The Alexandrian

GUMSHOE House Rule – Basic Expeditions

July 30th, 2018

When running a globetrotting historical Trail of Cthulhu game — whether set in the 1890’s, the 1920’s, or the 1930’s — it’s not unusual for the investigators to find themselves trekking out into the wilderness, akin to those expeditions described by H.P. Lovecraft in The Shadow Out of Time or At the Mountains of Madness.

Pelgrane Press has actually published an entire collection of such scenarios in Mythos Expeditions, which I understand to also include a rather robust set of rules for organizing and running such expeditions. I’m afraid I don’t actually own that particular volume, and the rules you’ll find here are unrelated to whatever full-fledged mechanics you might find there. What I wanted/needed was a relatively streamlined set of mechanics that could be used to meaningfully organize expeditions as part of a larger campaign in which they were not necessarily the primary focus, but nevertheless a significant part.

EXPEDITIONS

These guidelines assume a modest, personal expedition consisting of a fairly typical group of investigators, perhaps one or two local guides, and their porters. They’re not appropriate for larger groups, industrial-scale explorations, or military expeditions into the wilderness (although adapting them to such might not require too much effort).

SUPPLIES: The supplies for an expedition require a 1-point Credit Rating spend per week of supplies.

PORTERS: The expedition requires 1 porter per investigator, plus 1 porter per guide. It generally costs a 1-point Credit Rating spend per porter, but Bargain reduces the total cost by 1-point. A 1-point Bargain spend halves the total Credit Rating cost for porters.

If an expedition will last for more than three weeks, the number of porters must be doubled (due to the increased number of supplies to be carried).

GUIDES

In broad terms, a guide will provide a pool of Outdoorsman points (and other expertise which may or may not be useful). In certain circumstances, guides may also possess specific navigational knowledge (i.e., the location of a “lost” locale or local watering holes) or other advantages (friendship with local, usually hostile tribes).

TRACKLESS WASTE: Navigating through a trackless waste is not trivial. It requires a 1-point Outdoorsman spend simply to navigate out of the waste. (For example, getting to the Atlantic coast from the midst of the Amazonian jungle.) Getting to a specific point of your choosing is a 2-point Outdoorsman spend.

However, a map or compass each counts as a 1-point Outdoorsman spend. (So if you have the Outdoorsman skill, a map, and a compass, you can get to a specific point of your choosing without any spend.)

FINDING A “LOST” LOCALE: Sometimes you don’t actually know the specific point at which you can find whatever it is you’re looking for. (For example, you might be searching for the lost city of Irem.) For each week of the expedition, the expedition rolls 1d6. Assuming the location actually exists and is in the region they’re searching for it, they’ll find it if the die rolls “6”.

The Investigators and their guides can spend points to enhance the search. For every 3 points spent, they can roll an additional d6. Such spends could come from Outdoorsman, Archaeology (analyzing ruins throughout the area), Anthropology, Oral History (questioning locals), or any other skill for which a logical purpose can be proposed. (This will be highly dependent on the particular circumstances of the specific locale being searched.)

INTERPRETERS

Whether on an expedition or not, any Investigator without an interpreter who cannot speak local languages must make 1-point spends with Interpersonal abilities that would otherwise function without a spend. Acquiring an interpreter generally requires Bargain or Streetwise.

Acquiring an interpreter without Assess Honesty may result in hiring an unreliable fellow. Such an interpreter may do something that could inconvenience or even harm their employer (abandoning them, stealing from them, warning local cultists, etc.).

OTHER CONCERNS

Depending on where the expedition is located, it may be appropriate to use a Heat track (or similar environmental impact mechanic). Investigators who insist on hauling large quantities of explosives into the outback will find themselves saddled with additional logistical concerns.

Filed under: Roleplaying Games Comments (2) Article tags: gumshoe, house rules, trail of cthulhu

Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Dynamic Terrain

July 27th, 2018

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 13B: The Tragedy at the Door

Sun Tzu said:

To cross mountains follow the valleys, search out tenable ground, and occupy the heights. If the enemy holds the heights, do not climb up to engage them in battle. This is the way to deploy an army in the mountains.

The army likes heights and abhors low areas, esteems the sunny [yang] and disdains the shady [yin]. (…) You must quickly get away from deadly configurations of terrain such as precipitous gorges with mountain torrents, Heaven’s Well, Heaven’s Jail, Heaven’s Net, Heaven’s Pit, and Heaven’s Fissure. Do not approach them. When we keep them at a distance, the enemy is forced to approach them. When we face them, the enemy is compelled to have them at their rear.

When on the flanks the army encounters ravines and defiles, wetlands with reeds and tall grass, mountain forests, or areas with heavy, entangled undergrowth, you must thoroughly search them because they are places where an ambush or spies would be concealed.

I was originally going to write that a lot of emphasis has been given recently to creating “dynamic terrain” or “tactically rich environments” or “interesting areas” or whatever other term somebody has decided to hang on the concept (all of which are just euphemisms for “two guys standing next to each other in an open field beating on each other is really boring”). But then I realized that this emphasis has actually been going on for like 10-15 years, which I suppose means it doesn’t really qualify as “recent” any more.

(Get off my lawn.)

What I will say to all you whippersnappers is that I think this has become significantly over-emphasized. This includes My Precious Encounter™ design where GMs become obsessed with creating the “perfect” encounter terrain, filled with all kinds of pre-programmed tactical features. It also includes the strange, Rube Goldbergian edifices that I’ve seen spring up where you need to mechanically “tag” the battlefield like some kind of amateur graffiti artist so that the characters can use a whole ‘nother set of mechanics in order to “invoke” the tags in order to (usually) gain some prepackaged, generic effect. Or, worse yet, you custom-build mechanical interfaces into every tag so that the players can dock into them with keywords or some such.

Gah.

Basically, what I’m saying is that if this is how you’re achieving dynamic terrain in your games, then you’re really over-thinking the whole thing.

Just create realistic, detailed locations and then have your bad guys use them logically. (Or insanely awesomely depending on circumstance and genre.)

You don’t need to drape mechanics over it. The staircase can just be a staircase. You don’t need to pre-tag it with the “Banisters” property so that people can slide down them. And I’d argue that you shouldn’t spend a lot of time pre-planning the stunts your Triad martial artist mooks are going to be performing, because the fight might just as easily happen in the next room or the PCs might just blow them all up with a grenade before the fight even starts.

In fact, rather than trying to nail everything down and covering it with an encrustacean of extruded mechanics, I tend to embrace the largely opposite approach as championed by Robin D. Laws:

In Feng Shui, you want to be able to decide on the spur of the moment that there just happen to be awnings hanging over that walkway between buildings, or there is indeed a ledge big enough for that hoodlum to jump off of. (…)

An alternative to maps are color pictures from magazines. Travel or architectural magazines often have excellent photos which you can use as the basis of your set design. You can show these to your players to help visualize where their characters are, and they will stimulate the imaginative process instead of hampering it.

If a player says they want to slide down the banister, then unless the staircase was explicitly established as not having a banister, then it almost certainly does now. (And if that’s case, why would I need to not only spell that out in my notes, but also dump a bunch of mechanics into it? See what I’m saying?)

EASIER SAID THAN DONE

It is, of course, really easy to just say, “Describe terrain and then be awesome with it!” And with thirty years of experience, maybe I am overestimating how easy it is to do this in practice for people who haven’t done it before.

But I will say this: It’s a skill and it will improve with practice. And all that mechanical over-engineering? It’s not practice for this skill. It’s a completely different thing.

And here’s my super secret technique for creating dynamic terrain:

Try not to describe empty spaces.
Think about how the space is actually used.
Make sure to include the third dimension. (Both up and down.)
Create chokepoints.
During the actual fight, think about the unintended ways in which characters can affect the environment and vice versa.

That’s basically it. If you find that you’ve jotted down an empty, featureless room in your notes (or conjure up that visual while improvising on-the-fly during play), second guess that impulse.

If you’re looking for inspiration, think about why the room exists: What purpose is it currently being used for? (Or was being used for if the area has been abandoned.) What furniture would be there? What physical shape would the space possess? What decorations or accoutrements would people put here?

Finally, remind yourself that your map may be two-dimensional, but the game world isn’t.

This last point, almost entirely by itself, can carry a lot of the heavy weight when it comes to dynamic terrain. You can see an example of that in this session, when the PCs get trapped trying to descend and ascend the sinkhole. That one tactical reality pretty much defines the entire encounter (which is one of the most memorable of the entire campaign for the group). There was a similar example back in Session 11, actually, where there was a short ten or fifteen foot drop down into the fungal garden corrupted by sickstone.

“Okay,” you say, “but what if the group is outside and there are no walls and they’re in the desert or the prairie or some other vast, wide open space?”

Well, in that case the point of interest is the vast, wide-open space. What does that distance do to the combat (particularly the initial encounter range) compared to the claustrophobic knife fights that most RPG combat tends towards?

Just don’t do it all the time, because anything repeated often enough will become boring. Find a box canyon or something. Or just throw a couple of hills up. (Ask Paullus and Varro what can be done to you with a couple of hills.)

Filed under: Roleplaying Games Comment (0) Article tags: d&d, in the shadow of the spire, ptolus, running the campaign

In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 13B: The Tragedy at the Door

July 27th, 2018

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 13B: THE TRAGEDY AT THE DOOR

December 16th, 2007
The 1st Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

A sudden hush filled the long hall – the violence ending almost as quickly as it had began. But even in this unexpected lull, the threat of danger still hung thickly over them. The door may have been shut upon Ursaal, but the warcaster was still an eminent threat.

They rallied quickly, reviving the injured goblins and falling into a defensive formation that quickly moved down the hall. Agnarr, with his flaming sword, hacked through the webs that Ursaal had left behind him. Once a path had been cleared to the stairs, he and Tee climbed up to the double doors of iron.

Tee quickly inspected the doors and found that no traps had been laid upon them. She fell back into the middle of the defensive formation at the base of the stairs, leaving Agnarr alone to place his hand upon the latch and swing one of the doors open.

Beyond the doors lay a spacious hexagonal chamber illuminated by seven strangely illuminated braziers arranged in a ten-foot-diameter circle in the center of the room. The sickly green stone of the braziers was carved into the shape of writhing, amorphous tendrils reaching up to support corroded iron bowls in which sputtered foul-smelling flames.

These braziers surrounded a strange idol carved in amorphous, undulating waves. Thick sheets of dripping algae and slime coated the walls, and dark-green tentacles of the stuff dangled down from the ceiling like thick, half-congealed ropes. All of this stuff slithered and writhed – sliding about the place almost as if it were possessed of life.

Vision into the room was utterly obscured by the constantly wavering layers of gelatinous growths, but shadows could clearly be seen moving within.

As Tee and Agnarr had worked, Elestra had whispered to her python viper – instructing it to follow the scent of Ursaal. So, as Agnarr opened the door, the massive snake slid between his legs.

Agnarr moved to follow, but as his arms touched the dangling tendrils he felt waves of horrible nausea sweep through his skin and overwhelm his senses. The floor beneath him, too, seemed to reel at his tread. He lurched backwards, but the tendrils reached out as if to follow him. With a disgusted sweep of his greatsword he sliced them away.

Agnarr stepped forward again, this time planning to cut a path through the seething chaos of slime and fungus. But as he did so, the unmistakable chants of an arcanist echoed through the smoky chamber. Acting on sheer instinct, Agnarr leaped back and slammed the door shut.

A moment passed as all of them looked at each other. But then Elestra, realizing that her beloved pet was now trapped within the room, gave a sharp cry and leapt forward, shoving the door open again and crying out for the snake to return to her side. Read more »

Filed under: Roleplaying Games Comment (0) Article tags: campaign journals, d&d, in the shadow of the spire, ptolus

Check This Out: Web DM’s Intro to Hexcrawls

July 26th, 2018

Some of you may already be familiar with the Web DMs, but this is a really excellent overview of hexcrawl gaming.

There’s a bit of talk in the video about when hexcrawls are an appropriate structure vs. not appropriate for wilderness travel. My experience:

1. Exploration. (The “West Marches” approach.)

2. There’s meaningful consequences as a result of the navigation choices you’re making.

Anything else? Don’t run it as a hexcrawl.

When it comes to #2, the meaningful choices also need to largely be at the scale you’re running the hexcrawl at. If Moria vs. the Gap of Rohan is the meaningful choice, then 3-mile hexes aren’t the right scale. If Old Forest vs. the Road to Bree is the meaningful choice, then 3-mile hexes would probably work well.

(You might also consider the benefits of a point-crawl here if the meaningful navigation choices are actually quite limited.)

This makes for an interesting corollary to my oft-repeated comment about keying hexes: If you’ve got a lot of empty hexes or if you’re routinely keying multiple areas of interest into each hex, that’s also an indication that you’re using the wrong scale for your hexcrawl.

Filed under: Roleplaying Games Comments (2) Article tags: check this out, hexcrawl

Blades in the Dark: Progress Clocks

July 25th, 2018

Blades in the Dark - Progress Clocks

Blades in the Dark uses progress clocks to “track ongoing effort against an obstacle or the approach of impending trouble.” Actions, consequences, fortune rolls, and the natural evolution of the game state can all cause the clocks to accumulate ticks (or, more rarely, lose ticks). When the clock fills up, the thing it was tracking — the state of alert in the general’s compound, a faction’s goal, the sinking of a ship — happens. Progress clocks are a quick and effective way of visualizing and tracking persistent and/or impending activities, allowing the GM to juggle more of them (allowing for the creation of more complicated and Byzantine scenarios), clearly communicating the current state of affairs to players, and (rather crucially) giving a flexible mechanical structure that the players can engage with in order to affect those game states.

I’ll probably have more to say about progress clocks and countdown clocks and similar mechanics at the some point in the future (probably as part of the Art of Rulings), but at the moment I’m gearing up to a run a Blades mini-campaign and so I’m focused on the actual tools involved in using them. I like to do my campaign prep primarily on my computer (I think best with my keyboard), and since like 90% of Blades in the Dark is either assigning a progress clock or tracking a progress clock, I wanted digital resources for doing so. And I was actually surprised to discover that these resources did not, in fact, already exist. (Or, at least, my Google-fu was unequal to the task of locating them.) So I ended up creating them scratch, and now I’m sharing them here.

IMAGES

Blades in the Dark uses a 4-segment clock for complex obstacles, a 6-clock for more complicated obstacles, and an 8-clock for daunting obstacles.

The zip file below contains a full set of images in both both SVG and PNG formats for each clock (ranging from empty to full).

FONT

The file also contains a TTF, EOT, and WOFF font files for the clocks. Use the following characters with the fonts, from empty clock to full clock:

4-CLOCK: A B C D E

6-CLOCK: a b c d e f g

8-CLOCK: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

(This information is also contained in a text file in the zip.)

Permission is granted to use these resources for all commercial and non-commercial use, as long as credit is given.

PROGRESS CLOCKS – FONTS AND IMAGES

(zip file)