Ste’s Game

Ste was the last of us to get his own D&D. He’d played in my first D&D game, where he was a halfling with a dire wolf as a pet, when I started running Red Box Basic but it wasn’t until much later that he got his own rule box and started running games.

This surprised us all. Ste was quite a passive player, generally going along with what others wanted to do and taking an easygoing attitude towards our games. I suspected he wasn’t really that into the whole thing but it’s what his friends did, so he played along. However when Ste’s parents bought him the rules for Christmas he went all in. Ste had two brothers, two sisters, lots of cousins and lived in a large house with lots of space. There were always other kids at his house. Loads of them. Ste began to run D&D for them and he did it a lot. Ste’s game was always on. 

Ste was a very permissive DM. He was often running for friends who usually ran games for him, so he took a position very much as referee. He assumed his players knew more about the rules than he did and he simply approved or not the inclusion of ideas they game up with. Mostly he approved. He was running the game every single day, open table style, characters would advance loads and it became a battle to keep up with each other. 

His game got extremely high powered very quickly as a result. We often played just one on one or two players, often at lunchtimes at school and frequently with no dice. We were into the domain game before long and this rapidly turned PvP as we competed to control the map of the Known World in the Expert set. 

In a territorial masterstroke Jit (not his real name; it was short for Michael McJitland, also not his real name) had built his castle within the walls of the town of Threshold and as a result come to control that iconic settlement. This was much to the annoyance of all the other players. Until my character, Gurak Bloodbath the Fourth (I was eleven years old) destroyed the town with my flight of brown dragons. However Jit rebuilt the town with his vast monetary and supernatural resources, renaming it Stronghold; now with added anti-dragon defences. We all thought this was a genius move and one we were extremely envious of. 

Meanwhile Ste’s younger brother Matty and his friend Walty stopped engaging with the rest of the group and began adventuring exclusively together. We didn’t know what they were up to but we suspected they were seeking Paths to Immortality and probably seeking to destroy all other players in the process. 

Matty’s character was a ridiculously powerful magic user and one of my strongest allies, so his loss was a great blow to me personally. I didn’t know this at the time but he and Walty were now secretly working against me, and to be fair everyone else, but specifically me because I had access to knowledge that they did not. They were envious and fearful of me because of my esoteric library. While everyone else was still operating at a Basic level, I had surpassed this: I had AD&D.

AD&D gave me a raft of options not available in the basic game. Spells, items and cherry picked rules that Ste allowed me to use to my advantage. 

The game continued in this vein, Matty and Walty betrayed me: murdered my dragons and razed my stronghold to the ground. Jit upped the ante by somehow permanently transforming his body into the form of Demogorgon. I stayed up all night on several occasions; like Batman plotting to exploit the weaknesses of each member of the Justice League in turn. 

You see, despite total immersion in the game, we were all slowly coming to the conclusion that we missed being able to sit around the same table and play together. So when I finally pulled off my grand plan and slew all the other characters as inventively as I could, no one was that bothered about after the initial shock. The very next week we all went to Ste’s house, rolled up new characters and set off adventuring together again. 

The Raid on the Temple of the Molybdenum God

Lovely chunk of Molybdenum 

Following on from their exploits with Black Market Thyme/Time the PCs undertook a mission to steal the bones of the Prophet of the Molybdenum God from his resting place in the aforementioned God’s temple. Carkus Swole, lay priest of the Scions of Mineralism, hopes they can steal the molybdenum-ised bones of the prophet and replace them with some iron bones of dubious origin. 

Carrying out reconnaissance during a guided tour of the temple. They visit the Alloyed and Unalloyed chapels but they don’t really come up with a plan. They do observe that the sarcophagus in which the prophet is entombed is guarded by the Molybdenum Guard. Four of the elite templars stand watch in 12 hour shifts. This is more security than our protagonists anticipated. 

They retire to the local pub to sink a few ales and divise a suitable scheme. However on their way to the Dread Elephant tavern they come across local thieves crew the Van Cortland Blades about to burn down the pub which it transpires is full of cultists from the Society of the Magenta Joy. 

The player characters decide to prevent the Aron and engage the thieves in hand to hand combat. Although ultimately victorious, a flaming barrel of oil rolls down the hill towards the Temple of the Molybdenum God. Taking advantage of the chaos the PCs charge in. They use drugs found in the house party escapade to incapacitate the Molybdenum Guard but as the they remove the mineralised bones of the prophet they are faced with a horror of the ancient world, a molybdenum elemental. 

Fleeing into the sewers they discover it is not easily shaken. However they all pile through their pocket door into the temporal dead end beyond. Having failed to bring suitable offerings to Pharosocles the self proclaimed king of that realm they are suitably chastised. Whilst they attempt to wait out the molybdenum elemental, they notice the creepers that bind the door that contains some irate Temporal Hounds seem to have weakened. However they escape back to the Aecret Shack of Mercenaries Sellspears and Blades for Hire in order to receive part payment from Carkus Swole. The representative of the rival mineral sect is not totally happy with the overt way on which the bones were stolen. Surely there will be consequences. 

Appendix Grim: The Warriors

 

Gygax’s Appendix N in the 1e DMG listed the inspirational material that informed his games of Dungeons & Dragons. Of course the Appendix Grim relates only to The Grim North. 

The Warriors, Walter Hill’s 1979 cult classic, is a huge influence on the Grim North. The whole concept of stylised, thematic street gangs I stole, whole cloth, and inserted into the setting. 

I didn’t want to have a Thieves Guild. It’s too lazy, straight out of the rule book lazy. Also stolen from Lankhmar and lampooned in Ankh Morpork. So, no. We’ve done that to death thanks. 

If for some bizarre reason, like you’re some sort of younger person, you haven’t seen The Warriors; it’s an old, old film about street gangs in New York based on the novel of the same name by Sol Yurick; which in turn is based on Anabasis by Xenophon, detailing the Long March back from Cunaxa to Greece by Hellenic mercenaries involved in a civil war in the Persian Empire. If you’ve listened to enough 90’s hip hop and hardcore and then watch The Warriors then stand by for the origin of a lot of your favourite sampled dialogue. 

This plot is one of the greatest premises for a role-playing game ever. The Anabasis version has PCs as foreign mercenaries in a war of succession between brothers when their employer-prince is killed. Fearing the PCs’ band could be used against them further, the victorious faction invites their leaders to a banquet and promptly murders them all. Faced with annihilation in a hostile empire thousands of miles from home, the PCs must get back to friendly environs with every hand turned against them. Sweet. Roll initiative, or whatever.

In The Warriors; ten representatives of every major street gang in the city are invited to a big meeting in Brooklyn under a truce. No one goes armed and non-aggression is guaranteed. Cyrus is leader of the largest gang in the city, the Gramercy Riffs, and it is his grand plan to unite all the gangs and control the streets of the city. All the gangs have to do is give up their petty rivalries and embrace the big picture. It’s a good speech, I dig it. Everyone seems into it until a single shot rings out from the crowd. Cyrus is killed and the gathering is raided by the cops. The Warriors leader, Cleon, is blamed for the murder and slain by the Riffs in retribution. The rest of the Warriors flee the police and start to make their way home; unaware that every gang in the city is out to get them for killing Cyrus. 

I’ve run this exact scenario as an online convention game for BurritoCon during the pandemic. Warriors of the Grim North is a Dungeon Crawl Classics funnel that pretty much follows the plot of the film. Except the gangs and districts are Grim versions of their cinematic counterparts. The Dockside Boys in their sailor suits, the Grimball Furies with their painted faces and obsession with the eponymous game, the Fancy Lads in their affected finery and invites to exclusive parties. I also threw in some Grim North classics like the girl with no eyes, the Childcatcher (although this is more of a chitty-chitty bang-bang classic) and the psychopathic eight year olds who tend the bar at the Secret Shack of Mercenaries, Sellspears and Blades for Hire. It worked pretty well and I’d run it again if I had occasion to attend any form of convention in the future. 

A common theme that I expect to establish itself as I, at some point, get round to expanding on the Appendix Grim is that many of the things I feel influenced the Grim North is that the setting, which for a city based game is predominantly a city, and the interaction with that setting is so significant that the setting/city itself is effectively a character in the drama. So it is with the Warriors. The late night trains, the elevated stations, the parks, the tunnels, the subway, the architecture and even the street corners are all features the Warriors must negotiate. New York itself is both ally and antagonist to them as they cross its grimy territory in one fateful night to make it back to Coney Island.

A further point to all this is that as ridiculous as the Warriors is; there’s nothing realistic about the gang culture presented in this film, except maybe the poverty and disaffection, it’s played straight by everyone involved. So for a game that’s not entirely serious, it has wizards for instance, this is important to bear in mind. 

The Thieves Crews of the Grim North take their cues from The Warriors. Stylised and differentiated by quirks of attire as much as geography, none the less they are lethal if crossed and essentially they’re criminals. You probably shouldn’t be associating with them. 

However, the Grim North does not deal in absolutes*, so other organised criminal network structures can and do feature. The Naar’s gang in the Terrace District for instance or the Spirals Residents Association in the district of the same name. 

*with one exception: Absolutely no elves. No fucking exceptions there. 

Recently in the Grim North

I use the word recently with some narrative ambiguity.  However, player characters have engaged with the setting. A bonus then. Creating material for games that doesn’t get used is a sad affair. You must play to get the most from the hobby of RPG.

An out of control house party has been shut down, this has probably earned the enmity of everyone involved. It was the Von Eirik mansion and those patricians are just… well, they’re not like you and I. Amongst the invitees were The Cult of the Supreme and Baleful Eye;  and some dealers in Prophecy Fudge, the latest narcotic craze to sweep the city. It gives visions of many potential futures but one of the downsides maybe that there’s a strong chance it’s made from the excrement of prophecy moth larvae. These are hard to keep; given they are analogous to the old DnD carrion crawler; and the second stage of their lifecycle is insanity inducing and deadly in the extreme. Plus the host turned out to be the patron’s older brother, so family drama. 

Simultaneously, or perhaps at the same time, two of the PCs involved played a divergent time stream diversion where they heisted a trade for the last owlbear egg. Owlbears obviously being ridiculous (although as I child I did indeed own a set of the plastic chinasaurs that Gary based some of his monsters on, no idea how I came by them.) This created an interesting situation for me. I asked the two players that turned up that night if they wanted to continue the mansion thing without the others or do something else. They opted for something else and the divergent time stream thing kicked in. That meant some stuff I was debating including in the setting, such as the Achronous, the Lords of Synchronicity and their Time Skirmish; was now in play. Unleash the Temporal Hounds, I say (stats as Hellhound but their breath weapon is pure time, aging effects forthwith.)

The hunt for ghost snake liver took the PCs into the Underworld beneath the city and there several of them met their end. Reaching into a corrosive pool to recover a submerged sword and falling from a medium height while trying to negotiate vertical tunnels. So nothing too extravagant. They encountered more cultists (this is the Grim North, minority religious practices are rife,) albino sewer alligators, cannibal mole men and the Ghost snake itself. I’m not sure cannibal is a term I can really apply to the mole men, after all their humanity is somewhat diminished. Sentientivore is a clumsy and non-evocative alternative. 

Then there’s the whole Black Market Thyme/Time Caper. Previously in the Grim North a group of PCs were hired by the Herb Cartel to smuggle some

fresh herbs into the city. Herbs are valuable here, this is a setting of permanent winter so getting plant based stuff in from the outside is always going to be lucrative. The PCs double crossed the Herb Cartel leading to them burning down the old House of Mercenaries, Sellspears and Blades for Hire and the setting up of the new Secret Shack of Mercenaries, etc etc. So the PCs headed out of the city with a hand cart and some manure, intending to smuggle a barrel of black market thyme back into town. The barrel had been stolen by some of the Achronous, those who would live unaffected by the passage of time, resulting in their deaths and the acquisition of a pocket door. The door lead to a temporal dead end, a branch of the time steam left to go fallow; effectively a small extra-temporal realm. Occupied by an impossibly old Achronous, the PCs used the the realm to smuggle a barrel of ambiguous contents ( perhaps it was Thyme, perhaps it was Time) back into the city and deliver it to their employer. As he left they caught a glance of the hourglass pendant of the Achronous concealed beneath his beard. 

Why I Prefer the DIY Approach

 I write my own adventures. Not for you to read and play, you understand, but for me to run at my table. When I say adventures I’m giving myself a lot a of undue credit. I have always preferred the term scenario in any case but I feel that it is more appropriate to what I do. Write some notes, draw or appropriate a map, roll on some random tables. We’re done. 

I see the advantage of buying and running prepared materials. Especially when I observe people who play a lot of different systems or game with a high frequency. There’s only so much cognitive space available for RPGs in one’s life. Using prepare material takes frees up some of that space for learning new rule systems or maintaining three weekly campaigns or whatever we’re trying to achieve. Or perhaps most of that space is already  taken up with work, social activities, family, stress factors etc. 

It doesn’t really occur to me to do this however. I do every so often strive to include more of other people’s materials in my games. Added diversity of ideas and making other people do the work for you so you can get on with the business of playing seem like wins to me. I don’t really enjoy reading rpg materials though. Scenario and setting creation is part of my hobby too. I like that element of the game in the same way that I don’t collect games for their own sake as some of my friends do. There are loads of ways to do RPGs as a hobby and none of them are objectively wrong.

Following someone else’s scenario seems limiting to me. When do engage in it I tend to use the framework of the writing as an adventure seed and go my own way with it. I suspect this is what most people do also but when I look back at times I’ve run published material it rarely looks even remotely like it does on the page.

Presentation matters too. Two column wall of text style just isn’t for me. I realise that some adventures are written with the intention of being reading material rather than to be run but I am not that demographic. If we get something like Wilderlands of High Fantasy with its brief hex descriptions; or something in the Necrotic Gnome house, style with its bullet points and  bold text for primary information, then we’re off to a good start.

Ultimately, it’s the sitting down with graph paper, pens and pencils and dice; these days it’s often my iPad, or notes I sketch during play. I might moan about GM prep but it’s an essential creative outlet for me. That’s why I’m DIY.

The Perils of Sunday Evening Games

Currently I run for two hours between 8pm and 10pm on a Sunday evening. This is the time slot which I am most consistently available. It has its quirks. Both the players and I are often tired from the weekend or have to be up early on Monday morning. The relatively short sessions reflect this and the requirement to play via video chat. What this means for the game is that deep character immersion and ultra serious gameplay probably isn’t achievable. Hence, I have gravitated back towards the Grim North. 

An open table style set up coupled with the dark whimsy of the setting seems to work well for a group of internet friends with a couple of hours to kill (some molemen hopefully) at the terminus of their weekend. 

It does mean that I have shelved my more pretentious attempts at Otherworld immersion. This isn’t such a bad thing. There is high potential to disappear up your own arse in this hobby, if you take it too seriously too much of the time. 

The Grim North is not that game. The Grim North does not take itself too seriously. It could use some tweaks here and there though. One area I’m constantly blocked about is tying new characters into the setting at the generation phase. Something like the Warhammer careers system would probably do the job here, albeit adapted to Swords and Wizardry. So setting appropriate subclasses or the failed careers for Electric Bastionland. It’s the sort of work that when I finally complete it, will pay continual dividends. I never regret working on random tables for the setting. For instance on this week I had occasion to roll on my Random Thieves Crew Activities table which added just the right amount of chaos to the session and I was all pleased with myself like I’d done something impressive rather than just put numbers next to unimaginative, gibberish phrases and roll a die. 

Random Thieves Crew Activities

1. Me and my crew were out breaking windows…
2. Looking furtive while transporting a decent amount of narcotics
3. Casing a joint for a robbery
4. Jumping someone into the gang
5. Shaking down an innocent shop owner for protection money
6. Looking for drunks to roll
7. Gearing up for a street fight
8. On their way to burn a tavern down 
9. About to perform a rope access burglary
10. Bored and spoiling for a fight
11. Getting wasted
12. Pursuing a rival gang member on the wrong patch
13. Leaving a venue not normally associated with Thieves Crew activity such as yoga or crocheting 
14. On the run from the Law having just heisted some fresh produce
15. Acting as protection for a clandestine Patrician
16. Cart jacking
17. Tagging interesting architecture 
18. Picking pockets for practice
19. Burgling somewhere 
20. Helping an old lady cross the street

More GM Prep but different

This is the second post of my rather scruffy GM prep. It’s in note form and represents a Dungeon Crawl Classics funnel designed to kick off a Crawljammer style campaign. Crawjammer being an awesome Spelljammer style zine for DCC. It should really be fleshed out into its own setting, with a boxed set and everything. Instead you can get it here.

The pitch for Crashed Black Ziggurat from Outer Space is  a space-going Chaos temple collides with a Crawljammer craft filled with space vikings and the whole thing crashes into your pseudo-medieval world. It’s leaking raw chaos into the environment and the smart money is it’s going to blow up, destroying everything. Your band of level-0 nobodies investigate the crash site in the hope of escaping their impending doom. 

I realise of course that this is a step pyramid, not a ziggurat but the latter makes for a snappier title…

The point of this of course is to have the player’s 0-level peasants get come face to face with space vikings, chaos spawn, a weird alien squid, negotiate with an imprisoned demon and either escape through a magic portal or fly off into the aether in a stolen Crawljammer Drakkar. Lots of them will die along the way but that’s part of the fun.

I ran this over two sessions of about three hours and it resulted in the serving characters taking a portal to an arboreal world just as the Chaos Singularity exploded and engulfed their world in pure Chaos. 

Through Sunken Lands

 

I’ve run a bit of Through Sunken Lands since acquiring it. A good few sessions with the Sunday group and now with my midweek group. I posted about running Beyond the Wall as a low prep second game but we ended up playing Through Sunken Lands instead. 

It is built similarly to BtW, with collaborative playbook character generation and random table scenario packs but the focus is on a Sword and Sorcery milieu. Instead of the pastoral fantasy of BtW we have a set up invoking the works of Robert E. Howard, Fritz Lieber and Michael Moorcock. So far, so good. 

There are nine playbooks and three scenario packs included, some setting detail, a bestiary and rules (combat, spell lists, experience, battle rules, journeys.)

The playbooks are nice and flavourful and the collaborative character generation works well, albeit the shared city generation is not as effective as the shared village from Beyond the Wall. It’s still useful but the bigger nature of the city means the players have less influence over its totality. The scenario packs do the job, I’ve run two out three presented, giving you an at the table prep experience that produces a satisfying adventure. This, like Beyond the Wall, is very much the focus of this book. 

The setting detail is adequate but what is missing ultimately are the tools for longer term play. There are some nice touches here but there are not even any random encounter tables for either the City or any region of the wider world. The book does signpost the campaign tools from Further Afield as being compatible with TSL, which they are, and the implementation of Threats and the shared sandbox elements would go a long way here. Although there’s enough here to run a campaign, it’s not the focus of this book.

Through Sunken Lands does, exactly like Beyond the Wall before it, a very good job of evoking the feel of its milieu and provides all the tools for a group to get an evening’s play starting literally from scratch. It has proved popular with my players (especially the magic users amongst them, who love the magic system) and I enjoy running it. 

Beyond the Wall has additional material to support the core book and Through Sunken Lands has been missing these extra elements. However with the release of The Sorcerous and The Weird; and the upcoming Of Glory and Peril this looks to be well rectified. 

Ultimately I’m a profound enthusiast for Flatland Games material. Beyond the Wall is great, Through Sunken Lands is great too. We’re continuing with TSL albeit in tweaking the setting to my own tastes but the core of it is as described.  (One of the nice touches in the core book is they do a map of the city and the world with their own brand names on them and also provide blank versions for GMs like me who are burdened with a grand imperative to not run anyone else’s material.)

Modules

We don’t seem to say modules any more but that’s what they used to call purchased adventures. The idea seemed to be, at one time, that these adventures weren’t campaign specific and you could just use them in whatever world you played your game in. 

I don’t know if that was ever really the case except in the examples afforded by pure location based scenarios. The Keep on the Borderlands could work anywhere a dull, fighty series of very similar caves could exist. 

If these things aren’t fairly generic then we’re going to need to do some work to make them happen in our own setting. Worse if they’re not user friendly. 

For example I purchased a pre written adventure in a pay what you want crowd funding campaign. I don’t tend to use them a lot so I can’t explain the decision except that I didn’t pay very much for it. 

When the actual book turned up, the production values of it were far in excess of the meagre amount I offered. The art looked excellent, paper quality was excellent, it was hard back, A5, a solid high quality product. I began to feel a little guilty. I’d offered an amount commensurate with a home-brew zine type affair not this highly professional product. However, the literal opening text is…

So what is it about then? I don’t know. I didn’t read any further. I no longer felt guilty. I don’t spend money on game products to spend hours prepping them. I can do that myself. If I’m paying money for an adventure, the whole point of it is; it replaces the work I either couldn’t, or didn’t have time to, do. 

I’m probably not the target audience for your average pre-written product. Part of the joy of gaming for me is making it all up myself. Having to learn and internalise someone else’s ideas is work I don’t need or like to do. I find it hard. It’s easier for me to portray NPCs and situations that I have created myself than learn someone else’s stuff. 

I see the point of it though. People play in different ways. Having a pre-written adventure can be a great framework to run your sessions. I liked the Anomalous Subsurface Environment for this. I had the time to play but not really do a lot of prep. Having a massive, usable dungeon available meant I could game on Thursday evenings when other wise I could not. The ASE though is filled with ideas I would not have come up with myself. It’s also easy to prep. Read some dungeon rooms, sometimes just five minutes before the session and then go. It worked. 

I get that this is not what everyone wants to spend their money on but at the table usability is my number one RPG product concern. It’s why I love the Black Hack. It’s why everyone loved Vornheim (before they changed their minds.) Necrotic Gnome adventures are structured for their at the table presentation and are almost universally loved. DCC modules, despite often being on the wrong side of the railroad, are also very table friendly. Behold any Doug Kovacs map, you could probably run from it if you had to…

Dungeon layout, less than awesome; but flavour? 

So, I don’t need or want all that text or whatever. It’s not what I’m spending my money for. I have a bookshelf full of novels. Give me products designed for use at the table, things I can run at a glance, or open to any page and just go with it. Don’t get me wrong, I know writing RPG material for others to run is hard. I don’t think I can do it but I’m not asking for your money either.

Unconscious GM Burnout

 I was burned out on RPGs and I didn’t even know it. 

Me, on Sunday nights

I was busy. I did not have time to prep. I struggled to improvise. I didn’t have ridiculous unrealistic expectations of my gaming life. When games were cancelled due to lack of players, I was not overly upset about it. 

I didn’t know it but I was burned out. It seemed like I was having a good time, even to me. I was off my game though. 

As I returned to running the Grim North to fill gaps in player availability my interest in playing and running games was rejuvenated. I was still busy but I was able to tiny prep my way around it. Ideas started to come thick and fast. I’ve been ticking over with the Grim Underworld in a slow but progressive way. One room at a time isn’t a lot of progress but it adds up. 

I’ve started to have unrealistic thoughts about Marvel Superheroes; or learning to play Champions or even Rolemaster. My MSH box has sat unopened for a long time, and I last played it before I went to University in 1996… Champions and Rolemaster I remember from the Games Store. I loved the covers but the games seemed dense and inaccessible, and beyond my meagre finances. Do I owe it to my younger self to try these games now that I could? I’m not sure 12 year old me envisaged their middle age spent buried in 600 page rulebooks or drowning in hit tables or highly involved character generation processes. 

It seems I needed a change. The signs were there but self evaluation is hard. I’m running another Grim North session on Sunday: The PCs are caught up in the ambiguity between smuggling  Black Market Thyme and Black Market Time. It’s very entertaining. And there’s lots of spelling things out. 

Behold! Actual GM Prep

In order to show my working out I am planning to discuss two older examples of my GM prep. Both are for game sessions that I felt especially well prepared for and resulted in, for me at least, some memorable games. 

The first is part of the campaign in which I returned to running Dragon Warriors for the first time since childhood. Originally conceived as a one shot, it finally resolved 5 years later. In this period of the campaign the PCs were sailing to the Holy Land from Ferromaine and had stopped off for supplies in Molasaria. 

I didn’t really expect much to happen here but threw out a little hook about the local headman’s wife and daughter being missing. To my surprise (although perhaps I should’ve known better) the PCs decided to pause their voyage and head into the ominous Molasarian woods to seek them out. 

These notes are pretty basic and I backed them up with some text on my iPad. Essentially I estimated that Molasaria was roughly equivalent to Bulgaria, at least in terms of folklore so I incorporated as much Bulgarian folklore as I could. I make no claims as to authenticity and some of what I used was general Slavic folklore from surrounding regions. All woods in my Legend based games tend to have a least a bit of the Mythago Wood feel to them. Woodlands have memory, and because in Legend they are magical places, that memory can be drawn to a sort of life or you can become engrossed in it. In this case, probably the wolves and some ancient horse-nomads (the ancestors of the modern Molasarians.) The other, more faerie inspired creatures have a different relationship with the Wood and its collective memory. Being incredibly long lived, they can exist in its past and present simultaneously. 

The Hala was a lovely piece of Bulgarian folklore that I immediately fixated on. Essentially a bad weather demon that can manifest in numerous forms, the Hala presaged the coming snows of winter. The local NPCs laid it on thick how dangerous the Hala was and that it came only at night. The PCs treated it with a healthy respect, probably due in part to some recent character deaths, but also due to the strong implication that the Hala played for keeps. 

Other things that caused my great amusement were the knight whose armour turned out to contain only worms and maggots; and the old woman who changed identity with the fall of night and the breaking of dawn. 

This took two three hour sessions to resolve and included the PCs dealing with grey skinned dyavol in a shadowy mockery of the village; and slaying the local priest in a church, continuing their modus operandi of killing people in houses of worship. 

Foul Devices of Sorcery

Your Rod, Staff or Wand has charges that power its magic but what are they?

Bit of Wayne Reynolds for the crowd

Souls. They’re souls.

If your wand of fireballs or whatever has thirty charges, then thirty folks went under the wavy bladed* knife to feed it. 

Thuul-Botha Cinth (a PC,) He of the Eldritch Eyes, liberated soul-burned Black Magician Kallisran of his staff and also his life. The staff held strange powers,  each fuelled by the soul of an innocent that had been imprisoned within the witch wood of the stave. Their faces appeared upon its length as though burned onto it from the inside.

*No self respecting cultist would be caught dead with a straight bladed sacrificial implement. 

More Tiny Prep

As I tinker away with my game stuff I find myself disappointed with the transience of my prep. I often just make a few notes or maps and this allows me a framework for a session which is largely improvised from that base. I enjoy running games that way and find more focussed prep to feel a bit like homework and therefore I don’t tend to do it. 

Tiny prep appropriate tools

However I do frequently feel underprepared for a session as a result of this. Also, I sometimes lack the required mental energy to play this way and in the moment wish I had more to fall back on than half a page of barely comprehensible scribbling. 

Trying to concentrate more on the Tiny Prep method has resulted in two things. One is a greater volume of material. My previous method of staring out of the window, waiting for inspiration to strike is inefficient. Writing down a sentence, even if it’s just the name of one setting appropriate detail, is progress and often leads to inspiration. These small things add up to something greater. Given I feel I’m short of time for thinking about games at the moment, the efficiency of Tiny Prep is essential.

The other is more coherent notes. In this I’m making more of an effort to produce stuff that is reusable. The effort that goes into a campaign can often be specific to that game on that Sunday or whenever and that’s fine and good. However there are some things I’ve prepped and run that I could use again but the notes no longer make sense or they’re buried in a thousand different notebooks, Frequently I doodle and scribble of my notes while GMing which renders them messy and awful by the end of the session. Or the PCs do something unexpected and I draw maps and plan as I go in session but these artefacts are on loose sheets of paper that subsequently disappear. Again, this is inefficient. Settings that I could use long term, i.e. for the rest of my life, should benefit from this development. All that prep could serve a greater purpose. Maps and locations could be reused. If I wheel the Grim North out for another convention type game for instance (I ran Warriors of the Grim North for Burrito Con online and felt like I was tightly prepped for the game but when I’ve reviewed my notes to run it again, it was like “Oh my God, how did I ever pull this off?”) or if I end up running it for my boy and his gang when they’re a bit older.

So as I prep at the moment, I’m making a conscious effort to be a bit neater, rough maps in pencils and then ink them. Scan more stuff so it’s backed up digitally, and inversely copy tables I draught on my phone at lunchtime into appropriate notebooks when they’re complete. 

On Being Too Attached to Old Games

Last year or maybe longer ago than that I had an idea to try and play all my unplayed games. The Clearing the Shelves project. It didn’t go that well. I played Warlock! and Through Sunken Lands and that’s (it although I have played TSL with two different groups.)

Reflections on why it failed, lead me to the following conclusions:

I like the Dragon Warriors world of Legend. If I’m not playing a game in Legend, I miss it. 

I like running the Grim North. When I’m not, I miss it. 

Short form games are fine but I prefer to have them run long. It’s the accepted wisdom, or in some circles set in stone fact, that average campaign lasts ten sessions. This is not my experience when running. My average one shot lasts three sessions. Ten would be a mini campaign.

So I should  just commit to playing them for ever and stop getting lured into to trying to find time to run Traveller or Runequest or The One Ring or Empire of the Petal Throne of whatever. At least until I retire; and my kid leaves home; or we enter another pandemic. Or the final version of Jewelspider appears.