"Room Monster"

Surely someone else has done this better than me...?

Maybe a mimic that is trying to become a whole room? I found this piece of paper in among all the files and stuff I am sorting out. How many hit dice would a room have? Or hit points for that matter?

How do you kill a room?

Illness In Games

On Saturday morning I woke up with a cold. By tea-time I was hunched over in bed, shivering and shaking as my temperature crept up close to 40 degrees (nearly 104 if you're Fahrenheit-inclined). When I woke up on Sunday morning my fever was completely gone, but since then I've continued to have aches, pains, cold symptoms and general body discomfort. Nothing major, not compared to people in real distress, but enough to make me go "Urgh!" at the thought of doing anything.

(so of course this coming week is busy than the last two combined when it comes to my day job...)

But all of this got me thinking about illness in games - or more specifically, the fact that I can't remember EVER playing in a game where any character, mine or another party PC, got sick. People got injured, sometimes badly, but they never stumbled around through a cave because they had earache, you know? They never sneezed inappropriately due to complications from dwarf pox.

Maybe it would be boring. I remember that, as we were coming to an end of a small campaign in a D&D game, my character got petrified. There was about half an hour left in the session, we didn't know if or when we would pick it up again and so I sat there listening, twiddling my thumbs and calculating my character's weight now that he was stone and not flesh. I understand why I didn't roll stats or become a random pregen, but it was a little boring.

Maybe pretending to sneeze or wheeze or groan would be dull too. Simply adding a penalty to some rolls doesn't feel like quite enough...

...but I can imagine a little fun in character and NPC interactions maybe. Nevermind charisma rolls, but how does the High Priestess look upon you when you have dragon boils? Or even just a simple cold, with red-rimmed eyes, streaming nose and slight clumsiness?

Maybe getting sick in a game is a sign that you need to rest your character. You could push on through the jungle, try to find a trail to the Hidden City of Somewhere, but you'll make things worse. Three days of rest at camp should see you right though (of course, someone else might get there first...).

I'm definitely not an expert on games, not by a long shot, I just can't think of any games that I've played in, run or read which have rules for the consequences of simple (or complicated) illness.

Can you? What would you do if characters got sick?

Highlights of the D&D 5e Starter Set Misadventures!

A little over two years ago, Christmas-time 2016, I met up with Patrick Stuart and David McGrogan to have a meal, catch up and play something. Patrick suggested the D&D 5e starter set adventure. Dave and I had played a little 5e but weren't really familiar with the system. Over the course of a few hours things got weird...

*

Patrick: "You're a couple of adventurers taking supplies to a village... Do you want more than one pregen each?"
Us: "We'll be fine!"
...five minutes pass...
Us: "Who else have you got?"

*

We kill some goblins. My goblin-hating elf desecrates the shallow graves that Dave's responsible dwarf digs. We head to town and promptly leave the wagon in the open with one guard, not knowing that a gang of brigands roams the town after dark.


Violence follows.

The mayor is concerned that adventurers have arrived in town and started murdering the locals. We suspect (wrongly) that he is in league with the brigands. My chaotic elf wizard fakes a weird holy symbol to try and force a (non-existent) confession out of him. We persuade a brigand to help us out, but then fake a curse on him to try and ensure compliance. We get caught out but kill him.

*

Moving on to an area we think is the real source of the problems we encounter a strange creature. We need to tell deep, dark secrets to get past it. We invent things, getting deeper into our characters. One of us is a thief, another killed their goblin-deity worshipping grandmother.

Things get dark.

*

We rush into a wizard's bedroom and seize the advantage. We hurt him and then put him to sleep. He's the head bad guy. We tie him up, gag him and break his fingers - "just in case" - then when he still raises the alarm we drag him along with us because he knows stuff.

Some impressive visual cantrips scare away enemies, but then we're cornered by three larger foes. We take out one, and then two of our party are slain. Our last PC runs into the night, escaping with no friends, no treasure and no XP. She lives to tell the tale, but barely.

*

All of this happened over the space of about fourteen in-game hours. A series of seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time choices, followed by instant regret, mayhem and disaster.

Maybe it was a mistake to desecrate the goblin graves.

Maybe it was wrong to push a prisoner down some stairs into a stone basement.

Maybe we should have thought through some of our plans more.

*

Editor's Note, two years later: It was a really fun game. I found some of this in a G+ post I wanted to see archived, and it seemed like it might give some amusement to the general reader!

Lamentations Of The Dogs In The Vineyard

G+ is on life support, so a few weeks back I trawled through every post I'd made in my 6+ years using it to see if there was anything that I wanted to archive.

I found about a dozen posts that were effectively blog posts I'd misplaced. One was an idea I'd loved but done nothing with. I think over the coming weeks/months/however-long-I-maintain-a-regular-writing-habit I'll expand on this concept and flesh it out as much as I can.

From a November 6th 2014 G+ post:

Prequel to Dogs in the Vineyard; early 1800s sandbox campaign in a largely unsettled counter-Utah; party are not-quite-Dogs; sent off by the church to convert isolated communities, make contact with the Mountain Folk and look into those odd reports of weird caves in the Border Hills.
BUT play with LotFP as base system (plus guns). Clerics are true believers, magic-users are the church's investigators into other stuff who are now a bit tainted, fighters and specialists are the useful novices.
And the weird caves are filled with things out of Lovecraft.

I'm a fan of the setting for Dogs In The Vineyard, and in the G+ circles that I used to read and the blogs I currently read I see barely a mention of it. I LOVE what the game is about, I love the idea of the Watchdogs and I think that Dogs is possibly Vincent Baker's best game - at least out of everything of his I've read. The game-setting-making process he leads the reader/GM through is magical. Going from simple prompts it steers your creativity without being prohibitive.

But while I like the basic stats and skills setup for Dogs, I found it really bothersome to keep on top of the dice pools. The rolls and re-rolls, the escalation. It could be tense sometimes, but at others it was just eight or nine dice on each side clattering and trying to find an exception as no-one backs down.

So why not mix a little Old School goodness in to the blend to simplify some of the mechanics? Why not use D&Dish stats? And since LOTFP has a system that uses equipment and assumptions about a similar background period of history, why not "simply" perform an RPG transplant operation?

Why not write about this in bits and pieces over the coming however-long-I-maintain-this-blog-yadda-yadda-yadda?

Why not.

A few thoughts on playing

I mentioned in the last post that I had joined the pre-medieval Japan 5e game that noisms is running on a Sunday morning. This is the first campaign that I have played in for a long time – in fact, I'm really struggling to think about how look it must be since I have played in a regular game. A couple of years maybe...

I'm not going to AP about it all, you can go read noisms' wonderful, atmospheric descriptions. My character, Pasekur, a heroic former-NPC ranger who had been helping the party, was pretty lucky – lots of 20s, lots of useful skill checks – until he wasn't. First of all losing his axe on a fumble, then falling victim to a natural 20 from an opponent who clubbed him on the head with a rock, instantly killing him.

Taking over Toitoi, Pasekur's sister, was a little tricky. I'd not rolled up a character in 5e before. Not that this is hard, but it's just different. Over 90% of the games I played or ran in 2015 were either Into The Odd or hacked from it, and I think the others all came with pre-gen characters. While it was simple enough to play 5e, rolling up a character in a system I wasn't au fait with anymore was weird.

All that said, I like my druid – a class I've never played before – and am enjoying playing her. The setting oozes atmosphere. I've no idea how much prep that noisms has done, but the game feels seamless. There are no “loading times” - hang on a minute, erm, yeah, so, hmm – when we ask about something there is a response.

Like when I started playing RPGs in 2011, the more you play the more you want to play. June is a busy month, but I'm hoping to run something in that time... I'm sure I'll post about it here when I do.

AP: Doom-Cave of the Crystal-Headed Children

Finally got a game in! noisms was visiting, Patrick was around and so was David W, so finally after many long months we sat down and played something.

The guys all knew that they were playing DCCHC, but hadn't read it. They rolled up new characters, two each (ending with a party of six, two fighters, two MUs, a cleric and a specialist) and then found themselves a little way out of the town of Rookwood (there was a steakhouse out of the window of the cafe we were playing in with the same name, and it sounded good). A series of women of all ages approached and *SPOILERS* (if you've not read or played DCCHC and don't want to spoil anything, then don't click through; I will try to refer to things as sensitively as possible to avoid spoiling, but cannot promise I won't miss something).

Click through!

Spell: Pause

Found this in my Google Keep folder and thought it might be worth sharing; there is half a thought somewhere in my head that I have seen this already in an LotFP book - if I have, will someone put me out of my misery and let me know please?

On the one hand, this looks a little bit like a blanket way of halting magical effects. It did get me thinking though, that if a group with a few MUs spent a few rounds casting targeted spells at some great monster or something while a couple of Fighters/meat-shields held things back, there could be some tactical value - as well as a magical protection/deflection spell.

Of course, time has to catch up at some point...

Pause
Fourth Level Spell
Distance: A sphere of radius up to 30'/caster level (can be made smaller at MU discretion)
Duration: Caster's level in rounds
While this spell is in effect every spell subsequently cast by any Magic User or Cleric, and even any charge used in a rod, wand or other item, will be suspended. The caster must roll a d20 for each spell to determine the order that they resolve in after the Pause ends.
Spells in effect before Pause is cast are not effected (e.g., an invisible person is still invisible) and magic that is bound to a particular item or location still works (e.g., a flaming sword) so long as the power of that item was active before Pause was cast. Any power that must be activated is paused as well, unless the boundary of the spell is crossed, the power activated, and the boundary recrossed.
A spell "fired" from outside the boundary into the area may have unexpected effects (GM's discretion).

Encounter: The Dead Five

(no night idea, another peaceful night, but looking through my drafts folder I came across this, which needed one or two sentences to finish, hurrah!)

Rolling on another of Patrick's marvellous creations gave me the following:

"Black Ops Ghosts, possessing as they go, have orders to outflank an apparently empty fort but have no idea they are lead by an incompetent fuckwit."

Fleshed out, there's a damn good hex or encounter in that. Heck, there could be sessions in it depending on how you wanted to run it, develop it or portray it. For now though, how about the following?

It's a Puppet!

The baby pretty much slept through the night, hurrah! A victory for sleep, but no night idea. Today, however, is my regular day for childcare while my wife works on her various Masters' assignments. So up in the nursery with the baby and what do we find but PanPan, the red panda puppet that we got at the zoo last week (post about captivity and role-playing games still coming).

And seeing PanPan gets me thinking...

For a special sort of kami, it is not enough that you make offerings and say prayers to them. If you wish to appeal and gain favour you must carry their likeness - and more than this, you must allow them action.

Puppet of PanPan
Can be purchased from any shrine to PanPan with an acolyte. PanPan offers blessings for tracking and foraging, and also offers an awareness of animals of animals in forested areas (very rarely surprised). Simply putting PanPan on for a moment and making him act as a red panda (to the best of the operator's knowledge) will be enough to get a +1 to tracking and bushcraft. For every hour up to three hours, gain an extra +1 to these traits. After one hour, the operator gains the awareness of animals in forests such that they are unsurprised.

PanPan will not confer favour if the operator is wielding any kind of weapon, or any item in a weapon-like manner. If an operator harms an animal while the puppet is in use they will find that PanPan is angry. the puppet will make the operator especially attractive to wild animals for 24 hours.

Kait Legendary - a Kamikaze Librarian

Later today I'm playing in my first game in months (wife's online Masters is cancelled for tonight and am FLAILSNAILing for the first time into a game I've heard is good). I've also wanted to play as a Kamikaze Librarian ever since I saw Patrick's post last year.

Kait Legendary ("KL") was in a knowledge cult for a little while - the Burning Order - but realised that they were deliberately hoarding to deprive others. The name Burning Order comes from their imperative to rule and to destroy the scholarly treasure troves of others (after making sure they have a copy for themselves). Anywho, KL left before she took her novice exams, but was seriously bitten by the scroll-bug, and loves to collect scrolls, parchments, maps and books for her own personal library. When she has enough she plans to exhibit and set up shop in the University District of Wetham.

Until that time she adventures! Either she finds interesting and useful things on her travels or she finds the means to buy interesting and useful things on her travels. It's all the same to her. She looks like a hulked out Scarlett Johansson (because why not).


(stats below the fold)

A Ghost: Hanna On-the-hill

Hanna On-the-hill (a ghost generated by noisms' table)

Olpek is the oldest man in the village. He has been making furniture and wooden toys for over sixty years. When he was eight years old, his grandfather told him about the terrible girl who lived on the hill past the Red Forest. Legend said she was a beautiful princess. After angering a necromancer by refusing his marriage proposal, she was cursed with eternal unlife and a terrible hunger. Bound to the hill where he proposed, Hanna feasts on flesh when she can get it, preserving her body and regenerating when she gets enough.

Monster: Spiky Slugs

In the private workspace of Hirgon the Shapeshifter sits a large stone chest which cannot be moved. It came from Somewhere Else, and is held in our universe by forces beyond anyone's understanding. The contents of the chest hunger, but are thankfully sealed by the stone tablet on top. If it were removed or broken they would be free...

Wizard Matchbooks

You're a wizard. You're really well-established in the magical arts. You can create life from non-living material, fly and shoot lightning out of your eyes. It gets to be that you think: "Hey, I'd rather spend my headspace remembering spells to shatter the boundaries between reality than how to illuminate stuff or detect an invisible something..." So you make wands or a staff and then one day it hits you. What can you carry in your pocket, with a little one-time shot of magic, easy, handy and convenient. A book of matches. Strike one, and your spell's done.

You start making simple stuff and then realise, "Hey, I could do a lot with this..."

Somewhere South: Living, Dying and Mourning in Wetham

The last few months have been quite patchy for gaming; fortunately I have only one week coming up when I won't be around to run/play something - until I become a father in September, and who knows how that will effect things then. But 'til then, let's see what sort of things have been happening recently in Wetham, shall we?

Patrick and David went to sleep after their trip to the warren of the Dread Rabbit, and woke to find themselves in a strange sugar-coated nightmare world - Lamentations of the Gingerbread Princess. Despite the machinations of evil stuffed toys and dastardly cherubs they were able to escape, bringing back some items with them that would probably prove useful...

Setting Idea: Yippee-ki-yay!

On Sunday I saw Olympus Has Fallen, which was good in a pulpy, ridiculous sort of way. Good actors making the most of an overblown plot. It has been described as "Die Hard in the White House" which is a description that totally fits.

Last night I was watching an episode of Lost (don't worry, if you've never seen it I won't spoil anything) and there came a point where a character was crawling through a ventilation shaft. Something connected back with Olympus Has Fallen and the "Die Hard in the..." summary. Which in turn lead me to write "Game/Setting Idea: Die Hard in an abandoned castle/wizard's tower" over on G+.

So...

Monster: Weaves

Art sometimes get a bad rep. On our world people look at graffiti and wonder if it has merit. They look quizzically at a shark in a tank of formaldehyde. And they just don't get why Picasso couldn't get perspective right.

In other places, people look at a bizarre statue: a creature supported by a dozen piglegs, stitched to a cow's body, the head of a gargoyle, creepers growing out of all of the orifices and tree limb arms ending in scythes. "How is that art?" they ask. Then they run screaming as it stirs into life and chases them.

They didn't hear the story about the adventurers excavating under the hill of the Dread Rabbit who found a similar composite creature: a tripod of metal, stone and flesh (a bent broadsword, a three-foot stone column, the leg of a grotesquely fat person) carries a great dead horse head, mouth held shut by nailed bands of metal. A sword spike juts out of the top of the head, tentacles that sprout rosebuds spill out of the eye sockets and nostrils. As the adventurers walked past it shuddered into movement and pursued the group.

These are descriptions of Weaves.

Games Night: Veins of the Earth

So last night I rolled up a couple of characters to take through a dungeon based on Patrick's Veins of the Earth setting/sourcebook. This was kind of a playtest I guess - I don't know if I'm the first person to encounter some of these creatures and situations in the wild - but it was all new and different and weird to me.

Creature: Wilizards

Someone from another universe, perhaps a universe like ours, would see a saurian-like creature such as the Wilizard and think "that's a chubby sort of little velociraptor without the sharp claws; a bit fatter like a T-Rex but definitely a smaller dinosaur." As the Wilizard is not native to these parts, and is more readily found in the lands around Wetham, the chances of you seeing one are slim.

And probably just as well.

People who study such things don't know what has happened; a few hundred years ago Wilizards were simple pack predators, hunting, sometimes scavenging. They were nowhere near the top of the food chain, but at around four feet in height, with sharp teeth and a tail to help them balance running on two legs they were at least on the middle rungs of the ladder.

No longer.

Recently Wilizards have been showing greater levels of intelligence than simple pack-hunting animals. They track prey and wait until nightfall before striking. They pretend to play dead so that others investigate. They - somehow - construct crude pit traps and lie in wait for the unwary to fall in. Not all of these tactics are well executed, but more often than not they allow the opportunity for a Wilizard to bring something down, be it a man or beast. Scholars are trying to determine from old museum artifacts whether they have always had opposable claws...

Large Chess

The people of Wetham appreciate board games - if they are played on very large boards. While Flaming Chess has been popular for hundreds of years, a variant known as Large Chess has become popular much more recently. Pieces are represented by people, and they move according to the regular chess rules but for one difference: moving on to an opponent's square does not indicate capture, merely combat - a fight to the death or surrender for the two pieces involved.

There are unarmed Large Chess leagues where teams compete regularly: pawns are boxers, rooks are wrestlers, knights fight according to the styles of faraway lands and so on. However, in recent years those with the means to organise such things have taken to invoking Large Chess to settle civil disputes and outstanding debts. Writs are served specifying dates and times for people to pay up or settle by the rules of the game, with both sides bound to abide by the result.

Most choose to pay.

Somewhere South: The Warren of the Dread Rabbit!

Previously: Orve, Vaskin, Orchard (all Patrick) and Rowntree (David W) set out from the city of Wetham to investigate rumours of a Dread Rabbit, a big demonic creature that rises every thirteen years from slumber to wreak havoc. After a few encounters with a small Grogan, psychic rats and giant mucus worms, they retreat to the nearby town of Bilge...