Housekeeping

But for like Grim North houses

Currently playing: WFRP 2e on Sundays. It’s ok. I had this scenario knocking around from my clearing the shelves project. Reading “The Devils” by Joe Abercrombie put me in a Warhammer state of mind so I decided to run it. I’ve not run 2e before and I’m not sure I like it. The game sessions have been fun enough but the early 2000s action economy is not to my taste. The PCs are involved in an attempt to cleanse their mortal souls in the eyes of Sigmar by recovering some holy items of behalf of his Church from the Border Princes. It’s suitably downbeat and gritty so far.

Additionally working on: Grim North open table for Thursdays or like any weeknight really. It’s not that open because I can’t be arsed to advertise for players everywhere but it’s scheduled for this week regardless. Probably tidy up a loose thread with some experienced heads and then start offering it to the world for next week. 

In the background: Been tinkering away with various Grim North bits. The Grim Underworld progresses. If any PCs found the entrance it’s probably playable in its current form. There are seven mapped areas of level 1 and most have at least a minimal key. It very much has the theme of mole men, undead and cultists at the moment  

I’ve added a few bits elsewhere to the world. Encounter tables for the Far North and the Plains of Sanguine Desolation. A few smaller dungeon locations. More details on the factions of the Grimwood. This sort of cumulative prep is building the setting as a whole but doesn’t generally help with what’s going to happen in the next session. It’s very much how my mind works in creative spaces though. 

Considering: Time and healing. One of the WFRP PCs took a fair bit of damage last session which he believes is going to take 6-8 weeks of game time to heal. I’m not sure how fun this is. One of the grumbles about Dragon Warriors from my players was they always seemed to be injured. Access to magical healing should be rare in WFRP and DW, which it is in my games but I wonder whether constantly dealing with injuries, while more realistic, this is the most enjoyable aspect of the game. I’m reminded of Chris in my Carcosa game saying it was easier to die and roll up a new character than barely survive and heal back up. Hmm.

Into the Gloom

“Scarcely out of the city, we were set upon by eel-men. They slew the captain, and when we’d driven them back, only two crewmen were alive. We attempted to recruit a new crew in an accursed town in the Gloom. Only a small boy answered the call, and he proved to be a thing beyond our ken. We lost the last crewmen, and barely made it back in a rowboat.” Rufus Rose, Fighter Level 2

Ste’s Game

Ste was the last of us to get his own D&D. He’d played in my first D&D game, where he was a halfling with a dire wolf as a pet, when I started running Red Box Basic but it wasn’t until much later that he got his own rule box and started running games.

This surprised us all. Ste was quite a passive player, generally going along with what others wanted to do and taking an easygoing attitude towards our games. I suspected he wasn’t really that into the whole thing but it’s what his friends did, so he played along. However when Ste’s parents bought him the rules for Christmas he went all in. Ste had two brothers, two sisters, lots of cousins and lived in a large house with lots of space. There were always other kids at his house. Loads of them. Ste began to run D&D for them and he did it a lot. Ste’s game was always on. 

Ste was a very permissive DM. He was often running for friends who usually ran games for him, so he took a position very much as referee. He assumed his players knew more about the rules than he did and he simply approved or not the inclusion of ideas they game up with. Mostly he approved. He was running the game every single day, open table style, characters would advance loads and it became a battle to keep up with each other. 

His game got extremely high powered very quickly as a result. We often played just one on one or two players, often at lunchtimes at school and frequently with no dice. We were into the domain game before long and this rapidly turned PvP as we competed to control the map of the Known World in the Expert set. 

In a territorial masterstroke Jit (not his real name; it was short for Michael McJitland, also not his real name) had built his castle within the walls of the town of Threshold and as a result come to control that iconic settlement. This was much to the annoyance of all the other players. Until my character, Gurak Bloodbath the Fourth (I was eleven years old) destroyed the town with my flight of brown dragons. However Jit rebuilt the town with his vast monetary and supernatural resources, renaming it Stronghold; now with added anti-dragon defences. We all thought this was a genius move and one we were extremely envious of. 

Meanwhile Ste’s younger brother Matty and his friend Walty stopped engaging with the rest of the group and began adventuring exclusively together. We didn’t know what they were up to but we suspected they were seeking Paths to Immortality and probably seeking to destroy all other players in the process. 

Matty’s character was a ridiculously powerful magic user and one of my strongest allies, so his loss was a great blow to me personally. I didn’t know this at the time but he and Walty were now secretly working against me, and to be fair everyone else, but specifically me because I had access to knowledge that they did not. They were envious and fearful of me because of my esoteric library. While everyone else was still operating at a Basic level, I had surpassed this: I had AD&D.

AD&D gave me a raft of options not available in the basic game. Spells, items and cherry picked rules that Ste allowed me to use to my advantage. 

The game continued in this vein, Matty and Walty betrayed me: murdered my dragons and razed my stronghold to the ground. Jit upped the ante by somehow permanently transforming his body into the form of Demogorgon. I stayed up all night on several occasions; like Batman plotting to exploit the weaknesses of each member of the Justice League in turn. 

You see, despite total immersion in the game, we were all slowly coming to the conclusion that we missed being able to sit around the same table and play together. So when I finally pulled off my grand plan and slew all the other characters as inventively as I could, no one was that bothered about after the initial shock. The very next week we all went to Ste’s house, rolled up new characters and set off adventuring together again. 

The Raid on the Temple of the Molybdenum God

Lovely chunk of Molybdenum 

Following on from their exploits with Black Market Thyme/Time the PCs undertook a mission to steal the bones of the Prophet of the Molybdenum God from his resting place in the aforementioned God’s temple. Carkus Swole, lay priest of the Scions of Mineralism, hopes they can steal the molybdenum-ised bones of the prophet and replace them with some iron bones of dubious origin. 

Carrying out reconnaissance during a guided tour of the temple. They visit the Alloyed and Unalloyed chapels but they don’t really come up with a plan. They do observe that the sarcophagus in which the prophet is entombed is guarded by the Molybdenum Guard. Four of the elite templars stand watch in 12 hour shifts. This is more security than our protagonists anticipated. 

They retire to the local pub to sink a few ales and divise a suitable scheme. However on their way to the Dread Elephant tavern they come across local thieves crew the Van Cortland Blades about to burn down the pub which it transpires is full of cultists from the Society of the Magenta Joy. 

The player characters decide to prevent the Aron and engage the thieves in hand to hand combat. Although ultimately victorious, a flaming barrel of oil rolls down the hill towards the Temple of the Molybdenum God. Taking advantage of the chaos the PCs charge in. They use drugs found in the house party escapade to incapacitate the Molybdenum Guard but as the they remove the mineralised bones of the prophet they are faced with a horror of the ancient world, a molybdenum elemental. 

Fleeing into the sewers they discover it is not easily shaken. However they all pile through their pocket door into the temporal dead end beyond. Having failed to bring suitable offerings to Pharosocles the self proclaimed king of that realm they are suitably chastised. Whilst they attempt to wait out the molybdenum elemental, they notice the creepers that bind the door that contains some irate Temporal Hounds seem to have weakened. However they escape back to the Aecret Shack of Mercenaries Sellspears and Blades for Hire in order to receive part payment from Carkus Swole. The representative of the rival mineral sect is not totally happy with the overt way on which the bones were stolen. Surely there will be consequences. 

Appendix Grim: The Warriors

 

Gygax’s Appendix N in the 1e DMG listed the inspirational material that informed his games of Dungeons & Dragons. Of course the Appendix Grim relates only to The Grim North. 

The Warriors, Walter Hill’s 1979 cult classic, is a huge influence on the Grim North. The whole concept of stylised, thematic street gangs I stole, whole cloth, and inserted into the setting. 

I didn’t want to have a Thieves Guild. It’s too lazy, straight out of the rule book lazy. Also stolen from Lankhmar and lampooned in Ankh Morpork. So, no. We’ve done that to death thanks. 

If for some bizarre reason, like you’re some sort of younger person, you haven’t seen The Warriors; it’s an old, old film about street gangs in New York based on the novel of the same name by Sol Yurick; which in turn is based on Anabasis by Xenophon, detailing the Long March back from Cunaxa to Greece by Hellenic mercenaries involved in a civil war in the Persian Empire. If you’ve listened to enough 90’s hip hop and hardcore and then watch The Warriors then stand by for the origin of a lot of your favourite sampled dialogue. 

This plot is one of the greatest premises for a role-playing game ever. The Anabasis version has PCs as foreign mercenaries in a war of succession between brothers when their employer-prince is killed. Fearing the PCs’ band could be used against them further, the victorious faction invites their leaders to a banquet and promptly murders them all. Faced with annihilation in a hostile empire thousands of miles from home, the PCs must get back to friendly environs with every hand turned against them. Sweet. Roll initiative, or whatever.

In The Warriors; ten representatives of every major street gang in the city are invited to a big meeting in Brooklyn under a truce. No one goes armed and non-aggression is guaranteed. Cyrus is leader of the largest gang in the city, the Gramercy Riffs, and it is his grand plan to unite all the gangs and control the streets of the city. All the gangs have to do is give up their petty rivalries and embrace the big picture. It’s a good speech, I dig it. Everyone seems into it until a single shot rings out from the crowd. Cyrus is killed and the gathering is raided by the cops. The Warriors leader, Cleon, is blamed for the murder and slain by the Riffs in retribution. The rest of the Warriors flee the police and start to make their way home; unaware that every gang in the city is out to get them for killing Cyrus. 

I’ve run this exact scenario as an online convention game for BurritoCon during the pandemic. Warriors of the Grim North is a Dungeon Crawl Classics funnel that pretty much follows the plot of the film. Except the gangs and districts are Grim versions of their cinematic counterparts. The Dockside Boys in their sailor suits, the Grimball Furies with their painted faces and obsession with the eponymous game, the Fancy Lads in their affected finery and invites to exclusive parties. I also threw in some Grim North classics like the girl with no eyes, the Childcatcher (although this is more of a chitty-chitty bang-bang classic) and the psychopathic eight year olds who tend the bar at the Secret Shack of Mercenaries, Sellspears and Blades for Hire. It worked pretty well and I’d run it again if I had occasion to attend any form of convention in the future. 

A common theme that I expect to establish itself as I, at some point, get round to expanding on the Appendix Grim is that many of the things I feel influenced the Grim North is that the setting, which for a city based game is predominantly a city, and the interaction with that setting is so significant that the setting/city itself is effectively a character in the drama. So it is with the Warriors. The late night trains, the elevated stations, the parks, the tunnels, the subway, the architecture and even the street corners are all features the Warriors must negotiate. New York itself is both ally and antagonist to them as they cross its grimy territory in one fateful night to make it back to Coney Island.

A further point to all this is that as ridiculous as the Warriors is; there’s nothing realistic about the gang culture presented in this film, except maybe the poverty and disaffection, it’s played straight by everyone involved. So for a game that’s not entirely serious, it has wizards for instance, this is important to bear in mind. 

The Thieves Crews of the Grim North take their cues from The Warriors. Stylised and differentiated by quirks of attire as much as geography, none the less they are lethal if crossed and essentially they’re criminals. You probably shouldn’t be associating with them. 

However, the Grim North does not deal in absolutes*, so other organised criminal network structures can and do feature. The Naar’s gang in the Terrace District for instance or the Spirals Residents Association in the district of the same name. 

*with one exception: Absolutely no elves. No fucking exceptions there. 

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.