Savage Hall of Bones part 1

What follows is a re-counting of my on-the-fly conversion of Hall of Bones for my co-workers. I was asked about how the the OSR-style setup converted to Savage Worlds and wether or not the styles were mismatched. Its just reposted here on the blog to keep it from slipping away into the G+ stream. Theres a great bit of back and forth in the comments and you can find the original post here.

Anyway, the on the fly work I did is leading me to want to dual-stat things in SW and in LL / Swords & Wizardry...more about that later I believe. Here's my reply to Jack that turns into a re-cap & reflection on my GM style...which seems to be a position statement that is emerging form my time running, and playing lately:

+Jack Shear  I did my best to be a lazy GM and read the module bit by bit as they explored. I rounded out their party with a starting "healer" and "mage" from the template list in Deluxe. First thing I ran into was the dilapidated village, its got a map (as +Erik Jensen  points out) for very little reason. I think maybe I'll recycle that map for a combat above ground post-dungeon. The two players were very cautious, and Tork's player was enthusiastic and battled with being too cautious and being "the brick" but he did it with gusto. They explored and started running into a conversion problem (ie making good "notice" rolls but getting little information.) So I just began with surface details / obvious things and your roll would give you a second level of detail, and a raise would give you accurate information. I'm a big fan of +Courtney Campbell's work, so I kept trying to bounce the decisions back on them with some ideas, kept trying to summarize etc. though I'm not sure I'm super good at hewing faithfully to the ideal on that. (hey, its all practice right?) 

They ran into puzzles first, and since the fighter was ironically and sufficiently suspicious of the button he'd pressed they found the stair trap. He also set off the moldy room trap, but the other player was thinking quickly and dragged his sleeping form from the doorway pretty quickly. There was some great ham acting on his part and the two of them bantered with my two extras a lot, and had a good time. Since they thought to ask the "healer" and the "mage" about the mold after activating it they were able to get info on disabling it, and spent an "hour" with faces covered, burning out the mold with torches. They faced a bunch of "do you get discovered by dungeon monsters checks" and never had an encounter. They discovered the sanctuary room, beyond the mold trap and just before the end they faced down my re-skinned "ghouls" in the big, trashy ghoul den. I simply re-wrote "goblin" stats from the SWDX and gave them an extra power. Because they were super scared by the purple mold, I played that up in the description of the little, toothy dead-things with purple-ley patchy beards and body hair. I also doubled the number monsters in the room, and just gave the first two "surprise" THEN I had to react to the first initiative card dealt (a joker of course) to the Archer. So, I declared my actions, and then let him decide to interrupt or not. Then started the first round.

Rules I made up or may have mis-used:
Purple Mold: 
vigor -2 or fall asleep for 2d6 rounds; the end of the round you fall asleep it settles on you, colonizes and you make one more vigor check @ -2 save = fatigue, fail = 3d6 damage. If you're asleep then someone else has to take actions to help you, or the mold eats you. Mold continues to eat you every round as before.


Surprise:
Two ghouls in this room just get automatic surprise. Fine. If someone pulls a Joker, let them in on the first round before everyone else goes, then go in order of the initiative as the cards dictate.


"Groovie Ghoulies": (goblins by the SWDX)
These four-foot undead have been colonized by a strain of mold or fungus that grows on their bodies and so just add a paralyze to their attacks. Any shaken, or wound they cause also gives a Vigor check. Fail = lose actions (not very sexy, but its how I translated it on the fly) for 2d6 rounds. Second thoughts about these monsters is that they should have 2, maybe 3 attacks since they're basically fighting d6 and are not likely to hit the fighter's 6 parry. Then maybe rework the paralyze by going to look at other examples of paralyze in SW products. If they are "purple mold ghouls" you could just use a the Vigor vs Sleep rules from the mold entry I guess, but I was going quickly and thats just hindsight...

The combat was quick and they did well. I'm going to have to do some kind of work on the spell casters that makes them easier for me to use...ie I need to know the Power Points system better or give them a set number of spells or something...

All in all, I felt like it was Fast for what we were doing, and we definitely had fun, I'm not sure about Furious but I can include that later. This was pretty good for a ZERO prep game though.

Thats everything I've got on it right now. I plan to take some down time and actually prep some of the module so I'll report back on that if anyone is interested. I should also get out the NPC pdf and see what kinds of personalities the "healer" and the "mage" have...right now, its like a 4 person buddy cop movie in there...which is also good.

Re-skinning for fun, not profit.

This is just a personal statement about use of stats. In a similar vein to +Jack Shear's Just Use Bears. I'm posting it here as a challenge to myself, and to provide a LINK to understanding how I intend to use / reference stats for things I post here later.

Economy:
Don't spend hours and hours rolling, or building bad guys. Pick some stats from one of the following lists...maybe add a really important, distinct power that uses existing rules. What stats you use depend on what game you're playing. Making baddies tougher is easy. 

For D&D / S&W / LL, you simply add a hit die, or raise AC or both. Lots of times its much easier to pick a new stat block from a humanoid or something up the scale a step, and just describe it differently. NO NAMES, DAMNIT. Calling it a goblin ruins it. Let the players call it whatever they want...if a monster appears more than once, they will name it. 

In SW, you make a stat block tougher by bigger or smaller degrees through manipulation similar to D&D and the clones. Parry goes up when fighting goes up. Edges can make a stat block harder to hit, harder to wound etc. Don't re-invent the wheel. Use what works for you. Steal what you need and describe it differently.

In either system: Pick one thing. You won't remember more than that for each type / individual bad guy. Make sure it uses existing rules, don't re-write rules and stay away from obscure rules that never get used. Head towards the core of either system and just play.

Quirks:
I really like +Brendan S's house rules for the "Finchbox"game he's running. Borrowing his HD mechanic for NPC's / Monsters / Adversaries is a good idea. Your milage may vary, but it makes sense to me. Same for adopting a flat AC score, and removing bonuses. Although, I'd say that for a GM, having the HD demonstrate prowess in combat is a nice, simple mechanic...so a 3HD whatever might still have a +3 to hit, or hit as a Fighter lvl3 or what have you. Do what makes sense, anything else will atrophy in use because its not suited to your style. Steal stats from the LL Monster Matrix, and keep going. Use special monster that follow simple rules you know, or duplicate spell effects that you know. Add an attack, or a special power use in the same round as experience dictates. Establish your own Ascending AC reference, and then refer to it.

For SW I steal a lot of stats straight from the SWDX explorer's edition, and might tweak if I feel the need. Of the scads and scads of settings I have, there are lots of stat blocks to sift when I'm feeling like it. Also, you can raise or lower a die type pretty easily on the fly, figure out a Parry or Toughness score by comparison, and if you run SW you'll become familiar with the typical "buff" style special powers pretty quickly. Even just rolling a d6 and sending in more copies of the stat block you have on the table is a good one in SW. If they're not Wild Cards, they can ratchet tension and not really slow players down. Wild Cards have their own wounds, and chance to soak wounds so they really seem to freak the players out when they show up, or you declare their actions. Lastly, 

Skin Factories:
The early attempts to commodify me are very useful as skin factories because I know them well and I love them...Thundarr, He-Man, Scooby-Do and all those other shows whose theme songs I still have memorized...they are skin factories that I should be stealing plots, characters, and situations from every chance I get, or every time I'm not feeling creative.

Freebie Stats:
LL Monster Matrix
SW FREE Bestiary

Hex Reassignment Surgery: Backmarsh, meet The World Between

Deciding where I wanted to pull my ideas from for this mash-up / re-skin was pretty easy. I've been reading +Jack Shear's Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque compendiums for a couple of weeks now. I am really enjoying them as gaming materials and academic primers on the subject of gothic literature. Reading them, and trying to understand 'how-to: Gothic' has been fun and challenging. I'm finding that in my attempts to wrap my head around the materials that I'm able to prevent some of my own, vanilla fantasy assumptions from being so automatic.

The Swords & Wizardry SRD has all the marks of a labor of love, and like its bigger cousin the Pathfinder SRD I love that its online, and easy to get to. When I saw the Blackmarsh Campaign Setting described as an example for newer GM's to follow, I decided I wanted to take the time to try and understand it. Hex-mapped campaign settings are not really in my background as a gamer; I was rarely able to afford game books growing up, and I didn't take the time to really appreciate the technical side of game books until much more recently. So, hex-mapping is pretty much "all-new" to me.

Having read most of the TotGaD companions a couple of times now, I can tell that while I'm going to aspire to be as "Gothic" as I can manage while re-skinning this, I don't think I will manage to be as faithful to the inspirational materials as I want to be. That's pretty okay with me in the context of trying it out though. I'm not writing any papers for Jack's class so I should be okay. The exciting thing for me is going to be using his material as a way to stretch my GM repertoire and try to put a clear "fingerprint" on this basic campaign setting. Due to my own personal tastes I may wind up with something more Alex Toth than Edgar Allan Poe, but I will have made an honest attempt.

I want to read Blackmarsh through a couple of more times before starting, in earnest with the re-skin and hex reassignment, but here are some of the ideas I've got forming currently on the big picture side:

Blackmarsh vocabulary changes:
We have GOT to get rid of 'Viz' as a name. I can't take it...I keep flashing back to the Coo Coo Cola Cult episode of Rescue Rangers. I'd rather call it Magicite, or Manna. Quintessence has the right sort of feel to it, but seems less "does what it says, says what it does" than Manna. Even blood stone, star metal, or ghost rock would be better. So, Viz is gone and Manna is in for now. I want to reserve Jack's 'demonstone' for later.

So, Manna is a thing in this setting. A discreet unit of magical quintessence that allows a magic user to cast a spell, but retain it in memory. This works on a 1:1 ratio of Manna to Spell Level. So, you can burn 1 Manna and keep a Level 1 spell in memory; 2 Manna for a Level 2 spell etc. Also, 1 Manna is equivalent to 100 GP for making magic items.

That's pretty cool, right? It makes Manna a fantasy-style gold-rush kind of resource. The problem now is that I'm reading that Manna (Viz) is both a discreet unit and some kind of interestingly unique snow-flake resource. The setting has some indications that it can be any number of amazing forms: "a flask of pure spring water, a newly bloomed flower, or an iridescent rock" while simultaneously, the sand-box has locations with artefacts that have places where "Viz can be inserted." So I'm going to want to clean that up. Hopefully without rules / too many rules. The questions that arise immediately for me are "where are the Manna pools?" or "how can I make that game-able?"

What I'm thinking right now is that Manna can be caught, and crystalized somehow to make it a unit. With some skill, this could tie into the gothic 'grandeur of nature' thing and maybe even cast an eye towards Reason vs Supernaturalism...I'm not sure yet.

Gothic themes and window dressing:
Feyan Folk, Elves, Eladrin, Drow and fairies of the D&D description are a bit whimsical for the inspirational material. Making Elves weird is going to be hard for me in actual play, so I'm going to want to set them up well in my head. That means narrowing the field and changing some designations and really trying to use Elves for something other than 'High Men' or whatnot. (I will not take 'Ancient Astronauts' off the table.) So I want to lump Elves, Eladrin, and Drow as concepts into something more compact. I think I want use them to highlight the fears as indicated in the Compendium...I just don't want to make a major kind of distinction between them. I think I'll have an easier time emphasizing the subtleties at the table if I keep them together in one slot in my head.

I will want to think deeply about the cultural rules that allow Men and Feyan (or whatever I'll call them eventually) to interact. In Blackmarsh, as in Tolkien, the Elves are the shepherds of civilization but on the wane...I'll want to address that in particular rather than assume it. Bake it into the setting as a feature not a bug. Keeping them weird will require some anthropological raiding for strange customs and the like.

Weird ideas about individuality, property, and modesty
roles as names "Puck" "Alder King"
bound by certain kinds of agreements
morbidly fascinated by mortality in short-lived sentients
a comment on class / colonialism
problems with intensity or exposure to human emotionality makes ruling humans complex
have a 'veiled countenance' and 'unveiled' wich is hard on other sapients

Monsters are going to get lumped a little too. I want Trolls that are Giants, and want to call them Trolls ala 'Troll Hunter' with a lot of various breeds. There are Troll tables for that. Gnolls are definitely in because of the 'Grand Guignolls' and my love of animal-dudes. There's plenty of swamp, but I don't know what kind of D&D swamp denizens I want. I do want Goblins as Gremlins, and maybe Kobolds can be my swamp guys. They eat humans and are devious so they hit some classic Degenerate Hillbilly notes with a lot less of the classist implications I see with Ogres and Voodoo Halflings. If I have Orcs, I may use them as created enforcers for the Elves...

Thats it for now. Feel free to sound off on some of this if you have the notion.

~IMCTT

Clerical Ramblings

Genesis?:
In a timely enough fashion, playing a cleric has become a topic of discussion in my house. My domestic partner, who is new to table top gaming, has undertaken the task of playing Kyra in a Pathfinder Basic Box game that I'm running for my cousin. I bought him the Box for Christmas after he told me he missed playing D&D from his high school days.

I've always liked characters connected to divinity, because I'm a support player. So when she started talking to me about "how to play a cleric"  I did some quick Internet searching and started to try and condense the "problem of Clerics" in a short, non-boring way. I did not succeed...as you may read.

Backtracking:
My early search revealed some interesting turns of thought and I started off on the typing. Then, today, This appeared in my google reader stream...showing that this is an issue that will likely never resolve its various differences. So, I typed on...and here's what I wrote...

On being a Cleric:
Crusaders, zealots, oracles, and pawns of the gods. The standard fantasy cleric is a thing of controversy.

Here's what the Pathfinder says about them:
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/core-classes/cleric

Here's an article from the D&D 3.5 era about Cleric strengths and weaknesses:
http://www.wizards.com/default.aspx=dnd/cwc/20041125a

And even more meta-analysis related to Clerics:
http://www.wizards.com/dnd/article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20110426
http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20110503

It seems like a lot to read...but its good background that you don't need to study, just skim...

LASTLY, let's look at the entry for your deity in the wiki:
http://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Sarenrae

SKIM all this...but don't take it as...ahem...gospel. Its just for flavor. WE will build this particular cleric's personal experience more as we play. This is just the baggage that comes with it.

and then...

On being a Cleric Part 2; my ramblings...

Conversely, the fiction aspects we strive to emulate with fantasy gods and their "clerics" is much more ambiguous; more reminiscent of myth and legend. IMHO, before the great Christening of the world we humans thought about "the gods" as unknowable, unpredictable, and downright dangerous to be associated with.

Dunsany's 'The Gods of Pegana' is listed as an inspiration for some seminal fantasy writers, and chief amongst those must be Tolkien. For better or worse, his vision of a sweeping, and fantastic pre-history of earth filled with wars and songs and elves and dwarves gave us the foundation upon which the creators of D&D and most "high-fantasy" began to build their own stories.

Pathfinder and its cousins are the evolutionary successors of the mass marketing of the Tolken-eque ideas and european fantasy tropes piled in on top of each other and packaged for sale. They're familiar enough, strange enough, and able to be known...much the same way that 'The Lord of the Rings' movie trilogy is a branch/flavor of Tolkien's cosmology.

Now, contrast that with the works of another Dunsany fan, H.P. Lovecraft...his work is so intimate, specific, subjective and full of uncertainty that his emulators are often mocked rather than revered. However, if you've read Tolkien's 'Silmarillion' ... its easy to see Tolkien, and Lovecraft clearly following the paths of earlier "fantasists."

That's where our split in the sub-culture comes from now...certainty vs. uncertainty...but that's a digression.

So the problem with Clerics is that some people interpret their presence in game as "proof" that THE GODS ARE REAL and then they extrapolate a false corollary THAT ALL BELIEF IS FOUNDED ON PROOF IN THE FORM OF MAGIC AND MIRACLES. When, in all actuality, neither one of those is true...nor are they false...the interpretation is up to the gamers involved.

I like to think that Jesus is the most iconic Cleric in fiction. Flipping tables and breaking cages, throwing out the un-righteous. Casting out demons, and rocking other miracles. However, Buddha, and most of the Greek philosophers can count too. Holy folks and philosophers of all stripes...thats what clerics really represent. The human connection to the mystical is what they represent in the game world.

So, its a question of what kind of Cosmology is there really? In the game? What kind would emulate the myth, legend, and fictions that we love collectively as humans and as gamers? Its a weird place to be, and a hard question to answer. The books being published and sold have to be universally appealing. So they are irrevocably ambiguous and use a sort of centered assumption of whats holy and how the universe is ordered. I really can't wait to explore them things in a game!!!

IMCTT,
>B