Spark tables and Dragon Warriors

 In his excellent RPG Electric Bastionland, Chris McDowall provides Spark Tables for the use of the referee (although he uses the term Conductor.) These are simply a few d20 tables sprinkled with setting appropriate terms to act as inspiration when you need something to kick start the imagination. When my own game prep process of staring out the window and drinking coffee fails me I resort to similar measures. After all, if someone has a good idea then I’m all about stealing it (and implying that it is my own work, ha.) 

I saw these particular tables, or perhaps early versions of them used at Dragonmeet a couple of years ago when we pressured Chris into running a game for us with zero notice. He’d brought a manuscript of Electric Bastionland to show around at the con and after a few minutes of reading it and also being long time fans of its forerunner, Into the Odd, we coerced Chris into running it there and then. He took a few moments to sketch out a map and rolled on two spark tables for each location combining the results into something Bastion appropriate for us to encounter. Then we were off and a good time was had.

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Using random tables to provide GM inspiration is as old as the hobby itself and it’s the sort of thing that I find most useful on my own prep. I’d rather create a tool for a specific session or campaign than I can reference again later, than say devise some specific story twist for this week’s game. The latter are better developed at the gaming table during play in any case. Of course you could always use something designed for this very purpose such as the Tome of Adventure Design by Matt Finch. This is filled with tables and while it has an old school D&D bent there’s a ton of material and it’s not really system or setting specific. Setting specific stuff is good though and at its best when you come up with it yourself to match the content and style of your own games.

To that end, I’m including two spark tables written for use with my own Dragon Warriors campaign. These were written back when we were still in Albion and are somewhat less useful now that the PCs are up to their necks in strife and woe in the Principalities of the Crusades.

Oh, and get Electric Bastionland. It’s really good.

Roll d20 as many times as you like on each table, combining the results to gain elements of inspiration for this week’s game.

1. Cobwebs
2. Crumbling castle
3. Twighlight
4. Moss
5. Rain
6. Mud
7. Shadow
8. Forest
9. Revenant
10. Ivy covered stone
11. Faerie 
12. Hollow hill
13. Mere
14. Hunger
15. Rust
16. Stone ring or henge
17. Cairn
18. Birds
19. Iron
20. Haunt

1. Sorcery 
2. Execution
3. The church
4. Tournament/disputation
5. Crypts/tomb
6. Statue
7. Thorns
8. Beasts
9. Horns
10. Graves
11. Heresy
12. Black magic
13. Mercenaries 
14. Bones
15. Abandoned chapel
16. Charcoal burners
17. Plague
18. Death rituals
19. Runes
20. Hunt

The Black Hack: More of a Love Letter than a Review

For those who don’t know: The Black Hack (available here) is a rules light old school D&D inspired game that uses a simple roll under your stat resolution mechanic and is focused on player rolls. Now on its second edition. Examples you say? You try to hit the goblin? Roll under your Strength. You want to dodge the blow dart? Roll under your Dexterity. It’s pretty straightforward. This simplicity at the heart of the game is its strength. You’re never going to get a simulationist experience playing this way and if you prefer complex machanics then this is not your bag. However this game has spawned a thousand hacks in all sorts of genres, the simplicity of the rules making it extremely versatile. You can do anything with this mechanic, as long as it’s simple. I mean you could say the same of any mechanic really but you only have to search DriveThru RPG to see how this ruleset has captured the imagination of independent games designers. I mean with such a proliferation of hacks the quality is wildly variable but some of them are even playtested, which is nice, and rather good.

Even the cover is a die drop table of weird shit

So at this point I should probably add the disclaimer that I know David Black. For it is his brainchild that I am writing about. When I say I know him, I mean to the extent that he’s played in some of my online games, that we hang out and play games at Dragonmeet, and that he patiently listens while I bitch and whinge about people I don’t really know except from their blogs and so forth. I was also once mistaken for him while I was running a game in the bar at Dragonmeet, my only claim to roleplaying fame.

The 1st edition rules are all you need to play the game. Indeed I used to keep a copy in my backpack so; that along with some paper, pencils and a dice roller on my phone; I was table ready at any time should the opportunity arise for a game of some sort. I have introduced numerous new players to the hobby because of this. The Black Hack uses slightly different mechanics to old school/retro forms of D&D but is backwards compatible because things like hit dice and spells still have meaning in TBH rules. You can easily convert the module of your choice on the fly if you wish.

There is now a second edition of the game. It contains some rules tweaks, a bestiary and shed loads of GM tools (generally in the form of random tables.) This now truly is all you need for the table. Plus, it’s good. The first thing I saw in the book that I instantly loved was the what are the monsters doing when you encounter them tables. In the bestiary each monster entry has two 1d6 tables that combine you give what the bad guys are up to, should you randomly encounter them for instance. So if I encounter pig faced or men I roll a 3 and a 5 to discover they are (3) drunkenly bickering over... (5) ...1d12 left boots. Nice. Plus it comes with this cool Sean Poppe illustration...

Give us your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle. Mostly your boots though, and only the left ones at that.

In addition to this I get random tables for dungeons, for wilderness adventures, NPCs, adventure hooks, traps, poisons, magic stuff, treasure, and some tasty GM tips too. It looks great too.

Can it all be positive? I mean, no. When your rules are this light there are going to be cases they just don’t cover. Player vs player is one that seems to constantly come up on social media discussions (admittedly it’s mostly theoretical questions I see rather than an actual problem from play.) There are always going to be people who aren’t comfortable making things up, prefer a definitive word of god answer. As the GM I miss rolling dice (except for damage, *insert evil laugh*) and PCs can eat up old school modules as Black Hack PCs at lower levels are generally more powerful than their B/X equivalent, for instance. The answer to all this is as simple as you can change stuff you don’t like. A simple rules framework means it is easy to modify without ruining everyone’s fun. Hence all those hacks of it I guess.

I’ve used this game to run either impromptu fantasy games or sword & planet games, combining TBH with Warriors of the Red Planet in my Warriors of the Black Planet games. It’s worked out great and I’ve enjoyed myself thoroughly. I’ve only been a player in a Black Hack game once, and back then it only existed as a handful of sheets of paper that Dave had printed out and brought with him to Dragonmeet. He ended up running it in the bar using Barrowmaze, which he’d bought an hour beforehand along with some hideous, green, neon dice. It went smoothly and I knew then that the game was going to be good.

Now my kickstarter 2nd edition has arrived in a sleek black box and its fucking cool.

The King Under the Forest, part two

I mentioned previously that this was the first adventure I ever ran, back when I was eight years old and new to RPGs. I recently had occasion to do so again...

I was at Dragonmeet, London’s largest RPG convention, in December 2018 and ran some off the books gaming for a group of crusty old European Grognards. With virtually no prep, no change there, I ran King Under the Forest using Dragon Warriors Rules As Written. In my current DW game, which runs about once monthly via Hangouts, I have some slight modifications to the by the book method. However here I wanted to see the system in all its original glory. So characters were rolled, 3d6 down the line as Gygax intended and I declared I would be reading the boxed text aloud verbatim. The latter to provide the authentic 1980s adventure experience but also I thought it would be interesting, seen through the eyes of modern gamers.

No such thing as too many swords

I have no wish to enter the Great Read Aloud Text Debate however it did lead to, for me, an interesting exchange:

GM “You pause and hold your breath as you study the outline of the shadow...”
Player “No, I don’t. I breathe heavily.”

Here and in some of the other passages the adventure shows it’s gamebook heritage (“will you climb? Or turn back?”) but then the designers also wrote some very successful gamebooks and in designing an introductory RPG for sale in bookshops (I got five out six books in WH Smith) rather than Games Workshops I can only assume that this was a deliberate design choice.

Of course running an intro adventure for genre savvy grognards means that they’re probably going to eat it up without too much drama and that was certainly the case here. There is a nice encounter with some warriors who materialise out of a tapestry with “faces the colour of old cloth.”  This is mechanically quite tough as a straightforward fight but instantly I was told “I burn the tapestry.” The Tapestry Warriors burst into flames and disappear with a ghostly howl.

Similarly the other puzzles were solved without too much drama and this is a strength of the adventure that the difficulty is sufficient that they require some thought but are not ridiculously taxing.

Overall it was a good time and although there was some eye rolling at some of the read aloud bits, the players seemed to enjoy it too. There are some really nice touches in this adventure that hint at the greater myth of Vallander, the King Under the Forest, without beating you over the head with it. There are some parts that seem a little jarring, the gorgon encounter for instance (although this has received some treatment in the re-issue version in the Sleeping Gods book) and the obligatory giant spider...

I’d like to redo this adventure building on the original framework and taylor is it to my own vision of what Vallander’s tomb would be like in my version of Legend. Perhaps more on that later.

Grim North: Dragonmeet Edition

Beards: Cool until they want you dead

Rogues Gallery:

Pahn McDohl, lvl 1 fighter
Wister, lvl 1 fighter
Ottsa, lvl 1 mystic and former Otter cultist
Andy's lvl 1 thief who I can't remember the name of...

In which a team from the House of Mercenaries, Sellspears and Blades for Hire investigated the claims of Cilk Von Herrick. A patrician who having defeated a rival in a beard growing contest now believed his beard was sentient and trying to kill him.

A return to the butchers saw the PCs become freelance debt collectors for the Butcher's Guild. Each pinned a piece of chicken skin to their chest as a sign of office. The Fizzing Stone public house in the Patrician District was visited, where the owner keeps three pet wolves in the bar and yet it is still a high class establishment. Cilk Von Herrick turned out to be a drunk in possession of an enormous beard who would not deign to speak to the PCs directly but only via his manservant.

Ottsa used her mystic powers and detected hostile magic on the beard. Andy's thief cut a lock from the beard causing Von Herrick actual physical pain. In the stables the beard was combed for evidence, finding only a family of doormice, before being plaited for ease of transportation.

Religious instruction was sought at the Cathedral of the Aeternal Lords. A clandestine meeting with a priest in the crypts below lead to heading North across the city to the Necropolis, passing through the Merchant District and the District of Bridges on the way.

Fortunes were told. Von Herrick's movements had to be lubricated with the application of lots of wine.

In the necropolis strange, grey robed priests arranged the embalmed dead in scenes from life, such as a card game and watching a parade.

They met the wizard Oraculees, who was wizened but with giant eyes, and his stunted servant Maximillian. Some ate a turkey that had been served for a dinner party of the dead.

Wister paid the wizard's price of three cups of blood. Oraculees consulted the Book of Beards. He deemed that a demon should be summoned and a sacrifice was needed. Without hesitation Pahn offered the patrician's slaves but it turned out only a chicken was needed. One of the relieved slaves was sent off with some silver to buy a chicken.

And there we finished as time was drawing on.

Dragonmeet 2015

My first con.

I had met up with Mick Reddick and David Black for some breakfast prior to arriving at the con. There was no skulduggery involved in our entrance to the venue, none at all. No sir.

Mick Reddick knows absolutely fucking everyone. Not a joke. He couldn't go five feet or drink a cup of tea without bumping into some gamer buddy or other.

I bought nothing. I have to admit I was a bit bewildered by the trade floor. There was so much stuff on offer but basically nothing I wanted or didn't already own. I'm not a collector of rpg stuff, I like things I can use and when I own things I haven't used they gnaw at me... Mick bought some Lamentations of the Flame Princess stuff to round out his collection and Dave bought Stonehell, which he already had as a PDF but wanted a book of, and some ugly neon dice to play his Hivelife 1979 retro future D&D hack with.

Then we headed up to the bar to set up for some games. I ran a Grim North session with Oli Palmer, Kathryn Jenkins, Rachel Tew and Rachel's other half Andy. Rachel and Oli have played in the a Grim North before via hangouts and it was nice to meet up face to face and throw down in a tale of one man and his potentially evil beard. We didn't get to resolve the session due to time constraints. As is fairly normal for me I rambled aimlessly along and we finished up with the players looking to sacrifice a chicken in order to carry out some sort of divination on the evil beard while its owner was kept in a state of near constant inebriation by wine toting slaves. Good times.

With too many players for one game Mick had recruited enough random passers by to make up two games and Dave stepped up to run his rag tag bunch of plucky misfits through Stonehell using his streamlined retro clone Black Hack. I ran Mick's fighter for about 45 minutes while both Stonehell and Black Hack proved their worth. David is clearly cool with GMing a game with zero prep and his Black Hack system runs really smooth and easy. Stonehell is a great resource and it was handled well. Everyone at the table was having a great time, even if I nearly got Mick's character killed at the end. Still, what's a bit of crippling between friends?

Things I learned. David Black both writes and runs a good game. Seek out his work and enjoy it. He runs games via G+ UK OSR Hangouts community. His Black Hack rule set is available for free on the internet. Mick Reddick is a force of gaming nature, when a man says "I'll just nip downstairs and get two more players" even at a gaming convention I don't expect him to be back inside of two minutes! And last but not least the UK OSR Hangouts Community is a great place, filled with lovely people who I have thoroughly enjoyed gaming with so far, and long may it continue.

I'm going to write a quick session report for the Grim North game tomorrow.