My brain is melting

We're entering crunch time in the Halter household, what with the end of the semester coming up, along with the impending occupation of various (mostly in-law) relatives for the holidays. On top of that, my mind is beginning to wander: I was eaten by Factorio for a few days (an addiction that thankfully wears off quickly) and other such things.

On top of that, I'm starting to run into the question of how much to put here, on this blog. I have a bunch of cool ideas I want to flesh out, but how much setting-specific info do I want to publish? After all, while it's unlikely, a player might stumble upon this blog (once I have any).

I'm probably going to publish a lot of it anyway, since this space is primarily geared toward getting my head on straight and my ideas past that vague beginnings stage where, without sufficient impetus, I always keep them, because I'm bad at content production.

All that said, I have made some (slow) progress on my megadungeon. I have an entryway that's five different entrances disguised as one, and I'm about halfway done mapping the first section of Level 1. By the time you see this post, I hope to be a good bit further along. When I'm done I might post the map for criticism and to talk about some interesting things I've run into as a newbie mapper.

At the same time, whenever I start thinking about the Desolate North and what I need to do to get to play, my mind stubbornly refuses to stay on task. Instead I think of hex contents, weird history and hidden stories, other settlements, how to handle tribes, new rules for expeditions, what kind of monsters I want stocking my wilderness, and on and on and on. These will probably make it into this space, subject to the caveats above.

The more I dwell with it, the more I like the Desolate North. It started out as a kind of Great White North/Nanuk thing, purely because I like the cold. But that quickly becomes boring if you stick to it too hard. So over time it's morphed into a kind of Alaska meets Central Asia schtick, giving me more room for varied environments, other settlements, and possibly even (depending on interest) a fantasy version of the Great Game focused more on colonization instead of vassalization. Still, at least at first I want to avoid town adventures and political intrigue - at least until I and my players are comfortable with the decor and want to move the couch and paint the walls a bit.

A lot of the way my thinking has evolved is due to +Hill Cantons. I've already borrowed his concept of the Weird and given it my twist. I'm hopeful that Queen's Landing will slowly twist into something strange and beautiful layered over that Cold Botany Bay core I've set out. We'll see.

I'm hopeful that through the holiday season I'll be able to keep up my enthusiasm and my impromptu twice-a-week schedule. Wish me luck.

A supplementary theory of rule generation

I've seen a lot of posts on the nature of the shift from O/BX/AD&D to 2nd and beyond both in the nature of the rules and their proliferation. Many of these posts have been very helpful for formulating how I want to play D&D, and enlightening besides, because I'm interested in this stuff. (Learning about the history and evolution of your hobby is fun in itself.)

The general consensus seems to be, broadly speaking, that the earlier versions of D&D were naturalistic (according to a pseudo-technical definition evolved in the OSR), 'objective' (by which I mean the world didn't change to accomodate plot or narrative, but rather treated those as emergent qualities), and action-focused, rather than character-focused.

One of the myths of the OSR is that rules proliferation was driven by an attempt to make the game "fair" and curtail the power of the GM as used for evil. By myth I don't mean to imply its falsity; I mean something like a cultural story. Personally I think there's good hard evidence in the way certain rules and mores in our hobby evolved for this myth. Further, even beyond questions or truth or falsehood of the essential facts, the myth is good and useful, because it makes us think about social interaction at the table and form the correct response to the spectre of social friction.

However, I don't think it tells the whole story. To that end, let me offer another explanation, meant to go side-by-side, rather than replace the above.

Most OSR bloggers I have read got into the hobby as kids in the 80s. These folks cut their teeth on B/X or AD&D with their brothers and neighbors, with lots of time and the general social difficulties children have influencing their gaming. It's true, there are bloggers out there who started in the 70s, or as adults, or in the 70s as adults, but I feel pretty comfortable saying that the lion's share of the OSR bloggers out there to whom I have been exposed either are the children of the 80s or strongly influenced by them.

I have a different perspective. I started gaming in the 90s, with GURPS - with adults. (I was three.) By the time I started regularly playing with people in my own age group, I was in college. So I largely side-stepped the difficulties of gaming with (other) children, who haven't fully developed a social consciousness. I never really experienced the difficulties of an unacceptable adversarial GM relationship, or gaming with people who can't be 'adult' about things.

One of my other hobbies is mucking about with computers. This is hardly surprising; there's a large intersection of gamers and computer hobbyists of all stripes. One thing about computer hobbyists, no matter what distinct strain they adhere to, is that they like tinkering with things and building things. For some it's more mathematical constructs, others play with soldering irons, still others like creating and refining software.

I think those urges spilled over into the hobby of gaming as well. People started making new rules not just to fix what they considered broken but because they wanted to improve the system they used. Tinkering with improvements and redesigns, while putatively useful, is actually often an end in itself. Some people garner enjoyment from the tinkering.

This same thing happened with rules. I posit that some of the rules-creep that happened happened because people enjoyed making rules and having rules.

Unfortunately, while the process of making rules can be fun, and being able to say you have rules is enjoyable, the actual use of those rules can be a real bear. Especially when those rules were made at root for the fun of their own making, with actual play being secondary. (c.f. AD&D's weapon speed factors)

This urge is still with us today, and while we have a cautionary tale against changing the game to make it more 'fair' I haven't yet seen anything like a consensus narrative addressing this problem. (Peter's Has that come up in actual play? is the pioneering exception, for which the man should get massive kudos. Everyone coming here already knows about that post, but go read it again.)

Tiny post on SM House Rules for Dungeon Fantasy

 Found this in the old posts and thought it might be good enough to throw out there as-is.


Skeletons have SM -1 because they're harder to hit, since the structure isn't all there. The same logic can be used for other creatures, e.g. the Elegant Spears of the Jungles of Zaridun, who have adapted to the heavy monsoons by becoming voluminous lattice-works of chitin to let the water flow through without resistance.

SM can never give more than a -4 or +4 in melee combat, and it will never cause the Size/Range/Speed bonus to be larger/less than +- 4 (by which I mean that the full SM will apply, but the bonus/malus will cap out if it would cause a larger deviation)

For example, fighting a Giant with SM +6 with a sword would only give you a +4 to hit, because after something gets large enough it isn't easier to hit it if it's larger. Is it easier to punch a barn than the Shuttle Assembly Building?

Similarly, if you shot an SM+10 creature from 200 yards away (-12), you'd be at an effective -2. If you shot the same creature from only 15 yards away (-5), you'd be at an effective +4 - the other +1 is lost, because after a certain point it isn't easier to shoot a larger thing. If you were shooting it from two inches away, you'd still only have a +4 - though I wouldn't make you roll unless there were serious other factors in play about whether you could hit it (which the rest of its SM could be used to help cancel out - it is easier to hit the Shuttle Assembly Building than a house if you're trying to do it in a gale).

Remember Masters of Orion?

For those of you who don't know, Masters of Orion and its sequels were a turn-based galactic empire-building game. However, they're hard to get ahold of, especially if you run Linux. Enter FreeOrion, the free Linux "clone" (with versions for Windows and Mac, too).

They're only up to version 0.4.2, but it's fully featured and currently playable, both single and multiplayer over a network. (Besides, community-built games like these never actually hit version 1; they just keep slicing the version numbers thinner and thinner.)

And now you know why I haven't updated the blog.

Back Monday. (Friday's bad because of the 4th of July as well. For all you Americans, enjoy the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. My wife and I will be re-reading it, as every year.)

New spell and other miscellanry

Do you like session reports? I like session reports. I've mentioned before that what finally inspired me to run the Temple of Elemental Evil is session reports, especially Peter's. +Jason Woollard has a blog full of well-written session reports. They read like stories, which is the best kind.

Mucking around with putting together a small dungeon on the side, I invented a new spell. Some background: the precept of the dungeon is that it's a reptile-man shrine, from back when their civilization ruled the earth, à la H.P. Lovecraft or R.E.H.

Blessing of the Eye      (Special)

Duration: See below
Cost to cast: 5. Cannot be maintained, must be recast. See below
Time to cast: 10 sec
Prerequisites: None, or See Secrets, or whatever. The idea is this is a secret spell.

Casting Blessing of the Eye requires the caster to draw a rune of Kiskig's Eye on a solid surface in his own blood. The caster takes 1 HP of damage for each day of duration, chosen at time of casting, that does not heal until the spell ends. Once cast, the Eye disappears from the surface as though soaking in (though Mage Sight will allow it to be seen).

While the Eye is active, the caster can see through it at any time without concentration and can cast spells through the Eye as though in its exact location.

Any night the caster sleeps while the eye is active, he is affected by nightmares as per the Nightmares disadvantage on B144 (SC roll 12 or less). I recommend something like The Shadow out of Time

Questions I forsee

Why cast this instead of Wizard Eye or Invisible Wizard Eye? You can cast through Kiskig's Eye. You cannot cast through Wizard Eyes. Also, this lasts longer.

What abuse potential do you see? First thing that popped into my mind when I put my player hat on was drawing this on a sheet of paper and slipping it under doors. Second was drawing this on my allies so I could always see where they were and cast spells on them or their enemies. This might be especially egregious since I could sit at home in my tower and still be useful on the adventure.

If you don't like these potential uses, specify that the spell must be cast on some relatively immovable surface (like a wall or a door) and/or that the maximum range is also dependent on HP expenditure; something like 1 HP per mile or league should work.

Breaking the hiatius

I'm finally back. Life has been keeping me from this blog and most other past-times lately, but that's all over.

It's hard, coming back to something like this after such a long break. I pretty much stopped thinking of this project except in odd moments because there wasn't the necessary cognitive space. That being the case, this post probably won't contain too much useful information for people looking to play the Temple in GURPS or convert other AD&D material. Sorry.

I still have a lot of posts I need to write, and I will get on that this week and in the weeks to come. Despite the fact that I stopped doing pretty much any preparation, I did keep gaming, so there are session reports that need to be fleshed out and posted. (This is the blessing both of lots of front-loaded preparation and the fact that T1-T4 contains the Moathouse as a separate starter dungeon.) On the flip side, I don't think I'm going to continue the Know Your Options posts; other bloggers in the GURPS niche can cover DF-centric tactics much better than I can. Perhaps I'll pick them back up once I have some experience under my belt. We'll see.

Beyond that, I need to consider what needs doing next. The Moathouse is basically done, but I still need to work on Nulb and the Temple itself, where I've done very little. I think I'm going to stat up Nulb with City Stats in a rudimentary fashion, because I hope that will help me answer some questions about using it as a base for adventurers, like how much wealth the local economy can absorb, and how the town will change over time because of PC influence.

I also need to work out a new note system, since the method I currently have just doesn't work very well. I'm stuck flipping back and forth. I have a few ideas on that score that I'll try out and report on, but if anyone wants to come forward detailing what you do to keep track of treasure and monsters in the dungeon, I'd love to hear it.

I might occasionally wander off-topic; I've been considering a sort of hex-crawl campaign for a while now, though I don't expect it to ever get off the ground. It's for when the Temple's been gone through and we're ready to move on to something else - an eventuality I expect to take years to arrive.

Finally, I think I'm going to move down to a Monday-Thursday update schedule for the moment. That could change once I get my thoughts in order. It isn't the best thing for the blog, but the point of the blog was to force me to continue working on the Temple and to be a repository of useful information, not as an end in itself.

Since I'm a big believer in not posting if you don't have anything useful to say, I'll bring up something I've been mulling over for a bit now. I'm considering restricting spells learnable in town to those without any pre-requisites, unless the town or mage in question has special connections. Other spells would have to be picked up in the dungeon or researched. I don't know how much I like this idea: on the one hand, it brings back that flavor of why a wizard would delve and it makes magical scrolls and the like treasure truly worth it. On the other, it hamstrings mages, perhaps too much. Maybe I could combine it with not requiring pre-requisites for spells learned from spellbooks and scrolls? If I do that, and simply make learning spells from town prohibitively expensive, it might perform the same function without being too much of a handicap for spell-casters.

Good Friday

It's Good Friday today, which means I don't really have a lot of time to dive into posting. However, in the spirit of the day, let's talk about myth*.

The sense of the mythic is what first drew me to fantasy roleplaying. Even as a small child, watching Eric's campaign unfold and reveal new sides to itself, I got the feeling that here was something grand, some primal act of storytelling. It didn't have a plot or defined narrative the way 'story' is mostly interpreted today, but it had an internal consistency and sense of action and discovery that infuses the best of campaigns. In a phrase, myth brought me to roleplaying.

Personally I'd like to play in such a game again. A second-best would be to run it. However, if you're looking for advice on how to evoke such a feeling at the game table, you've come to the wrong place. I'm just as lost as you - maybe more so. I've seen that car, even ridden in it, but I don't even know how to change the oil, much less rebuild the engine.

*I use the word 'myth' not as a judgment about truth or untruth, as it is commonly used today, but rather as a description of the structure of the truths imparted.