Continuing our “Fun With Vornheim” series from yesterday, today I’m going to use two of the tools included in Vornheim to create a drama-filled scenario.

First, I’m going to use the “Aristocrats” table on page 46 to create four unique nobles:

• Kyle the Exquisite, who has a peculiar fondness for injured women.
• Lady Orchid the Decapitator, who only derives pleasure from others’ fear.
• Clarissa the Cleaver, who believes the city to be a living entity hostile to her.
• Sasha the Immense, who wants to kill her sister.

Now I flip to the “Connections Between NPCs” chart on page 53 and use it to determine that:

Kyle the Exquisite:

• Is attracted to Sasha the Immense.
• Secretly disguises himself as Clarissa.

Lady Orchid:

• Frightens Clarissa, who believes her to be an agent of the living city.
• Has befriended Kyle the Exquisite.

Clarissa the Cleaver:

• Is Sasha’s sister.

Sasha the Immense:

• Is suspicious of Lady Orchid.

INTERPRETATION AND EXTRAPOLATION

That gives us quite a lot of juicy material, obviously. How can we interpret it and extrapolate from it?

Kyle the Exquisite is a young and decadent nobleman who has been placed in charge of the city’s executioners, who are also known as the Three Grim Ladies: Orchid, Clarissa, and Sasha. He magically disguises himself as Clarissa in order to be near to Sasha, who he secretly loves.

Sasha, who stands eight feet tall due to the giant’s blood in her, doesn’t know about Kyle’s disguise and is incredibly jealous of her sister (who she believes wants to steal Kyle’s affections).

Clarissa gives every appearance of being a beautiful, delicate flower. Many believe that she has been forced into this line of work by her cruel half-sister, Sasha. But the truth is that her timid veneer merely disguises a crazed bloodlust. Recently she has taken to drinking the blood of the prisoners she executes, and these primitive blood rituals have, in fact, connected her to the malevolent Spirit of the City.

Lady Orchid, a minor noblewoman who has been sentenced to duties of penance as an executioner in order to shame her father, has befriended Lord Kyle who is the only person of her true rank she is allowed to associate with. She is right to fear Clarissa, however: The City wants her and her entire family dead.

More Fun With Vornehim: Ca-Tar-Strophe

UPDATE: The author of this book has been credibly accused of being a serial abuser and rapist. Although I am leaving this post up, I cannot recommend that anyone purchase this or any of his other works, as he has also demonstrated that he will use income from projects like this to continue harassing his victims.

Vornheim: The Complete City Kit by Zak S. of Playing D&D With Porn Stars is available for pre-order. And if you pre-order you can immediately download a PDF copy.

Which I did.

I’ve actually been looking forward to Vornheim with the most excitement I’ve felt towards any RPG product since Monte Cook’s Ptolus. I’m not entirely sure why, but every single thing I read about this book mademe say, “Yup. This is something I need to buy.”

I haven’t had a chance to fully digest the book yet, but I am having fun with it. Which is why I’m recommending that you buy a copy for yourself ASAP.

It should be noted that only about half the book is dedicated to describing Vornheim itself (a city from Zak S.’s campaign). But even here pretty much everything is presented in a format which makes it immediately and palpably gameable (a tribute which I think has become strongly undervalued in too many products which are ostensibly supporting roleplaying games). Vornheim has a unique, metal-punk flavor all its own; but even if you don’t use Vornheim itself, you’ll find that it’s easy to grab chunks of it to inject a little weirdness into your own campaigns.

It’s the other half of the book, though, that got me really excited. This is the section where Zak S. lays out a panoply of practical tools for running “urbancrawl” adventures. Stuff like: On-the-fly neighborhood streets. On-the-fly building floorplans. How to leverage the legal system for flexible, entertaining interactions. Rules for searching libraries. NPC generators. Book generators. And on and on and on and on.

Not everything Vornheim presents resonates with me. And I can say with a fair degree of confidence that much of it — perhaps even most of it — will not find its way into my permanent toolkit. But there’s so much of it that even the fraction that does resonate with me and will permanently improve my games makes Vornheim well worth every penny I spent on it.

And because the book presents such a cornucopia of useful material, I can pretty much guarantee you that if you have any interest in running urban-based fantasy at any point in your campaign, then you, too, will find it worth every penny.

One particular tool presented in Vornheim is so cool I’m not entirely sure how to discuss it without spoiling it. You know how useful a properly designed GM screen can be? Well, I’m pretty confident that Zak S. is going to revolutionize the utility and lay-out of my GMing space with what I’m referring to as “GM tablemats”. These are graphical charts which are designed to be rolled on. Not rolled and then consulted: You literally roll dice on the table and the position of the dice immediately feeds you useful information.

In fact, trying to discuss this book without simply spoiling its contents is quite difficult. So instead, let me share its awesomeness by way of example.

FLOORPLAN SHORTCUT

Here’s a floorplan that took me 30 seconds to roll up using the “Floorplan Shortcut” on page 38 of Vornheim:

The “pretty” version of it shown here took me another 4 minutes to quickly map using Dundjinni, but I was able to generate the usable-at-the-table version in less time than it takes to resolve the PC rogue picking the lock on the front door.

A quick flip to the back cover, a roll on the GM tablemat there, and I discover that this is a clockmaker’s house.

More Fun With Vornheim: A Noble Drama

This tip has been updated and revised. The new version can be found here.

A couple rules of thumb I use for crafting evocative descriptions as a GM:

THREE OF FIVE: Think about your five senses. Try to include three of them in each description. Sight is a gimme and a Taste will rarely apply, so that means picking a couple out of Hearing, Smell, and Touch. Remember that you don’t actually have to touch something in order to intuit what it might feel like if you did.

TWO COOL DETAILS: Try to include two irrelevant-but-cool details. These are details that aren’t necessary for the encounter/room to function, but are still cool. It’s the broken cuckoo clock in the corner; the slightly noxious odor with no identifiable source; the graffiti scrawled on the wall; the bio-luminescent fungus; etc.

THREE-BY-THREE: Delta’s 1-2-(3)-Infinity talks about psychological research demonstrating that repeating something three times takes up the same space in our brains as repeating something infinitely. Thus, once you’ve hit the third item in a sequence, any additional items in that sequence are redundant.

Extrapolating from this, for minor scenes you can describe three things each with a single detail. At that point, you’ve filled up the “infinity queue” in your players’ brains and their imaginations will impulsively fill in the finer details of the scene you’ve evoked. For “epic” descriptions, use the full three-by-three: Describe three different elements with three details each.

Like most rules of thumb, of course, none of these should be treated like straitjackets.

A couple days ago I followed a trackback from here to a Danish gaming blog called “The Voice from the River Valley”. Curious, I used Google Translate to take a peek around. The blog line, which in Danish reads:

En blog om rollespil af Morten Greis. Fra Tryggevælde ådal en dyb klang. Elverpigernes dans. Røre i det hvide slør. Disen hyller landskabet. De gamle stammer krogede trolde.

Is currently rendered by Google Translate as:

A blog about RPG by Morten Greis. From Tryggevælde creek in a deep tone. Elfin girls dancing. Stir in the white veil. Haze clothed the landscape. The ancient tribes hull trolls.

I don’t know anything about Danish, but I’m guessing something has gone slightly awry with that last sentence. The poetic imagery got me thinking about it, though… what if the ancient tribes actually were hulling trolls?

Trolls are regenerative, right? So imagine that a tribe of (let’s say) Vikings learned how to use certain alchemical compounds and rites to warp the bones and flesh of captured troll-spawn, twisting and stretching them until they formed the endurant, regenerating hulls of their longboats. Vulnerable to fire, of course, but so is wood.

Of course, for this technique to be worthwhile the trolls would still need to be alive. And the pain must be unimaginable.

Beware the Raiders of the Screaming Ships.

In the comments on yesterday’s post, I linked to my house rules for death and dying and my thoughts on save-or-die effects. One of the major thoughts in those posts was the fact that I’ve replaced death effects with Constitution damage in my campaign, and my hypothesis that non-deadly save-or-die effects could similarly be replaced with ability score damage. (For example, a petrification effect could inflict Dexterity damage. A flesh to stone spell would only turn you to stone if it reduced your Dexterity to 0. If your Dexterity wasn’t reduced to 0, then you can still feel your reflexes slowing down as your flesh stiffens and hardens.)

Using Constitution damage for death effects has worked really well: Death effects remain fearsome without bypassing ablative mechanics entirely, and the hefty hit point loss coupled to Constitution damage means that they have a meaningful impact even if death isn’t achieved.

Replacing other save-or-die effects with comparable ability damage, however, has run up against the fact that ability score damage can be a real headache in 3rd Edition. Dexterity damage, for example, means recalculating Armor Class, attack bonuses, and skill bonuses on-the-fly in the middle of combat. A certain degree of system mastery will allow you to simply note the penalty and then apply it to everything that you remember is based on Dexterity, but once you start tossing around multiple types of ability score damage it can turn into a real nightmare.

Recently, however, I’ve realized that the solution may have been staring me in the face. There’s another type of damage which would normally require massive recalculation of multiple scores and abilities: Energy drain. The designers of 3rd Edition, however, recognized what a pain-in-the-ass energy drain could be in previous editions and supplied a simple method for handling it in the middle of encounters: Negative levels.

Thus, in 3rd Edition, when you suffer a negative level you simply:

• -1 on all skill checks, ability checks, attack rolls, and saving throws
• -5 hit points
• -1 effective level (for level checks, etc.)
• Lose 1 spell from highest-level of currently available spells.

Can a similar solution work for ability score damage? I think so.

SUPER SIMPLE ABILITY SCORE DAMAGE

For every two points of ability damage you suffer during an encounter (regardless of which ability), you suffer a -1 penalty on all skill checks, ability checks, attack rolls, and saving throws.

Constitution Loss: Constitution damage also subtracts -1 hit point per HD for every 2 points of Constitution damage suffered.

Spellcasting: Spellcasters who have their spellcasting attribute targeted must adjust the save DCs of their spells due to damage suffered.

When the encounter ends, re-calculate the actual penalties of any damage which remains.

(The rules for healing drain/damage remain the same. Similarly, the rules for what happens when an ability score is reduced to 0 remain the same.)