I'm writing, and that in turn makes me more passionate about what I'm writing.

Does this research and resulting mental mishmash ultimately bleed into my final product enough to make a real difference? I like to think so.

So … ready to write? Try hitting the books first.

Thanks Gary

I am greatly saddened to hear of the passing of Gary Gygax (or EGG or Col_Pladoh, as I think of him). Gary was an icon, and in no small part he was responsible for something huge, more than a hobby and indeed a huge passion for so many of us. One of my longest running friendships began with a short posting on a D&D message board. More recently, a mutual love of the game has brought me into contact with some fellow Goodman Games writers, truly wonderful fellows all. I wouldn’t be on the RPG writing path I am without having read so many great adventures by the master. Sample a bit of Gygax prose from The Temple of Elemental Evil:

The ruins of the Temple’s outer works appear as dark and overgrown mounds of gray rubble and blackish weeds. Skulls and bones of humans and humanoids gleam white here and there amidst the weeds. A grove of some oddly stunted and unhealthy looking usk trees still grows along the northern end of the former Temple compound, and a stump of a tower juts up from the northeast corner of the shattered wall. The leprous gray Temple, however, stands intact, its arched buttresses somehow obscene with their growth of climbing vegetation.

Everything surrounding the place is disgusting. The myriad leering faces and twisting, contorted forms writhing and posturing on every face of the Temple seem to jape at the obscenities they depict. The growth in the compound is rank and noisome. Thorns clutch, burrs stick, and crushed stems either emit foul stench or raise angry weals on exposed flesh. Worst of all, however, is the pervading fear which seems to hang over the whole area—a smothering, clinging, almost tangible cloud of vileness and horror.

Or the Vault of the Drow:

The small “star” nodes glow in radiant hues of mauve, lake, violet, puce, lilac, and deep blue. The large “moon” of tumkeoite casts beams of shimmering amethyst which touch the crystalline formations with colors unknown to any other visual experience. The lichens seem to glow in rose madder and pale damson, the fungi growths in golden and red ochres, vermilions, russets, citron, and aquamarine shades. (Elsewhere the river and other water courses sheen a deep velvety purple with reflected highlights from the radiant gleams overhead vying with streaks and whorls of old silver where the liquid laps the stony banks or surges against the ebon piles of the jetties and bridge of the elfin city for the viewer’s attention.) The rock walls of the Vault appear hazy and insubstantial in the wine-colored light, more light mist than solid walls. The place is indeed a dark fairyland.

Great, great work.

My only true meeting with Gary, and it was a brief one, took place at Gen Con 1998. I wanted to meet Gygax but was hesitant to approach him on the show floor. Later my friend Mark dragged me into the convention center bar where Gary was enjoying a cold one, and he was happy to sign our Player’s Handbooks. I took the opportunity to solve an old argument:

Me: “How do you pronounce the name of the dark elves, Gary?”

Gary: “Well, I’ve always said ‘drow’ (rhymes with cow) myself,” he saw my pained look and quickly added, “But whatever works for you!”

I lost the argument but was happy as a clam, just the same.

Gary was a gentleman, to coin his phrase, a Gentle Writer, and he will be missed. At the expense of sounding truly geeky, I hope every time those funny dice hit a table somewhere, Gary is smiling somewhere else. If one must have a claim to fame, giving a gift of imagination and enjoyment to millions via your creation and its offspring isn’t a bad one. Not at all.

The World After

Recent conversations with Mike (check out his blog—far better than mine—here) have gotten me thinking about the Gamma World game. I was always basically a “D&D player”; I experimented a bit with other systems—Mythus, TORG, etc.—and I own a few systems that seem cool but I’ve never actually played—Call of Cthulhu, Paranoia, and Vampire come to mind—but I always came back to the gold standard, flaws and all.

The one system that pulled me away for a time was Gamma World, the first edition with the grey book. True, the rules were basically D&D rules, and perhaps that made it more approachable, but it was also the subject matter. I’ve always found end of the world type scenarios fascinating, and GW had all the right elements: cool tables full of superhero power-like mutations, weird and malfunctioning robots and androids (Westworld is one of my favorite films of all time), secret societies with hidden agendas, and a campaign milieu that allowed for a broad variety of encounters.


My friends and I played eagerly, especially when we needed a break from wizards and dragons, and I still remember our adventures set around the starting city of Horn. We battled badders and arks (mutated, intelligent badger-men and dog-men), destroyed killer androids, puzzled over ancient artifacts, and lived in terror of the mighty Death Machine. It was great fun.

Last week I took advantage of a stop made at my folks house to raid my old closet. This meant laying on my belly in the dust, pushing up layers of boxes and reaching and straining for that most-buried box that still held some old modules. It took about 20 minutes of struggle and some scraped knuckles, but buried amid old Dragon magazines and convention brochures I hit pay dirt—the Gamma World motherlode. I unearthed the Gamma World second edition boxed set (I never played past the 3rd) and several modules … Famine in Far-go, The Cleansing War of Garik Blackhand, The Mind Masters, and Alpha Factor.


Flipping through the old books was like a trip down memory lane, and it opened my mind to new possibilities. Slaying dragons is awesome (especially a young white my duskblade helped fell the other day), but mutants and androids are a cool chance of pace.

Rebooting

Recently I’ve thought a lot about RPG reboots. Perhaps it’s the New Year and all (and I wish a good 2008 to my readers—both of you!—by the way).

Occasionally it’s time for a RPG reboot, and often it can be a good thing. Many years ago I ran a regular campaign, almost certainly the best I’ve ever run as a DM. I had four players and we met every two weeks like clockwork. This went on for nearly three years. We were playing in the venerable World of Greyhawk and their PCs busily explored the Wild Coast in search of adventure. The PCs (a human fighter, half-elf thief, cleric, and drow mage/thief, if I recall correctly) used the town of Fax as home base, and they got involved in all manner of trouble. They worked their way through such famous modules as the entire Slavers series as well as many home-brewed adventures, all of which I stitched together into a giant tapestry of NPCs and subplots. They barely had finished an adventure when I laid down the clues for several more. Sometimes a previous bad guy would show up for revenge just when they were hot on the trail of the latest one.

It was a hell of a lot of fun.

Then one fateful day trouble struck. It was the dreaded TPK. No one did anything wrong, except they rolled really bad, and I rolled good (or high at least), and they just wouldn't quit, and one by one the PCs went down.

They were near the climax of a long-running adventure. The villain—truly the best sort, a minor cult cleric who escaped them once by dumb luck and then continually returned to cause them grief, returning ever-stronger each time—was before them, all his avenues of escape lost, and they vowed to “get him his time!” one way or the other. This fellow, one Selyular (but forever just known to this day as “the evil cleric”), had killed their key allies, eluded them several times (fairly), and once even threw them all, sans equipment, into a carrion crawler-infested cave system to die. It was their time now, and they weren’t going to pass it up. But as I said, fate intervened.

After the smoke cleared, we all discussed the situation. They had reached a hard-earned average of 4th or 5th level (this was the 2e era), and no one really wanted to roll up new characters. They wanted to “finish the story, dammit!”

Given their rather thief-like outlook, strong guild affiliation, and general nature, I decided that Olidammara (laughing scoundrel that he was) took pity on these poor mortals and decided to raise them, en masse, for another shot at life. (In those days I didn’t think or worry about what the death god might have said about that…) This was deus ex machina at it’s worst no doubt, but the players ran with it. There were penalties, of course. They lost experience, magic, and returned with but 1 hp each. Worship of Olidammara (spell that backwards!) was near mandatory, and the party cleric immediately went from worshipping Pholtus to worshipping the Laughing Rogue, with an appropriate if hasty change in abilities and spheres.

In the end, they tracked the evil cleric back to the cult’s big hideout, sacked the place, and chased the cleric and his strongest henchman on horseback until in a field just south of Elredd they personally sent him to his maker. The reboot allowed them to play the adventure they wanted, with the characters they wanted, and it ended up increasing the challenge. It seemed a good alternative to simply letting a multi-sided piece of plastic flop the wrong way and ruin it all. Later many creative PC decisions flowed from the reboot as well. It worked.

Recently I’ve seen creative frictions hamper game play among my older co-players, and I’ve also happily had the chance to roll the dice with some new faces, and I’ve also considered the rebooting factor of new groups and fresh blood, and the welcome breath of fresh air they breathe through the hair of even the most jaded gamer.

Used sparingly, RPG reboots (of all kinds) aren’t always a bad thing.

3.5e, the Good, the Mixed, and the Ugly...

As promised, here we go...

Here’s a few observations—nay opinions, and strong ones at that!—about Third Edition:

The Good

1. It’s a unified system.
Everything makes sense and works logically together. Skills are based on a relevant (well usually) ability. Making a skill check is Ability + Skill ranks + roll. Pretty logical. Other systems work together well.

2. Easy “to hit” rolls.
Low-level combat is easy for the DM. Forget those old 1st Edition combat tables! Forget the much-ridiculed THAC0 mechanic. The monster’s AC is the total roll needed to hit, period; if the PC reaches that number, they hit. I’m so glad we moved away from a negative number AC system.

3. Feats.
Now all 10th-level human fighters need not be the same! Personal customization is key. Receiving additional feats and abilities greatly add to the fun of leveling up.

4. Magic-users are fun again.
It’s great to have wizards and sorcerers with more spells. In the old days, you fired off your daily sleep spell at 1st level and then hid behind the fighters. Now wizard-types can mix it up pretty well, without making the fighters feel weak or useless.

Mixed

5. It’s a unified system.
The integrated system lauded in #1 above can also make customization more difficult. Don’t like attacks of opportunity? Throw them out … but look out for the PCs or monsters with the Combat Reflexes feat… Retooling the system just got a bit more difficult.

6. Miniatures use.
Using miniatures has now become almost de rigueur for D&D gamers. The game has a much more tactical feel. I personally like minis, and I like knowing how far I can move in combat (especially having suffered as a player under poor DMs that slow PC movement unfairly while letting their favorite villains move about in combat like the Flash). I do know some players that hate the new, chess-like aspect of combat, however. I’ve often seen crazy, zig-zag movements to avoid attacks of opportunity that don’t jibe with heroic combat at all, so at times I can understand the criticism.

Ugly

7. Long stat blocks.

Years ago I tried the Mythus game system with a bunch of friends. We played through a dungeon of two using the very Gygaxian rules … and then stopped. One of the main reasons, beyond all the new abbreviations and odd rules quirks, was the loooooong stat blocks. (Pick up a copy of Necropolis sometime—which makes the Tomb of Horrors look like a day at the beach, by the way—and look at the BBG’s stats at the end and you’ll see what I mean.)

My first thought when we abandoned the system was, “God, I hope D&D doesn’t ever look like this. Skill-based stat blocks are pure hell.” Well, flash forward 10 years…
I hate the super-long stat blocks for bad guys at CR 8 and higher. Hate ‘em. Scanning a stat block for a super-villain is ridiculous—what does he do next? I understand providing all the spells for a 20th-level wizard/fighter, for instance, but do we really care if he has a flare spell? Would he really use that spell? Ditto for listing many of the prerequisite feats. It just doesn’t seem necessary.

It appears this problem is being adjusted in 4e. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

8. Advancing monsters.
I’ve heard differing views on this one, so I’ll chalk it up to personal taste. I’m not a math guy. I have a very logical brain but my SAT scores were fairly lop-sided. So when it comes to computing stat blocks … well, meh.

I think advancing creatures—be it advancing a beast or leveling up a humanoid— is a royal pain. I like having War10 kobolds, etc., to keep the players on their toes (I can see the ad: “Kobolds aren’t just for 1st level anymore!”) but the DMs work just grew big-time. Check out the otyugh-advancing example in the back of the MM. This brings to mind a likely series of events:

1. DM spends a half-hour advancing an otyugh up 10 hit dice.
   
2. The two wizardly PCs dispatch the critter with two simultaneous fireballs.
   
3. The DM, suppressing a sob, leaps out the nearest window.
   

In the 1st or 2nd Edition days, creating a gnoll commander went pretty much like so: increase his HD by 3, give him 3d8 extra hit points, bump up his armor, and give him a magic axe. Done, five minutes!

Now let’s make a gnoll commander, say a Ftr4, in 3rd Edition: first we select the feats, then we compute the skill points and ranks (adjusting for class, synergies, armor, and racial bonuses)… Eech. Yes, if you’re running a home game you could probably leave out his Swim or Rope Use skill values and take some short cuts, but if you are writing for publication or want to be by-the-book, the DM’s job just got a whole lot harder.

9. Fast leveling, slow play.
Level advancement in 3.5e is too fast for my tastes. I agree that is shouldn't take years and years of game play to see PCs level up, but in my experience 3rd Edition PCs level up every other session in the lower levels—first and second level seem to flash by—and it seems that the players barely get used to their PCs before they’re tacking on new feats.

Likewise, gameplay has generally slowed down. Combat at higher levels is painful—for the players and DM, not the PCs and monsters! A dramatic final combat can take hours.

Creating characters on the fly is also a chore. In 1e, an experienced player can create a fully-equipped 10th-level PC in 15 minutes if they aren’t overly fussy about mundane equipment. Creating that same PC in 3e/3.5e probably takes an hour.

10. Third Edition is a powergamer’s dream.
Part of this falls under DM responsibility and control over one’s players, but the new system makes number abuse very tempting. Third edition has made charisma less of a “dump stat” and has balanced out the abilities fairly well, but there are other areas where “clever players” (read: munchkins) can build unbalanced characters via bizarre class combinations—I’ve seen some absurd combos online to be sure—or weapon and feat choices. Spiked chain, anyone?

A recent Wizards column spoke about Power Attack and how the feat was meant to represent a warrior’s ferocious swing in combat but instead led to most players coldly min-maxing their bonuses to get the best “bang for the buck” in combat—some minor abuses are very common.

11. Poor grappling rules.
I guess some things never change!

Detroit (White)rock City

This past Saturday was the Goodman Games’ Castle Whiterock (DCC # 51) release party at Gamer’s Gambit in Fairlawn, New Jersey.

I tromped down into the Gambit “dungeon” to find Adrian Pommier already hard at it—running a table-full of eager adventurers through the caves of Whiterock. (Actually Whiterock has all types of environments, including underwater, but this was mostly a cave level.) As many Gen Con tourney players can no doubt attest, Adrian is a kick-ass DM, and it was great seeing him comfortably run the PCs through their paces. Soon I was offered the sole spare character—a bard*—and despite a raging fever (I had spent much of the week fending off a fierce bug, almost ankheg-sized at that), I got sucked into the action. Play in Whiterock? Sign me up.

Jeff LaSala and his wife Marisa participated, as did Adrian’s wife CJ, and Whiterock co-author Chris Doyle hovered about at the ready, lending aid and handing out copies of the Sinister Secret of Whiterock (DCC # 51.5) as needed. Adrian’s got a great play style, and I found myself forgetting my spinning head and getting pulled into the adventure-in-progress. Our party was fighting its way through a cave level of the mega-dungeon, fighting off giant ants, mountain troglodytes of all types, and hideous demonoid-looking frog spawn. The mountain trogs were an unexpected treat—its not often one gets “on the wrong side” of one’s own monstrous creations and I had never actually encountered them as a player (I understandably DMed all the playtests for The Scaly God). This level had mountain trogs raised a notch, including what might have been the biggest, baddest trog of them all! I won’t spoil the surprise, suffice to say that Adrian’s description of a huge creature with arms like trees sauntering toward us got everyone’s attention. It was a great few hours—the type that pass too fast—and it’s a great dungeon. Get ‘em while they’re available, folks. (Me, I had Mike Ferguson bring me back one from Gen Con—something he probably cursed me for on the plane ride as the boxed set must weight 15 pounds! Thanks Mike!) I congratulate Adrian and Chris on their big, bad dungeon and I hope one day to explore its fabled halls once again.

*I’ve never played a 3rd Edition bard … ever. I don’t have anything against them, but it just never worked out that way. So this was kind of funny. And when I tell my regular players, they’ll find it amusing indeed. Let’s just say the bard was quicker with his rapier than his lute. Call me impulsive.

Halloween Treats

Halloween weekend in my house always includes a few frightening movies, played back-to-back and viewed with friends (beer, coffee, and chips also in abundance). This year, in addition to a few “scary” Three Stooges shorts inserted to break up the gloom, were two offerings I had never seen before: The Descent (2005) and Saw (2004). I often prefer older, classic movies—such as The Omen—so this year I went for the new(ish).

The Descent

This movie involves a group of six women who partake in a yearly adventure-sport outing. Shortly after a white water rafting trip in Scotland, Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) loses her husband and young daughter to a grisly automobile accident. Her strong-willed friend Juno (Natalie Jackson Mendoza) and Beth (Alex Reid) convince her to join the next expedition—a caving excursion in a scarcely populated area of North Carolina.

After arriving and entering the cave system, things begin to go badly wrong. The women are trapped by a cave-in, and Juno admits that, rather than exploring the ‘boring” cave system they had planned to visit, that she purposefully led them to an unmapped, unexplored cave system. The ladies hunt for a way out, struggling with injuries, short supplies, and each other, and just as things can’t apparently get worse they do—something else in the caves is alive and wants to feed on them.



The film worked for me. This is straight-up horror. The film-makers don’t bother with gratuitous topless scenes or silly humor—this is pure horror, like it or not.

The six characters, while not all well defined, are realistic and reflect all stripes from the reckless and headstrong to the meek and over-cautious. All the major food groups of horror are represented: claustrophobia, darkness, fear of heights, painful injury, being trapped, being hunted, and friends you cannot trust. Jump-at-you scares are coupled with rising dread well. My biggest complaints: at times, especially as the action picks up in the last third of the movie, it’s difficult to tell whom is with whom or where people are in the caves; the creatures also could have used a slower revelation, in that once the women become clued in that they may not be alone, the creatures are there in abundance attacking them. The creatures themselves, described as “crawlers” in the credits, were well played and frightening. Watching this film definitely helps put the fright back into visions of RPG explorers wending their way through dark cave systems.

Saw

This film has become a popular franchise, so a I knew it was just a matter of time before I saw it. For the uninitiated: the plot of this first installment finds two men, Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes) and Adam (Leigh Whannell) awaking in a dirty room, chained to the wall. Neither one appears to know the other. They discover cassette tapes in their pockets and, after obtaining a recorder clutched in the palm of a corpse lying between them, play the tapes. They are being held captive by Jigsaw, a serial killer know for placing his victims in devious deathtraps where they must undertake almost unthinkable actions to survive. Following slim clues, they find hacksaws that are too thin to cut the heavy chains that bind them … but perfectly adequate for cutting off their feet. Meanwhile Dr. Gordon is told that he must kill the increasingly untrustworthy Adam by 6-o-clock—or his family will die.


For a series of films known for its gore (the third installment is reputed to be particularly gruesome) I found this film very “blood light” and far more of a mental exercise. This is not to say it doesn’t work—it does. At times the plot gets stretched a bit thin, and the film must be viewed tongue in check, but watched in that light I thought it to be an effective, interesting bit of psychological horror. I was happy to see Danny Glover in the role of an obsessed detective, and Cary Elwes and Leigh Whannel (who also co-wrote the movie) turn in reasonable performances.

I wish everyone a Happy Halloween!