How to present your game - like Habro?

I was listening to The Walking Eye podcast, and they were talking about Drifting. Drifting is a term from the Forge terminology, that usually entail changing the rules of the game in play to better fit the feel of the game you want to play.

In the podcast they talked about the futility of trying to design a game to limit drifting, to get the idea of your vision across. Somebody mentioned how the D&D Essentials could be an attempt to do just that, nail it all down. Then it was replied that we mustn't confuse design and marketing. It's a marketing move, to try to sell the same experience to all gamers.

So, is that a good idea? If you are into marketing your "old school" game, could you learn something from Hasbro when it comes to marketing? Can you do it without descending into the "a rule for everything" morass? Maybe. I'm thinking that maybe there is a way to learn something here, even if it's not marketing.

We all love the idea of having a game where the excellent DM adapts the game to perfectly fit the group. Maybe it's the sandbox or "fly by the seat of your pants" school of game mastering. But, do you do it?

Zak have, in Vornheim, brought the idea forward of using the graphical design of the game to be utilitarian. You have that chart in front of you, roll the dice on top of it and read the results! That is, in a small way, a way to have a framework on how to use the rules. Compare that to the "delve format" in modern day 4th ed D&D. You have the same layout, the battle map prepared and the same details there on the page, a full spread with everything you need, right in front of you. Sameness, not of experience, but of usage.

Nothing here is all new, I have already mentioned how Zak have done. But, maybe understating and leaving things out, like in some monster or spell descriptions, are not the only way to foster the loose "old style" play. Maybe it's not even sure that's what you want. Maybe you just want better, or "easier to access" play.

I'm starting to think that maybe rules can be presented with something like the "delve format". Things you need to grasp at first, ways to expand upon the rule, why this piece is here, another rule for this and maybe a table or three to summarize or generate new content from the rule. This not as much a way to make sure the rules are learned, as much as it is a way to present why it is that way - at the same time. Am I overthinking it?

I know how some people have tried to have a uniform format for adventure modules, with boxed text and stat blocks and maybe a "at first glance" text. I love to see experiments like that. DGP had their "nugget" system for their Traveller adventures, which showed critical "encounters" and how they related to each other. It was thought that it made it easier to improvise and run the scenario when you knew how the pieces fitted together.

Thinking on that, drifting and the idea of making use of graphical design I also think there are opportunities here to work with the text of the rules. If you think this sounds kind of vague, that is because it is kind of vague! Exactly how to do it, I'm not sure yet.

A new way to use the Ronnies

Since I have had no time lately to devote to even think about designing a game, and the Ronnies always makes me want to try, I have held off the Forge for a while.

The last round had these words from which you had to pick two and had to ignore the rest.

amazon lust chains queen


Can you feel the wheels start spinning? I mean, who will not get at least some imagine in their head from those words? Rob Kuntz have posted many times on his blog about creativity, and I think this is making me think about that elusive quality.

Ron suggests you take two of those words and then start to associate and get the mind roam around those words to get the creative juices going. This set of words I think is extra good at showing how that helps creativity. Talk about loaded words.

How about this as a spur to make great adventures, not whole games?

* amazon & chains - Why are those amazon warriors seem plundering caravans in the Purple Forest? Is there something behind the fact that they just claim all the copper items on the baggage train? Why have they suddenly stopped, after kidnapping the village smith? Are they making chains for something big and dangerous?

What kind of adventure can you make up from those words? I know I have more images in my head I'm not developing here...

An overlooked facet of the game - treasure

I know that I have read more than one magazine article, and more than one blog post on how to spcie up the loot you give out in your game. Now I have read yet another one. But, this one was quite good, and I thought I'd share this link to J.B.'s post on treasure. While I find the output on the Blackrazor blog to be more than I can keep up with, I felt this was a post worth linking to. Considering the failings of the alphabetical blogging project, this post was worth highlighting.

I remember when I started to roll on a bunch of tables from Pegasus Magazine for the appearance of potions. None of my players cared that much, and was quite confused by the ceramic container with glass stoppers containing purple bubbling liquid. What the heck, I enjoyed describing them! Go wild with your treasure.

A new game in town

A while ago I decided I was fed up my the gaming drought, and decided to follow the advice of Jim Raggi. He had an article in on issue of Fight On! about how to find players, and I did like he said and printed up a flyer and spread it around. Not any bloody response at all in the fourth biggest city in the country, with a university and lot of people coming and going. It just didn't work.

I would like to think that Swedes are insular and scared of letting anyone talk to them. It's almost as if you have to be drunk, or mentally unstable to address another human being in this place. Can you tell I'm a bit disappointed? Yeah, and maybe a bit bitter and unfair as well. Sometimes I wish I was back in North America, though.

Heck, I could probably fail there too.

...or we should all move to Finland.

Anyway. I did attend a character generation session last night, though!

Blogging seem to have brought me into contact with some really cool people in a way the flyers did not, and yesterday night we fixed up some characters for Unknown Armies. I have no idea where this will lead to, but I have a character named Frank, and he is stupid and into "darkness" and have some obsessions and social misadjustments. Simply put, he is a nutjob. I think that makes him a perfect PC in Unknown Armies. I'm really looking forward to this game!

One thing struck me about our PC gen session. We talked a lot about how we imagined our PC to be looking or sounding like this or that celebrity. Maybe this is the way to go when you are left with a game devoid of randomness? Pick an arena to be famous in. Say, pick an actor or a musician. Then think of some distinctive feature, like Sean Connery's way of speaking with his teeth clenched. Bring that look and feel into your game and try to stat it out.

It wouldn't surprise me a bit you you couldn't get a deck of cards and scrawl the names of actors/singers/writers/whatever on it and go from there at random. 

Reign and the D&D engame

Have you heard of Reign? The game showed up on my radar when I was reading Unknown Armies. Apart from being a game with a very cool setup, that game is the best written game I've ever read, so seeing who had written Reign I thought that it was bound to be at least a good read. It did have some other qualities, and one that I'm focusing on in this post is the so called "Company Rules".

To begin with I'm going to let you know that you can buy Reign from here. Hopefully I will be that convincing.

Reign describes itself as a game about "Lords and Leaders". What could then be more fitting to use as inspiration for the endgame?

A company could in theory be a way to play the whole party of PC at once, but I'm going to consider it more for domain management. Just like a character, a company have stats. Inspired by Reign, I'd suggest to at least have Fortitude, Wealth, Psychological Strength or Influence as stats for your company. Now, when you have stats, you can treat that realm as an entity that can take actions, and be affected by actions.

To consider your fief, thieves guild or wizard's school like a character like this, you can use it to play long term actions while playing on the PC scale, and you can use it together!

Consider this.

Say your realm have a Fortitude of 12 on a scale of 1 to 20. If your DM have told you that there's a drought in the lands, you roll a d20 at your Fortitude, or better, to have the realm handle the problem without penalty. On the other hand, if you need to do something like influence the politics of a nearby realm, you use the Influence of your company as a modifier to a die roll for your character. Maybe you divide that rating from 1 to 20 by 5 and have that as a d20 roll against CHA to see how well your diplomatic mission went after preparing the neighbour with your Influence.  You get the idea, right?

This way the domain rules wont be a totally different game, but just a more abstract way to handle a character with a few basic stats. I imagine that that would lower the bar, and make it easier to not only include domain management, but also integrate it as die modifier to the regular character level.

I'm not sure I'm making sense, or that this became as well presented as I would have liked. On the other hand, maybe I can just get the message across that Greg Stolze's Reign is a game with a very modular system that can be borrow outright, or used as inspiration for what I consider a fascinating aspect of higher levels of play. I strongly recommend it. Let me know if you manage to pound the suggestions above into something cool. I'll probably try to massage it a bit further myself.

Alphabet Challenge ends

After a few days of inactivity I think the alphabet challenge project is dead. My visitor stats went down and comments were almost nonexistent. While I write for my own enjoyment I do like to see that somebody is enjoying what I write and this apparently wasn't a success for me nor my readers.

Even though I constantly get google hits from people looking on Kalamar stuff, it seems those people are not many or vocal enough for me to get the kind of sustainable conversation that makes you slog on when you write according to a plan, and not from the random whims of my heart.

Now I will go back to my usual musings. Maybe not as challenging or developing as a writer, but easier and more fun.I do think I did manage to produce a few posts of some entertainment value, though.

Next up: Reign and the D&D endgame

[From A to Z in Kalamar] Merchant's Tongue

In almost every game world, there is a language that everyone knows. A "common" if you will. In contrast to our world where things like latin evolved from the learned world, the game worlds very often base it on commerce. KoK is no different. Today I will base my musings on languages.

So, why have a "common" at all? Isn't is very "unrealistic"? I guess it is, but also very handy. I have played games where not everyone could talk to each other, and it was fun a while. A short while. Having to roleplay not understanding is quite strain on the group after a while.

If we want to have a common language, what can we do with it? I have seen people suggest that you could imagine that a language evolved mainly for trade and commerce should have problems to convey subtler things. Maybe you could have a penalty to your die roll if you tried to talk diplomacy using the trade language?

Another interesting option is that the trade language can actually make people understand what the other person want, not what they say. If the language is used for trading, and maybe it a gift from a god of trade, it could be a magical effect transmitting just those kind of impressions even if you are not talking about trading. Try to wrap your head around that one.

Something which are very common in game worlds is the old empire. Usually it is long gone and the realms of today are the smaller states resulting from the squabbling and infighting which resulted from that collapsing civilization. You could build a lot of interesting game situations based on the fall of Rome. Seen from that point of view, maybe the different national and tribal languages are all strongly influenced by the language of the empire. In that way you have suddenly made that "unrealistic" common language make a lot of sense.

In the Kalamar setting there are multiple languages. There are even lists of common names in different languages, and examples of glyphs in the different alphabets. Since I am quite interested in typography, I like that bit. It's very cool to both have your cake, and eat it. You let everyone converse in Merchant's Tongue, but then the old treasure map you give out as a handout is written in old Brandobian letters!

[From A to Z in Kalamar] Lamellar Armor

Can you tell that I pick the most catching words in the index of the KoK campaign sourcebook? I have once again missed a day, but hopefully this will be of some interest.

In a sidebar of the KoK sourcebook we can read about lamellar amor. It's the kind of stuff you usually see in sourcebooks, right? More classes, monsters, equipment and spells. Using all of this is another kettle of fish, entirely.

I once ran a 3rd ed campaign. It started when the game was fairly new, and it ran for something like five years. Originally I had intended it to be longer, but the group became geographically dispersed and the game fizzled. In that game I allowed everything imaginable. We had weird spells, weird items and god knows what. I totally lost any sense of control of where the feel of the game was heading, and I knew nothing of how to make it right. Doing the right thing from the beginning would have helped, I guess. But what?

Now I see all this options as something of a hindrance. Considering how common the "rules light" meme is in the OSR parts of the web, I guess I'm not alone. I'm not against the idea of new stuff, but it has to somehow reinforce the setting.

So, what use are a thing like lamellar armor? Well, I think one way to make a secondary world, like a game world, come alive is to make it stand out. To have all the magicians cast spells from the same PHB spell lists, and to have the all monsters be the same old, same old from the MM, it will feel just like any other game world. While you can go as far as Talislanta, or Glorantha, or Tekumel, I think there might be a middle ground.

Take some of that crunch, like special classes or a odd piece of equipment that might have the same game stats like any other, and make it culturally significant.

Let's say our bold hero, having slain a hobgoblin chief, wanders into Bet Rogala i Pekal wearing the armor of his fallen enemy. Suddenly everyone's attitude towards him seem different, and suddenly people start to expect him to behave in a special way. Maybe they suddenly want him to take part in some dangerous task, or religious ritual? What if that kind of armor is something only the sacred chief, bound to be sacrificed to the gods after the campaign or war, is supposed to be wearing. Suppose that armor means something else, and quite significant as well, to some other culture the characters might encounter.

In that way even a suit or lamellar armor might be more than just another piece of "kewl power" from the latest sourcebook to plunder for maximum powergameing potential. Maybe it can be that as well...

[From A to Z in Kalamar] Joto II

What would you call somebody who refused to believe the existence of the gods, when their followers are all over the place using powers which should tell all and sundry that the powers they follow are the source of them?

Let's take a look at King Joto II of Shynabyth. He wages a long and bitter war on a nearby theocracy and don't tolerate any religion in his realm. Quite an odd fellow in the polytheistic realms of common rpg fantasy. Consider that the majority of my readers are from the US, another realm where the refusal to accept the existence of a god probably will forever lock you out of higher office. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but in the western world, the US is about as religious as it gets. King Joto would be odd even there.

But, imagine he is right?

No, I'm not going to make this an issue about American culture, but investigate an uncommon twist in fantasy rpgs. Let's for a moment consider that the king is right. This could happen in many different ways.

The first way would of course be that the divine magic is nothing but arcane powers in different garb. Lots of fancy robes, mitre and other garb it is. Then the question is why not everyone can wield all kind of magic? Maybe it's just a question of training. I could see interesting campaigns happening when the players find the ancient way to unify all the forces of nature. Eh, magic, I mean.

The second way could be that in the realm of Shynabyth the divine powers are just imaginary, and their powers useless. Is there a anti-magic aura radiating from the king himself? Ars Magica, a game I usually am not that fond of, had this idea about how arcane magic didn't work around people of strong and pure faith. Now, imagine something in the same vein, but opposite in effect. Is it a curse, or a blessing? What would happen should the king meet his end? Would divine power suddenly start working? Would it seep back into the culture?

The third option, just to pick some, could be that all those powers are really psychic powers channelling the inner energies of the caster. Both Tunnels & Trolls and Talislanta have wrought their worlds of fantasy out of that mould. Talislanta is actually the only fantasy rpg that I know of where the very existence of the gods is undefined.

Now, how could you use this in your game? Just imagine an idea out of option two up there! How would you win that war against the theocracy? By extending that aura of non-belief into their lands, of course! Back in the 2nd ed era there was at least one Planescape adventure where the player characters could make a village slide into the abyss by furthering the idea of chaos! I see opportunities like that here.

[From a to Z in Kalamar] Inolen

I remember that when the campaign setting source book for Kingdoms of Kalamar was published, I read some reviews that feel the setting was too dry for their tastes. They must have missed the section about Inolen in Brandobia!

This is a city, rules by a duke who makes everything he can to befriend bands of mercenaries. He also pays on time and let them handle things as the see fit. Naturally there are patriots who feel the duke are heading out on deep waters and wonder if it's time to act. Add to this the fact that there are caves a few miles south, known to be havens of monsters in prehistoric times, and "Farmers insist that otyhughs lives in the caves". Adventure time! Also, " he [i.e. the duke] is greatly concerned about the rumors of a secret cult of a dead god of Tellene". Epic Adventure time!

Now I really want to run/play a campaign in that city and its environs!