The day I killed two campaigns

After much consideration of recent events Doug, Pat, and I have decided to bow out of the World of Alidor. And I'm abandoning my Eberron effort, with a new project to follow on its heels.

It might be possible to misread my report of the last session and come to the conclusion that Jon is some sort of blackhearted villain. That's not the problem. I think that there was an ongoing issue of incompatible priorities. We wanted to roll around the campaign world getting into trouble and breaking shit, while Jon had some sort of epic plotline he wanted to play out. We never seemed to get those interests to sufficiently overlap, frustrating both us and the DM.

The sidetrip to Hell and the events that followed only served as the camel that broke the straw's back. Every gamer I know has one or more hotbutton issues that simply turn them off completely. Doug bristles under permanent ability drain effects. Pat loathes being told he must play a Good character. When I go to the trouble of writing an elaborate background for my PC, I absolutely hate the DM overwriting my ideas and telling me that my background story was a false memory implant. The diabolic sodomy and the events leading to it were not my idea of a good time. Nor Pat's. Nor Doug's. I can't really speak for Jason as I haven't discussed the matter with him at as great a length, but I think he agrees with us.

Has everyone else been following the most recent Marvel crossover, Civil War? It takes the old Marvel universe we all know and love and makes some pretty startling changes. Iron Man becomes a fascist in the name of national security. He gets onboard a government program to either conscript or imprison all known superheroes. He does horrible and reprehensible things in the name of public safety. Captain America (you know, the Sentinel of Liberty) leads a ragtag group of rebels against Iron Man and his crew. In the final issue of the main mini-series, Cap surrenders to government authority and Tony Stark's fascism brigade wins. It's ugly.

And that's sort of my point here. For serious storytelling, maybe Alidor and the new Marvel universe work. As venues for escapist fantasy they are simply too ugly for my tastes. The thing that sticks out in my mind about Alidor right now is that in all our globe-trotting adventures we never found one place worth fighting for. As far as Osric the Slayer can see there's no Shire, no village of Hommlet. The elves are opressive samurai racists. The halfings are cannibalistic draco-lich worshippers. The dwarves are surly and inhospitable, even moreso than usual. The humans of Jelling, where we started the campaign, are all either totalitarian thugs or bumpkins straight out of Deliverance. Can all these ideas be the grist of great stories? Hell, yes! But as the player of a fighting man, I'm completely at a loss at to what the hell I'm fighting for. I am not exaggerating when I say that I've seen Gamma World set-ups more inviting and cheery.

And then there's my game. I'm not going to lie to you. One of the reason's I'm dropping the game is because I'm a big wuss. I don't want to call Jon on the phone and tell him that I don't want him to come to the next session. Out of fairness to the other player's I wouldn't drop the game for just that one cause. But even before this present mess I got a clear vibe about this new campaign that it wasn't gelling in the way that I had hoped. Something's not quite right. In actual play Eberron isn't speaking to me the way I had hoped it would. The setting seems almost like a burden. So I'm going to look into doing something else.

So there you have it. I sincerely hope Jon finds players that are more comptible with his ideas as to how D&D is run. I don't wish the man ill. But his ideas as to what goes into a good D&D game and mine seem to be at a fork in the road, and I'm going the other way.

Blackpowder & Balrogs

I've started a thread at theRPGsite about Guns in 3.5. I'm looking for ways to jazz up flintlocks and such for my upcoming Sky Pirates of Eberron campaign. Any input from d20 mechanical wonks would be greatly appreciated.

Look out! Lava Monsters!

Howdy, folks! I'm back from my absence. My daughter has recovered from the chicken pox and returned to school this morning.

I use a lot of prepainted plastic figures in my D&D games, thanks to the D&D collectible miniatures game, Heroscape, and MageKnight. But sometimes I like to make my own flat counters. Google image search and even a novice level understanding of a simple paint program can produce some really fun results. Behold:

At full size those are Huge lava monsters. The counters were made by swiping someone else's screencap of the Challenge of the Superfriends episode "Monolith of Evil" and adding my own text with MS Paint. "Monolith of Evil" is one of my favorite Superfriends episodes. It's one of the shows where the Legion of Doom go on an adventure of their own, which I always love. And this time they journey to the molten center of the earth to steal the ultimate source of evil energy. Also, there's a sequence where Braniac shrinks the UN building and steals it. Awesome. By the way, the text on the first counter is pretty much a direct quote from Cheetah when the lava creature pops up.

The stats for the creature were kludged together by taking the Lead Golem from Tome of Horrors and adding the Fire Elemental template from Mike Mearls' Monster's Handbook. I've mentioned it before but it's worth repeating: I highly recommend Monster's Handbook to newbie DMs who need to get a handle on creating their own creatures. My confidence in running 3.x went up a big ol' notch after using Monster's Handbook a couple of times. And Tome of Horrors has a great mixture of new baddies and old critters updated to the new D&D. I chose the Lead Golem as the basis for this particularly baddie pretty much solely on the grounds that their leaden fists use multiple d12s for damage. I love d12s. The Fire Elemental template I used isn't really supposed to stack with constructs but here's a DMing trade secret: sometimes the DM can and should cheat on stuff like that.

I was pleased with the resulting Lava Monsters. The players had a chuckle at the throwaway text, the monsters bothered them for a few rounds, I got to roll some d12s. The one downer was that they were totally upstaged by the two Lavawights also in that encounter. Who decided that epic monsters should permanently and irrevocably drain stats? My players found that idea to be the polar opposite of fun.

Proscriptive Campaign Creation

The one time I ran adventure S4 The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth it was a bit of a mess, yet it remains one of my favorite AD&D modules. Not because of the adventure, but because of the awesome insert, called simply Booklet 2: Monsters and Magical Items.

It's 32 pages long, the last 3 of which are specific information for the Lost Caverns. But the other 29 pages are chock full of awesome. The first eighteen pages contain the write-ups for thirty-odd new monsters. (All of which later appeared in the original Monster Manual II, so don't rush out to get this puppy just for the new critters.) Following the monsters are a few pages of magic items, including three nifty artifacts: Daoud's Wondrous Lanthorn, the Demonomicon of Iggwilv, and the Prison of Zagig. The Demonomicon contains several new higher level cleric and magic-user spells. One of these new spells, Henley's Digit of Disruption, was not reprinted in the original Unearthed Arcana tome, even though all the others were. After the spells and items are a brief essy on magical diagrams and a brief list of reputed properties of gems.

Taken together as a whole, the contents of Booklet 2 seem to be whispering a message into my ear. And that message is "make a campaign out of me". This almost random collection of monsters, magic items, spells, and miscellaneous bric-a-brac looks like just enough stuff for you to build a cute little setting. Give me this slim volume, a Player's Handbook, and a decent screen, and I could run a neat little mini-campaign without either the Dungeon Master's Guide or any further monster book. I'm not seriously suggesting that anyone do that. It would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Especially seeing as just last month Doc Rotwang! and I were mooning over the 1st edition DMG over at his blog.

Instead of being draconian about it and saying "I'm only using the stuff in this pamphlet", a fair more reasonable and sustainable approach would be to use the contents of Booklet 2 as the center pieces of a campaign that includes all the usual D&D stuff. So you could have orcs and dragons as needed, but the main threats of the campaign would be the derro and behirs or dracolisks from Booklet 2. Imagine a world where all the 'dragons' breathe acid AND petrify at a glance! That'll wake up some complacent dungeon hackers. (Incidentally, Jim Holloway draws the creepiest little derros I've ever seen.)

So this finally brings me around to the title of this blog post: Proscriptive Campaign Creation. The basic idea is to help yourself drill down on campaign creation through deliberate acts of omission. I find this approach extremely handy when dealing with kitchen sink settings or games with simply vast quatities of monsters and stuff. D&D being my prime example, of course.

By saying to yourself something like "Hey, this campaign is going to focus on this list of monsters" you'll achieve a tighter focus and a more memorable campaign. The big key is to pick memorable monsters across a wide spectrum of abilities, types, and power levels and to not paint yourself into a corner. When you've embarked on this type of exercise you need to remember that sometimes it's absolutely okay to occasionally break out the old standards like orcs and ogres. Hell, I'd be a bit sad to get through an entire campaign and never stab an orc at least once.

Generating the list of featured creatures can be the tough bit. I would absolutely love it if someone swiped the idea of using the S4 Booklet 2. Sign me up for any campaign where the Big Bads are the demon lords Baphomet, Fraz-Urb-Iuu, Graz'zt, and Kostchtchie. Remember Kostchtchie? He made the cover of Dragon once. That hammer of his may not be as powerful or have as much street cred as Mjolnir, but it's still pretty effin' cool.

Another awesome monster source for a proscriptive campaign would be the original Fiend Folio. Alot of people think of that book as the worst grab-bag of monsters TSR ever cranked out, but I think of it as a wonderful, glorious buffet of wacky critters. (You know, not many folks these days seem to remember that where we all saw the Githyanki for the first time.) Many of the monsters in the old Folio might be crap by today's standard of dungeon ecology and mechanical coherence, but if you used it as your sole monster book I guaran-damn-tee your players will never forget your campaign! For a modern D&D campaign I'd probably go off the beaten path for my monster source. My first pick would probably be Bastion Press's Minions, the 3.5 version of which is a PDF product called Complete Minions. Though I gotta say that it would be hard for me to put a Secret Eater into one of my games. They just look too much like Todd McFarlane's Spawn for me to take seriously.

In a game with lots of little shiny bits like D&D there are plenty of other things besides monsters that come in long grocery list quantities. Shining your light on just part of the list works with much of that other stuff as well. Going back to Booklet 2 for a moment, Daoud's Wondrous Lanthron, the Prison of Zagig and especially the Demonomicon of Iggwilv look like perfect Macguffin level artifacts around which you can build lengthy plot arcs.

The one thing I recommend DM's not trim is the list of character build options. I firmly believe it's the players' job to decide exactly what kind of freaks of nature they run. Don't let them roll over your campaign with some obscure ultrapowerful class or race from an oddball supplement, but give them a wide enough variety of nifty options to choose from and most players won't go that route.

My new toy

I don't have any interest in Wizards' new minis game Dreamblade, but dang are some of the figures cool. This particular figure had to be mine:


In Dreamblade this dude is the Knight of the Autumn Gate. That's a pretty cool title but to me he's the Bugbear King. I know he doesn't look anything like a bugbear, but at one time bugbears looked like him! The first illustration of a bugbear appeared in OD&D Supplement I: Greyhawk. Dig it:


Pretty much every subsequent appearance of the bugbear since then has depicted the giant goblinoids we all know and loathe. Turns out the creepy jack-o-lantern dude above was the result of a miscommunication. Gary Gygax once explained over at Dragonsfoot. "The pumpkin-headed bugbear was an artist taking literally my description of the monster as having a head like a pumpkin, i.e large, round flat oval."

The pumpkin-head version of the bugbear survived in Runequest under the name Jack-o-bear, so you can actually find a few lead minis of this throwback design. But a prepainted plastic figure was just too cool to pass up. Especially with that flaming sword, awesome armor, and wicked grin.