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.