The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft are available in a handsomely compiled e-book from the Arkham Archivist, so there’s never been a better time to read Lovecraft’s original stories if you’ve been depriving yourself until now.

If you’re feeling ambitious and want to read all of Lovecraft, then simply reading the stories in the order that they were written is definitely the way to go: You’ll see the evolution and transition of his ideas in “real time” (so to speak) as the mythology of the Mythos grows up around you. I, personally, find this experience fascinating because, at the beginning of his career, Lovecraft was extremely racist, virulently xenophobic, and cynically terrified of the future. At the end of his career he would certainly not be considered liberal by today’s standards, but his views on all of these subjects had radically shifted and softened. I find Lovecraft’s racism appalling, but I find the totality of his career to be hopeful and uplifting: People can learn. People can get better. People can expand their horizons.

But tackling the complete corpus of Lovecraft is definitely a major undertaking, so it’s understandable if you’d rather just sample his work. For that approach, this is the list I recommend for getting a good overview:

• The Dunwich Horror
• The Call of Cthulhu
• Shadow Over Innsmouth
• The Colour Out of Space
• Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
• At the Mountains of Madness

The order in which you read these six stories doesn’t matter much (although I’d save At the Mountains of Madness until last). But if you read all six you’ll have a pretty good sense of Lovecraft’s breadth, you’ll have experienced most of the “big ideas” that people talk about when they talk about Lovecraft, and you’ll have read a good selection of Lovecraft’s best work.

A case could be made for adding “The Shadow Out of Time” and “The Statement of Randolph Carter” to this list (the latter of which should be read before “Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” if you read both). But I, personally, don’t think they’re as good as the six stories listed above.

Go to Part 1

One of the things I talked about in the Game Structures series was the vertical integration of game structures. For example:

The hexcrawling structure delivers you to a hex keyed with a dungeon. Entering the dungeon transitions you to the dungeoncrawling structure, which delivers you to a room keyed with a hostile monster. Fighting the monster transitions you to the combat structure, which cycles until you’ve defeated the monster and returns you to the dungeoncrawling structure.

This can be crudely characterized as: “You explore the hexcrawl so that you can find dungeons. You explore dungeons so that you can find things to kill. You kill things so that you can get their treasure.” This is, obviously, a vast over-simplification. But it effectively drills down to a core structure that exemplifies the basic elements that make these scenario structures tick.

So, in a naturalistic sense, we can ask a wandering hero standing at the gates of a city, “What are you looking for?” But we could look at the same question through a structural lens and ask, “How can we vertically integrate the urbancrawl with other scenario structures?” (And what can that tell us about how we need to structure the urbancrawl itself?)

The structure “above” the urbancrawl is pretty easy to figure out: A hexcrawl brings us to the city, delivers us to the gate, and brings us right back to the question, “What are you looking for?”

Which turns our attention to the structure under the urbancrawl. And for that, let’s start by considering existing structures that we could stick in there.

URBANCRAWL TO DUNGEON

What if we treated an urbancrawl just like a hexcrawl? It delivers you to location-based adventures using a dungeoncrawl structure.

This sort of structure could work well for a Ptolus-style or Waterdeep-style “dungeon under the city” scenario, where the goal of your urbancrawling is to find new and potentially lucrative entrances to the city’s literal underworld.

But while this hypothetical structure could serve as an intriguing patina for a megadungeon campaign, it seems to be primarily interested in providing an alternative exit from the urban environment. What I’m interested in, on the other hand, is finding a structure for actual urban adventuring.

Of course, we wouldn’t necessarily need to do literal dungeons: We could deliver up vampire dens or mob houses or whatever. The mental stumbling block I run into, though, is how to reliably trigger these from simple geographic movement in an urban environment. (But it’s definitely something to keep in mind.)

URBANCRAWL TO COMBAT

What if we treated the urbancrawl just like a dungeon? You crawl into a neighborhood and it triggers a combat encounter just like entering a dungeon room.

The problem I see here is contextualizing this string of violence into something interesting. In a dungeon there is an immediate, physical contiguity which can be used to bind multiple encounters together: The goblins in area 4 are working with the other goblins that can be found in areas 5-10.

By contrast, an urbancrawl is distinct from a dungeoncrawl in that it is presenting selected elements of interest from a much larger pool of information. (As opposed to the dungeoncrawl, which generally presents everything inside the dungeon complex.)

Which isn’t to say, of course, that you couldn’t figure out a way to contextualize urbancrawl combat encounters. For example, if we key a vampire in Lowtown and a vampire in Empire Villa it wouldn’t take much imagination to assume they’re both based out of the same blood den. But since that connection is non-geographical, we would need to figure out a way to “escalate” from the ‘crawl-triggered vampire encounters to the blood den.

(This becomes necessary because movement in a city is, generally speaking, not limited.)

It strikes me that this urbancrawl-to-combat structure would probably work really well for a Dirty Harry-style cop campaign: The ‘crawl becomes your patrol, with the various encounters triggered by the ‘crawl serving as potential hooks into larger investigations.

 URBANCRAWL TO MYSTERY

Which brings us to urbancrawls triggering mystery scenarios.

A natural image to pull up here is the cop out on patrol: They walk the streets, spot something suspicious, and the investigation of a crime is triggered. For similar reasons, this might be an interesting structure to explore for a superhero campaign: The classic “Master Planner” story from Amazing Spider-Man #31-33 was triggered by Spider-Man simply spotting some burglars trying to steal atomic equipment and then following a string of clues that eventually led him to an underwater base hidden in New York’s harbor.

This sort of “walking the streets and having something mysterious bump into you” is also quite popular in classic sword and sorcery literature, however. Robert E. Howard uses it in a number of Conan stories, for example, including “Shadows in Zamboula” which opens with a quivering voice declaiming that, “Peril hides in the house of Aram Baksh!” as the titular barbarian is walking down a street.

As I mentioned earlier, however, true mystery scenarios don’t play well with a true ‘crawl structure because they’re not holographic in their goals: You can’t solve the second half of the mystery unless you’ve collected the clues from the first half. So let’s lay mysteries aside for a moment and back up a moment.

URBANCRAWL TO LOCATION

“Peril hides in the house of Aram Baskh!”

Actually, I’m drawn back to that quote. Because what’s really happening here is that Conan is being told, “There’s something interesting in the house of Aram Baksh! You should totally check it out.” (The actual character is saying “don’t go in there, it’s dangerous, other people have died”, but from a structural standpoint the hook is saying the opposite.)

So let’s remove the trappings of the “dungeon” concept and instead just deliver up “locations”. That actually sounds familiar: It’s very similar to how hexcrawls work.

So what if we treated an urbancrawl just like a hexcrawl?

If you go exploring through an urbancrawl, what types of locations does it deliver to you? How does it deliver them? Why are you looking for them?

I have no idea. So let’s make a hex map of Ptolus.

Go to Part 4: Experimental City Hexes

As I’ve mentioned before, the manuscript for Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock has seen better days. Torn pages and missing words are damaging enough, but perhaps the most devastating loss to the play is its finale: At least one full leaf is missing at the end of the play, taking with it at least 120 lines (based on the number of lines per leaf in the rest of the manuscript). It’s unlikely that we are missing more than one or two leaves, as the play is already rather long at 2,989 lines and is clearly heading towards a conclusion.

The ending of a play, of course, contains the culmination of its plot, theme, and characters. Therefore, in order to discuss or analyze Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock, one must hypothesize the nature of its ending. (If Godot shows up, Waiting for Godot looks like a very different play.) And if one is going to perform it, of course, a conclusion of some sort must be written.

It is perhaps unsurprising to discover that the hypothetical ending of the play has become a crucible for the authorship debate: Write the ending one way, and it strengthens the play’s ties to Shakespeare’s Richard II. Write it a different way and the plays become completely incompatible.

CONCLUDING THE PLOT

Much like the authorship debate itself, there are basically two possibilities for the ending of Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock:

First, the play could be viewed as a complete conflation of Richard’s reign: The cronies of Richard’s final crisis (Bushy, Bagot, Scroop, and Green) are transplanted into Richard’s first crisis (which historically featured an entirely different set of nobles). Gloucester’s death, which in real life took place between the two crises, is dramatically shifted to the culmination of the first. But instead of being resolved in a series of primarily political maneuvers, this crisis is instead resolved on the field of battle in the fashion of the second crisis.

Theoretically one could argue that this is not a prequel to Shakespeare’s Richard II, but rather supercedes it entirely: All one needs to do is provide an ending in which Richard abdicates his throne in order to complete the play’s masterful blending of every crisis in Richard’s reign into a single, unified narrative.

This theory runs into a rather significant stumbling block, however, when one notices that Henry Bolingbroke — Richard’s replacement and the future Henry IV — is conspicuously missing from the play. While it’s impossible to completely rule out a last minute revelation of the heir apparent (akin to Henry VII in Richard III or Fortinbras in Hamlet), it’s rather difficult to imagine how the play would simultaneously remove Bolingbroke’s father (the Duke of Lancaster), who has also been left rather inconveniently alive.

Thus we are forced to turn to the second possibility, in which Richard’s first deposition is carried out: Stripped of his friends and with their tyrannies revoked, Richard is allowed to keep his throne. Much like the historical record, there is a return to a sort of status quo, allowing for a relatively seamless continuity with the beginning of Richard II.

In addition to Richard’s fate, there’s the question of how the issue of Woodstock’s murder was to be resolved. It has been hypothesized that Lapoole’s entrance as a prisoner at the top of the scene must presage an ultimate revelation of Woodstock’s fate, but this isn’t necessarily true: Lapoole may merely be rounding out the crowd of Richard’s cronies who have been captured during the battle (and destined to be sentenced during the course of the scene). If the play is connected to Richard II, it’s notable that while Gloucester’s death is known at the beginning of that play, even Lancaster and York are left to speculate on the king’s guilt in the matter.

CONCLUDING THE CHARACTERS

Tying off the loose ends of the plot in R2: Woodstock is largely a matter of shuffling historical necessity and guessing which bits the author intended to include. More difficult to guess are the particular conclusions of each character’s arc, since each character — although largely drawn from the historical record — is nevertheless the unique creation of the author’s genius.

Of course, not every character in a drama is necessarily worthy of equal attention. Therefore, one needs to choose which characters are to be given the spotlight’s focus. In the case of R2: Woodstock, my best guess is that this focus belongs to Nimble and Tresilian (who have been the focus of the play’s B-plot), Richard (by necessity of his deposition if nothing else), and the king’s surviving uncles (partly as a continuation of Woodstock’s important legacy within he play).

As for Nimble and Tresilian, the thrust of their arc has already been initiated in Act 5, Scene 5, and is being drawn to a close when the script abruptly cuts off. It’s not difficult, therefore, to round off an ending in which the servant becomes the master (completing a cycle of class inversion found throughout the play) and Tresilian is brought to justice for his tricks in the culmination of a final trick played by Nimble.

Next we turn to Richard, who is most likely brought onstage as a captive by the Duke of York (who is conspicuously absent at the beginning of the final scene). Is he to be humbled like Tresilian? Perhaps. But if Richard is to end with his crown intact, it may make more sense to draw a contrast between his fate and that of his false judge. Let us instead suppose a Richard who, out of his need to find some strength to rely on, turns to the surety of his divine right to the throne: This harrowing experience can actually serve to strengthen and purify that belief, already found as a subtext throughout R2: Woodstock, into the central tenet of his existence (and thus setting the stage for Richard II).

Finally we come to the dukes of York and Lancaster. Throughout the play they have largely acted in concert as “headstrong uncles to the gentle king” (as Greene describes them in 1.2), but there have also been subtle divisions drawn between their characters: The “relenting Duke of York” (2.1) being contrasted against a Lancaster who is frequently “past all patience” (1.1).

Let’s suppose that in this final scene this division between brothers is brought into the open, perhaps driven by their different responses to Woodstock’s death. Lancaster, who had already sworn to “call King Richard to a strict account” (5.3) can follow their initial inclination to its extreme and depose Richard. York, on the other hand, can learn from Woodstock’s counsel and follow his example of temperance and patience, thus turning Woodstock’s death into a final sacrifice in accordance with Woodstock’s final prayer.

(And this, too, transitions the characters naturally to the beginning of Richard II.)

CONCLUDING THE THEMES

Even moreso than with plot or character, attempting to provide a thematic conclusion for the play bears the risk of stamping it with one’s own interpretation of the drama. Thus I have chosen to walk carefully, preferring to include thematic elements without necessarily seeking to summarize or pass judgment on them.

Occasionally, however, boldness is called for. In particular, I have chosen to take up key themes of Richard II. Many of these themes have already been highlighted in Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock, but others which have not previously been present in the play are established as the transformation of one theme into another.

Thus, for example, a king who has been vain turns reflective. And whereas in the aftermath of Anne a Beame’s death Richard says of himself, “My wounds are inward, inward burn my woe.” In the face of fresher losses, we find that his woe has consumed entirely, transforming him into a hollow king.

Have I overstepped scholastic certainty? Of course. But the ending of a play should never be completely predictable. So if we limit ourselves to providing an ending which does nothing that is not already contained in the play as it exists, we would confine ourselves to an artistically and dramatically unfulfilling conclusion. In seeking to push the boundaries of the play beyond the known limitation of its final, broken page, aiming towards Richard II as lodestar provides at least some guidance where we might otherwise find ourselves stumbling blindly in the dark.

THE SCRIPT ADDENDUM

The ASR scripts of the play have been updated to include the ending as it was performed during the Complete Readings of William Shakespeare. If you’re interested in reading the new ending by itself, a separate PDF link has been included below.

Permission to use this additional material in print or production is freely granted as long as the following notice is included on either (a) the title page or cover of the printed publication or (b) the cover of the production’s program, website, and any posters, postcards, or similar advertising:

New Ending Written by Justin Alexander
https://www.thealexandrian.net

Originally Produced by the
American Shakespeare Repertory
http://www.american-shakespeare.com

RICHARD II: THOMAS OF WOODSTOCK – THE NEW ENDING

RICHARD II: THOMAS OF WOODSTOCK – FULL SCRIPT

RICHARD II: THOMAS OF WOODSTOCK – CONFLATED SCRIPT

Originally posted on September 19th, 2010.

Go to Part 1

As a first step in experimenting with urbancrawl structures, I simply broke down the three basic elements of ‘crawl-based play and tried to apply them to an urban environment:

1. Keyed Locations
2. Geographic Movement
3. Exploration-Based Default Goal

KEYED LOCATIONS

What are we keying? Neighborhood? Buildings? Organizations? People?

Neighborhoods seem too large. For example, here’s a map of Green Ronin’s Freeport as found in the Death in Freeport module:

If you look at something like the Temple District, it’s pretty easy to imagine multiple locations that the PCs would want to interact with. If you’re trying to key multiple entries to a single location, it’s a dead giveaway that you’re keying at the wrong scale. For example, the idea of writing up multiple key entries for a single dungeon room probably sounds inherently weird to you. Although, just for the sake of argument, here’s an example from Lords of Madness I recently stumbled across:

Hexcrawls tend to be a little more forgiving of multiple keys per location, but even there I would argue that if you’re frequently keying lots of stuff into a single hex it’s an indication that your hex map is at the wrong scale.

Individual buildings, on the other hand, seem too small. Even a small city like Freeport has hundreds or possibly thousands of buildings. Keying even 10% of them would be a daunting task, and if you left 90% of a dungeon or a hexcrawl unkeyed you wouldn’t have enough material to hold the scenario together. (And even if you did key them, most of them would be boring. It would be like keying every tree in a forest for a hexcrawl.)

Keying organizations or people would give you a very different way of “navigating” the city. For example, Monsters & Manuals talks about building a relationship hexmap for urban-based sandboxes.

But since our next bullet point is geographic movement, I’m going to at least temporarily steer away from that and propose that we should be looking to key a geographic entity somewhere between neighborhoods and individual buildings.

GEOGRAPHIC MOVEMENT

How do we move through a city?

It seems like the obvious question to ask here, but I find that it ends up being a trap. If you’re like me, when you go out “into the city” you’re generally pursuing some specific goal: You’re going to the grocery store. Or driving to Suzie’s house. Or walking to the park.

I’ve come to think of this as “utility-based” or “target-based” movement. It’s the way I’ve run movement in an urban environments at the game table for years: The PCs say they want to go to Castle Shard and, at most, I figure out how long it takes for them to get there before segueing directly to, “You arrive at Castle Shard.” (Occasionally there might be an encounter along the way that gets triggered one way or another.)

But target-based movement is anathema to the ‘crawl structure. The PCs aren’t making a choice of geographic movement, they’re making a choice of where they want to be.

The distinction might be clearer if I apply the same logic to wilderness travel: Let’s say the PCs are in City A and they say, “I want to be in City B.” You can resolve that by looking at a road map, calculating how long it will take them to travel along the road, and then say, “Three days later you arrive in City B.”

But if you do that, you are not hexcrawling.

Which is not to say that there’s anything wrong with that. There are plenty of situations where that is exactly the right way to resolve that sequence of events. But it’s not a ‘crawl.

Similarly, if my players say, “I want to go to Castle Shard.” And I respond by saying, “Five minutes later, you arrive to find the drawbridge lowered and Kadmus waiting to greet you outside.” There’s nothing wrong with that. But we aren’t urbancrawling.

EXPLORATION-BASED GOAL

The key distinction here appears to be the difference between travel and exploration. Which neatly brings us to our third bullet point: A default goal based around exploration.

What does it mean to explore a city? Does it mean anything at all? How are we interacting with the city when we’re “exploring” it?

If you google “explore a city”, what you generally find is a lot of travel advice. And most travel advice takes the form of target-based movement (“take a tour”, “go to a museum”, “visit a club”, etc.). Alternatively, we have this guy who explored a city by flipping a coin at every intersection to determine his route. And here’s a blog post talking about women walking through New York on foot, but they’re doing so just for the experience.

This may be an insurmountable hurdle. If “exploring a city” doesn’t actually mean anything – if it’s not a naturalistic behavior that characters would actually pursue – then we’re trying to model something that doesn’t exist.

But let’s not despair quite yet. Let’s tackle this from a different angle: What’s the goal we’re trying to pursue in the city?

For example, in the dungeon we’re looking for monsters to slay and treasure to loot. In a dungeoncrawl this naturally carries us from room to room looking for the room which contains these things. Similarly, in the hexcrawl we go from hex to hex seeking locations filled with interest.

So if you’re a fantasy adventurer who has just walked through the gates of a city… what are you looking for?

Go to Part 3: Vertical Integration

Tagline: Buy it! Buy it! Buy it! Buy it! Buy it! But it! ………. Buy it NOW!

This game kicks ass… and not just because it’s a fight game, either.

Real time card games (a term which I am almost certain was coined by James Ernest) are, in my opinion, one of the coolest developments to hit gaming in recent years. Collectible card games may have been innovative, but the sheer power of the real time concept easily blows them out of the water without blinking.

I have reviewed two other games in this trend – WOTC’s Twitch! and Cheapass Games’ Falling! — elsewhere on RPGNet with words of glowing praise, every one of which they earned and more. Now it is with great pleasure that I review Brawl, which takes all of this to a new level.

The game is currently marketed in the form of six interchangeable decks, each named after a fictional “fighter”: Hale, Chris, Bennett, Pearl, Darwin, and Morgan. It is well worth your time.

(This is not – repeat, not! — a collectible card game. You need two decks – one for each player – to play, but each and every one of the decks is stand-alone. You aren’t supposed to combine the decks.)

THE RULES

Okay, first off: What’s this “real time” concept?

Basically it means what it says: You play the game in “real time”, instead of artificially breaking the game into a series of “turns” or “rounds” or “hands” or whatever other gimmicky term the creators have come up with.

How does it work in practice?

Each deck in Brawl is composed of a variety of cards: Bases, Hits, Blocks, Clears, Hit-2s, Presses, and Freezes. The exact number of each type of card (as well as their presence and/or absence) is determined by which character you select – in other words, different characters have different strengths and weaknesses. In actual play you need to be aware of these, because it can have a profound difference on your success or failure.

To begin play each player shuffles their deck. Then they put one base in the middle of the table and put all of their Freeze cards on the bottom of their deck. You play cards off of these Bases in the following manner:

Hit. All Hits are colored. You can play a Hit card directly on the base, or on top of a Hit or Hit-2 card of the same color.

Block. All Blocks are colored. A Block can be played on a Hit or a Hit-2 of the same color. (Because Hits can’t be played on Blocks, a Block thus prevents further Hits from being played.)

Press. A Press is played on a Block, allowing you to resume playing Hits on that Base.

Hit-2. Functions just like a Hit, but you can’t play it on a Press or a Base.

Clear. A Clear card removes a Base (and all the cards which have been played on it) from play.

Freeze. A Freeze is played directly onto a Base (regardless of which cards have been played off of it) and prevents any further play on that Base. When all Bases have been frozen, the game ends.

Base. Additional Bases may be played as they come up, but there can only be three bases in play at a time.

Play proceeds off both sides of a base (each side being given to one of the players). When the game ends you count up the number of Hits and Hit-2s which have been played on your side of the base (Hit-2s count for two points) – that’s your score. The player with the higher score wins the base. The player who wins 2 out 3 bases wins.

“Wait a minute,” you say, “Where’s this ‘real time’ thing come in?”

Well, like I said, there are no turns. Once play begins you begin playing cards off the top of your deck (i.e., you take the top card off your deck, look at it, and then play it, before looking at the next card and playing it) as quickly and as effectively as you can. (You can also discard cards into your discard pile, and can play the top card from this pile instead of turning over the next card in your deck as you wish.)

WHAT YOU SHOULD BUY

As I mentioned before, there are six decks to choose from. Conveniently, on the back of these decks, Cheapass Games has provided a series of three important guides: Skill Level (rated Easy, Moderate, and Hard); Advantages (a couple sentences on potentially successful strategies); and Weaknesses (a couple sentences on the potential soft spots in the deck).

I’d suggest starting with Hale and Chris, the two Easy decks. Hale is a bruiser – he’s easy to play because he’s all hits (offense is easier to handle than the finesse of defense). Chris is a well-balanced girl – easy to play because she doesn’t require any special strategy.

I’d tell you where to go next, but once you’ve played the game with those two decks you’ll be totally addicted, so it doesn’t matter. The other four will fall neatly into your pocket without a second thought.

SUMMARY

What makes the game so effective is a combination of factors: First, the real time mechanics are a perfect fit for the fighting motif (Video Fighter, which I review elsewhere on RPGNet, looks stodgy by comparison). Second, the variety of decks for different fighters (a concept which was imperfectly originated by Video Fighter, coincidentally) shows the ability with which a simple set of rules and cards can be combined in various manners to create very specific dynamics and tactics. Third, the entire package is beautifully put together – great artwork, great design, great appeal.

Finally, and most importantly, the game is just damn fun to play. James Ernest, once again, proves he has an ineffable sense for near-perfection in game design – balancing a disparate set of elements in just such a manner to make them, ultimately, totally enthralling.

Whatever you do, don’t start playing this game unless you’ve got plenty of time on your hands.

Otherwise, you’ll regret it.

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Author: James Ernest
Company/Publisher: Cheapass Games
Cost: $6.95
Page Count: n/a
ISBN: n/a

Originally Posted: 2000/03/12

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.