Death Comes Once More to the Grim North

As in everyone. Total party kill. Sounds dramatic but with only two player characters and one NPC fighter it was always on the table. 

Black Crow on a Tombstone, a cracking Satyricon track

Rufus Rose F3 and Tulip Roth T2 were in company with Lott the Humble when exploring a Ventari Reliquary to discover a chest full of cursed demon gold. For some reason throughout the session I found “reliquary” to be extremely hard to pronounce. In this instance it’s an architectural reliquary, so a dungeon.

They spoke to the half petrified four armed wolf demon but could not propose a way to lift the curse that was turning it slowly to stone; despite its offer of a boon in return if they could.

A secret door was discovered and beyond they encountered four red lesser demons with spiky dreads. After negotiations seem to have failed to get the demons to had over their chest of cursed gold, an attempt was made to kill them and take their stuff. It did not go well. 

Rufus was blinded by magic and Tulip hit with a critical in the first round. Many criticals and fumbles then ensued, and as is typical with these things a few more lucky rolls would’ve won the day for the PCs. Alas they were rendered unconscious and then eaten by demons. An ignominious end for a brave band. 

Although I forgot to mention it in game, I had rolled on the Grim Omens table at the start of the session and got “woman seen washing bloody clothing” which generally presages a violent death…

However, like good old school-ists everywhere we immediately got to rolling new characters and by the next session we will have switched from Swords&Wizardry to Crypts&Things Remastered, now with a Sorcerer and a Thief. 

Under new rules, the Grim North awaits. 

More Clearing the Shelves

Once upon a time I embarked on a quest to play all the games I had bought but never used. I even made a blog post about it: Clearing the Shelves

However, I did not clear the shelves. Things came up. Recently though I find myself running two game nights a week. One for WFRP 2e and one for the Grim North (it’s on Thursday, drop in style, you should play.)

It occurred to me last week that WFRP 2e was a shelf game. Another one ticked off the list (except I added two to the list by buying Basic Fantasy RPG and Classic Traveller, neither of which have seen the table.)

The 1st edition cover is better

So of the original list I’ve run: Warlock! Through Sunken Lands and WFRP 2e. All which proved to be excellent and campaign worthy games. Through Sunken Lands I’ve actually run twice with two different groups. In order to tick off another game I plan to convert the Grim North to Crypts and Things Remastered. At least temporarily. That sounds grander than it is given C&T is a Swords&Wizardry based game and I already use the Complete version of that system for the campaign. I’m interested to see how it works out. C&T is explicitly designed to be more pulp sword and sorcery than most retro clones; so the characters are a bit more robust and mechanically capable than your average S&W PC. 

All this does lead me to think about the possibility of turning more shelf games into table games. Some of those games are beasts though. Runequest. Empire of the Petal Throne. Traveller. The One Ring. All games I think are suited to longer form play, or at least I would want to run them out for more than a one shot to really get the full experience. 

Essentially there’s no rush, it’s all play and should all be good fun. 

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.