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.