In “Tales from the Table: Gems in the Belly” yesterday, I mentioned the use of wererat ghouls in my restocking of Atarin’s Delve. Here’s what those look like (using a mixture of an AD&D stat block with OD&D verbiage):

Frequency: Rare
No. Encountered: 4d6
Move: 9″
Armor Class: 6
Hit Dice: 2
Attacks: 1d3/1d3/1d6
Special Attacks: Ghoul touch, vestigial lycanthropy, surprise on 1-4
Special Defenses: Immune to sleep and charm spells
Magic Resistance: Standard
% in Lair: 20%
Treasure Type: B
Intelligence: Low
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Ghoul Touch: Wererat ghouls paralyze any normal figure they touch, excluding elves. Any man-type killed by a ghoul becomes one.

Vestigial Lycanthopy: Anyone seriously wounded by an undead lycanthrope (assume about 50% of total possible damage) will be infected and himself become a similar lycanthrope within 2d12 days unless they are given a cure disease spell by a cleric. A saving throw may be made, with a +4 bonus due to the vestigial nature of the lycanthropic infection.

I’m preparing to run some combat stress tests in order to put the monster creation rules in Legends & Labyrinths through their final paces. In order to do that, I would like to get my hands on high level character sheets from actual play.

Let me explain what I mean by that: What I want are actual 3.0/3.5 characters who are 10th level or higher and reached that level by earning experience points at the gaming table and leveling up in an organic way. They don’t necessarily need to have started at 1st level, but I’d prefer to see characters who have seen at least 4-5 levels of actual play.

What I don’t want are pregens or characters that were freshly rolled up at higher levels. I’ll be doing some testing with those, too, but they’re easy to find or create.

(Why do I want ’em? In my experience, characters who are created at higher levels tend to look significantly different than characters who have leveled up to those levels.  The organic process of gaining loot and shifting your intended character build in response to the campaign’s events creates different characters than those who are given an equipment budget and allowed to build to a focused spec in a single sitting. And while I’ve got samples from my own games, I’m specifically interested in getting a wide sampling of what the organic processes at other tables created.)

If the sheets are online, you can link me to ’em in the comments. Otherwise drop me an e-mail with “[Character Sheet]” in the subject line. (You can find my e-mail address on the About page.) I don’t particularly care what format they’re in, but I’m particularly interested in the equipment lists so don’t leave those out.

Also: The more the merrier. And if you’ve got multiple versions of the same character at different levels, send ’em all.

If you send me a sheet, I’ll be crediting you as a “Playtest Assistant” unless you tell me not to.

Thanks!

(I don’t need additional external playtesters at this time. When I do, I’ll be posting something about it here.)

There are quite a few older D&D modules that feature various creatures with gemstones or gold coins or magical items lodged in their gizzards. I was never a big fan of the idea: First, it seemed weird. Second, it seemed improbable that any of my players would actually hack open one of these creatures and find the treasure. Third, if they ever did find one of these treasures it would only prompt them to go around systematically gutting every corpse they created.

Admittedly, the “kill ’em and loot ’em” mentality has never been particularly heroic. But advancing that into the territory of butchering your enemies in the hope that something valuable might be squeezed out of their intestines just seems to take things to a new level of tastelessness.

But this is the tale of how, after twenty years of gaming, I ended up putting a gemstone in a gizzard.

And it’s not my fault.

SPOILERS FOR MY PLAYERS BELOW THIS LINE

(more…)

As I’ve mentioned a couple times recently, I’m in the process of playtesting some rules for hexcrawling. This is something I’ll probably be talking about in more detail at some point in the near future, but one key element in testing the system was figuring out how do characters move through the wilderness.

In most traditional hexcrawling systems, this question is resolved by navigating the hex map: You move through the wilderness by indicating the next hex you want to go to.

I, on the other hand, specifically wanted to play “hex blind”. I find the abstraction of hexes useful as a GM for mapping and keying a region, but I don’t want the players to “play the abstraction”. But once “I want to go to that hex” was taken off the table, the question became (a) how do you navigate the wilderness and (b) how can we resolve that in an efficient and interesting way? What we slowly hashed out is that people navigate the wilderness by:

• By going in a particular compass direction (“I go north!”)
• By heading towards or following a visible landmark (“We’ll take the road” or “I’ll head toward the mountain I can see on the horizon”).
• By using a map
• By aiming for a familiar destination
• By searching for a location they think is nearby
• By searching a general area looking for anything interesting.

And so forth.

Eventually I figured out that all of this could be mechanically boiled down to two methods:

1. Navigation by compass direction
2. Navigation by visible landmark

Accompanied by some guidelines on “how you find something” in the wilderness (based on whether it’s a familiar, unfamiliar, or unknown location). So far these core guidelines seem to be covering our bases.

(Of course, this assumes that wilderness exploration is the desired mode of play. If exploration isn’t desired, then there are easier/better ways of structuring a journey from Point A to Point B.)

DUNGEON vs. UNDERWORLD

I mention all this merely as a prelude for my main point of interest this afternoon: Navigating the underworld.

Let me quickly explain what I mean by “underworld” by contrasting it to the traditional “dungeon”.

In a dungeon, the players’ navigation of the environment can be handled in an essentially literal fashion: They see a door and can go through it. They see a hall and can go down it. They see a corner and they can turn it. (This is one of the reasons why dungeons are great for new DMs: They don’t need to worry about framing, transitions, or pacing.)

But this only works in dungeons because there is a certain density of cool stuff within the complex. Poke around a corner or two and you’ll find something interesting to interact with: A monster. A trap. An inscription on the wall. Strange tracks. A magical effect. Whatever.

So by “dungeon” I’m referring to any complex where the density of cool stuff is high enough that navigating the complex “room by room” is interesting. It should be noted that this has nothing to do with the size of the complex: A megadungeon can be very, very large indeed. But it’s still a dungeon, because it rewards that “room by room” method of navigation.

By “underworld”, on the other hand, I’m referring to a complex where the density of “cool stuff” is small enough that “room by room” navigation won’t be rewarding. Consider Moria from Lord of the Rings, for example: It’s a vast complex that takes the Fellowship days to traverse, but in all that time they only find a half dozen or so interesting things. Running that on a turn-by-turn, room-by-room basis would be incredibly boring.

NAVIGATING THE UNDERWORLD

Okay, so let’s pretend that we’re standing at the entrance to an underworld complex. The first question the needs to be asked is, “Why are we going in there?”

• You’re trying to find some specific location within the underworld.
• You’re trying to get through the underworld to the other side.
• You’re following the trail of someone (or something) which has gone in ahead of you.
• You’re just mucking around down there and hoping to find something interesting.

First question: Anything I’ve missed on that list?

Second question: How would you go about doing any of those things? I mean this from a purely in-character perspective, for which a few thoughts occur to me:

• You have a map.
• You generally know that your destination is in a particular direction. (For example, in Lord of the Rings Gandalf knew they needed to head generally east and up to reach the far door.)
• You can follow tracks or other signs.

Other thoughts?

This is all the foundation stuff on which mechanics can later be built. Such mechanics seem to be fairly trivial if you’re willing to remove player agency (“gimme some Dungeoneering checks to see if you find the Golden Crypts”), but more complicated if you want to let the players actually explore the complex by making choices about how they’re proceeding.

Another key element of all this is the handling of transitions to the “dungeon”-type complexes within the underworld. (See Thunderspire Labyrinth or the original D series of modules for a couple different approaches to this sort of underworld exploration.) This seems to be fairly easy if you’re just willing to fall back on the metagame and say, “Okay, you’ve reached the interesting bit.” And then transition back to the more familiar room-by-room sort of thing.

But this can be limiting and jarring. What sorts of things would “naturally” attract greater attention and, thus, provide a more natural transition between exploration modes? Finding recent tracks? Noticing a glint of gold? Encounter creatures?

This is more of a mini-reaction, but during last night’s session I was suddenly struck by something in OD&D’s description of vampires:

VAMPIRES: These monsters are more properly of the “Undead” class rather than Lycanthropes.

Whenever I read that passage, I would think to myself, “Well… yeah.”

But tonight I had an epiphany which may already be obvious to some of you: “Oh! Of course! They could be classified as lycanthropes because they turn into wolves.” (This may be because I’ve been spending a bit more time than usual around Dracula.)

Bit of a digression here: I went to see Blade II in the theater with a large group of friends and friends-of-friends. My most vivid memory of the experience comes from the car ride home, when I listened to someone in the backseat ramble on for 15 minutes about all of the different ways in which Blade II had violated the continuity of Vampire: The Masquerade.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that Blade II took it’s fair share of inspiration from the milieu of the World of Darkness. But it is also self-evidently not the same setting and, therefore, not bound by its rules.

With that being said, I do think it’s interesting to note the degree to which roleplaying games encourage us to think about myth and fiction in terms of categories and quantifications.

To explain what I mean, let me digress again: We interpret all media through the lens of our previous experiences with media, a fact that I think can probably be seen most clearly when we are young (and our exposure to media limited). For example, I can remember when any new work of space opera I encountered was first understood in the context of Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy and Star Trek. Unless the author clearly established a delineation, I just sort of assumed that their universe worked like an admixture of the Federation and the Galactic Empire. This wasn’t a conscious choice on my part: It was just that my formative experiences with these works had created a lens through which other experiences were understood.

This is an effect which has been significantly diffused as my exposure to science fiction has broadened and deepened, but this doesn’t mean it’s gone away: When an author invokes the Singularity, my brain promptly plops in a whole gestalt understanding of what that means based on exposure to Vinge and Stross and MacLeod and Transhuman Space and Eclipse Phase and God only knows what else. Because it’s diffused, I think it’s easier for each work to make its unique impression upon me. But that filter of previous experience can’t be fully escaped.

So, to escape out of this recursive sequence of digressions, let me say this: Sitting in that car 10+ years ago, I could shake my head sadly at someone who interpreted all fiction through the lens of a roleplaying game. But it took this sudden epiphany regarding OD&D vampires to realize the degree to which a youth spent pouring over Monster Manuals had planted some pretty deeply rooted hierarchies into my understanding of the fantastic.

Vampires are undead.

So are skeletons and zombies. Actually, the clear-cut and categorical distinction between skeletons, zombies, and ghouls (among other things) is something else that I almost certainly owe to D&D.

And this isn’t just me. And it isn’t just limited to roleplaying games. By vector of fantasy fiction and film and computer, this stuff has seeped into the cultural gestalt.

This was something we talked about during rehearsals of Drakul: I think it’s actually impossible for any person in the modern world to fully appreciate Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

I mean, I’m generally somebody who really enjoys reading works with an eye towards their historical context: I get a huge kick out of reading Skylark in Space and realizing that this shit had never been done before. I can feel the vicarious thrill of imagining what it would be like to read that book for the first time in 1928. But with Dracula I can’t quite pull it off: I mean, I can sort of intellectually see that Stoker is very carefully hiding the true nature of Dracula from his readers and treating it as a terrific mystery. I can logically conclude that Victorian readers would be wondering what strange and horrible curse had afflicted Lucy.

But my brain just keeps thinking, “It’s a vampire.” She has bite marks on her neck? It’s a vampire. She’s experiencing acute blood loss? It’s a vampire. C’mon, let’s get with the program. It’s a vampire.

And so forth.

To make a long story short: I find the degree to which pop culture fantasy has eradicated the mystery of the mythic interesting to consider. Perhaps even more interesting is the question of how we can inject that sense of mystery (and majesty) back into our own fantasies.

Back to Reactions to OD&D