Half the Story

Your job as GM/DM/Referee is to write half the story. The player characters are the other half. If you find yourself writing their bit then YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG*. The GM presents the problems, the players provide the solutions. If their solutions don’t match your expectations you are honour bound by the Great GM Code Article 1 to play them out regardless. 

Now, I realise that this may seem elementary to my three or so regular readers but from my consumption of RPG related social media (here read Twitter in particular) it seems to have been lost somewhere along the way in certain GMing circles. What I’m saying is no matter how much you think it will make the game better, do not railroad the players. Even in secret. They’ll work it out and fun will cease. 

Old School GMs be like...

I like fantasy fiction as much as the next nerd but stories and games are two separate things. A game is played, that’s how you find out what happens, then you have a story. Not the other way round. The player characters must be able to make meaningful choices, even if the choices they make are rubbish ones. Even if it means the game gets a bit shit for a while, even if they all die, even if it short circuits the Really Cool Encounter you had planned. If the players choices don’t matter then you aren’t really playing a game with them, you are subjecting them to your fantasy fiction and trust me, despite what your mum told you, it’s probably not even good.

Now, obviously it’s your game and you can run it however you want. If your players are cool with being railroaded all the time, or even some of the time, then also that’s fine I guess. It’s not my sort of fun but each to their own. The so called agency of the players is important to me, they must be able to make their own choices and for those choices to have meaning.

What that means if you’re a player in my game is that sometimes you might face problems, dilemmas or obstacles that I have no idea how you’re going to surmount. That’s good. Especially as every time I think “The players will probably do X at this point...” they almost universally do not. That element of uncertainty is good for a GM, it is the thing that allows you to actually play the game. When the player characters do something unexpected, play it out. Improvising around PC actions is some of the best fun you can have as the referee. You can make it easier for yourself by having a decent understanding of NPC motivations, so that they react realistically to PC behaviour. Also by having at least a vague idea of what will happen if the PCs do not interact with your hook. The world should carry on. It can often be worked out later (between sessions) what the consequences of the PCs action/inaction and this will be fuelling your prep for the next session. 

One of the great things about RPGs is that they can go anywhere. There is no board. No boundaries. Don’t shackle the game to your preconceived story. Do not limit the possibilities, embrace them.

*This is just my opinion, there is no objective “right way” to play RPGs.

Dark Sun, part two: The Bad Different

Continuing where we left off here...

What’s not quite as good is traditional fantasy game races, given the “our elves are different” treatment. Yes, you get the half giant with it’s bizarre alignment rules (although surely everyone just chucked those out,) and everyone seems to like idea of cannibal halflings but seriously this does my head in. If you’re changing the nature of elves so much that they’re now ultramarathoning, desert tribes who are renowned for stealing shit, why bother calling them elves? It’s retarded. I have heard that the original plan was to get rid of the traditional D&D races but pressure from above forced their inclusion and quite frankly it does feel a bit forced.

Bow down before the awesome power of my novel infused railroad

Then after the first boxed set you get the immediate release of not one but a five novel set, The Prism Pentad, which are immediately deemed canon for the game products. So instead of the great set up we had, now every scenario, setting book and supplement is affected by the events depicted in unrelated game based fiction. This is now the reverse of cool. Pray to your non existent gods, denizens of Athas, for you are now beholden to the greatest evil in RPGs: The Meta Plot. Insidiously they were setting you up for this right out of the box, that ziggurat that one dude was building? Buy five novels to find out what happens next. Spoilers: It spoils everything.

We start to get 2e splat book bloat. Hugely verbose over written treatises with an emphasis on development of the canon of the setting. We know now that paying your writer by the word is not going to produce useful at the table content for your RPG supplements. Drown in useless fluff, oh dear reader, the cool random tables you wanted are either stuffed in an appendix at the back or conspicuously absent. They even mention in the foreword to the Dragon Kings supplement that one of the reasons the material contained within was not included in the original boxed set was because they didn’t want to include spoilers for the novels!

Our Fellowship is Different

The adventures are bad. Instead of an awesome sword & sorcery sandbox (a literal one) we are given a series of railroads tied to the published fiction of the setting. Now I realise that this was the nineties and that was the fashion at the time but also the fashion seemed to be for TSR to go out of business too so I’m not placing too much store in that.

We still have clerics, yes even of Athas we can’t escape them, but instead of gods they worship elemental beings of great power. So, gods then. Just elemental ones. They still grant spells and the power to turn undead like gods in other settings. It’s like with this setting every time they make something cool they snatch it away from you in spite and make you have your same-D&D-setting-but-slightly-different-regardless.

Crossing the magic blasted desert in search of agency

Did I mention that writing is outlawed in most city states? This is good because then the PCs never have to find out about the the god awful back story they shoe horned into this at a later date. You see, you can’t just have ancient history that has been forgotten about or is unexplained. No way, are you crazy?  Every fully realised game setting must have a Silmarilion like prehistory dating all the way back to its very creation. So for Dark Sun we get all this bollocks about the Green Age and the Blue Age, and ancient wizards, and so and so the hobgoblin slayer. Because you can’t just not have hobgoblins. That would be stupid. You have to come up with some ridiculous, contrived scenario about how they were all slain by this super powerful wizard guy. Same for the orcs, and probably the bugbears. It’s insane. If you don’t want bugbears in your setting, you don’t have to have them. It’s ok. The ghost of Gygax will not strike you down. What’s even more certain is you don’t fucking need a half baked mythological construct to explain why they’re not present. They’re just not. Fucking deal with it. There’s loads of cool stuff included in Dark Sun; you really should be emphasising this, rather than the lame stuff you didn’t include. Much less coming up with progressively lamer reasons for why that is the case.

This is all getting a bit negative. And really, Dominic doesn’t like something is not news for anyone. This is a game setting that was railroading you even when you weren’t playing and if there’s one thing we know about RPGs, it’s railroads are bad. Such a shame really because all this annoying stuff about the setting? You can just ignore it. Well, perhaps you can, it’s still driving me mental now.

Dark Sun, part one: Our D&D is Different

Of all the TSR published settings, the one that seems to get the most love is Dark Sun. I find this both interesting and disappointing, a bit like Dark Sun itself. I have previously described it as the biggest false alarm in gaming and used other fairly derogatory terms in reference to it. Whilst I don’t care why the Forgotten Realms is shit or that Greyhawk is so boring, the fact that I consider Dark Sun to ultimately be a failure actually causes me physical pain because of its potential.

Dark Sun could’ve been good. It isn’t though. That makes me sad.

This is how they draw you in

Sword, sandals and sorcery in a post apocalyptic world dominated by near immortal sorcerer-kings just sounds like it’s going to be the best thing in fantasy gaming. We get the scarcity of not just water but metal; all the weapons are of bone, stone or obsidian. It just sounds cool. There’s the additional focus on psionics. D&D has never had good psionics rules but at least they fit thematically here as opposed to feeling tacked on like they do everywhere else. There’s loads of original monsters, specific to the setting and they’re all pretty horrific. This is good stuff.

Magic is bad, it drains the life from the planet with every use. So this scorched, nightmarish landscape? The wizards did it. I love this. The cost of magic is something I constantly bang on about (see just about every post on this blog) and here we are with it literally costing the earth.

Sword, sandals and whatever that weird two pronged thing is

There are no gods. This is a massive departure from D&D settings previously published. It would be hard to get anything done in Dragonlance for instance without one of the pantheon sticking their nose in, banging on about the balance or some shit. True gods means there’s some hope of a higher power intervening to sort all this out. No such luck. Do not trust to hope, it has forsaken these lands...

It is all extremely grim. Slavery is an ever present evil. Most people live in city states, ruled tyrannically by the aforementioned near immortal sorcerer-kings. Their agents enforce that rule in the harshest, most self serving way possible. Injustice and inequality are ordinary facets of daily life but the wilderness is super deadly, so take your pick.

There are ancient ruins all over the place and tribes of escaped slaves and merchant trading houses, and political intrigue galore. This has great adventuring potential for a bunch of rag tag, rebellious individuals on the make in a world gone badly wrong.

There’s tons of cool art by Gerald Brom, so everything looks great too.

However, here endeth The Good Stuff. If you just took these elements and ran with them you have the set up for a great game. This was not to be though. Next time I shall discuss where, in my eyes, it all goes a bit wrong.

Things That Have Worked: Rumour Posts

My Grim North game was run via Google Hangouts and had its own G+ community by which it was managed. This was good for organising the actual sessions as well as posting up the after action reports; who gained what XP and what the share of the loot was etc. 

Yeah, I can meme shit

Also at one point, probably after reading someone else’s blog on the subject (it might have been the Hill Cantons, I don’t really remember,) I started to post a weekly pre game selection of rumours. I have mentioned previously that the game nearly always started in the House of Mercenaries, Sellspears and Blades for Hire with the various paid work available posted to the board marked “Jobs.” In addition to this was the PCs always had the option of doing whatever the fuck they wanted, after all there are no railroads here. 

Do not play here: Stay off the railroad kids

That’s great and everything but information is crucial here. Rumours are a double defo, carved in stone, baby’s eyes, must have for sandbox gaming. Without that information the player characters either have to interrogate the GM or just go along with the adventure du jour, which is fine every once in a while. However, self motivated PCs are gold for a gamesmaster, therefore throwing out as many hooks and tit bits of setting info as possible for them to bite on is elementary to enabling them to be so.

Crucially it adds depth to the environment. If ten foot poles are suddenly banned in the city then that has implications for the average group of dungeon crawling fools. And in Nox Aeterna, poles over six feet in length are indeed banned, player speculation indicated it was Big Carpentry throwing their political weight around.

By posting these rumours to the G+ community a couple of days before the game a few things were achieved that worked in my favour as GM. Discussion via the Internet prior to the week’s session; as a result sometimes the players chatted online about the game before we played, this saved valuable “air time” given we were generally operating over mixed time zones and had roughly three hours to play. It allowed me to drip feed some random bits of setting info in; this was a game with a semi rotating cast of players so not everyone was in every game. By having everyone get the rumours if they read the rumour post it kept them connected to the setting and for those who were interested it was an additional source of setting info. 

Great gaming environment: Not literally

I think this is my favourite: It provides the player characters with a sense that the game world has depth. When the game is on then the player characters are the stars. We were playing Swords & Wizardry White Box so they’re not the X-men but the game is about them. There’s no fucking Elminster of the Grim North. This said, the world still turns. So if the PCs don’t bite on a hook then perhaps they hear about how that turns out on the rumour mill. Or it’s inconsequential fluff that I just came up with on the spot and can’t think of any way to usefully incorporate it at the table so I’m just sticking it out there and maybe you read it, maybe you don’t, maybe it adds to your immersion or maybe it doesn’t. Because let’s face it, not everyone is going to read that stuff or even care, and that’s fine too. Just showing up in the hangout on time, fully clothed, with your dice and character sheet handy is good enough for me.

The Tavern at the End of the Multiverse

This was an idea I had for a drop in or Flailsnails style of online game. The idea being a tavern that exists in every reality, or travels between them at random, and conveniently sits atop a mythic underworld of campaign spanning proportions. A megadungeon that exists simultaneously in every campaign world and none.

So we combine the well used tropes, or dare I say clichés, of starting in a tavern and it having a fucking massive dungeon beneath it to go and adventure in. Also by starting and finishing each session in the tap room we can accommodate a drop in style of play. The cross-reality nature of the place means it is flailsnails compatible.

I didn’t really get that far with developing this but what I did have follows..

It’s called the Purple Sloth Tavern. This is an unsubtle tip of the hat to an old T&T gamebook that partially serves as inspiration for the place.

Josh Kirby, ladies and gentlemen...

The barman is Stanley, an anthropomorphic sloth, he’s a lot quicker than you might imagine and also the source of rumours the party might gather before heading down into the depths.

There’s a market in the courtyard outside that will allow does a fine trade in adventuring equipment and the fencing of looted treasure.

The are stables and everything else you might expect to find in a regular tavern, after all you can spend the night, eat, drink and gamble there if you wish. Carousing is optional but encouraged.

The entrance to the mythic underworld is via the cellar. Because Cool, and also cliché. At least this is the one that everyone knows about and the one that Stanley will give you for free. There are rumours of entrances originating elsewhere in the tavern that lead to various different parts of the dungeon below. However this knowledge is not freely available to starting characters.

The dungeon follows standard old school conventions and has factions and “themed” areas and all that jazz. Or at least in theory it does as I only got as far as drawing a bit of the level one map and adding two or three potential factions for those areas. For although I like this idea as a set up, and while it is more realistic in terms of what sort of game I can actually play given time constraints and availability, drawing a huge, fuck off map and/or keying it is not an exciting prospect for me. 

Huge fuck off map by Dyson Logos

There are tricks and so forth available for faster megadungeon creation than the labour intensive “just get on with it” method but in a spectacular display of nose cutting to spite face, my sense of stubborn I-will-create-my-own-material-for-my-games-whether-it’s-achievable-or-not fails to permit such short cuts.

A seed for a style of play that I should probably do more with but in all likelihood will not.

Clerical Errors

I don’t hate clerics, I just think they’re limited as an archetype. Fighter, Magic User and Thief are much broader in their application, Rogue even more so (to use the new parlance,) but the existence of the D&D cleric in your setting implies quite a lot about it that the other classes do not. So, in the right setting the cleric is great. However; if we accept that I like to run games that generally follow either a low fantasy or sword & sorcery theme then clerics, with their magic powers direct from the gods, do not appear thematically appropriate.

Aleea, refusing to accept she is not thematically appropriate 

However the clerics access to healing magic and the ability to turn undead is baked into the game. A low level D&D party’s chances of survival are greatly increased by the presence of the cleric to hold off the dreaded level draining wights and produce cure light wounds spells, especially as those “light wounds” are often near fatal. Even if we examine TSR’s ultimate our D&D is different world, Dark Sun, they’re still plugging away with the cleric even though “there are no True Gods of Athas” is one of the stated tenets of the setting. I could digress about how Dark Sun is the biggest false alarm in gaming but staying on the cleric they are now the worshippers of elemental beings (these are not GODS though, no freaking way) who provide them with spells and the power to turn the undead.

The slightly maligned AD&D 2edition rules allowed for a fair bit of variance in the class with the Priests of Specific Mythos. This could end up being a lot of work though as you tailored the class to fit each God from your setting but also doesn’t solve the problem if your approach is one where direct godly involvement in the PCs’ lives is limited.

Basically, my sister’s first D&D character 

And so what do I do with this big chunk of the rules, if the religious nature of the class does not fit my gaming aesthetic? Be less pretentious is certainly a valid answer. 

However if you are aware of Crypts and Things, Newt Newport has a tasty little answer for sword & sorcery games. In those rules, based on Swords & Wizardry with tweaks from Akratic Wizardry, the cleric and magic user are combined into a Magician class. The Magician has access to spells from a combined magic user and cleric list divided into white, grey and black magic. White magic contains your healing spells and so forth, grey has illusion and similar, Black is destructive or morally dubious. This is nice and I really like it. In fact I really Crypts and Things in its entirety and I recommend you check it out if you have not done so.

My solution to clerical issues in my Grim North setting was to reskin them. I didn’t want any sort of organised spellcasters existing outside of small cults and cabals. A powerful series of Churches with magic at their disposal didn’t suit the ideas I had for religion. I declared clerics were now “mystics.” Their powers were virtually the same but were psychic in origin rather than bestowed by the gods. We were playing S&W White Box and the only real mechanical difference I made was to remove the ability to turn undead and instead advance the spell progression so that they had a spell at 1st level. I also reskinned the spell names so they seemed more like psychic powers than clerical spells. I mean I’m not sure what the overall effect on the game this tinkering had but it certainly made me feel better about the whole thing. 

Also Paul C, better known these days as The Wizard of Macke Town, wrote this up into a tidy little pdf for Mystic players to refer to, available here.

On The Isle of Dread

The Isle of Dread is my favourite old D&D module. This isn’t a review, it’s a self indulgent nostalgia post. My copy of the Isle of Dread arrived one Christmas along with the D&D Expert set. You see I was getting quite good at D&D by this point and Basic no longer applied. I was definitely more of an expert. If you weere a child of Mentzer Basic like me then there was no module included in your Red Box, just an intro adventure in the DM’s book. However once I had the Expert Set I owned an honest to god real module, and it was good too.

Let me tell you of the days of high adventure... and dinosaurs

If you’re not familiar with the Ise of Dread it’s a hex crawl set on what amounts to Skull Island from the King Kong films complete with pirates, lost civilisations and dinosaurs. This type of pulpy, sword and sorcery adventure is exactly what I want from my D&D games. The only thing really missing from this is a gargantuan ape of some kind.

I ran this in 2017 in the bar at Dragonmeet for about six hours. I could’ve gone way longer but people had trains to catch. I did tease the presence of a huge albino ape but the PCs never actually met one. Instead they befriended the cat people, fought with the spider possessed locals (in a slight change from the original text I made the Aranea fist sized, mind controlling spiders that rode their human slaves as mounts), were on the receiving end of a triceratops rampage and loads more.

What this module delivers is encounter tables and adventure locations. Some are simple lairs but there’s a proper dungeon on Taboo Island too. Exploring the Isle is enough fun on its own but it’s possible to add whatever you like to this framework, develop the various factions, go pulp adventure crazy. I mean the cover to my copy (the orange one) has a Viking, a mongol warrior and a wizard fighting a T-Rex. That’s some good D&D right there. Throw a few five room dungeons in there and you’ve got the makings of a short campaign.

This is, for me, where D&D games shine. Play styles are exactly that and you can do anything with almost any game and it still be a good time. Pulp sword and sorcery is retro D&D all day for me though.

Expressing the Setting Through Play

I have this tendency to approach RPGs in a top down fashion. I generally decide on an aesthetic for a setting and then make lists of elements to include that match that setting, consider religion, cultures, ancient history, that sort of thing. Now I’m not talking about developing any of this things to any particular extent. I do not have for example reams of notes on any of this material but probably about enough to fit on the average blog post or sheet of A4 paper.

Then generally what happens is I will run games in this setting that do not really relate to any of the material I originally planned. For example if the woods are full of ruins from an ancient civilisation now overrun with beastmen of sorcerous origin and the players spend six sessions in the woods and over fifty in the city then they aren’t going to get the experience you had originally planned (and so I hang my head in a modicum of shame.)

Being beastman positive can only help the setting

I wholeheartedly accept that this is often a function of prep meets play, or no plan survives contact with the enemy... I mean players. However, for example if in my Grim North game there are ancient cultures that are the source of nearly all modern magical learning and I have magic user player characters that do not even know the names of these cultures then I have probably failed them in some way as a GM. Not to any great extent but nonetheless I at least should be doing better. After all, I don’t really expect that the players will be as interested in the nature of the GM’s carefully crafted basis for a game as they are in its gleeful destruction (I jest of course, I do not actually view the players in my games as the enemy, or as anarchic toddlers who only wish to destroy what I have painstakingly built.) However setting information can enrich play for those who are interested. If you want your players to be self motivated sand box protagonists, and this is to be encouraged (Dragonlance be damned,) then they need a flow of information on which to act.

Just say No: Metaplot and railroad ahoy.

That flow coming from rumours is good but the discovery of previously unknown setting elements provides hooks that tie the PCs closer to the game and allow them to interact better with what is out there. They need to know what’s on the table. Information dump is a poor way to communicate this. Show, don’t tell as the old RPG axiom dictates.

Therefore I should perhaps express my setting through the adventures that the players discover right from the off. Instead of the meta lists of setting elements to incorporate at a later date, these should immediately be turned into things the PCs can encounter. For example I like the idea of dinosaur men in the wilderness so I should write a big dinosaur men encounter. Maybe stick it in a prominent place on the encounter tables. Or have them be the antagonists in a dungeon or mystery or whatever adventure I’m planning for the next session. I should be getting my setting aesthetic front and centre through the challenges the PCs face. I mean I don’t want to beat them over the head with it but to hark back to my previous example, if they want to learn resurrection magic and they don’t know that the majority of necromantic wizardry originates with the ancient death magicians of accursed Xidia then they’re off to a bad start. However if they’ve bashed up a dungeon of Xidian origin and encounter all sorts of necromantic shenanigans then at least they know where to begin.

This way hopefully I’m better translating the feel I had for the setting to the players through their actual adventuring experiences than by just lecturing them about it in some GM soliloquy that sounds boring to me even before I’ve delivered it. Never mind having to sit through it as a player.

I guess the TL:DR version for me is, setting wise: top down creation, bottom up expression.

Appendix N: Dragon Warriors, part four

The continuation of my Dragon Warriors inspirational media posts. I recommend starting at the beginning.

Black Death

This film, brought to my attention by Dave Morris blog, is referred to only partly tongue in cheek as the Dragon Warriors movie. It has a suitably dark and downbeat feel to it. Pagans in the fens, the ruthless and powerful church, the plague, masses of associated suspicion and superstition, dirt, grim battles and the walking spoiler Sean Bean stars so no one is expecting a happy ending here.

Some additional media of note:

Fictoplasm is generally a good listen regardless but the two episodes below relate directly to this blog series:

Lyonesse (Click here) with Dave Morris and Tim Harford

The Chronicles of Prydain (Click here) with Tim Harford

The Grognard Files, another recommended podcast, this time discussing..

Robin of Sherwood (Click this bit), with a promised part two to follow.

And of course saving the most relevant for the Dragon Warriors curious until last: Dave Morris’ blog posts with the label “Legend” (and click) Find here discussions of the nature of magic and of faeries, some play reports from his games, Legend scenarios and loads more great stuff.

Appendix N: Dragon Warriors, part three

Three more media offerings for that authentic Legend feel.

Company of Liars by Karen Maitland

Excellent tale of ordinary folk amongst the plague. No fixation upon the armed gentry here. Eerie and character driven. Negative points for clumsy use of anagrams though.

No knights in shining armour here

The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell

Saxons and Danes for your Elleslandic games. The TV series as useful as the books if you can get over the shapes of the Saxon shields. The beliefs of the characters are what makes this important to me. Belief in a curse or the words of an oracle or sorcerer seems to change reality or the perception of it. The importance of the church is prominent here too. Plus there’s decent battles and drama and so forth.

Getting your shield wall on

Excalibur

John Boorman’s very atmospheric film about the eponymous blade. We get a spot on depiction of the costs of sorcery here. Merlin pays a heavy price for the magics he employs in the service of the family Pendragon.

Being a knight, not all it’s cracked up to be.

Appendix N: Dragon Warriors, part two

Continuing my discussion of useful media as it relates to Dragon Warriors RPG, part one located... well, these posts are sequential so, it’s the one before this..

The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke

Clarke’s short stories set in the same world as her more successful novel Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel. These really capture the whimsically dangerous nature of faeries. Also it’s the protagonists’ understanding of the rules of these interactions that allows them victories as opposed to any superior force of arms or similar.

The illustrations aren’t half bad either

The Time Travellers Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer

Essential non fiction. What we get here is a book about the day to day life of medieval folk from a qualified historical perspective. It’s emminently readable with none of the dryness associated with scholastic history books.

Also check out the reviews. People love this book.

The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell

Interesting take on the Arthurian myth. The depiction of Merlin is particularly good. No one can be sure if his magic is real or not. Or is it that his trickery, wisdom and secret knowledge are a kind of magic in themselves?

More helmets should have cool intrinsic war masks

Appendix N: Dragon Warriors, part one

At the back of the original Dungeon Masters Guide amongst the tables for random harlot encounters and suchlike was the much discussed Appendix N. This being the literary antecendents of the Dungeons & Dragons game. For the modern reader/consumer of multi media I have tried to compile a short list of useful media for the running of Dragon Warriors type games based in Legend or a reasonable facsimile there of. These are less influences on the game as it was created but more influential in how a modern GM might run Legend, as I see it at least. We’re generally talking theme and atmosphere here, these are the things that inspire in me in the mood appropriate for DW. This is in four parts because of image size and tiny editing windows on blogger..

Robin of Sherwood

The classic British TV series. This is the definitive Robin Hood for me. It still holds up well to these eyes. There is magic here but it’s low key, perhaps due to special effects limitations. However it is all the more creepy because of it. The whole thing drips atmosphere. Excellent.

Nothing is forgotten. Nothing is ever forgotten.

The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander

Cracking stuff based in Welsh myth. Fantastic but not overly so. These are children’s books, so not as grim as we might like for a Legend game. However the Cauldron Born and the Huntsmen of Annuvin are perfect. Like a Mabinogion in easily digestible form.

Straight outta Jewelspider 

Lyonesse by Jack Vance

Particularly his handling of fairies. Depicted as capricious and callous, albeit a bit rapey in places and thoroughly whimsical throughout. The adventures of Dhrun and Madouc are all about what we want here. The nature of wizards is very interesting too.

A classic 

Dreamlands D&D

Amongst grown up game players there is often great nostalgia for a time when we used to ride our bikes around to our friends’ houses and play RPGs all day and night. As adults this type of gaming is often lost to us as so called responsibilities eat up so much of our time. As a result, scheduling regular RPG sessions with the same group can be challenging. In the extreme.

This being the case, I’m always interested in framing devices for games that allow drop in and out play such as the famous West Marches or  the Flailsnails model. My own Grim North game was by, I hesitate to say design... means of fortunate accident known to function this way. New options are always welcome in this regard, who knows when they may come in handy.

Over the winter I had chance to read Ben L’s excellent zine Through Ultan’s Door which depicts a dungeon in his campaign world derived from HP Lovecraft’s Dreamlands. Up until this point I was not familiar with those works. Upon reading Ben’s zine I immediately consumed “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” and was captivated.

The Dreamlands: Legit D&D as fuck

For I had found, probably a hundred years after everyone else, a perfect framing device for drop in D&D (or the other role playing game of your preference.) As dreamers the PCs need only to breach the wall of sleep in order to partake in fantastic adventures that are limited by only the imagination. Everyone knows that dreams are flighty and inconsistent, fantastic and often bizarre. PCs enteringvthe lands of dreams could easily move from one fantastic episode to the next withoutt there being any break in the verisimilitude of the campaign. If Dave and Andy can’t make it this week because they’ve got parents night or karate class, it is easily explained by their PCs fading back to the waking world and they can slot back into whatever is going on once they return to the land of dreams.

Judge this by its cover and try and withhold your joy...

I feel like I could go on at length about this, and I might, but I see the land of dreams as a Matrix like environment. Not every dreamer has enough control over their dream state to be an adventurer. Some dream mundane dreams of carpentry and scribe work. Others dream themselves fantastic heroes or terrible villains. Creatures from nightmare, self aware dream beings, gods and devils abound. Essentially anything goes as you pass from one dream realm to another. Want to run a series of unrelated modules? That’s fine. Slumbering Ursine Dunes to Deep Carbon Observatory to the Isle of Dread is no drama. Want to have some sort of over arching meta plot for the PCs to thwart? Well, I urge that you don’t, we prefer the emergent stories we get from playing old school rogueish games around these parts but if that’s your thing then have at it.

This has got legs in my opinion... Remind me to tell you about the Tavern at the End of the Multiverse some time too.

Fake Authentic Medievalism

My name is Dom, and I’m a fake authentic medievalist. I like to present the world of Legend as an authentic late Dark/early Middle Ages setting for my games. I want the setting to feel real; to have a gritty, downbeat, darkness to it but I’m not going to die in a ditch over historical authenticity. After all this is a fantasy RPG we’re talking about. It’s a game not a simulation. It has to be fun, otherwise what is the point?

That balance between realism and fantasy, natural and supernatural is important. Clearly I’m not the first to discuss this, and like much of what I have written about RPGs, it is a matter of taste. My taste tends to run to the low magic, low fantasy, end of the spectrum predominantly. I like Sword and Sorcery a lot though, and Superheroes, and ER Burroughs like Sword and Planet. I’m not as keen on whatever D&D 5E is, high fantasy I guess.

What we’re saying in the tl:dr version is that to having the games fantastic elements actually feel fantastic then the majority of things should be mundane. Otherwise if everything is fantastic, then nothing is and we’re now firmly in Sword & Planet/5E territory. However dwelling too much on the mundane is the reverse of fun. So in my Legend games I tend to use a few simple things to try and suggest an authentic medieval reality without going overboard.

Fantasy? Ours goes up to eleven.

So, as Gary once said “blah blah blah STRICT TIME RECORDS etc.” As luck would have it Dragon Warriors furnishes us with a very serviceable calendar for Legend. The names of the months feel real and the days of the week track to our own so they are easy to remember. This is a good GM tool, if a basic one. By keeping track of time in the campaign in helps to create the verisimilitude I’m after and ground it in the days, months and seasons of the calendar. 

Another dull thing we like is encumbrance. Encumbrance in Dragon Warriors is based on the number of weapon sized items you can carry based on your strength stat. The average number is 10 items and armour is handled separately according to your Profession. So no fiddly weights in pounds, or even worse in “coins” (Basic D&D, go and stand in the corner in shame...)

Social order is important. This is stressed through NPC interactions. PCs will behave like player-characters but no one else will. Peasants will not talk back to lords. They’d regret it probably for the rest of their lives. PCs used to other play styles will not generally observe these conventions as a matter of course. Showing tat he than telling is best but sometimes gentle reminders are the order of the day.

Social inequality in action. Noble: Sweet chair. Peasants: Fabletics leggings. 

The church is important. People’s beliefs in religion are extremely literal, and this is to be expected in world that actually trolls exist, even if you might go your whole life and never actually see one. Therefore the church has a lot of power, resulting in both money and political clout. The main populist religion of Legend is the True Faith (although they’d argue that in the South or in Krarth for example) which is analogous to the Catholic Church of the The Middle Ages. There are even Crusades, which is nice. Well, not for everyone obviously.

Then we get to magic. Magic is definitely real in Legend. It should actually feel magical though and that’s the tricky part. I think the first port of call is the lack of demi-human player characters. Elves, dwarves and hobbits are not mundane. There is enough variety in common or garden humanity for your character differentiation without resorting to Tolkien pastiche. Unless of course you’re just after cool racial bonuses, in which case you’re making me get sad.

When I started my current Dragon Warriors campaign I did not allow the players to choose the magic using professions. I wanted to keep that stuff out of their hands as much as possible. Any magic system for a game is going to be reductive in how magic is seen by the players. This is one thing we don’t want to feel mundane, so it should be rare. It should also come at a cost. By this I don’t mean in terms of magic points or whatever but that when mortal man messes with the supernatural there should always be consequences. Magic is powerful but it’s a devil’s bargain. Overt displays of magical power should be avoided, so no casting of fireballs or bolts of lightning then. Keep it mysterious. Seriously, it’s more fun.