A common meme seems to be that CGI special effects are ruining modern films. This seems to have received a recent boost with Jackson’s CGI extravaganza of The Battle of the Five Armies getting panned and J.J. Abrams promising that Star Wars: The Force Awakens is going back to basics with more models and practical effects.

Laying aside the fact that the former assertion is often confidently proffered by Middle Earth fans who have apparently forgotten that Jackson’s earlier Lord of the Rings films were also laden with CGI effects, I feel compelled to point out that this meme is bullshit: The reasons the Star Wars prequels and Jackson’s Hobbit movies were mediocre films is primarily because their scripts are badly flawed. And, I’m going to be frank with you, the CGI didn’t write the scripts.

A related meme is that practical effects are somehow “timeless” while CGI effects age badly.

Bad special effects always look dated. Great special effects are always timeless.

People watch crappy 1950’s films and say, “Wow, these special effects look super-dated.” But nobody watches Citizen Kane or The Day the Earth Stood Still and says that.

The xenomorph in Alien looks fantastic… but it’s just a guy in a rubber suit. And there are plenty of examples of guys in rubber suits that look ridiculous.

The same is true of CGI: When it’s done well, it’s great. When it’s done poorly, it sticks out like a sore thumb.

Go to Part 1

The thing I value most about the Old School Renaissance – and the reason I enjoyed exploring the ur-game of OD&D – is that a lot of valuable and experimental mechanics and game structures were functionally abandoned as the hobby and industry kind of dashed headlong towards a post-AD&D / post-Dragonlance homogenization.

So when I’m struggling with something like urbancrawling I find that it can be very useful to dip back into the primordial pool and poke around a bit to see if anything useful pops out.

KEEP ON THE BORDERLANDS

It’s interesting to note that the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide doesn’t actually include guidelines for urban adventures: Dungeon adventures, wilderness adventures, aerial adventures, waterborne adventures, underwater adventures, and even planar adventures all get coverage. Urban adventures? Nope.

I believe this is because Gygax primarily saw cities as the hub around which adventures were based: You came back to the city to get supplies and hirelings. You left the city in order to have adventures.

Gygax’s handling of the Keep in Keep on the Borderlands seems to largely confirm this. Five specific points are given under “DM Notes About the Keep”:

I. Specific responses to PCs who break the law.

II. “Floor plans might be useful… exceptionally so in places frequented by adventurers.”

III. Rumors can be gained by talking to people at the Keep. (Example: “Talking with the Taverner might reveal either rumor #18 or #19; he will give the true rumor if his reaction is good.”)

IV. How to enter the Inner Bailey of the Keep and get a special mission from the Castellan.

V. After the adventure material in the module has been used up, you can “continue to center the action of your campaign around the Keep by making it the base for further adventures you devise”. Examples given include leading a war party to fight bandits, becoming traders operating out of the Keep, or exploring the wilderness to find additional adventures in the surrounding area.

(What I love about that fifth point is how casually Gygax drops the idea of three radically different game structures as potential avenues for developing the campaign. It’s very suggestive to me of how different the early GMs were in their approach to the game, compared to later “sequential dungeons” or “follow the plot” styles.)

In other words, the Keep is treated as a place for PCs to shop and as a place to gather information that will point them towards adventure.

THE VILLAGE OF HOMMLET

T1 The Village of Hommlet, also by written by Gygax, was published around the same time that B2 Keep on the Borderlands was published and it shows a consistent methodology: Every building is keyed. The places “frequented by adventurers” are given floorplans. Rumors are keyed to specific individuals (replacing the generic rumor table). Basically, there are only two significant departures.

First, no specific response scenario is given for PCs breaking the law. This, however, seems to flow as a natural consequence of the lack of a central legal authority in Hommlet.

Second, there is a seemingly odd desire to itemize the valuable contents of every single commoner’s hut.

In combination, however, this actually makes sense: Instead of legal response scenarios, a lot of attention is given to alliances and friendships. So you get entries like, “He has 20 gold ingots (50 g.p. value each) hidden away in a secret hollow under the stone wall in front. He has become quite friendly with the magic-user, Burne.” The clear implication, at least to my eyes, is that if you mess with this guy or steal his shit, Burne’s going to come looking for you. (Whereas if you mess with his neighbor, who is a member of the Church of St. Cuthburt, you’ll be dealing with the Church.)

The underlying assumption here (and in a lot of early city modules) seems to be that some significant percentage of PCs are going to be murderhobos: B2 deals with that by specifying centralized legal repercussions. T1 assumes that the PCs will succeed in looting a house or two (and therefore specifies the loot), but also lays out a comprehensive social network that’s going to come looking for their blood.

This is mostly a digression, but it is interesting to note that having these sorts of explicit or semi-explicit structures in place for dealing with murderhobos is an essentially universal aspect in all of the early city modules I’m looking at.

THE FIRST FANTASY CAMPAIGN

Let’s turn our attention from Gygax and instead focus it upon Dave Arneson. Although not published until 1977, the First Fantasy Campaign “attempted to show the development and growth of his campaign as it was originally conceived”.

First, an important note: “By the end of the Fourth year of continuous play Blackmoor covered hundreds of square miles, had a dozen castles, and three separate Judges as my own involvement decreased due to other circumstances. But by then, it was more than able to run itself as a Fantasy campaign and keep more than a hundred people and a dozen Judges as busy then as they are today.”

Even with my experience running an open table supporting 30-40 players, the sheer scale of what the Blackmoor campaign was like in this timeframe is really difficult for me to wrap my head around. And we need to keep in mind its unusual needs and demands as we try to unravel what the city-based game structures of the campaign were.

We’ll start with this: Over the course of its first two years, Blackmoor “grew from a single Castle to include, first, several adjacent Castles (with the forces of Evil lying just off the edge of the world) to an entire Northern Province(s) of the Castle and Crusade Society’s Great Kingdom. As it expanded, each area (Castle’s first and then Provincial Counties) was given a pre-set Army. Later, the players were to organize their own forces based on experience and goodies procured enroute to their Greatness.”

In other words, the early dungeon-based portion of the game was designed to prepare characters for establishing Castles which would be used to raise Armies in order to participate in wargames. “The entire 3^rd Year of the Blackmoor Campaign was to be part of a Great War between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys.”

So one of the primary uses for a city in Arneson’s campaign was to supply the Army.

In terms of how the Town of Blackmoor was actually run at the table, however, we are regrettably only given a half page of information.

“This map shows Blackmoor Castle, the town, and immediate area. All those areas named in the first years of play are labeled. Some names were later changed by the players so that Troll Bridge became known as Mello’s Bridge … Also the East Gate became known as Gerri’s Gate (named after Gertrude the Dragon who was killed there by the Baddies.”

The impression I immediately take from this is that the city was highly responsive and could be radically transformed by the actions of the players. This is further confirmed in the next paragraph:

“Buildings 1, 5, 23, 40, Town Inn, Comeback Inn, and Merchant Warehouses are owned or lived in by Minions of the Merchant (run by Dan Nicholson, these quickly became the local Mafia and spread to several areas of the campaign). Buildings 13, 15, 20, 21, 24, 27, 35, 39 were those of the followers of the Great Svenny and the secret society set up by Mello the Hobbit and “Bill” (sort of a counter to the Merchant’s Mafia).”

The overall image is one of powerful, influential organizations being established by the PCs. This is awesome stuff and it really gets my blood pumping. It’s definitely something to keep an eye on for the future (in much the same way that kingdom-building sits atop the hexcrawl structure, this type of Great Society play would naturally sit atop a proper urbancrawl structure), but in terms of the urbancrawl structure itself it is, unfortunately, not terribly informative. Therefore, I’m going to lay Arneson aside (at least for the moment).

Go to Part 7: City States of the Judges Guild

ASR’s script for Richard II is based primarily on the first Quarto of the play as it was published in 1597 (Q1). The decision to use Q1 as the source text of the play is based primarily on the relationship between the original texts as described by A.W. Pollard in 1916.

RICHARD II — FULL SCRIPT

RICHARD II — CONFLATED SCRIPT

Pollard was able to demonstrate (by tracing the inheritance of typographical errors from one edition to the next) that each quarto after the first was based entirely on the printed copy of the previous quarto: Thus Q2 was printed from Q1; Q3 from Q2; and so forth. (Richard II actually proved to be one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays in quarto. Other than Pericles, it is the only play to receive two quarto printings in the same year.)

The exception to this rule is Q4 in 1608, which adds a version of the deposition scene to the play. The leading theory is that the deposition, despite its central importance to the structure of the play, was simply too controversial in the waning years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign for it to be printed. (Another book regarding the usurpation of Richard II’s throne by Henry Bullingbrooke had already become the center of a major political scandal.)

The other text to consider is the First Folio (F1). Textual evidence seems to indicate that the F1 text was based on one of the later quartos, but it also includes additional stage directions (suggesting access to the theater’s prompt script) and a superior version of the deposition scene than the one found in Q4 (which reportedly shows signs of memorial reconstruction). But the exact nature of F1’s source text is a matter of considerable debate which can basically be broken down into two separate issues:

(1) Which quarto is the F1 text based on? (Some point to Q3. Others to Q5. Many to some combination of Q3 and Q5. But was it a single text assembled from a part of Q3 and a part of Q5, or did the typesetters have both a Q3 and Q5 laying around and simply consulted whichever was most convenient?)

(2) Was the quarto text being used as a promptbook (with stage directions being added to the printed copy and, thus, added to the F1 text)? Or was the promptbook being consulted separately with its stage directions and perhaps other corrections being incorporated into a text being set from the printed quarto?

To these questions we can add:

(3) What was the source of the Q4 deposition? (Memorial reconstruction is often one suggestion, but not a completely compelling one.)

(4) From what source was F1’s deposition scene (and possibly other corrections) taken from?

I have accepted the general scholastic conclusion that F1 is the superior source for the deposition scene, but since the F1 text is at least partly derived from a quarto text we know to be derivative of Q1, I have decided to employ the following textual standard:

Q1 is used as a source text. F1 is used as the source text for the deposition scene. F1 is also used to provide necessary corrections to the Q1 text, although if the correction originated in quarto editions between Q2 and Q5 (likely making it no more than a typesetter’s best guess), I don’t give it any more weight than other emendations.

STAGE DIRECTIONS FROM HOLINSHED

One final point of interest in the text are the stage directions for Act V, Scene 5 (in which Richard is murdered). In the original Q1 text, the scene appears like this:

KEEPER My lord I dare not; Sir Pierce of Exton,
Who lately came from the King commands the contrary.

RICHARD The devil take Henry of Lancaster, and thee,
Patience is stale, and I am weary of it.

KEEPER Help, help, help.

The murderers rush in.

RICHARD How now, what means Death in this rude assault?
Villain, thy own hand yields thy death’s instrument.
Go thou, and fill another room in hell.

Here Exton strikes him down.

The First Folio provides us with the identities of the murderers (“Enter Sexton and Servants“), but still leaves us with a lot of unanswered questions: What prompts the Keeper to call for help? And should we interpret “Villain, thy own hand yields thy death’s instrument” as a dramatic invocation (and perhaps foreshadowing) of the fate that awaits those who murder kings?

The description of the scene found in Holinshed’s Chronicles, on the other hand, may help to shed some light on it:

King Henry, sitting on a day at his table, sore sighing, said, “Have I no faithful friend which will deliver me of him, whose life will be my death, and whose death will be the preservation of my life?” This saying was much noted of them which were present, and especially of one called Sir Piers of Exton. This knight incontinently departed from the court, with eight strong persons in his company, and came to Pomfret, commanding the esquire that was accustomed to sew and take the assay before King Richard to do so no more, saying: “Let him eat now, for he shall not long eat.” King Richard sat down to dinner and was served with courtesy or assay, whereupon much marveling at the sudden change, he demanded of the esquire why he did not his duty, “Sir” (said he) “I am otherwise commanded by Sir Piers of Exton, which is newly come from King Henry.” When King Richard heard that word, he took the carving knife in his hand, and struck the esquire on the head, saying, “The devil take Henry of Lancaster and thee together.” And with that word, Sir Piers entered the chamber, well armed, with eight tall men likewise armed, every of them having a bill in his hand.

King Richard, perceiving this, put the table from him, and stepping to the foremost man, wrung the bill out of his hands, and so valiantly defended himself that he slew four of those that thus came to assail him. Sir Piers being half dismayed herewith, leapt into the chair where King Richard was wont to sit, while the other four persons fought him and chased him about the chamber. And in conclusion, as King Richard traversed his ground from one side of the chamber to the other, and coming by the chair where Sir Piers stood, he was felled with a stroke of a pole-axe which Sir Piers gave him upon the head, and therewith rid him out of life.

The fact that Shakespeare drew directly from this passage can be seen in its many similarities to the text of the play. In addition, it is relatively easy to see how the action described by Holinshed can be fitted to Shakespeare’s verse:

KEEPER My lord I dare not; Sir Pierce of Exton,
Who lately came from the King commands the contrary.

[Richard takes the carving knife and strikes the Keeper on the head.]

RICHARD The devil take Henry of Lancaster, and thee,
Patience is stale, and I am weary of it.

KEEPER Help, help, help.

<Enter Exton and Servants.>
The murderers rush in.

RICHARD How now, what means Death in this rude assault?

[Richard takes a halberd from one of them, killing several of them.]

Villain, thy own hand yields thy death’s instrument.
Go thou, and fill another room in hell.

Here Exton strikes him down.

While consistent, however, it should be noted that the exact timing of them and perhaps even their details are open for negotiation in actual production.

As an interesting note, the Moby Shakespeare on which virtually all online versions of Shakespeare are based includes a stage direction for Richard which reads: “Snatching an axe from a Servant and killing him.” (This direction is from the 1864 Globe Shakespeare on which the Moby Shakespeare takes its text.) But there’s no textual basis for Richard ending up with an axe, and Holinshed makes it clear the opposite is true: Richard employed a bill (or halberd). He was in fact killed by an axe, not wielding one.

TEXTUAL PRACTICES

Source Text: First Quarto (1597)
1. Original emendations in [square brackets]; emendations taken from F1 in <diamond brackets>; emendations taken from Q2 thru Q5 in {curly brackets}.
2. Speech headings silently regularized.
3. Names which appear in ALL CAPITALS in stage directions have also been regularized.
4. Spelling has been modernized.
5. Punctuations has been silently emended (in minimalist fashion).

Tagline: Huh?

“You are a highly trained and well-paid sous-chefs, who have decided to climb to the top of a tall buildng, as fast as you can. Devil Bunny Needs a Ham. And he’s pretty sure that knocking you off the building will help him get one. Perhaps he is right. Perhaps he is not.”

What the hell?

I have been given to understand that Devil Bunny is an arcane reference to the alt.devilbunnies newsgroup. I have to admit, I’m impressed. Very few cult references can slip past me with nary a blink of recognition – but this one did entirely until it was pointed out to me.

It still doesn’t make any sense, but at least the name “Devil Bunny” has been imbued with a certain degree of significance … despite the fact that the devilbunnies of alt.devilbunnies don’t seem to have much of a relationship with the Devil Bunny of this game.

Errr… Anyyyywwaaaayyyyy….

THE RULES

Your are provided with a board which represents a skyscraper. Your start at the bottom with three counters and make your way towards the top along six columns of boxes. You move by rolling two dice, moving your counters by the combined number of pips on your dice (you can break the number up anyway you like between your three counters, and you can move them left, right, or diagonally – but not up and down). You can’t move through other players, Devil Bunny, or the black squares on the board (which basically serve as obstacles).

The exception to this is if you roll a six. If you do, then Devil Bunny moves immediately – “jumping” on the climber who is farthest up the building, and knocking them down. A climber who is knocked down falls straight down until he hits another climber (and is automatically “caught”, by being placed below that climber’s counter) or until he hits the Ground. Midway through the board is the Line of Death – if you hit the Ground while below this line, you live and simply start of. If you’re above it and hit the Ground, you die and the counter is removed from the board.

Counters which reach the SAFETY! at the top of the building score points depending on the order in which they reach it (this is a series of fairly arbitrary numbers based on providing interesting and competitive combinations of exit orders). The person with the most points at the end of the game wins.

Variations: For an easier game, you can move on the black squares. For a more bloody game, have the Devil Bunny jump onto a random column. “You can also experiment with cheese, although it is primarily intended as a healthy snack.”

SUMMARY

Cheapass Games has a habit of designing really fantastic games.

Then there’s this one.

I have the vague feeling that if you first cracked this thing open while being incredibly high with a group of incredibly close buddies this game would have an intensely hilarious component to it that I, playing it sober with my brother, simply missed entirely.

That being said, for $2 it’s a rather fascinating game that’ll chew up at least half an hour with mild entertainment and will, thus, earn it’s keep.

Style: 3
Substance: 2

Author: James Ernest (also E. Jordan Bojar and Toivo Rovainen)
Company/Publisher: Cheapass Games
Cost: $2.00
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.

Go to Part 1

Using the experimental hexmap we made for Ptolus (which you might want to open in a second window for easy cross-referencing), imagine that the PCs are staying at the Ghostly Minstrel in hex E3. The GM asks them what they want to do and they say that they want to head south into the Longbottom neighborhood.

What happens next?

TRIGGERING THE KEYED ENCOUNTERS

When it comes to triggering the keyed encounters in an urbancrawl’s key, it seems to me that there are a few different options:

First, there is a chance they might trigger any time that someone travels through the hex. (In other words, even if the PCs are using the “target-based” movement we talked about earlier – when they’re simply moving from one known location to another – you’d still check for encounters in the hexes they pass through.)

Second, the encounters only trigger if the PCs are specifically patrolling or searching or crawling or putting their ear to the ground (or whatever).

(Of course, you could also go both ways by having different odds of triggering encounters depending on the approach the PCs are taking.)

If there is a difference between ‘crawl and non-crawl movement, one way to clearly distinguish between them would be to add some sort of mechanical hook to the ‘crawl based movement: For example, if the PCs want to ‘crawl hex E4 they might have to make a Gather Information check. (This would make an urbancrawl a little more like the old school “clearing the hex” mechanic, in which the PCs would have to specifically state their intention to take a specific action within a specific geographic location.)

This sort of mechanic, however, works best if the players are more aware of the structure: In other words, we’d want them to be able to see the hex they were exploring and know its boundaries. Which leads me to…

NEIGHBORHOODS vs. HEXES

Putting this hypothetical urbancrawl into imaginary practice, I’m almost immediately reconsidering my rejection of keying by neighborhood. Exploring the entire Temple District feels too large, but looking at the Ptolus map and saying “I want to shake things up in the Longbottom neighborhood” feels pretty natural.

Similarly, if I were to look at a neighborhood map of my hometown:

(click for larger version)

Keying content to each community (Nokomis, Powderhorn, Longfellow, etc.) actually feels like a pretty good place to start. And if I ended up wanting more detail than that, I could drill down to individual neighborhoods (so that Powderhorn, for example, would break down into Central, Bryant, Bancroft, Standish, and Corcoran).

Random thought: LANDMARKS. Put a landmark in each neighborhood/community/ward that you’re keying. Like, if you knew the city you’d say things like, “Oh yeah, that’s where Burt’s Tavern is.” Or the Old Clock Tower. Or the Red Sash Brothel or whatever.

CATEGORIZING THE TRIGGER

So the PCs head south into hex E4 and start poking around. They end up triggering the ‘crawl encounter, so I check the key:

E4. BLACKSTOCK PRINTING: Blackstock is one of the few businesses in the city with a functioning, large-scale movable type printing press. (Many of the city’s newssheets are printed here.) What is not widely known is that the press is controlled by six of Aelian Fardream’s clones (who were awakened from temporal stasis due to a strange magical surge several years ago).

In actual practice, my key would probably have more info about Blackstock Printing than that. (In fact, you can find a lot more information on pg. 353 of Ptolus.) But what I’m struggling with is the idea of what it actually means to trigger this particular encounter. Off-hand there a couple possibilities:

First, they could be walking by Blackstock Printing when they spot the same person standing in two different places at the same time. (That’s an interesting hook that might prompt them to investigate.)

Second, we could use something like the scenario included in the Ptolus sourcebook: The Shadow Eyes clone of Aelian Fardream attacks someone in Midtown. The PCs later overhear an eyewitness saying that she’d seen this guy before – at a printing shop in the South Market.

I can see how either of those could be a natural response to “we’re poking around the Longbottom neighborhood”. But what if they had headed southeast and ended up triggering the encounter in hex G4 instead:

G4. POTIONS AND ELIXIRS: A well-stoked alchemical supply and potion store. The sole proprietor is a half-elf sorcerer named Buele Nox.

Harder to see what triggering that encounter actually means. Part of that can simply be explained as the Potions and Elixirs shop not having innate interest, but to some extent I think that’s actually begging the question.

As I struggle to come to grips with what the encounter trigger really means in terms of the urbancrawl, I think I’m coming to the conclusion that part of my problem is that the urban environment simply lends itself naturally to a wider array of categorical experiences than a dungeoncrawl or hexcrawl.

Let me unpack that a bit: The default trigger for an encounter key in the dungeon is simply “entering a room”. Similarly, the default trigger for an encounter key in the hexcrawl is “seeing something on the horizon”.

Or, more generally, they both boil down: “They see something.”

This works in the dungeoncrawl because the border of the room is clearly defined. It works in the hexcrawl because the encounter stands in contrast to the wilderness around it.

The problem with the city (at least to my perception) is that the points of interest to a wandering adventurer are not placed in plain sight and/or immediately contrasted from the surrounding context: The monsters and mysteries and oddities and weirdness are tucked out of sight and generally inaccessible to the average person just walking by.

I’m beginning to suspect that the answer to this conundrum lies in a pair of questions: Why are the PCs urbancrawling? And what are they actually doing when they “crawl”?

Before we delve into those questions, however, I think I want to take a brief detour through some old school inspiration.

Go to Part 6: Old School Inspiration