New Blogs Added, Space-Age Sorcery, and Petty Gods

I have just added a few great blogs to my blogroll (right side). I have been following them for a while now. They are Swords and Stitchery, Gorgonmilk, and Heretikwerks. They are all great sources of OSR materials but I see them more than just great sources of inspiration for my own game; they have taken up the challenge and become creative centers of OSR knowledge packaging and re-distribution.

One great example of their work is this amazing new download at Heretikwerks: Space-Age Sorcery. If you want to bridge the gap between magic and technology, this is a must have. The greatest thing about it is that it doesn't create loads of new rules to make technology and magic work together... it just creates techno-spells that effect robots and other machines.

Another example is the work that is going on at Gorgonmilk. Greg has cast Resurrection on the corpse of James M's Petty Gods project... and upon rising from the dead it has become more powerful than ever just like Obi-Wan Kenobi and JC. Today sees the release of the original Petty Gods (download it here) compendium, an homage to the old Judge's Guild publication Unknown Gods. A grander, expanded version  of Petty Gods is in the works as well. I can't wait! BTW, I will have a little goddess in there of my own.

I think that Greg's banner (above) expresses the new force within the OSR scene... moving from the "Old School Rennaisance" to what I think should best be called the "Open Source Revolution". Even the most popular clones out there are open source. Swords & Wizardry, Labyrinth Lord, and Lamentations of the Flame Princess,  the most popular 1st Gen D&D clones, all have free versions available for download. That is how I first discovered these games a few years ago. Greg and the rest of the gang have become the new locus of OSR attention and they are producing some awesome resources.

There are other great blogs out there which have been inspirational to me as I have jumped back into D&D and turned to my D&D roots. I will detail some of them in the future.

Hulks & Horrors: All Hail Space Bears!

Thank you John from Bedroom Wall Press for pushing on in spite of your crowd sourcing not coming through. I have purchased the pdf and soft cover from DriveThruRPG. I have just finished reading this new take on dungeoneering... H&H takes the dungeon into outer space: massive space hulks packed full of unknown horrors and ancient, techno treasures. 

H&H has made it easy for me to do what I have always wanted to do: to take the ancient ruins at the lowest levels off my dungeons and to turn them into the crashed remains of a massive space hulk. Are those coffins packed with mummies or are they stasis chambers packed with cosmonauts? Is that horrible beasty in the next chamber a great lich-lord with a magic ray shooting wand, or is it a demented, chemically preserved techno-priest from Ancient Earth armed with a plasma beamer? Can the PCs travel to the stars... 

Our new masters, the Space Bears, are coming for you!

Tracking Ammunition, Torches, and Other Items

Roger over at Roles, Rules and Rolls recently wrote about tracking arrow usage and determining whether they are consumed (i.e. damaged and therefore unusable) when fired.

The solutions that he and others suggest seem to be a bit too crunchy to me. They involve either rolling a percentage die (e.g. 50% of the time the missile is not reusable) or basing the factor of re-usability on how much damage the arrow did on impact (i.e. on a natural roll of 6 on 1d6 for damage, the arrow is destroyed). After determining which of the arrows are re-used, then we have to either subtract those that may not be re-used from the total in the quiver or add them back to the total remaining in the quiver. Some consideration is even made for loosening arrow heads to make them more or less recoverable. 

Usually in my games, we just subtract any arrows (or other missiles) fired from the total in the quiver (sack, bag, etc.). That allows us to avoid the need to check to see if they are still usable... and anyway arrows, crossbow bolts, or sling bullets are really pretty cheap. We do track resource management and on extended forays into large dungeons resource management becomes pretty serious. 

But Roger has gotten me thinking about missile management. One could do something similar to the system I use to manage the use of light sources: oil, torches, etc. Regarding light sources, I have a little table (below) which I have put into my DIY DM screen. The column which applies most to the current discussion is the far right column: Exhausted. That is the roll on which the item is exhausted (oil is used up, torch is burned out, etc.). I have players roll approximately every hour of game time. For example, a result of 1 on 1d10 means that the oil fueling the lantern has run out. The reasoning behind this system is pretty simple, to me at least. In the case of the oil lantern, 1 flask of oil should last approximately 10 hours. So, on any given hour there is a 1 in 10 chance that that is the hour in which the flask will be emptied. When a 1 is rolled, the light source, in this case, lantern, sputters and burns out in 1d4-1 rounds.

LIGHT SOURCES
Source	Radius	Brightness	Exhausted
Candle	2	Dim	1 on 1d4
Torch	5	Bright	1 on 1d4
Lantern (Common)	10	Bright	1 on 1d10
Lantern (Faerie)	12	Dim	1 on 1d20
Campfire	10	Bright	1 on 1d12
Sunrod	20	Daylight	1 on 1d12
Phosphorescent Plant/Fungi	5	Dim	N/A
Fire Creature (Tiny)	2	Bright	N/A
Fire Creature (Small)	5	Bright	N/A
Fire Creature (Medium)	10	Bright	N/A
Fire Creature (Large)	20	Bright	N/A
Fire Creature (Huge/Gargantuan)	40	Bright	N/A

The system above is pretty simple to manage and avoids having to keep a running tally of exactly how long a lantern or torch has been burning before it is exhausted. Tracking usage by the hour could be especially crunchy when one lights a torch for an hour, then puts it out for a few days before relighting it again. This system also keeps the "work" of consulting the chart and keeping track of time in the DM's hands, allowing players to play.

This system can easily be morphed to  tracking arrows while simultaneously determining whether the arrows are still usable. One could simple say that every time an arrow is fired the PC rolls... a d20 maybe... and on a 1 the PC's quiver is exhausted. In fact, I have already used variants on this system to track other consumable items: spell components for example.

Combat: Lethality, Predictability, and Simplicity.

I have been following the great blog, Dungeon of Signs, for a few months now and I have to say that I love Gus' take on gonzo sword, science, and sorcery classic D&D. In fact Gus' play reports are what turned me on to Anomalous Subsurface Environment which arrived last week. A great purchase!

In addition to the piles of great content (tables, house rules, etc.) and play reports that Gus posts, he, from time to time, discusses his take on gaming and DMing. In this post he reduces running combats down to answering three simple questions. Should combat be...

1. Lethal vs. Obstacle?
2. Unpredictable vs. Managed?
3. Simple vs. Complicated?

Gus discusses the varied implications on play of how a DM answers these questions. I would have to say that, in my game, all of the answers are pretty much down the middle.

Lethality:
Lethality in my games is a real risk. PCs die and my players know that I am not going to pull punches. At the same time, death is usually the result of bad play (i.e. making bad choices) though a few horrible rolls might still be enough to do someone in.

Predictability:
I do like to throw a monkey wrench into the action once in a while... I do use critical hits and misses for combat and spells too, which certainly adds some chaos and danger. But generally my game is pretty predictable. Items which are consumed over time (i.e. oil, torches, etc.) are metered and consumed or exhausted with die rolls (e.g. a torch is consumed by rolling a 1 on 1d6).

Simplicity:
I like to keep things pretty simple. The crunchier bits I like to take care of behind the screen. The crunchiest thing I have in my game is a spell casting roll (see my Magic tab). I am also hacking the new martial class/combat dice systems from the D&D Next playtests into my game. Character creation is not like it was in 3.5/PF, choosing not completely understood options from massive lists; it has become more of a Chinese menu thing... choose one option from each of the 4 following columns. Rolling up a new character takes a about as much time as it did when I played AD&D/2e.

Plumbing Dungeons for Loot... The Holy Quest.

Check out this great post by Father Dave.

Rarely do we make connections or differentiate between what our characters "do do" and what they "should do". Most parties tend to be made up of a combination of, at best, charming rogues and, at worst, murderous thugs. Just check out his post post about the mega-dungeon as a holy quest for enlightenment.

In the future...

only man-machines will play the heaviest metal. Observe and be terrified fleshlings!

Encumbrance... Even Simpler

Many of you have probably already read about the encumbrance system I have been using in my own D&D game for at least a year or two now. Basically, I have been using James Raggi's great, simple system which has become one of the great innovations he has brought to D&D through LotFP. I love his take on gaming and the imagery and style of play which LotFP encourages. Here is my previous post regarding encumbrance. The system is pretty simple and can be easily hacked to fit into any TSR era or d20 D&D game. I still love it. I even made my own DIY character sheet which had the entire system, including tables, on the back side.

But in response to my players' needs and my own desire to simplify the gaming experience at our table (though it may seem like I like a bit of crunchiness on occasion: using comeliness for example) I have been searching for an alternative which requires little more than basic arithmetic while still making encumbrance an important player choice.

A great blog which I have been following is Brendan's Untimately. In this great post he lays out a system for calculating encumbrance and applying penalties which requires nothing more than simple addition and subtraction.

First, divide all items a character carries into two lists: encumbering and non-encumbering items. Encumbering items include any individual item or group of similar items which could slow a character down if carried. Let's define anything that a character would notice being removed from his backpack as being encumbering. A dagger seems to be a reasonable unit of measure upon which we can base our rule of thumb... or dagger. It seems reasonable to me that anything bigger or heavier than a dagger would be noticeable when removed from someone's rucksack; these would be encumbering items. Conversely, anything similar or smaller and lighter than a dagger would be non-encumbering. What do we do about carrying larger amounts of similar items? A quiver of 24 crossbow bolts would only be one encumbering item for accounting purposes, not 24. Additionally, how should we account for containers, like the one in which the bolts are carried (or backpacks, scroll cases etc.)? Basically, they are always counted as non-encumbering items. Additionally, what do we do about coins? A character should not be able to carry around 10,000 gp and have it only be as "heavy" (in encumbrance terms) as a bastard sword. So, for every  full 1,000 coins that a character carries his encumbrance is increased by a value of one (e.g. 2,350 gp increases encumbrance by two; 990 gp does not increase encumbrance at all). Magic items are usually encumbering items. Armor weighs in a bit differently: heavy armor has an encumbrance value of three, medium armor is valued at two, and light is just weighted at one.

The second step is to simply total the amount of encumbering items that a character is carrying. If this number, the character's encumbrance rating or value, is greater than the character's strength, the character is over-encumbered; take the difference. The difference is the character's actual encumbrance modifier.

The encumbrance modifier is the penalty applied to checks and rolls which are effected by being over-encumbered: all physical checks: attacks, saves, skill checks, initiative checks (this penalty is subtracted from a character's other initiative modifiers), etc.