Locale and Plot

A common topic of discussion among gamers reminiscing about their past is, "Which adventure modules have you run more than once?" I would contend that how one answers that question says a great deal about when one was introduced into the hobby and/or one's early experiences in it. I would hazard to guess that the majority of self-identified grognards would be able to list several modules they'd run more than one time. I myself could regale you with multiple tales of my having run, for example, David Cook's Dwellers of the Forbidden City, at least a half-dozen times, often with the same group of people. I expect this general pattern is true for many old school gamers, while it's something most younger players can't even imagine. How could I have possibly gotten multiple uses out of a single module whose page count didn't even break 30?

The answer is quite simple and it's this: old school modules were, by and large, descriptions of adventuring locales, whereas new school modules are plotted (loosely or tightly) adventure stories. That's not to say there aren't elements of plot in many old school modules. The aforementioned Dwellers of the Forbidden City includes a backstory about caravans being raided by mysterious enemies and the PCs are hired to go and find the source of the raiders and stop them. By the same token, many more strongly plot-driven modules, such as those in the Dragonlance series, include extensive descriptions of locales. There's a difference between the two types of modules, not merely in their focus -- which is important -- but also in their content. Dwellers never explicitly deals with the question of exactly who is behind the caravan raids. Presumably it's the yuan-ti, but the matter is left rather vague (someone can correct me if I'm mistaken on this point) and, at any rate, the backstory is there as an excuse to get the PCs to venture into the jungle and find the Forbidden City and its denizens. The real "plot" of the module is what happens to the PCs once they're there, not something the author has scripted in advance. That's patently not the case with the Dragonlance modules, whose entire purpose was to advance an epic story in which the player characters can take part but the general outlines of which were mapped out not by the referee but by the modules' authors.

If you're looking for a good signpost in determining where the old school ends and the new one begins, it's the shift in emphasis from locales to plots. It's not a hard and fast division; there are examples of both on either side of the line. Nevertheless, I think the expectation that a module "tell a story" rather than provide a location for a story of your own devising is a good indicator of where one's gaming sympathies lie. Since the late 80s at least, roleplaying has largely been defined as "freeform storytelling" and, given that, it's no surprise that adventure modules have been structured accordingly. Now, I don't actually think that definition is incorrect but it's misleading, because it doesn't take into account the increasingly heavy-handed role played by the manufacturers of modules, who've largely usurped the role of the referee in creating and maintaining his campaign world. This is why, though I love the folks at Paizo dearly, I've never been a fan of the whole "adventure path" concept that they've developed into a high art. I'd love to see them produce more location-based modules myself, but I expect they know their fanbase better than I do.

To some extent, I expect that the shift away from the location-based approach is a concession to the oft-repeated saw that gamers no longer have as much free time to make things up as they once did. I think this is hooey myself. More to the point, I do not favor the abandonment of modules entirely -- far from it! Rather, what I advocate is that modules should be made more, well, modular and that means providing lots of options and alternatives that a referee can then use to make its contents his own rather than someone else's. When I was a kid, I may have had lots of time to waste that I no longer have today. I can tell you, though, that I didn't spend hours and hours planning out my adventures, most of which were seat-of-the-pants affairs. What modules gave me was a structure -- map, room descriptions, game stats, etc. -- onto which could hang the story my friends and I created as I refereed their adventures. What I think has happened over the years is that, because "adventure module" has become so strongly associated with the notion of a pre-made adventure story, gamers now simply recoil at the notion of having to "make up the story yourself." They see it as too much of a chore, when, in point of fact, creating a plot/story is the easiest part of being a RPG referee, not the hardest.

I'd love to see some modern day easily reusable modules. Perhaps I need to write them myself.

Father of Us All

On this day in 1890, Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island. Perhaps the finest practitioner of the "weird tale" ever to have put word to the page, his influence on the subsequent development of horror, fantasy, and science fiction is incalculable. Even during his lifetime, Lovecraft's ideas were widely disseminated, as his colleagues in the pulps borrowed and expanded upon his imaginary mythology. After his death, thanks to his many admirers and imitators, his ideas were disseminated wider still and are now part of the common pool from which numerous genres draw inspiration. This, of course, includes roleplaying games, including not just the explicitly Lovecraftian Call of Cthulhu, but also Dungeons & Dragons and many others. Had "Grandpa Theobald" (as he sometimes whimsically styled himself in letters) never lived, the course of several genres of literature, not to mention the popular media they spawned, would be very different indeed.

As I noted in a previous post, Lovecraft has been a powerful influence on my conception of horror and fantasy. Most of my D&D campaigns include Lovecraftian elements and, while Lovecraft's worldview is about as contrary to my own as any, I still find something powerful in his writing that speaks to me on many levels. Like him, I have strong antiquarian tastes and I recoil at many aspects of the modern age. I also can't help but feel an aversion to the popularization of Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos. When you can buy stuffed versions of the Great Old One in a Santa hat, I hope I can be forgiven for feeling that H.P. wouldn't have been pleased at how his work has been treated. I understand that this is all evidence of many people's affection for Lovecraft and his stories. After all, there'd be no stuffed Cthulhus at all if people didn't love his work. Still, I'm uncomfortable with the way the Mythos has been reduced to a geekish jest in many quarters. But then I'm inclined to treat authors and ideas I like with a fair degree of reverence, so maybe I'm constitutionally ill disposed to find it all in good fun.

Of course, even Lovecraft smiled on occasion and so today shall I. I owe the old gent a great deal and it's only fitting I should remember him on the day of his birth. I encourage others to do the same. Chances are that anyone who's reading this blog owes him a lot as well.

Great Minds

An idea I've had for a long time and that I've never yet had the chance to fully implement is the creation of an "interplanetary" D&D setting, by which I mean one in which there are multiple inhabited worlds, each of which is (or has been) in contact with the others. This strikes me as true to the pulp fantasy inspirations of OD&D, with its regular invocations of Burroughs, and also with Vance's The Dying Earth, where there are frequent references to powerful wizards traveling to other moons and planets. I've also felt that the existence of congress with other worlds made it easier to justify the smörgåsbord of weird creatures that inhabit most D&D worlds. If I can say, for example, that lizard men are natives of the Green Planet and that those on the main campaign world are degenerate descendants of interplanetary travelers from the past, in my mind it's all a lot more "believable," if that makes any sense.

In my mind, I always imagined that the main campaign world had two sister planets, which I called simply the Green Planet and the Red Planet. I might give them actual names, but, as I envisioned it, regular travel between worlds was no longer common, having been curtailed by some cataclysmic event in the past (because all good fantasy worlds need a cataclysm in the past), so those names were known primarily to sages and savants and the rare wizard who still traveled there by arcane means.

The Green Planet is pulp Venus -- a lush, steaming jungle world filled with intelligent apes, all manner of reptiles (including dinosaurs), and weird amphibians. Imagine the Isle of Dread as an entire planet and you'll get the idea. The Red Planet, on the other hand, is pulp Mars -- a parched desert world whose decadent civilization teeters on the brink of collapse after untold millennia of practicing black magic and demon worship. Imagine if H.P. Lovecraft had written A Princess of Mars and you'll have the right of it.

What's fascinating is that Paizo's Pathfinder RPG setting, Golarion, seems to be trying to mine the same vein of pulp science fiction. It even uses the terms Green Planet and Red Planet much as I do. It's stuff like this that makes it hard for me not to wish the guys and gals at Paizo well, even if their taste in game mechanics are decidedly more new school than I like. If I ever get to use this in a campaign, you can be sure I'll be swiping a couple of ideas from Pathfinder.

Public Service Announcement (Again)

I've said before that I don't see being passionate about roleplaying games -- or any other hobby -- as a bad thing. Without passion, the world would be a much duller place. But passion can also lead people astray and make them say and do things in the heat of the moment that, on reflection, they'd probably never consider saying or doing. That's why I'd like to ask that, if you disagree with me or with anything I've said, if you think an idiot, a fool, or just an opinionated bastard, please direct your ire toward me and not toward my family, least of all my children.

I have a very thick skin and am not someone who cries foul whenever a voice is raised in anger against my views; it's happened my entire life and I fully expect it to continue so long as I dare to say anything the least bit controversial. I don't have any problem with someone engaging me in spirited debate or even launching a good polemic against me and what I think about gaming or anything else. If I shied away from disagreements, I'd never have put this blog out there for people to read. I'm sincere when I say that I welcome opposing viewpoints.

I may seem like an immovable stick in the mud who closes his ears to the world, but that's pretty far from the truth. I can and have been swayed to revise my opinions in the face of reasoned discourse. "Reasoned" is key here. And wishing ill upon my children because I happened to say something you disagree with, even strongly, is not a good way to convince me of your rationality. So, please, don't do it.

Thank you.

REVIEW: Points of Light

Points of Light, written by Robert Conley and Dwayne Gillingham, packs more old school goodness in its 48 pages than any product published in 2008 has any right to. Don't believe me? Take a look at the 11-page PDF preview and then come back here. Even a quick skim of that preview will make it clear what I'm talking about. Quite simply: Points of Light is the Wilderlands of High Fantasy for the 21st century -- and in some ways it's better. Hyperbole comes easily to me, doesn't it? Perhaps. Let's take a closer look at the book before continue with my effusive praise.

Points of Light describes four different settings, each one broadly consonant with the notion of a dangerous wilderness punctuated by small outposts of civilization. As everyone knows, this is the default setting assumption of 4e and the book's title is an allusion to it. I'll grant you that, when I first heard the title, I wasn't enthused. Like most things about 4e, "Points of Light," as a phrase, reminds me too much of my college philosophy classes, where 18 year-olds, confronted with Plato's dialogs for the first time, suddenly think thoughts they believe no one has ever thought before, failing to realize of course that Plato has been read and analyzed for 2500 years and that there are very likely no new thoughts about the great thinker. By the same token, "points of light" isn't new at all; it's been a setting assumption of D&D from the start. The formalization of the concept -- and the creation of jargon to describe it -- is a good indicator to me of how rootless 4e is, but that's a topic for another time. I don't blame the authors of Goodman Games for adopting the title in an effort to sell the product to players of the new edition, who could certainly learn a few things about the old school from its tightly-written pages.

Despite its title, Points of Light is not, in fact, a 4e product; indeed it's not a product for any system, since it contains almost no game stats at all. What stats it does include, such as references to classes and levels, for example, suggests that it's intended for D&D, but I have no doubt it'd be easily adaptable to any fantasy roleplaying game built on the same concepts as D&D. I was mostly quite pleased with this approach, as it increased the utility of the book a great deal and makes adaptation a snap. My only quibble -- and it's a tiny one -- is that some "high-level" NPCs are in fact given specific levels (Clr12, for instance). I'd have preferred that such things remain vague, so each referee could decide for himself what constitutes high-level. Now, such things are supremely easy to change, so I cannot complain too vociferously. I know from experience, though, that, if something is written in the book, at least some referees or players will expect it to be so and, in a toolkit product like this, the fewer expectations that are introduced, the better.

The meat of the book are the four settings it describes, each with an accompanying one-page hex map (each hex representing 5 miles). Each setting is given a capsule history of three or four paragraphs to "set the scene" and Adaptation Notes that give some ideas about how to customize it to suit the needs and interests of each referee. There is also a table of random encounters and random rumors to give the referee something from which to work in making the settings his own. The descriptions of the settings are divided into sections: Geography, describing terrain features and Locales, describing fixed "encounters," whether they be settlements, monster lairs, ruins, etc. Each hex is numbered and there is an entry in the appropriate section if the hex contains anything noteworthy. These entries are typically no more than a single paragraph, with a few (generally settlements) containing a little more detail (and possibly a thumbnail map). There's just enough detail here to spur the referee's own imagination and give a sense of a greater whole, but not so much that it's hard to change the details if so desired.

The four settings included in Points of Light are as follows:

• Wildland: An area analogous to an outlying province of the Roman Empire in the 5th century A.D. -- after the legions have gone. As its name suggests, it's a "wild" region, overrun with humanoid and barbarian tribes and only a few small outposts of civilization that cling to the old ways.
• Southland: An homage to the Outdoor Survival map of which OD&D often speaks, this setting is an untamed area "to the south" of civilized kingdoms and where the PCs are expected to go and establish themselves as local lords.
• Borderland: This is a war-torn area where several different factions seek the upper hand. It's a good locale for referees and players who like moral ambiguity and intrigue.
• Swamps of Acheron: The most unusual of the four settings, this one is located in an extraplanar realm dedicated to a Lawful Evil god, meaning that it's also the most limited of the settings. It's also the shortest of the four settings (and the one with the smallest map), which can be seen as either good or bad, depending on one's proclivities

Of the four settings, I found that both Wildland and Southland fired my imagination powerfully and I am already torn between using one or the other as the basis for a new campaign. Borderland is also excellent, but it's a bit less "primal" than the other two. The Swamps of Acheron is a puzzle. There are lots of good ideas within its description, but it's also very esoteric, being extraplanar in nature and the realm of an evil god. Its utility is much less than that of the other three, but the other three are so well-done that I scarcely minded. And of course, the Swamps of Acheron is good; it's just not as good in my opinion as the others, but tastes differ on such things.

The layout of the book is simple and usable. The illustrations are nice black and white pieces, definitely contemporary in their appearance but not of the Elmore strike-a-pose school. The writing is generally very clear and concise, with only a few infelicities here and there. The hex maps are simply gorgeous, a beautiful melding of old school sensibilities with modern technology. Indeed, that's how I could characterize Points of Light in general. It's an old school product with new school production values. The book even includes an extensive index, making it easy to find things, which is a nice if somewhat unnecessary touch in a book of this size. All in all, the presentation of Points of Light should serve as a model for how old school publishers present their own products. I'd have liked different interior art, for the most part, but it's not a huge issue and, given that the book is intended to appeal to a broad spectrum of fantasy gamers, I can't fault Goodman Games for not going with something more strongly connected to older forms of illustration.

If Points of Light has a significant flaw, it's the intimation of a larger setting when you look at all four regions it describes. Certain names, historical events, and concepts reappear throughout the book. Now, none of these things gets much -- or any -- explication in the text, so it's not a huge concern. My worry, I suppose, is that there will be a temptation to use these names and so forth as the basis for creating a larger setting that encompasses them all, as was done with the Dungeon Crawl Classics line. The desire to find coherence and unity where there is no need for either is a powerful force in the RPG hobby today. As it stands, Points of Light gives us the thinnest of details, a pencil outline on a broad canvas that we can then color to our own liking. However, I am sure there will be gamers out there who'd like to know more about the history of the Bright Empire or the teachings of the goddess Delaquain and game publishers have a tendency to cater to such obsessives. I'd hate to see that happen, but I can hardly fault this book for what might or might not happen in possible sequels to it.

Leaving aside my concerns for a future that might not be, Points of Light is nearly perfect -- so perfect in fact that I can reasonably call it the Wilderlands of High Fantasy for the next generation. Like its illustrious predecessor, this is a product that's meant to be used rather than pored over for trivial details. One cannot (yet) talk about the intricacies of any of its settings, because they simply don't exist. In that respect, I think it has more utility than the Wilderlands, but then the Wilderlands has had almost three decades of support products. Given that much time, I fear the "world" of Points of Light would be just as detailed. I hope that does not occur; I hope that the toolkit approach of this volume is kept pristine.

The animating philosophy behind this great book is "imagine the hell out of it," a do-it-yourself perspective that is positively refreshing in a hobby filled with brand building and canned settings. Points of Light is gaming at its best -- a call to each referee to use these raw materials to create their own worlds of the imagination rather than relying on the pabulum spoon fed by game companies looking to develop an IP. I have no idea if Points of Light will appeal to today's gamers; I'd love to find out that it sold like gangbusters. That'd be proof that the old ways aren't quite dead, that the kind of gaming I enjoy is still cherished. Regardless, this is a terrific book and I can't speak highly enough about it. Go out and buy a copy and see for yourself.

Final Score: 5 out of 5 polearms

A Bit Like Rock Music

"Games are a bit like rock music, in that no matter where you take them, there needs to be at least a grain of stupidity there, a thread leading back home. I think the same is true of anything done for pleasure."

Thus spake S. John Ross in his Epilogue to the True Scientific Edition of Encounter Critical, which arrived safely in my mailbox this morning. I'm very happy to have been turned on to this game by guys whose opinions I respect, like Jeff Rients. EC is a thing of beauty and I hope to have the chance to inflict it on my gaming group sometime soon. If I do, you can be sure I'll make a post about it -- oh yes indeed.

Grognard's Grimoire: Weird Monetary Treasures

One of the things you need to remember about old school D&D is that most characters received the bulk of their experience points for accumulating treasure rather than from slaying monsters. That's why treasure generation is given such detail in the old rules. It's also why many valuable items are bulky and/or unwieldy -- to make it hard for the characters to haul it out of the dungeon and thus gain experience points appropriate to its value.

That said, I was never really one of those referees who saddled his players with a funerary boat made of solid gold and took big to fit through the doors of the burial chamber where it was kept or a dragon's trove consisting entirely of copper pieces in the millions. I liked to toy with my players, of course, and test their ingenuity, but I preferred to go the route of simply making ordinary things like coins, gems, or jewelry sufficient weird that it took cleverness and perseverance to be able to be able to cash them in.

I used to have a formula for the way I determined the likelihood that monetary treasure was unusual in some way, but I can no longer recall it. So, I'm going to borrow a page from Matt Finch's Swords & Wizardry and go with the following:

For every 100gp in value, there is a 10% chance that 100gp worth of monetary treasure is unusual, AND

For every 1,000 gp in value, there is a 10% chance that 1,000gp worth of monetary treasure is unusual, AND

For every 5,000gp in value, there is a 10% chance that 5,000gp worth of monetary treasure is unusual.

Remember, of course, that "monetary" here means treasure whose value to the characters is expressed entirely in how much cash it can bring through its sale. I never used this method when dealing with weapons, armor, and other such things, because there already were tables to determine their unique properties, if any.

For every Xgp worth of monetary treasure determined to be unusual, roll on the following table to determine in what way it's unusual:

1 Unusual Shape (e.g. triangular coins or square gems)
2 Unusual Size (e.g. giant-forged coins or small bead-like gems)
3 Unusual Color (e.g. green gold pieces or blue rubies)
4 Unusual Markings (e.g. strange glyphs on coins or carvings on the surface of gems)
5 Unusual Property (e.g. glowing coins or floating gems)
6 Hazardous Property (e.g. coins coated with contact poison or gems that give off radiation)

Except for number 6 on the list, all of the other unusual qualities add about 10-25% value to the monetary treasure, but the characters have to work hard to get someone who will be willing to buy them. After all, how many fences have ever heard of blue rubies and would recognize their value when he did? The intent here is to spur side adventures and visits to sages and esoteric collectors in order to offload the weird loot.