Just Say Yes? GM Improv in Campaign Play vs. One-Shot Play

Some background before this post: Coulee Con is coming up, and I recklessly took the plunge and submitted two games to GM at the end of August. The first submission is Beowulf using the Yggdrasill system. The second is a Conan game called “Blood in Their Wakes” using the brand new 2d20 Modiphius system for Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of.

I call these submissions “reckless” because the last time I submitted a game, “The Boon of Barrow-Isle” for the Yggdrasill system at Gamehole Con 2016, I belatedly realized that I was nowhere near prepared enough to run it. Therefore it was a mixture of disappointment and relief when absolutely no one signed up to play. Now, for Coulee Con, I feel prepared enough to run an Yggdrasill game, having run a campaign of it off and on now for almost a year. But Conan puts me in a situation similar to where I was last year with Yggdrasill. I am enamoured with the material and the system and really want to be an ambassador for it. Therefore I committed myself to it by submitting a game, and with my home group I’m fairly anxious to familiarize myself with the crunchy 2d20 system.

So I have to get to the “Beowulf” content in my Yggdrasill campaign to provide myself with plenty of time for the Conan rules set. And this haste and anxiety led to the thoughts that I have for this post. Last session I made good on my resolution to resort more to the runes as a game mechanic, but I did something else that, during post-game analysis, I regretted. If I could go back to our last session I would act differently in response to a player’s question. This falls under the topic of “Just say yes” during improv play.

Some time ago I listened to a recorded seminar from Paizo Con. One of the panelists was a noted GM and practitioner of improv theatre. He had two major pieces of advice for GMs: 1. Let the players shine and 2. Just say yes. Really, he was teaching the improv rule of “yes and.” An example of this:

GM: So the oaf has you down with your back on the table. His massive mitts are around your throat, slowly squeezing the life out of you. What do you do?

Player: I look around. Is there something nearby that I can grab and hit him with?

GM: Yes, in your periphery there appears to be a kettle. Made out of iron, maybe, and you sense heat emanating from it. Perhaps it is full of hot water?

I have presented the “Yes and” principle here at the microcosmic level, and this would be perfectly acceptable in one-shot convention play. Giving the player something to hit her antagonist with, and adding to the request the detail that it is full of hot — maybe even boiling — water isn’t going to drastically derail the track the GM has prepared for a satisfying arc that hopefully fits neatly into four hours of play (unless it’s going to, but that’s up to the judgment of the GM).

But the “Yes and” moment I encountered last session had greater implications. Instead of saying yes, I said no, and I know why I did at the time. After thinking about it, though, I wish I had said yes, and the answer is because of this: I said no because I was impatient to get to the microcosmic “one-shot” aspect of my campaign. But I should have recognized that I wasn’t playing a one-shot but a campaign. As such, I should have said yes.

I’m doing something potentially problematic with my regular group. I designed a Beowulf campaign for convention play, and I want to playtest it with my group in the midst of an ongoing campaign. As a result, some edges of Beowulf need to be rounded and trimmed and sharpened. There are many campaigns, I know, that operate this way. That’s why people buy published adventures, after all! But not everything is a full adventure path. The GM has to determine how to incorporate his “second-party” material into his wider campaign arc — and the campaign arc, I’m convinced, should be a collaborative experience between the GM and her players. This is why in general I have such difficulty with published adventure materials. Often I have to modify them to the point where it would be much more efficient for me to just build my own content from the ground up. Also, when running a game like Yggdrasill (in contradistinction to OSR games), my “sandbox” style of play is less a hexmap of “hidden encounters” that the PCs uncover or reveal as they explore… Okay, to follow the “sandbox” analogy further, it’s less of a series of sand castles that somehow are hidden from the players, but more of a wide expanse of unshaped sand that the players and I together will form into a story.

I am to be forgiven, and I know my players will forgive me, for being impatient to get to the actual “Beowulf” component of our Yggdrasill campaign so that I can test it and move on to the Conan game “Blood in Their Wakes”, but what I want to remind myself here is that my players are not first and foremost my playtesters but instead first and foremost my regular group of campaign players. This has been preamble enough to what exactly went down.

A few posts ago I introduced Yggdrasill to Matt Finch’s Tome of Adventure Design. I generated a table of possible adventure hooks for if the PCs decided to go snooping about the shoreline during their trip to Hleidra. For whatever reason, I entirely ignored that table last session. Instead, I drew runes and improvised on the spot, which also is entirely acceptable. But drawing the runes perhaps would have been more effective if I had coupled them with my table. Nonetheless, I had plenty going on: despite the warnings of the PC Lydia, who is a Volva, the Sjaellings had looted the Barrow-Isle of cursed gold. As such, they were becoming paranoid Smeagol-ish people, thinking everyone else was after their shares of the loot. This quickly became a problem when the Sjaellings began to mingle in the fishing village of Klepp which was crowded with three longships of trading Geats! After some antics ensued, Lydia asked me if there were any Volva nearby. I consulted a rune and determined no, there were not, being unable to connect the rune directly to Lydia’s request.

But lets look at the table I devised and chose, in the moment, not to consult at all:

Beneath a field of clover is a massive bee hive, tended by Volva who brew from it mead that augments skills of prophecy and poetry. The local jarl wants to export it, and there is increasing tension between the jarl and the Volva.

And:

It is said that a Volva harvests the webs from a thousand spiders that visit her garden each night. From them she spins garments of supple but strong fiber.

Really, the rune I consulted should have determined which of these Volva were nearby, not whether there were Volva at all. During gameplay I was happy to skip this information and a possible time-eating excursion, thereby forestalling yet again the playtest. But the detour would have been richer overall for the campaign. And it would have rewarded a player for excellent gameplay. And it also potentially could have better prepared the Volva for what is going to be no easy encounter with Grendel!

So really my point here is that there are two types of games: campaigns and one-shots. There are two types of players: campaigners and dabblers. There therefore are two types of ways to say “Yes and”: yes, there is this possibility of an adventure that we will build right now out of the amorphous sand and yes, there is that particular item for sale right now in this fletcher’s hut. In campaign play, a GM’s first responsibility is for his campaigners, and she never should lose sight of that larger narrative structure in deference for the smaller. The campaign is an epic, the one-shot is a tightly-driven short story.

Reading the Runes: In Praise of RPG GM Mechanics

If you have been following me at all, more than once you have heard me whine about all the rules crunch in games like Pathfinder. You’ve heard me complain about how some rules and too many rules tend to allow minmaxing players to ruin games. But today I’m singing a different tune. Today I’m praising game mechanics, and I’m lauding the type of game mechanics that are made available to gamemasters.

What got me thinking about it was my last session of Yggdrasill during my return to the GM chair (my I had missed it!), and how something I had done had felt a little bit off. I need to foreground some of the following considerations by giving some background about just how much, for a Norse-themed game such as Yggdrasill, I have made Runes a mechanical aspect of my game. Well, let’s start with how Yggdrasill, rules as written, uses the runes. At character creation, players roll three times on three tables that each contain a set of eight runes. These results are recorded on the player’s character sheet and serve two functions. The first function is for roleplaying: the runes help the player determine a background story and personality for her character. The second function is for mechanics: during gameplay, if the player ever apprehends a moment wherein a particular rune attached to his character might serve as a benefit for that character, the rune translates into a mechanical bonus to a skill test or action; likewise, the GM might invoke a negative rune as a penalty to a character’s test. That’s about it for Yggdrasill’s rules as written. I expanded this aspect by introducing a bag of actual runestones to my table. When the Seidr-using character (a type of magic-user) “throws down the bones,” she draws three runes from the bag and interprets the results in any way she wants, and, depending on her skill test roll, this might influence game narrative. For my very first adventure using the system, the adventure called “The Boon of Barrow-Isle,” I decided to draw runes out of the bag, one by one, at significant “beats” during the story. If the rune Thurisaz ever was drawn, the undead giant in the cave complex would make his appearance. I decided to expand on this principle during later free-form sandbox campaign play. At the beginning of each session I drew three runes, and I “interpreted” these runes to aid me in determining what elements should be involved in that night’s session. Finally, I have incorporated the runes into random tables and even a mass combat rules system, which, for the curious, can be reviewed here.

Last session I had decided to skip the custom of drawing runes for narrative beats or elements, even as one of my players, by now habituated to the custom, offered me the bag. Perhaps that should have been a clue that I was neglecting a worthwhile ritual. Now, after the session, I think I should have been thinking about the runes more as I plunged my characters directly into the action.

Having been away from the campaign for so long, I started the adventure in media res. Thunder boomed. Lightning sizzled. The PCs were trying to rescue their jarl from being the victim of human sacrifice to a land spirit. They had to battle a necromancer who was being assisted by a fair number of hirdmen. The PCs chose, for the most part, to focus on the “Extras,” the “henchmen,” who were screening the necromancer from the PCs. This went on for a bit, and, in time, I decided that the villain should plunge his knife into the jarl’s breast.

I made my NPC make a Very Difficult Seidr test, and he succeeded. A major, recurring NPC, an ally of the PCs, was abruptly and spectacularly dead. In fact, this was the third major NPC to die during this fittingly brutal Norse campaign. But, unlike the other deaths I had impelled, something about how I had conducted this one felt “unfair,” not quite right. And it wasn’t until the calm reflection of postgame analysis that I understood why this was.

My action hadn’t been determined in any way mechanically. Now, there are many gamers in the OSR community who argue for a concept referred to as “GM trust” and that these kinds of arbitrary decisions are entirely fair. In many cases, I presume, they are. If PCs don’t manage to do something, then a consequence should result. And in this case my PCs hadn’t managed to get to the most threatening target in a suitable number of rounds. Nonetheless, it was me who had determined how many “thugs” the most dangerous NPC would have on hand to function as shields. And I hadn’t even concretely decided beforehand how many rounds this NPC would need to complete his dire ritual. My rulings all were quite arbitrary, and I wondered if I had unwittingly set up my PCs for failure, if I had in fact “railroaded” the situation.

In hindsight I realized that I had had a device — a very fitting device — for playing this scene out better: the Runes. As with the undead giant in a previous adventure, I should have begun drawing runes out of the bag and interpreting them in light of the ritual being performed and the PC actions. Yggdrasill considers many Runes indisputably negative in relation to the PCs, some positive, and others ambiguous. This would have seemed more fair, even more dynamic. Now I wish I had remembered it in time, and I’ll purpose to keep it in mind going forward.

One of the games I’m very much looking forward to running has a similar mechanic baked right into its core rules system. This is Modiphius’s Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of. In that game the GM has a resource called Doom, and these points can be used to complicate the narrative and buff NPCs. Now, the PCs also have their own resources — Momentum and Fate. Having recently run Fantasy Flight’s Star Wars rpg, which is designed by the same person who crafted Modiphius’s 2d20 system, I experienced a bit of the interplay between these kinds of GM resources vs. PC resources. In the case of Star Wars, these resources were Light Side Points (for the PCs) and Dark Side Points (for the GM). As I’ve indicated above, I think I tend to enjoy these kinds of mechanics because it gives the GM some justification for bringing the hurt to the players. The dual resources are part of the game. They make the storytelling appear much less arbitrary or mean-spirited.

So next time I’m at the Yggdrasill table, I’ll be sure to be drawing more often from the rune bag. Skol!

Yggdrasill Meets Matt Finch’s Tome of Adventure Design

Elsewhere I have expressed my admiration for Matt Finch’s writing, especially for his work on Swords & Wizardry and his Tome of Adventure Design. I’m about to get back into the GM driver’s seat this coming Monday, and I decided it was time to generate some ideas — some adventure hooks and possibilities in case I needed something quick if the action were to grow stale. So I reached for my Tome of Adventure Design (rather, I opened up iBooks) and drew a handful of dice out of my dicebag.

What I’m running next Monday is Yggdrasill. Yes, the plan had been to playtest ONOSR for the Beowulf campaign, but no matter how much you modify Swords & Wizardry — as I did to create ONOSR — it really is a form of D&D. And my group is playing a very fine D&D game on alternating Mondays. I myself am “polygamerous”: I simply didn’t feel like running yet another D&D game. I also sensed that my players were missing Yggdrasill, so…

I originally designed the Beowulf campaign for Yggdrasill. The trouble occurred when I began to imagine possibilities for broadcasting my work beyond the confines of my blog and my home game. I’m guessing Yggdrasill is a fairly protected intellectual property, so I felt creatively challenged in the event that I were to invest considerable time and energy into it. Swords & Wizardry, alternatively, as I’m sure no one need be reminded, is within the wide umbrella of the Open Game License. I also found Swords & Wizardry attractive when I started to scale the power structures of, say, PCs versus Monsters like Grendel. Thus ONOSR was born.

Nonetheless, Yggdrasill is a very fine system. It was my first love when it comes to Norse-themed rpgs, and it remains my favorite, so I decided to, after all, try to run the Beowulf campaign as originally conceived. We’ll see how these Yggdrasill characters do against Grendel, his Mother, and, perhaps eventually a Dragon!

But, as I said at the beginning of this post, I needed some ideas for what might occur to the PCs on their way to Hleidra, wherein is the Golden Hall cursed with Grendel. So, as I said, I reached for the Tome of Adventure Design.

The Tome clearly is most particularly designed for traditional fantasy rpgs such as D&D, but my recent experience with it showed that it can, to a considerable degree, be “system agnostic.” The Scandian world of Yggdrasill departs from traditional frpgs through its particularly naturalistic tone. It is what can be termed a “low magic setting.” Yet some of the tables in the Tome suggest towers of high wizardry and entire nations of bizarre creatures living right next door to the humans. Nonetheless, what follows is a list of what I generated using Finch’s adventure idea tables and then how I interpreted my results in consideration of the Scandian setting.

Skeleton-Cairn
Location – Stage raid upon Docks
Individual – Guard/protect Messenger
Puzzle-Tomb
Living Asylum of the Gluttonous Horde
Below ground Fane of the Master Wasps
Contaminated Mill of the Carnal Father
Fossilized Pyramid of the Vampiric Demon
Spider-Garden
Storm-Harbor
Event – Escape from Duel (Addict-Music)
Location – Capture and hold Docks for Ambassador

I crossed out “Puzzle-Tomb” and “Capture and hold Docks” because of redundancy, preferring, for my purposes, “Skeleton-Cairn” and “Stage raid upon Docks.” This also brought my results to a neat ten, a simple ten-sided roll if I wanted a random result. Of course, there is no reason I couldn’t roll a d12, but I liked the sense of appropriateness, Yggdrasill being a game that uses almost exclusively d10s. Then came my favorite part of being a GM and writer — the “dreaming.” Yes, what I rolled are, in essence, “writing prompts,” but what is most exciting about these is that I might actually get to use them rather than scribbling about them in my garret of an indifferent world. Here’s what they became:
1
The PCs are told of a “Dvergr Haug.” It might contain dwarf weapons. (It does not, just the smallish bones of a man and a woman in garments of desiccated hides. Beside them are bone and horn weapons and utensils.)
2
In Klepp, someone approaches the PCs inviting them into a raid on some ships loaded with local timber. The aim is to steal the ships and drive off any pursuit. “It’s not right that all of that costly timber should be leaving the area to build a foolhardy hall on some bit of rock of an island!” Will pay in silver.
3
An individual wants to be protected from a family who does not want him to bring word to a new wife’s family that she is being mistreated. Husband doesn’t want to lose the dowry. Messenger has been followed into town.
4
In one of the towns, more and more people are being infected with gluttony. It is a curse that is spreading into the town because someone shot a stag out of the nearby Alfwood. Some human sacrifices need to be hanged in the wood for propitiation.
5
Beneath a field of clover is a massive bee hive, tended by Volva who brew from it mead that augments skills of prophecy and poetry. The local jarl wants to export it, and there is increasing tension between the jarl and the Volva.
6
A mill (and the grain it grinds) has been cursed, because the miller had relations with his own daughter. All the grain makes people sick with morbid hallucinations. An evil spirit needs to be driven out of the mill.
7
In the center of a forest is an ancient, petrified ash tree. In its hollow core lives a troll that is said to flap out at night and suck the blood from sleeping people.
8
It is said that a Volva harvests the webs from a thousand spiders that visit her garden each night. From them she spins garments of supple but strong fiber.
9
It is said that a hammer fell out of the sky one night and broke a hole in a longship returning from a raid. The ship was loaded with silver, but divers have not been able to find it (nor the hammer — or the meteorite — that punctured the hull of the ship).
0
A young man who absolutely loves poetry and music asks the PCs to help him sneak away from a duel. He offended, in his drunkenness, a massive Viking who believes his own verses are the best ever. In the young man’s drunkenness, he agreed to holmgang, but now he admits he is a coward and will pay anything to be helped away.

This experience caused me to ponder just how far the Tome can be stretched into radically different genres. So far I’m certain it can be, because the results of course are about what the entries might evoke rather than the literal interpretation of the readings. If I ever create my “Diver” campaign for the Traveller system, it will be fun to use the Tome’s location and Dungeon Design tables to generate abandoned spacecraft. I’m certain the entries will translate beautifully.

Postscript

Incidentally, restarting my Yggdrasill campaign brought me by the Cubicle 7 forums, wherein I learned that Cubicle 7 no longer will be supporting Yggdrasill nor any of the other games it has had in English translation from Le 7eme Cercle. There is a suggestion that the Cercle might find its own means to translate its games into English and thereby continue its lines. But in the meantime it appears likely that Yggdrasill and some fantastic others (Keltia and Qin, for example) might be going the way of the Dead Games Society . Get your copies while you can!

Report from a Fallow State

AD&D 1e

I’ve been slightly fallow, after finishing my Star Wars campaign and waiting for my Beowulf campaign to begin. It had been scheduled for this coming Monday, but some core players couldn’t make it, so that means it will be two more weeks before session 1. On alternating weeks I’m taking part in an AD&D 1e campaign. It’s seldom that I’m a player, and it’s even more seldom that I enjoy being a player. But this experience has been great. For the first time ever, I read the 1e Player’s Manual cover to cover. I’m quite impressed with the game. I think it’s a good system. My DM allows every player to be running two characters: my rolls resulted in a Druid (Arty, short for Artemis) and a Cleric (Festus, sometimes called Fester, dedicated to the swine-god Gozer). My DM is about ten years older than I am. He is using all the original materials that he acquired in the 70s, because he never throws anything away, and we’ve been spending most of our time entering, exploring, and then usually fleeing a massive dungeon that our DM has designed. During downtime in the nearby village, Arty has built a hut in the forest and has started keeping chickens in some hand-built mud-and-wattle coops. Oh, that reminds me, the following is what I posted on our Facebook group:

Even after Artemis (affectionately known to those in the Order as “Ma Arty”) had become Grand Druid, those humble beginnings remained in the very center of the Grove Infinite. That dugout trunk and those mud-and-wattle coops functioned as the “Holy of Holies.” The chickens there were said to be preternaturally long lived. Their eggs, with yolks of a positively glowing hue, were said to boost fertility. And those seeking answers to the Druidic Mysteries made pilgrimage to those clucking oracles and contemplated that tired puzzler “What came first, the Chicken or the Egg?” The popular answer was “Neither”, or “Both”, for it is evident that the Chicken is within the Egg just as much as the Egg is within the Chicken. The two cohere in Immanence, which is as much as to say, as Ma Arty frequently has taught, that “the World is all there Is.”

Festus, alternatively, has been spending his time with the clerics in the temple of O-Ka (the Great Spirit), and because of their debates and discussions has come to learn that his own god, Gozer, serves O-Ka. Fester has come to believe that all sentient life — perhaps all life — originates from the Great Spirit, but in the process of incarnation, some life gets perverted or corrupted. These most commonly are the Chaotic and Evil entities, most often Monsters. And Fester’s divine mandate is to free these creatures from the shackles of the flesh so that their spirits might return to O-Ka for purification and eventual re-embodiment.

The Beowulf Campaign

Now and then I have poked along at Part 2 of the Beowulf campaign. I’m designing Part 2 as a bit of a hex crawl, making the PCs lords of Whale’s Head, the main harbor town of the “wind-loving Geats.” The thrust of the adventure, of course, will be for the PCs to try to locate and then possibly exterminate the Dragon who is terrorizing the farmsteads. The overall hex map has been created and I’ve sketched out the main outlines of the dragon’s lair. The rooms of this dungeon have to be detailed a little more, and a few other “dungeons” in various hex locations likewise need to be developed (just in case the PCs decide to explore outside of the narrative track). In this current fallow state, it’s difficult to continue work on this, though I’m certain that I’ll be inspirited once I’m able to begin playing Part 1 of the Beowulf Campaign.

Reading

I’m always reading a handful of texts, and a number of them typically inform ONOSR. Reading relevant to ONOSR has been some handbooks of Norse Mythology; The Land of the Silver Apples, the second book in Nancy Farmer’s Sea of Trolls trilogy; and Charles Watts Whistler’s Havelok the Dane. I suppose at any moment I might, in a gulp, finish my third reading of Poul Anderson’s Hrolf Kraki’s Saga, as well.

Conan the Slayer: Blood in Their Wakes

Ever since Cullen Bunn started writing his first six-issue story “Blood in His Wake” for Dark Horse Comics’s Conan the Slayer series, I’ve wanted to adapt the story — I think the story is original to Bunn — into a game for convention play. Over the last year or so I’ve considered adapting Swords & Wizardry for it (borrowing heavily, I suppose, from Mongoose’s d20 Conan system), but this was until I happened to purchase Barbarians of Lemuria on sale from DriveThruRPG. The iteration I bought was “Mythic,” and it is a prime demonstration of rules bloat. But searching out earlier, free editions of the game proved inspiring. I’m excited about the system and have sketched out a draft of Bunn’s narrative for quick convention play. I’ll probably develop this for my home group after the Beowulf playtest.

Traveller RPG

While grabbing Barbarians of Lemuria: Mythic from DriveThruRPG I likewise snatched up the original 1982 release of the Traveller RPG. A close friend of mine is deeply into the science fiction genre, and I thought it would be fun to run an original old school science fiction system to tell a story most likely set in Kristin Kathryn Rusch’s “Diving” universe. What’s great about Rusch’s most recent stories is how like an old school dungeon crawl they are: the difference is that Rusch’s characters, set on salvaging missions, are delving into the “Boneyard,” a strange area of space crammed full of mysterious, derelict spacecraft from a multitude of times and places. A game set in this milieu should be great fun, and if the experiment is successful it might result in yet another game I can offer for convention play.

Star Stealers: My Fantasy Flight Edge of Empire Campaign

The game in my youth that brought me the most pleasure (next to, I suppose, MERP and Champions) was West End Games’s d6 Star Wars system. A quick reason why this was, I suppose, is that that system emulated quite well for me the feel of that first trilogy of movies. Moreover, the GM advice section brilliantly broke down a satisfying Star Wars adventure into a formula: every adventure should contain a Chase, a Blaster fight, a Starfight, and NPC interaction. This formula made Star Wars one of the most dynamic and entertaining games in my collection.

For this reason I was eager to try out the latest system by Fantasy Flight Games, particularly since I had been hearing intriguing things about it. Therefore, when a friend asked me to run a Fantasy Flight Star Wars game, I readily agreed. The rules set most in circulation among these friends is Edge of Empire, so I agreed to that one. At session 0 my players devised a number of ruffians — one freighter pilot, one Niktos brawler, one Mandalorian bounty hunter, and one self-modding droid. The players agreed that they wanted to steal a Star Destroyer and blow up the Hutt home planet of Nal Hutta. Why? Well, because one character in particular had a grudge against the Hutts, because of slavery. That was enough for me, and to the drawing board I went.

I structured the short campaign into three episodes and said that it would take about ten sessions to complete. I think my prediction has turned out to be surprisingly accurate. We got started sometime in January of 2017 and played, roughly, every two weeks. The campaign ended last night. Here’s how the episodes broke down.

Episode 1: The PCs arrive on the volcanic mining planet of Varok on the Outer Rim. They are here because the Niktos has received word from a former contact that something fishy is going on here, and he thinks the Niktos might be interested in it. The information is that a large amount of ore is being moved to a Hutt casino moon some systems away, and the moon can’t possibly be using all that ore. When the PCs cause trouble (which of course they do), they are surprised to encounter an Imperial presence. When the Mandalorian bounty hunter spies a bounty and captures her, she is surprised to learn that this bounty is the new apprentice of her former master whom she left for personal reasons. The bounty hunter still wants to learn the secret of forging Mandalorian armor, so, while evading Varokian security ships, the entire group ends up moving to the forge of the Mandalorian Vo Kess in the heart of a volcano.

After encountering Vo Kess, the bounty hunter learns that Kess now pursues an ideal of Good in the form of the Light Side of the Force. Kess says that he is willing to teach Kida how to finish her Mandalorian armor if she and her companions will provide him transport to the Hutt casino moon: he is convinced that the Empire is using that moon as a fence to occlude the trail of that much ore from the Rebel Alliance. He thinks all the ore is being used for some diabolical Imperial project.

TIE bombers start pounding the volcano, and the PCs decide to flee in their freighter with their new allies. There is a brief starfight before the PCs make the jump to hyperspace.

Episode 2: Arriving at the Hutt casino moon, the PCs bluff security over coms that they are bringing in supplies for a prominent wedding between two Hutt families that is about to take place. This bluff ends up causing problems later on. Disembarking, the PCs enter the casino, trying to gather information. The planet is a crazy jungle planet in the midst of a Pre-Cambrian explosion, except the giant animal life is insect-based. The main structure of the casino descends to the jungle floor, which itself serves as a kind of gladiator space for the Hutts and their gambling clients. Of course the PCs eventually find themselves in it, but not before making contact with an on-leave Imperial recruit who hates his job of sending refined ore that is left hidden in the rings of the moon’s planet on course for an anomaly in spacetime that swiftly transports the ore to that system’s Oort Cloud. While escaping the jungle floor, Vo Kess (who had been captured by the Hutts) sacrifices himself to create a distraction, and the PCs are off to the space time anomaly and Episode 3 of their story.

Episode 3: Rather than fly to the Oort Cloud and start the tedious business in all of that space of finding the location of the drifting ore, the PCs enter the space time anomaly directly. There is a chance of this causing spacial distortions and mutations to themselves or the ship, but this doesn’t happen. They come out into a region of space that has experienced some anomaly. There is some kind of residual energy here that appears conducive to what the PCs are beginning to suspect are Imperial experiments in creating a cloaking device that could operate on something as large as a Star Destroyer, particularly when they see the hulk of a dark-colored Star Destroyer and are drawn into it by tractor beam. Inside the Star Destroyer, they fight a number of droids and make their way to the bridge, where they encounter more droids and the PC droid’s creator, an Ugnaught named Gidget. Leading up to this time, the bounty hunter, who has been growing Force sensitive, has become aware of a chaotic, dark force in the center of the ship and a fierce personality that at one point reached out to her.

The PC droid, in attempting to destroy his creator, is knocked down by a missile from one of Gidget’s Assassin Droid bodyguards. In the ensuing battle with the rest of the party, Gidget collects his prodigal son and hides himself and his charge in an elevator descending to the center of the Destroyer. The PC droid comes to while Gidget is preparing a mind wipe. The droid skewers his creator.

Meanwhile, the other PCs have discovered that Gidget, before escaping, has moved operations of the Destroyer away from the bridge to elsewhere in the ship. They decide to hunt for the med bay to heal their wounds.

A skeletal-looking protocol droid comes to their temporary base in the med bay inviting them to dinner with his master Lord Quon-tik Theiz. The PCs accompany him on a floating skiff that descends through an open construction zone to a dark singularity in the center of the Destroyer. It is here where Theiz is using his Force mastery over subatomic particles and the proximity to tachyon emissions near a black hole to cause the ferrous material to phase with more accuracy, lending it a cloaking effect. The experiment is unstable, however.

The PCs befriend Theiz and, with the PC droid as Theiz’s new assistant, begin work on a sub-atomic bomb capable of disintegrating an entire planet. The implicit understanding, though, is that the droid is to remain with Theiz. Therefore, when the PCs rig the Destroyer to collapse into its dark heart and begin their escape on their freighter, Theiz phases into the freighter’s hold and battles the PCs until, grievously wounded, he phases off ship.

After this, the PCs make their way to Nal Hutta and, well, blow up the planet. The PCs fail to operate the bomb in a manner that leaves themselves unthreatened by the blast, however, so the ship is caught in a temporal rift and crash lands on an unknown planet.

I would finish the description of my campaign with more about Quon-tik Theiz. As a type of Forsaken Jedi, I think he’s pretty cool. He has an understanding of the Force that reaches beyond the organic cellular to the subatomic. As such, he is able to halve damage and teleport through spacetime. As flavor, his lightsaber glitches in and out of existence. During the Imperial pogroms against the Jedi, Theiz cowardly hid himself in the Void, losing much of his soul to nonbeing and destruction, until the Emperor drew him out.

Impressions of Game System

It was a fast moving game. I like the Light Side/Dark Side Force mechanic, and I almost exclusively used my points to add complications and structure to the plot rather than spend them on mechanical benefits for NPC actions. “Strain” as yet a second kind of damage was annoying to keep track of and it never came into play. As GM, after the first few sessions I felt empowered to direct formidable forces against my PCs, secure that they would feel challenged but get out of the situation more or less “okay.” My job as GM was fairly easy, but for the players I feel that the game has more crunch than I prefer. If I felt the urge to tell a Star Wars story again sometime soon, I probably wouldn’t use this system (without much cajoling) but try to talk everyone into using my beloved West End d6 system. Here is a great podcast on that one, and here is a great article.

May the Force of Others Be with You!

Coming-of-Age Swords & Wizardry

I’ve seen a meme or two going around about how nerd or geek (just attempted to look up on the Web the difference between these two terms and decided I didn’t have the energy to explore it very far) dads have children so they can buy them the toys and experiences that they really want for themselves. I’m not buying a whole lot for my latest young child, but I’ll admit that I’m planning on gaming with him. As I think about this, I recognize the disparity between the usually violent nature of our average rpgs and my hope that my son grows up virtuous, moral and nonviolent. Okay, let’s admit it: all children emulate their parents, and therefore most of them, if they become gamers, will explore all kinds of perspectives and play styles by the time they hit middle school. I think this is natural and healthy, particularly if they are gaming (as I once did) with their friends and peers. But for my son’s very first foray into gaming, I’ve decided on some “family friendly” house rules. In forming these, I certainly have consulted John Cocking and Peter S. Williams’s excellent Beyond the Wall, a game I would love to play and modify if I simply didn’t better know Swords & Wizardry and my existing house rules already.

Core Modifications to Swords & Wizardry Complete for Coming-of-Age RPG

• Attribute Rolls. Since kids want to play heroes, I might as well let them roll 4d6 (drop lowest d6 value) and arrange as desired. If explanations of the Attributes at the youngest age promise to be tedious, perhaps just make up Attribute values based on how the child envisions her character (make her be less than average in at least one quality). It should go without saying that all characters most likely will be pre-teens.
• Class. The character can be any Class but Assassin.
• HP. Characters get their full potential HP value at Level 1.
• Alignment. Beyond the Wall interprets Chaos as a character trait or a point-of-view, but I’m more comfortable equating it with Evil and requiring all PCs except for Druids to be Lawful. Neutrality in the context of Druids will mean affinity with the animal and natural world and not as a description of a self-seeking nature or selfishness.
• Equipment. Characters will start with whatever is natural to their Classes as well as any other specific items understood or agreed on before play.
• Level Advancement. Characters will reach Levels based on play sessions, 2 after two sessions, 3 after three sessions, 4 after four sessions, and so on. I believe this is the Swords & Wizardry Light advancement.
• People Are People. Every “monster” should have clear, understandable goals, desires and motivations. Few people will be “evil” for no reason. Even goblin minions of a Dark Lord should be worthy of empathy and redemption. The experience I hope for this game to emulate should be more in line with The Hobbit, A Wizard of Earthsea, and Miyazaki’s films. If during play the PCs knock out a Monster or NPC, that creature then has become their responsibility.
• Corruption. To the end that People are People, if players decide to make what commonly are perceived as “easy” choices by doing bad or questionable things (such as killing or stealing), they gain Corruption points. Of course, the Referee should make it stridently clear that a certain player character is about to gain a Corruption point if he continues in an intended action. Corruption points cannot be removed except for in highly unusual and extreme circumstances. Once a character gains as many Corruption points as his Wisdom value, that character becomes the property of the Referee, perhaps to continue on in the game as an antagonistic NPC. This, in effect, is the only way that a PC can “die” in game.
• Simplicity. I have been thinking about ways I can simplify the game even more, perhaps along the lines of Swords & Wizardry Light, and particularly with an eye at the magic systems, but nothing really good is coming to mind. Perhaps the Quick Start character templates of SWL or the Playbooks in Beyond the Wall is all I need do when the opportunity comes.

Randomness in Villains and Vigilantes (and Others)

I recently got excited about Villains & Vigilantes after listening to Dead Games Society’s interview with V&V’s publisher and co-creator Jeff Dee. I think what excites me most about the game is its description of character creation. Well, I should back up a bit and say that it is its character creation as described in its original release that interests me. It contains a bit of randomness that also has more or less been a component in every iteration of the Original Game and perhaps many others besides V&V.

With the Original Game I’m of course talking about the Attribute rolls at character creation. Originally a mere 3d6 were rolled for each value, the resulting values assigned in order to the Attributes list, and the player was left to see what kind of character would be most strategic to build with what resulted. An attractive aspect of this is its randomness, an emulation of the “real world” wherein none of us “construct” our own bodies and psyches. If we could, we would determine before conception our parents, our genetic predispositions and, perhaps, the likely environmental influences on our character formations. Instead, in reality, we just “come to be.” My own ONOSR engine uses the Attribute rolls described in Swords & Wizardry Complete with the exception that three additional values are rolled that have to replace three other values. These last three rolls represent the Norns, Past (Urthr), Present (Verthandi) and Future (Skuld). The device allows players some degree of choice at character creation without threatening too much of a possibility of players “gaming” the system towards a preconceived outcome. In fact, it could happen that the player is left with no “good” choices resulting from those last three rolls. That’s fickle Fate for you!

These random formations seem deeply enmeshed in the OSR. In my view, they reinforce just how much the hobby has arisen out of tactical gaming, with strategy games’ sense of randomness and the onus of participants to “play to win.” Early in rpg history, systems arising out of the Original Game and those developing more or less independently alongside it began putting more power into the hands of the players at character creation. Increasingly, players were allowed to develop the kinds of characters they wanted to play rather than characters they randomly rolled. In other words, characters were being created to fit a preconceived notion rather than the other way around, a concept in which characters arose out of random generation and resulting gameplay.

If I’m to make generalizations based on the desires and attitudes of how I played in my youth, I would hazard that a lot of these changes were first innovated in home games. A lot of us got into the hobby as a fantasy escape from the real world. We wanted to play heroes, characters who were greater than ourselves (or at least our idealized selves within worlds unaffected by the mediocrity of “modernity”), not because we wanted yet another number crunching game of tactics and probabilities. So I imagine that it was first in living rooms and in basements that additional dice were rolled for Attributes, that placements were rearranged, that point buys were developed, that class prerequisites were ignored, and I think this was done mostly by young people who wanted to play particular characters. They began with concepts. Then they applied those visions to the rules.

I would say that this idea of a starting concept is most important to the superhero genre. It’s no secret that many established superheroes are just plain silly–listen to those folks at House to Astonish pull out a character chestnut or two at the end of each show! And for my young friends and I who in the early 90s were certain we were going to break into writing and drawing comics, nothing was more important than how our characters and their costumes looked. And these looks, of course, had to have appropriate themes. And themes, of course, are constructed, not random at all.

For this reason we were attracted to Champions, whose character creation process follows exactly the process of concept to power level to point buys for abilities. Now in my later years, however, I’m more attracted to randomness. I care less about immersing myself in a particular fantasy archetype than I am in exploring the artistic eureka–systemizing and making sense of –randomly generated, disparate elements. V&V character generation sounds like fantastic fun. In that game, players usually play an analogue of themselves, but they roll on tables to see what powers they randomly acquire. I don’t know anyone, right now, who would have interest in playing a supers game with me (and I have plenty to do with ONOSR anyway), but I’m tempted to purchase this game anyway, just to generate characters for myself. I think I’ll set aside some funds for 3rd edition’s release.