Why even are there “adventurers?” Like, seriously, why? It seems like a pretty horrible way to make a living. You risk life and limb and the possibility of having your face eaten by an eldritch horror or some kind of undead grub worm, and for what? Enough gold and gems to pay for another week at the inn that you're only staying at because it's close to the dungeon where you're plundering treasure to pay for your stay at the inn?

I mean, get a job, dude.

If you look at it through a romantic lens, the PCs are kind of like prospectors – the hardy souls who braved the American frontier to make a fortune during the gold rush. The kind of plucky freedom-lovers who couldn't be tied down by something as mundane as a vocation or a farm. And you know, most of whom died broke and shoeless.

I think a much more likely option is that PCs are scumbags who either can't or won't participate in society and for sure aren't interested in an honest day's work. Best case, they think they've found a way to get rich quick. More likely, this is the last option available to them.

Maybe that fighter is a veteran who couldn't re-integrate into civilian life. That cleric got caught drinking the sacramental wine one too many times and finds himself between congregations. That thief...well, thieves gonna thieve. Plundering ancient treasure hoards actually makes sense for them.

For old-school dungeon-delving play, there's an economy based on desperation that lends itself far more to people on the fringe of society than it does dewey-eyed young heroes-in-the-making who, I guess, are going to rob only as many graves as necessary to get their throne-bound life of glamour back on track.

Naw, fam. Dungeon crawling is the provenance of Dirtbags.

Now, they might be dirtbags with a heart of gold – scamps, even. They're not necessarily hardened criminals. Dungeon delving may even represent a way to turn their lives around. But they're surely not honest taxpaying citizens of the empire happy with baking pies or slopping hogs or marching to the hinterlands to die in the mud in the service of the king.

Look, our table is comprised of professional comedians, DJs, writers, actors, and a Canadian, so we gravitate quite naturally to dirtbag play.

Our Low Fantasy Gaming campaign was based almost entirely around the fact that they found some green dragon scales on a random roll and told everyone they'd killed a dragon. Our Traveller characters have destabilized entire planetary governments instead of admitting we had taxable income. Shit, even our Brindlewood Bay ladies were played pretty gritty – definitely a pile of used scratchers in Gertie's glove box, you know?

I guess what I'm suggesting is that if you're going to dungeon crawl, I really recommend embracing the sketchiness of it all. It's definitely a play style unto itself. It's not quite the same as junior high kids trying to assemble a party of goth edgelords – more like a table of middle aged men who have been in enough comedy clubs to be very familiar with the lovable dirtbag archetype.

Delving ain't pretty. Embrace it.

Discuss...

#osr #dnd #ttrpg #dirtbagfantasy

One thing I’m keenly aware of these days is that my personal journey with running and playing D&D is in large part a microcosm of the larger OSR movement that unfolded while I was away from the hobby.

I played D&D back in the 80s, drifted away, came back with third edition, fell away, tried to get my kids into the hobby with Pathfinder, bounced off that (although it really hooked one of ‘em) got invited to play fifth edition, bounced HARD off that, and then rediscovered the old ways and the old school. That is to say, I did what everyone else did, only 15 years later and at my own pace (including, apparently, starting a blog).

And I’m only just now starting to really understand why people start hacking systems and how powerful that really is. Before, I was always kind of the opinion that the world doesn’t really need another version of D&D, but now I get it. No one version is perfect, and maybe these are less rules and more toolkits anyway. There’s nobody who’s going to care whether I’ve mixed and matched rulesets – I’m not going to get kicked out of D&D!

In fact, while writing this , I just so happened to stumble across this post on Travis Miller’s Grumpy Wizard, which basically says this perspective has existed from jump and ends with this simple, brilliant advice:

Do not seek to play The game. Play Your game.

Thus, here I am trying to decide if I should use BX or Swords & Wizardry or OSE for my next campaign, and clearly, the real answer is to start with whatever, begin adding to and subtracting from it, throw in some of my own sauce, and come away with “my” D&D, which is what people in the hobby have been doing from the very beginning, including Gygax and Arneson themselves.

In fact, this even solves the secondary problem of having too many systems to play because I can just play them all at the same time by using the pieces and parts that make sense for me and my table. Very demure, very Jeet Kune Do.

To that end, I’m building a “Players Handbook” in Quest Portal for easy access during the game (though I think I’m going to shift that documentation to a neutral location), and it’s going to be a living document. I think it’s important to have a canonical home for it, so everyone who plays in my games is using the same rules, but there’s no reason why we can’t collaboratively decide we like the initiative system from this one but we like the resource management from that one. And when someone publishes a new spin on the game, we can borrow from that as well.

Anyway, I’m about to burn a Christmas gift certificate on The Elusive Shift so I’m sure I’m going to get a lot worse about these theoretical meanderings before I get better.

Discuss...

#osr #dnd #ttrpg

After wrapping up a 3 ½ -year campaign, I’ve started planning the next one and hope to cross another thing off my TTRPG bucket list: a mega-dungeon. And it just so happens I grabbed The Halls of Arden Vul when it came up in a Humble Bundle, so we are good to go, right? Let’s roll ‘em up and get delving.

One small hiccup: what system do I use? WHAT SYSTEM DO I USE?

I mean, the plan was to just use good old B/X. We used that earlier this year for our playthrough of Keep on the Borderlands in honor of D&D’s 50th anniversary, and we all had a blast. The simplicity, the flexibility, the ease of character creation after the first party inevitably got bodied…plus, I still own the original books!

But then…I also have the Basic Fantasy 4th edition rulebook. People rave about that and I am super into the whole open-source mentality.

But then people also rave about Old School Essentials, and that’s on my Christmas list.

Plus I have Hyperborea 3e and have been dying to try that. Hell, I’ve still got my original AD&D Players Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide, so why not just keep it legitimately old school? Arden Vul was made for OSRIC, after all. Hell, maybe I should look at OSRIC?

And I just downloaded Swords & Wizardry because the PDF was 5 bucks and I have a job.

Plus, let’s be honest, I’m going to tinker a little here, graft on a mechanic there, steal a bit and make some shit up at the table and whatever system I choose isn’t even going to look like itself after four sessions.

I’m agonizing over this decision, and it’s stupid, because they are all the same god damn game anyway.

I mean, obviously they’re all iterations of the same rules, which were themselves iterations of each other due to contract weirdness and interpersonal beef between Gygax and Arneson. At the end of the day, it’s six attributes, hit points, roll the dice, steal the treasure, and hail Satan. And in the age of the virtual table top, a machine’s going to handle the rough stuff anyway, right?

Somewhere I read a piece about TTRPG essentialism, the gist of which is that every TTRPG is actually the same ur-game anyway. Basic or Advanced or 5e or Traveller or literally whatever, it’s all just a re-statement of some Platonic role playing game that exists independently of our attempts to codify it.

That may be true, I don’t know. But for some reason, Swords & Wizardry gets me excited to play when I read the rules in a way that Basic Fantasy doesn’t. I don’t know if there’s some grand philosophical reason or if it’s just because the font choice and artwork resonate better.

I think maybe that’s really the dragon I’m chasing: that excitement. The same excitement I experienced the first time I cracked open that Player’s Handbook and this whole D&D thing opened up in my mind like a fever dream. Some systems hit and some don’t, and I’m sure what lights me up leaves someone else flat.

All that to say, right now, I think we’re using Swords & Wizardry, with Goblin Punch’s Underclock bolted on, played on Quest Portal, starting in about a month, at which time, I’m sure all of the above will have changed.

#osr #dnd #ardenvul #ttrpg #swordsandwizardry

Earlier this year, our group successfully concluded our campaign The Tales of the Green Dragon Brotherhood, and now that I’ve had some time to think about it, I wanted to write up a quick retrospective, capturing what went well, what didn’t, and what this campaign meant for me personally going forward in the hobby.

If you’d like to read about the campaign in gory detail, it lives on LegendKeeper here.

Honestly, the primary thing I wanted to accomplish with this campaign was, well, actually running a campaign. As I’ve written before, I have played a lot of games in a lot of systems, but had never been able to run or play in a campaign all the way from beginning to end. So the fact that the same group (mostly) started and ended together after several years and dozens of sessions in the same game world felt like a massive success. The fact that it ended with the exact die roll a specific character needed at exactly the right time was just icing on the cake.

Another sort of meta-level success is that by starting the campaign, I also started our game group (affectionately known as The Sunday Night Dirtbags, and there will be more to come on that). I initially sent out an email to a few guys I’d played with over the years, then we pulled in a couple of work friends, then a couple internet friends, and lo and behold, we now have a regular crew that vibes pretty well. We like the same kind of games, we take the same approach, and we’re all moderately able to keep to a schedule while still giving each other the grace that being adults with jobs and lives requires.

The system I chose – Low Fantasy Gaming – worked perfectly for the kind of campaign this ended up being: very sandboxy, very emergent. The mechanics really clicked for us – martial exploits, luck and rerolls came in clutch over and over, but so did the looming specter of PC death. We lost two PCs in the first two sessions, which set just the right tone. We used the Midlands campaign map right out of the box, and I only added a couple of towns out of necessity. I started the whole thing off with one of the written adventures (Tomb of Graxus), and the set pieces from that ended up influencing the entire campaign- I couldn’t have written a better, more narratively satisfying conclusion.

And I mean that – I couldn’t have written it. Every preconceived thing I did in advance for this campaign ended up being pretty useless. I started out very nervous about wanting to do this thing “right,” so I read a bunch of books and blog posts about how to GM properly, going so far as to write up the stuff recommended by Sly Flourish’s Lazy DM system – which I then promptly ignored and/or couldn’t shoehorn into the actual game at the actual table at all. Almost everything of note happened due to a random roll on an encounter table, an unexpected player choice , or me taking something they did and running with it.

There was an entire little mini-arc on a strange, alien planet complete with ray guns, bandersnatch, tribes of frog men in a hollowed out asteroid, and psychedelic mushrooms – none of which was remotely contemplated when I decided to run this game. Which is to say, this campaign really helped me learn how I actually GM. Turns out, I’m not a “write a 5 act story” kind of guy. Which is good, because I gravitate pretty heavily to the OSR so emergent play is the order of the day. All that to say – I now have some confidence as a GM I didn’t have when the campaign started. I now know what “my way” is, and I feel good about it.

One thing I’d like to improve on with the next campaign (and “improve” is not really the right word) is to really enforce things like resource management, wandering monsters, morale, henchmen/retainers, encumbrance – those old school techniques that I believe can really serve to force meaningful player choices. I tried to introduce a couple into this campaign, but it was too little, too late. We were already having very loosey goosey fun so it didn’t feel totally correct to suddenly start enforcing stuff like encumbrance rules at the end.

Of course, doing that will require some solid campaign management tools, and that’s another area I feel like there’s room to explore. I ran the campaign mostly in Foundry, using LegendKeeper for campaign notes and the occasional homebrewed monster or weapon. More and more I find myself resisting the urge to use most VTT tools. I don’t want automated everything. I don’t want animated maps. I don’t want my tabletop game to become a slow, crummy video game. Earlier this year, we spent a few sessions playing Keep on the Borderlands using the original Basic D&D rules, and everyone just used fillable PDFs and a shared dice roller on Quest Portal, and I think that’s the direction I’m going. Although that site has a ton of functionality – mostly I just want a nice splash screen, some ambient music, and dice, with the ability to pull up a grid if we need it. But I’m going hard towards theatre of the mind for the next campaign, make no mistake.

All in all, I could not be happier with how things turned out. A great group helped make a great game. Onward!

#sessionreport #osr #dnd #ttrpg #lowfantasygaming

Note: this is a repost from an older blogging platform. Links may be hinky.

The Owlbear Boys Ride Again!

This was one hell of a night of fantasy adventure gaming: amazing feats were performed, characters died for reasons poetic, combat was cleverly avoided (until it wasn’t), and the tech stack stayed the hell out of my way.

We started the session back at the Keep, of course. A week has passed so the PCs had to do some financials for room and board, which left them pretty cash strapped and also really clarified the old school play loop: of course they’re going back to the Caves of Chaos – they’re fuckin’ broke. They chose to not hire any help but two players did run two characters each, including a new Fighter. Great news, right? Another sword never hurt!

They hoofed it back to the Caves under a grey cloudy sky and while deciding whether or not to re-engage with the Kobolds, Earl the Thief caught a glimpse of a Goblin lookout taking notice of them, which the party interpreted as evidence of an impending attack1. Rather than leap from the frying pan into the fire, they went with Door Number Three and fled towards an as-yet unexplored cave (the surely-not-that-bad Shunned Cavern).

Staying true to the “as written” nature of this…I guess it’s a campaign now?…as the players searched the bones and gristle at the cave entrance, I rolled for wandering monsters and wouldn’t you know it? A grey ooze falls from the ceiling. Now, these players have had some bad experiences with grey oozes, though obviously, the PCs have not. They role-played the situation beautifully, though, with the dewey-eyed Cleric urging peaceful co-existence and the Dwarfs just wailing on the thing. Alas, one of the Dwarfs got hit by a gooey blow, which dissolved her armor and revealed the fact that she goes commando, which condition persisted the remainder of the night. The new Fighter turned tail and ran out of the cave, claiming to be looking for “rocks to throw or something.”

Eventually, the ooze was dispatched and the party moved quite cautiously deeper into the caverns. They’ve adapted to old school play, so it was slow going and ten-foot-pole prodding. They came upon a nest of giant rats, though I finally remembered to perform a reaction roll and the rats weren’t too fussed. They moved quietly enough to begin to hear the sounds of something big snoring in the distance. Rizz McSwag, the other thief, decided to investigate, and dear reader, hand to God, this motherfucker had the hottest dice you’ve ever seen.

First level thief needs to move silently? Dude rolled a 9 on d100. Check. He comes upon a slumbering fuckin’ owlbear and decides to backstab it. Double damage die nearly maxes out, taking 2/3 of the thing’s HP. Rizz wins initiative, hits again, and another near max damage roll and just like that, he’s killed an owlbear by himself and trust me, that didn’t do anything for his humility.

The party resumed their exploration (after dubbing themselves The Owlbear Boys), and upon discovering the shallow pool and yet more oozes, they quite cleverly attempted to lure an ooze away with a trail of “owlbear chunks,” because boy did they want the bejeweled chalice at the bottom of the pond. While the lure was successful, they didn’t count on yet a third ooze, and rather than risk a fate worse than a topless Dwarf, they decided to ditch this cave and try another.

Climbing up the hill a bit, they discover a cave entrance festooned with signs promising “Safety, security and repose for all humanoids who enter – WELCOME! (Come in and report to the first guard on the left for a hot meal and bed assignment.)”

Again, props to the player whose Cleric bought it hook, line and sinker3. They went in, found the guards, who offered the good Reverend Cherrycoke a skewer of meat and then ran him through with the same. The battle was joined and well, the party’s luck ran out. When the dust settled, the Cleric, the new Fighter (who didn’t fight shit), and the gruff-but-sweet married Dwarf/Elf couple lay dead and the two ranged-weapon-preferring thieves and the free-swinging Dwarf were hightailing it back to the Keep.

Looks like The Owlbear Boys are hiring…

Miscellaneous Notes

• A combination of Quest Portal as VTT and LegendKeeper as map/manager worked perfectly.

• Really enjoying this foray into B/X and the roots of the hobby. This group has three other campaigns going, including my own Low Fantasy Gaming campaign which is about six sessions away from completion, so we’re moving on in the rotation. I am very strongly thinking about shifting this game to another night and running it as an open table for now.

• Descending AC really isn’t that hard to work with, you cowards.

#dnd #osr #ttrpg #sessionreport