Eyes of the Overworld

With all credit due to Jack Vance.

Like this, only pink

Eyes of the Overworld are brittle, concave cups of a slightly pinkish material. The inner edge keeps itself moist through some mystical method or other.

When placed over the eyes, Eyes of the Overworld shrink to fit over the eye. Anyone wearing them is obvious; they look like pink globules over the eyes. They are very slightly sticky on the interior surface and so will stay in place through all manner of exertion after placement, but they are easy to remove, with a single Ready action per eye if done in combat.

When worn, the world appears a happier, more beauteous place to the world. Ordinary men and women appear as queens and kings, as does the wearer himself; the ugly is rendered beautiful. It affects all senses, so that the dumpy hermit with a speech impediment appears instead to have regal features and raiments and to speak with refinement. This has several beneficial effects:

• Immunity to Sense-Based attacks. You cannot be affected by a basilisk's gaze or a ghast's stench while wearing the Eyes.
• Immunity to Fright Checks and all fear effects.
• Temporary annulment of some disadvantages like Chronic Depression or Manic Depressive
• Other small effects as the GM sees fit. Examples might include a reduction in cost of living, since you're now satisfied with a broken-down hovel and slop, and a bonus to reaction rolls from some people since you're liable to treat them courteously.

However, there are a few drawbacks as well:

• Between -5 and -10 on Naturalist, Hidden Lore, and other skills used to identify monsters and items, depending on how much the GM feels the Eyes of the Overworld change the appearance to make it presentable to you.
• Complete inability to use Merchant or other value-appraisal skills.
• The Eyes are very easy to shatter. Any attack to the eyes that does at least HP/10 points of damage shatters an Eye and drives the shards into your eye, causing an additional HP/5 injury.
• The Eyes are mildly addictive. Each day spent continuously wearing them, the wearer must make a Will +4 roll or refuse to take them off. If they are forcibly removed, make another Will roll. the wearer suffers Chronic Depression (15 or less) for (24 +- margin of success) hours.

The Eyes must be worn on all eyes to be effective. If not enough Eyes are worn,  the user gets a splitting headache - treat it as being in Medium Pain for as long as the wearer keeps the Eye(s) on, and for 1d seconds after.

Nobody knows the origins of the Eyes of the Overworld. Some say that a wizard of old perfected a technique for creating them from the lenses of Eyes of Death. Others claim they are relics of a god who was slain for his beautiful scales, and these scales are the Eyes themselves. Still others claim they are excreted as spore casings by certain types of fungi that live at magical nexi.

Random Encounter tables are useful: After play report 5

Cast:
Calawas - Elf Thief (Katz)
Amalia - High Elf Cleric (Paraj)
Volbak - Dwarf Knight (Jim)
Lamaevhun - Wood Elf Scout (Tim)
Ilsildel - High Elf Wizard (Martin)
Chief - Wood Elf Barbarian (Catherine)

The PCs had decided to head back to Verbobonc to clear their debts by getting rid of their absurdly large book and do their general buying and selling in a large town instead of tiny Hommlet.

The walk there was mostly uneventful, though they did come across a group of traders and peasants making the trek out to Hommlet, until the third day. On that day, near dusk, they saw dust in the distance and wisely decided to get off the road and onto a nearby hillock.

No sooner had they accomplished this than the dust resolved itself into twenty-odd horsemen. From the road these horsemen claimed to be collecting a toll for use of the road in the name of on Lord Diego. Pretty much everyone in the party thought this was a ruse, and a poor one at that, since the admittedly well-equipped men didn't bother with any standards or devices other than a red armband.

After several tense minutes which involved two of the "men-at-arms" entering the camp while leaving the other eighteen on the road in a show of goodwill, Volbak, who has taken on the role of party leader, decided to let them take their tithe and go. Which they did, claiming a pair of crystal goblets and a fine broadsword "for the safe use of the road through the territory of Lord Diego, rightful ruler of these lands."

They reached Verbobonc without further incident.

In Verbobonc was a bit of accounting and a bit of rumourmongering to the effect that the eastern reaches are again becoming unsafe unless you travel in large groups - though not everyone in the city believes that. Notable expenditures included Isildel learning Create Fire after the fiasco with the green slime and the hiring on of a porter by the party, a shield-bearer by Isildel to cover him while casting spells, and a healer by Calowas. Despite groaning over the cost, they chose to pay all three the monthly rate.


In addition, Calowas got an audience with one of the Duke's chancellors and informed the man about the band claiming to be working for a Lord Diego. That got a serious frown and a "we'll send some people to look into it" to which Calowas responded, "We'd be happy to be those people" and the chancellor responded, "No, I think we'll send some soldiers to look into it." Bandit lords claiming territory out from under the rightful duke is nothing to sniff at.

On the way back, the trip out through the populated lands was marked only by the occasional farmer using the road to travel to his neighboring village. However, once they reached the Kron hills, about three days out from Hommlet they were overtaken by a gnomish patrol. Relations with the gnomes were cordial to the point where they camped together and they got a chance to try some of the gnomish marching brew. It was potent stuff; so much so that the party isn't sure where Amalia ended up for the rest of the night.

From the gnomes they learned that there has been an increase in orcish and hobgoblin overland movements to dangerous levels. This very patrol had, four days previous, rousted two trolls from a relatively new den in the hills.


Oh, and did we mention the green dragon? But don't worry about that; it's hardly ever seen.



The next morning they set out and in another three days' time they made it to Hommlet, where the smell of smoke hung in the air, and that's where we stopped.

Notes

Don't ever leave a session report as long as I have for this one. I have a strangely good memory for details, but still, it's best to report on these things when they're fresh.

I never actually expected to get use out of my random encounter tables. Not only did I get use out of them, but we actually had a whole session based around them, and they created a plot to boot. Furthermore, with the exception of the accounting in the middle, I'm fairly sure all of the players were engaged and interested in the game. Goes to show that random encounters overland aren't the same thing as random encounters in the dungeon.

Speaking of accounting, does anyone have any tips for making that go as quickly as possible other than do it all between sessions? Sometimes that's not feasible, since I can't end each session back in town.

Encumbrance tracker spreadsheet

I cribbed up a spreadsheet for tracking encumbrance in real time that shows the total weight, the current encumbrance level, and the effect on dodge and move. Now I can require players to track encumbrance (or do so for their hirelings or other NPCs) without having it bog down the game.

You can get it either in OpenOffice format or Excel.

In order to use it, fill in the (N)PC's name and all the fields in grey: Lifting ST, Unencumbered Move, and Unencumbered Dodge.

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.

NPCs do the craziest things

I love wacky NPC personalities, so when I find inspiration, I have to share it.

The man loves his onion

(Should be back to regular posting next week! Yay!)

Dungeon Fantasy Thieves - a proposal

There's been a bit of buzz in the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy blogosphere about DF Thieves. Basically, it boils down to a sort of broad-spectrum agreement that they're a little anemic and could use some help to keep up with the other templates. I agree, and I think the point has been made fairly well, so I won't rehash it again.

So what's to be done? +Peter V. Dell'Orto has some good suggestions for template reform, but I don't think they go far enough. However, before I show you mine, I feel it needs a little justification.

One of the methods of accomodating the thief in the OSR (detailed here on pg. 44 - that's a PDF link) is to make it clear that anyone can try to do normal "thiefish" things, but the thief is so good he can do abnormally "thiefish" things. To quote, specifically from the first source:

When I allow Thieves, their class skills are treated as extraordinary capabilities. That is, anyone can hide, but a Thief can hide in shadows. Anyone can move quietly, but a Thief can move silently, without even making a sound. Anyone can climb, but a Thief can climb sheer walls. Et cetera. -Philotomy Jurament

Now, I realize claiming that this is the proper interpretation of a D&D thief is somewhat controversial. So instead I'm taking the dodge of borrowing this interpretation from Swords & Wizardry, a retroclone that, if you don't know about, you simply aren't paying attention to the OSR. (If you aren't, that's fine; not everyone's into it. Though I have to wonder if you came here from Peter's blog.) In Swords & Wizardry, this interpretation of the Thief is explicit.

Without further ado, how to turn the DF 1 Thief template into something more closely resembling the class abilities as explained above:

Advantages:
Drop Perfect Balance as a required advantage. Instead, put it in the list of discretionary advantages, and increase that point limit from 30 to 50 points.

In the discretionary advantages, include these:

• Chameleon  (Shadows or other areas of at least -3 vision penalty and that are large enough to cover you only, -60%) [2/level, up to 10 levels]
• Clinging (Vertical surfaces only, -50%) [10] 
• Detect (Traps, Occasional) (Precise, +100%, Short Range, -10%) [19]
• Discriminatory Hearing [15]
• Silence [5/level, up to 10 levels]

Skills:
Drop Filch, Shadowing, and Smuggling entirely.

Drop Urban Survival to 1 point and make it a background skill, optional
Put another point into Escape and another two into Lockpicking.

Equipment

All "Thieves'" whatever - Thieves' mail, etc - should allow the use of the Silence and Chameleon standing-still bonus while moving if it covers most of the body and isn't obviated by some other equipment - for example, a thief trying to sneak with soda cans tied to his ankles is going to have a hard time even with Thieves' Boots - but he'd find it easier to get over a nightingaled floor.



Really, the above could use a little more polishing (like removing some dross from the optional advantages - should anyone really be taking Catfall at this point?), but I think this is a good basis for letting thieves reclaim some of their niche. For one, they're much better to send ahead in a dungeon than a Scout. Your thief could easily have effective Stealth 34 while moving with the right advantages - or higher than that, with the right (mundane) equipment. However, he doesn't steal the Scout's schtick, which is both putting lots of arrows in targets and being sneaky out-doors, where the Thief's limitations are apparent, since there aren't a lot of dimly-lit corridors outside.

Bandit Template

One of the things the Temple of Elemental Evil has in spades is human "monsters." Bandits, brigands, pirates, burglars, highwaymen, robbers, thugs - if it's a synonym for "group of men who try to rob you", they've got it. Heck, there's a whole town full of 'em.


That being the case, I thought it'd be useful to me (and perhaps to others) to have a baseline template the work off of. Yes, it's not hard to come up with, but having it done and in one place is still something. I give you:

The Bandit

ST: 12	HP: 12	Speed: 5.25
DX: 11	Will: 10	Move: 5, possibly down to 3 with encumbrance
IQ: 10	Per: 10
HT: 11	FP: 11	SM: 0
Dodge: 8	Parry: 10, but see below	DR: 2-4, see below

thr 1d-1, sw 1d+2

Weapon (14): Damage is by weapon. Other important things to consider are reach, number of hands, and weight (for breakage). Weapons are almost always cheap. Usually, if this is a ranged weapon, they'll have a Secondary Weapon; otherwise, it's a block.

Popular weapons include shortswords, maces, axes, spears, and polearms. Popular ranged weapons are crossbows, shortbows, and regular bows.

Secondary Weapon or Shield (12): If a shield, probably a small shield with DB 2 giving Block 11 and +2 to other defenses.


Skills: Weapon - 14, Secondary weapon or Shield - 12, Riding - 12, Stealth - 12, Survival (Terrain type) - 12

Traits: None, really. Maybe Social Stigma (Bandit). Many have Addiction, Cowardice, Bad Temper, and other such disadvantages.

Class: Mundane (Humanoid)

Notes: Just out to make a buck. Usually won't attack unless they think they can win (comes in numbers) or unless truly desperate. Also, usually won't fight to the death, either trying to parley or run away if the battle goes against them.

Gear: Weapons are almost exclusively Cheap. Most bandits will be in heavy leather, with some especially fortunate bandits getting chain shirts or hauberks, and a few having pot helms. Your average bandit will also have 1d copper in pocket change, and maybe 1d-2 silver.

Usually at least a few will also come with horses, so as to be able to actually chase down travellers. These will mostly be outriders, unless the bandit troupe is well-prepared