Ten Priests for Dragon Warriors

 So, following on from the ten random knights, I give you ten random priests. Except there’s really eleven, after I used one to fill a quick post in game and then added a replacement. Once again this is in the raw form I used in my own campaign.

Ten priests

1 Father Harald, tall, genial, long black hair, priest to ladies, not a monk...

"God does not deny joy"

2 Father Leopold, stern but non confrontational, keeps bees, brews mead, "fascinating creatures bees..." Tells bee parables, stretches it a bit

3 Father Rickon, blunt, black haired and bearded, "it is the will of God to suffer a fool, I am but a poor shadow of his grace" carries cudgel

4 Father Wulfric, willow thin, devoutly pacifist, sees the good in everyone even when their isn't any, trusts in God, forgiving of even the greatest sins

5 Father Osgar, brown hair, no beard, Tesshu like polymath, former knight, genuinely does not care if he lives or dies, faith is unshakeable, once took a beating from a Thulander thane to prove his faith was stronger than the man's hate, great calligrapher

6 Father Hrodgar, red faced, chubby, drinks, a lot, by turns incessantly cheerful and completely morose (now in Chapelfod's small monastery)

6a Father Llewin, cornumbrian, red hair, long drooping moustaches, great baritone, takes pity on small animals, 

7 Father Eardwulf, schemes, spies for the bishop, sees witches and heretics everywhere, secretly has them killed, renowned herbalist/clandestine poisoner,

8 Father Dunstan, tall, blonde, good looking bastard son of nobility, trained at arms but reluctant to fight, defender of the downtrodden, still has influence with his father

9 Father Cyneric, bookish, obsessed with the occult, knowledgeable but refuses to accept some things are better left alone (chapel at Saxton)

10 Father Aedelric, charming yet pure fucking evil in a cassock, sleeps with others wives, cruel to animals, revels in chaos for it's own sake and utterly self centred, although makes an outward show of piety......

Ten Knights for Dragon Warriors

 As my Dragon Warriors campaign is currently located half a world from Ellesland I thought I might share some of my old material in case it’s useful to other DW GMs. In any case I’m starting with this, a table on ten random knights you might meet in Northern Albion.

Ten Knights

1 Sir Readgar, mace and shield, black rose on a red field, zealous, sees heretics everywhere

2 Sir Rhaedbert, battle axe, red rose on a black field. Battle weary from the crusades, disillusioned, melancholy, thousand yard stare.

3 Sir Beornward, morning star and shield, white axe and sword on a green field. Devout, pious, dull. Very large. Montombre's man.

4 Sir Eodred, sword and shield, griffin rampant in gold on a green field. Dashing, brave, long curly hair. Has secret shame.

5 Sir Brictbald, greatsword, three stooping Hawks blue open a gold field.  Vicious, borderline robber knight.

6 Sir Caedfrith, warhammer, white lion head on an azure field. Tournament fighter, extremely strong, likes to drink fight and whore. Not a thinker.

7 Sir Eadwahl, sword, bow, two pike blue on a field of scarlet. Rough, country gentry, ancient line but poor. Fisherman knight. 

8 Sir Wilstan, axe and shield, black bear rampant on a field of argent. Gambler, owes money to merchants (including Earnwold) and others of low birth. Corrupt as a result. Raider. Sells slaves.

9 Sir Oslyn, spear, black boar's head of a white field. Proud, quick to anger, spoiling for a fight.

10 Sir Godward, mace, had a shield but constantly loses it. Three black crosses on a scarlet field. Drunk, friendly, not especially competent...

 

Don’t @ me about my descriptions of heraldry, if you want it done properly I cordially invite you to look elsewhere. 

I don’t tend to include stats in these sorts of things, I just eyeball the Stats for an Average Knight in the rulebook and decide what’s appropriate at the time.

In my campaign Sir Beornward was a feature for a while, as part of a rival group of adventurers in the service of Montombre. The PCs ripped off the others’ Holy Book heist before they could get there, and ended up in a confrontation with the group outside the small church in Igham. Churches seem to feature in a lot in this groups violent actions.

Art by @kekaikotaki on twitter 

Lockdown Gaming

During the lockdown I have gamed extensively, four times a week. Week in, week out. This has seen me actually use my Dungeon Crawl Classics rulebook for something other than a convenient perch for iPad. Also doing some real, actual playing as a player in other people’s games rather than just being the GM/referee all of the time.

I’ve been running Anomalous Subsurface Environment, the old school megadungeon written for Labyrinth Lord (although we’ve been using Lamentations of the Flame Princess rules because I have them in hard copy and they are easier to reference in that form.) This is my first and, probably only, attempt at running a megadungeon. It’s pretty great overall. The science-fantasy setting includes all sorts of weirdness, which might put off some more pure-fantasy mixed folks but I say give me a world ruled by despotic wizards and filled with cyborgs, dinosaurs and rejects from the sci-fi pop culture of yesteryear. It’s not that serious a game, just good fun.

I’ve been playing, and also trying my hand at running DCC. I played through The Chained Coffin scenario with one group (and also a nice home-brewed pulp 1940s adventure). With another group we ran through Hole in the Sky, Well of the Worm and are hex crawling the Treasure Vaults of Zababad. DCC has been a bit of a revelation to me, I’ve enjoyed it thoroughly and even drafted and run my own funnel; Crashed Black Ziggurat From Outer Space. This has led to sort of running a Crawljammer style game where I also ran Cry Freedom and Let Slip the Batmen of Venus from the Crawljammer zine #1. Thanks are due to Jürgen and Alex for introducing me to this excellent game.

Meanwhile my Dragon Warriors campaign has continued at an increased pace due to lack of social complications. This has seen the PCs leave the uncomfortable confines of Ellesland to pursue adventures in Ferromaine, briefly Molasaria and currently the Principalities of the Crusades. Much has been accomplished in this time but death has been a constant companion and only one character survives from the original four that set off to find funds to repair a church roof back in 2016. Interest in Dragon Warriors seems to be at a high point with an active discord server and more online games being played, plus the new zine Casket of Fays and the prospect of a new rule set designed specifically for Legend by Dave Morris in the works in the form of the Jewelspider RPG. Good times.

And last but by no means least I’m currently exploring Castle Drachenfels in WFRP 1st edition as a player. I finally ran WFRP in 2019 but what was meant to be a short campaign seemed cursed with many cancelled sessions and took nearly a whole year to work through even if we didn’t play that often. Castle Drachenfels is a contrast in that it’s high level stuff (or third career stuff in WFRP parlance) the other characters having already played through the entire Enemy Within campaign. Other people keep commenting to me that Castle Drachenfels is not that great an adventure but we’re having a great time with it, so cheers to Tom for running it.

Social distancing and playing RPGs online

So in these bizarre times of Coronavirus and social distancing, self isolation and even quarantine, I thought it might be pertinent to share how I run my online games. Just in case it helps someone who either has a regular face to face group they no longer attend because of the virus or is just interested in playing RPGs while their usual social activities are on hiatus.

Step one: Google hangouts. This is a video conference calling app. Get it. Arrange with your players what time the call starts and then get on it together. Now you’re sat around a virtual table. It’s a bit different from a face to face game because you need to get disciplined around only one person talking at a time, however there is text chat that you can use simultaneously in addition to the video call if required. Use some sort of headset. I run my games off the hangouts app on my iPad with some headphones plugged in or connected via Bluetooth. That just stops echo from the speakers being picked up by the mic. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t use headphones , just a bit annoying. Many of the people I play with have proper headsets with built in microphones plugged into their computers, which is cool if you’ve got it but I don’t need it.

Just some super cool Pete Mullen art, because why not?

Step two: Dice. I use the honour system. You roll your dice and you tell me what you got. I trust you not to cheat, because if you’re a grown adult who needs to cheat at dungeons and dragons to maintain your self esteem, then ultimately I’m ok with that unless it ruins things for everyone else. However there is an online dice roller in hangouts chat that you can use and everyone sees the result.

Step three: You’re on your own now. Play your game the way you would play it face to face. Hold stuff up to the camera if necessary, pull faces, do voices, or don’t. It’s your game, play it how you think it should be played. Have fun. Stay safe. Wash your hands.

 p.s. I know lots of people who go deep into this stuff and no doubt provide a great online experience with the likes of roll20 or fantasy grounds. They give loads of great options around displaying maps and character sheets and positioning for battles etc. It’s good stuff but it’s also work. I’m too lazy for all that so I go with the most basic option. Whatever floats your boat is good.

Enjoy your gaming.

Also for some bizarre reason I can’t reply to comments on this blog at the moment but I’m on Twitter @domjnicrpg if you have questions.

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.