OD&D: tax paradise

July 25th, 2012

Now that I’ve read Chainmail, I thought I’d go back to the OD&D books and see if I had a new perspective on them.

Chainmail was, for the most part, a historical simulation. It tried to produce results that were as plausible as possible given Earth’s military history. One of the inspiring things about OD&D is that it tries, in as few pages as possible, to provide an alternate world to simulate.

As a new-school D&D player, there’s a lot of D&D history I’ve missed. Editing Cheers Gary, gaming with Mike Mornard, and illustrating the AD&D Dungeon Generator have helped, but there’s a lot in D&D that I still don’t understand. I’m going back to the OD&D texts to see whether they can help my new-school game.

The few details on baronies and castles are tantalizingly incomplete if you consider D&D a stand-alone product, but make a lot more sense when you consider them as add-ons to the Chainmail Fantasy Supplement.

On my read-through of the OD&D rules, I was struck by the fantasy world simulated by the taxation rules:

“Top-level fighters (Lords and above) who build castles are considered “Barons”, and as such they may invest in their holdings in order to increase their income (see the INVESTMENTS section of Volume III). Base income for a Baron is a tax rate of 10 Gold Pieces/inhabitant of the barony/game year.”

On the other hand, “Clerics with castles of their own will have control of a territory similar to the “Barony” of fighters, and they will receive “tithes” equal to 20 Gold Pieces/inhabitant/year.”

Without much economic information to go on, the fighter’s 10 GP/year sounds like a pretty good profit from each peasant. But then we find out that the cleric’s “tithe” is 20 GP! Since a tithe is 10% of an income, that means that barons are levying a 5% tax on their peasants.

From the section “Relatives”, we learn that “the relative would inherit the estate of the character, paying a 10% tax on all goods and monies.” Estate tax is 10%!

Note to tax-hating libertarians: move to OD&DLand! Taxes are astonishingly low there. And no central government to speak of. But you might be eaten by a White Ape!

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dnd with mike mornard: next level

July 23rd, 2012

With my DM Mike Mornard moving from New York (he finished school and got a job! congratulations!) my OD&D game will end. I’ve enjoyed the high-mortality dungeoncrawl during the six months or so I had Mike as my DM. It’s been a great complement to my 4e game.

We got together for one last OD&D game: we all met up in the afternoon and played till 1 AM, ordering pizza at the game table. It felt like an archetypical game session to me, and Mike compared it to the games he used to play when he DMed for Phil Barker. Those games, which also typically wrapped up around 1 AM, were played at a time when the iron of D&D was still white hot off the forge. Sparks kindled. As Mike told us, “Whenever we introduced someone to D&D, they’d come back in a week or two with a dungeon they wanted to run.” Phil Barker, of course, came back to Mike’s group, after considerably more than two weeks, with Empire of the Petal Throne.

our dungeon map

One of the reasons we played so late (on a work night!) was that we wanted to finish our maps of level 1 of the dungeon. Tavis Allison and I were both mapping (his maps look nicer than mine do), and we both wanted to fill in the last dead-end corridors to complete the unbroken line bounding the borders of the dungeon. Like summoning circles, dungeon maps with gaps in the borders can be very dangerous.

I’d like to give you a scan of the map, but I can’t find it at the moment. Anyway, it’s not necessary. If you saw it, you’d recognize it, in its general outlines, as the sample dungeon in the 1e Dungeon Master’s Guide, as it would appear if it were mapped by a somewhat inexpert cartographer.

In session 1, a player realized that we were in the 1e dungeon. During the campaign, I made sure not to look at that dungeon: I wanted no refreshers about dungeon layout or contents.

As it turns out, it wouldn’t have mattered much. There are only a handful of encounters in the DMG, and Mike changed several of them anyway. In the large central chamber, instead of a puzzle leading to a secret door, Mike put one of his NPC characters, Necross the Mad. Every interaction with Necross was a negotiation, where we traded something (usually not treasure) for passage through the room. By the end of the campaign, we were quite chummy with Necross, despite the fact that he claimed to have plans to destroy the universe.

Actually, come to think of it, we didn’t map ALL of level one. Somewhere in the dungeon, we Charmed an evil cleric. He complained endlessly about how his superiors didn’t appreciate him (ah, the banality of evil). Between complaints, he warned us of a troll nest to the north. Later, when our dwarven fighter announced that he smelled a terrible trollish stench, we turned around. Sure, we wanted to complete our map, but low-level OD&D characters don’t become high-level by being stupid.

arise sir roger

My thief character, Roger de Coverley, was named, somewhat randomly, after an 18th century dance, the Sir Roger de Coverley, that appears in a lot of old novels. Having given my character this name, I decided that his destiny was to be knighted and then to invent the dance. Most of my character’s decisions were made with my knightly ambitions in mind. Figuring that every knight needed property and followers, I tried to gather money, hire troops, and have other PCs swear fealty to me.

The gathering-money goal turned out to directly conflict with the gain-followers goal. In my attempt to keep everyone alive, I bought plate mail for everyone I hired. Furthermore, when NPCs died (and they died a lot, even with the plate mail), we felt duty-bound to get them Resurrected. It wasn’t good business to spend thousands of GP to resurrect a guy who earned a gold piece a day, but it kept the NPCs happy. In Mike’s game, it’s hard to keep NPC hirelings happy. (As he says, “Loyalty is a luxury the poor cannot afford.”) Our health care plan seemed to do the trick. It left me poor, though. By our last few sessions, we were starting each adventure trying to raise money to resurrect a dead henchman. In the dungeon, we’d raise the money we needed – but lose another henchman along the way. It was like a resurrection Ponzi scheme.

Besides Necross the Mad, the other main NPC of Mike’s campaign was Lord Gronan. The dungeon was below his throne room: apparently he used the dungeon as a sort of Darwinian training ground for high-level heroes. When, at level 1, I offered to join his service as a knight, he told me, “Perhaps one day, if you prove yourself.”

Before our last trek into the dungeon, a level-five Roger de Coverley was summoned to Lord Gronan’s audience chamber. “I’ve watched you over the last months,” he said. “You have displayed the knightly virtues: you’ve been honest and you have guarded and served your followers. Too few remember that knighthood is about service.” Lord Gronan asked for Roger’s oath of fealty and dubbed him knight.

No sooner had Roger reached the summit of his ambitions than a new hireling joined the party: a female thief, a gold-digger who had clear designs on becoming Lady de Coverley. With Roger’s 7 Wisdom, I don’t expect he’ll be able to escape her toils.

off the edge of the map

The last time we passed through the dungeon, I told that unpredictable dungeon denizen, Necross the Mad, “It has been an honor and a pleasure exploring your dungeon.” I could have said that to Lord Gronan as well, since he sent us into the dungeon in the first place. And I could have told it to DM Mike Mornard as well. It’s true in all three cases.

Our characters have survived the dungeon. We’ve finished the map (except for the troll den). Mike is off to re-explore the Midwest; Ben (the dwarf fighter) got a job in Virginia; Tavis (the pyromaniac fighter) will return with new OD&D tricks to his Red Box game; and, in our weekly new-school game, Andrew (the wizard) and I will explore the wilds of 5e. Time to start a new sheet of graph paper.

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the wight land

July 20th, 2012

“The Ill-Made Mute” by Cecilia Dart-Thornton is somewhat of an odd novel. It’s sort of the counterpart of “The Night Land”, which I described as a better Shadowfell sourcebook than it is a work of fiction. The Ill-Made Mute is practically a Feywild sourcebook. It suffers some of the problems that you might expect if you tried to express a D&D sourcebook entirely as flavor text: it’s a bit of a world tour, and there are enough monster encounters to fill a bestiary. The upside is that there’s a lot of D&D inspiration to be mined.

You really could construct very full Fey monster encounter tables just from the encounters in the book. Fey creatures are called “wights” (confusing to my D&D-trained ear), and each plays by its own rules. It works very well with the rules I offered for giving every Fey creature its own ritual.

Here’s an essay in the novel that expresses the fundamental rule-bound nature of fey creatures:

Wights, he had told Imrhien, had to obey their own natural laws. Just as men could not become invisible or shift their shape in the manner native to wights, so wights–save, perhaps, for the most powerful–could not move against mortals unless certain conditions were fulfilled, certain actions taken or words spoken. If fear was shown, or if a mortal should be foolish enough to let his senses be tricked, or should he break certain silences or reveal his true name or answer questions ignorantly, or if he should transgress against wights by trespass or other means, then the creatures of eldritch could strike. Then the unfortunate man might be torn apart, drained of blood, crushed, hung, or slain by any manner or means, or he might simply die of fright. Yet even then, there was a chance he might still be saved by fleetness of foot, quick-wittedness, valor, intervention from others, or pure luck.

There are wight-encounter set-pieces of all kinds in the novel, but here’s a throwaway detail of some fairy creatures that can be used for some by-the-way fey flavor:

Here, where fantastic dragonflies and glittering midges played, more of the little wide-mouthed toads with bat-wings were skipping over the water’s surface, making free among tall rushes growing along the shore. They were quite lovely in a loathsome way, their froggy hides spangled gold and green, their tails long and thin, barbed at the tips. The veined vanes of their wings were so translucent that light shone through them. Their eyes were great, glowing, amber jewels, their teeth were many, tiny, and pointed.

Possibly this is a sight that can be seen on the way to the Temple of the Frog.

Here’s a set-piece to be found in one of the book’s underground dungeon environments:

Driven by an engine of rusted cogs forced into action, the portcullis began to descend, squeaking and clamoring with the reluctance of old age. It was halfway to biting the floor when, like an outrageous firework, a force came roaring around the bend and slammed into it. A current surged. Sparks exploded in a blistering snarl, and Diarmid was flung backward up the passage, where he lay motionless. Rent and twisted, metal screamed.

The “wight” here is a being made of lightning. It could be expressed as a pretty cool D&D monster. It does electrical damage, obviously, and it’s incredibly fast. Its weakness is that it can’t pass close to metal without being diverted into it – and then it bounces the way it came. Therefore, a portcullis, even a half-open one, is an impassable barrier: it will try to pass through the gap but will be diverted to bounce off the bars (electrocuting anyone touching the portcullis).

Another interesting combat effect of this power is that, if a wizard and a mail-clad fighter are standing next to each other, the electrical being can’t possibly attack the wizard: it’s, perforce, attracted to the fighter.

I’d like such a fight to offer lots of possibilities for trapping and channeling the monster.

Also handy: there’s an appendix describing the author’s sources for all the fairyland monsters, so you can skip the novel and go right for the folklore.

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flying carpet, leveled

July 18th, 2012

Intelligent flying carpet: PCs who solve a runic puzzle woven into their carpet might discover that it can not only obey voice commands, it can be trusted on independent missions. While it can’t communicate with the user (beyond “fly up for yes, fly down for no,”) it will happily follow orders to rendezvous at certain places at certain times. Furthermore, when its owner whistles, the carpet will speed to his or her side.

My old houserules for leveling magic items mean that every piece of magical treasure has the potential to gain power in ways that the players can’t predict. Furthermore, WOTC recently invented the concept of the “rare magic item,” but we don’t yet have lots of examples.

While some items may get mechanically better (for instance, a +1 sword becomes a +2 sword), it’s more challenging to improve items that don’t have numeric bonuses. I thought I’d go through the Wondrous Items in the 4e Player’s Handbook and give examples of how each could gain powers that reflect their history.

Roll 1d6 for personality quirk:

1: The carpet hates one person in the party. It will tip upside down if that person ever boards the carpet first.
2: It has knowledge of some ancient secret, knowledge which it can’t communicate verbally. It will occasionally disoebey orders and take the PCs to the site of important clues.
3: It’s feisty and protective of one of the PCs. It will butt attackers in the knees. It has a small chance of tripping opponents.
4: It has a bad sense of direction. Every time it travels independently, it has a 20% chance of getting lost.
5: It was once a war carpet. It quivers with excitement when it scents battle. It can charge, in which case you do an extra die of damage with lance and spear hits.
6: It is old and threadbare. It wants nothing more than to lie on a floor in a nice study. It rises from the ground grudgingly, often pretending not to hear its command word the first time.

Caravan carpet: The problem with most flying carpets is that they’re not practical transportation for a family. They can only hold 1 person, or at most 1 person and a princess plus monkey.

This carpet can be modified to hold up to 8 people in comfort on overstuffed chairs.

Sports carpet: If properly tuned by an expert weaver, this stylish red carpet’s speed permanently increases from 6′ to 12’+1d4. Every time the carpet is tuned up, reroll the 1d4. When the carpet travels at a speed over 6′, the swooshing note of its passage is audible within 100 feet.

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Posted in 4e D&D, game design, RPG Hub | 4 Comments »

against the patriarchs

July 16th, 2012

How about this as a pitch for a Dragon article:

“AGAINST THE PATRIARCHS

Born into an existence little better than slavery, most female humans in history are seen by the dominant males as mere resources to be used and discarded. This article details four character themes, each a path by which a female human might seek to establish herself in a world that is hostile to her very existence.”

How about this pitch instead?

Matriarchs really get the shaft. Can’t they even have Menzoberranzan? 40 years of Dragon magazine, and there is not even a single character theme designed to undermine the patriarchy!

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paladins with expense accounts

July 13th, 2012

“So should we go to Morne, to arrange for approval?” Mostin asked brightly. “Oh, no need for that, Mostin,” Eadric replied. “As an inquisitor, I am more than qualified to release the money to you. I’ll just write you a check to draw against the temple funds.” The Alienist’s mouth dropped open in an expression of disbelief. Here was such an enormous potential for financial abuse that his mind boggled. Then again, thought Mostin, that’s probably why he’s the paladin and I’m not.

Sepulchrave’s Lady Despina’s Virtue is the story of a real D&D campaign, but it’s also one of the most enjoyable fantasy stories I’ve read. It’s got a lot of stuff you can pull out and use in your own campaign. Here’s one thing you can use:

If you want to give a real moral temptation to a paladin, don’t have leering demons offer hellish pacts. Just have the paladin’s superiors give him an expense account.

PCs usually have stuff they want to buy. A lot of it can be used to fight evil, so there will be some legitimate expenses. There will also be a temptation to borrow against the expense account for less-clear-cut expenses, and pay it back out of future loot. See if you can get your paladin to start embezzling.

That’s when you bring in the inquisitors. Revel as the paladin is forced to compromise his ideals to avoid discovery. Laugh as he loses his paladinhood. Celebrate your dark victory as he returns as an anti-paladin!

Or not. But a paladin needs to face some real temptations, or he’s just a fighter with good PR.

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Dungeon Robber rules ready to download

July 11th, 2012

Here are the beta rules for Dungeon Robber, the solo board game played on the Random Dungeon Generator poster. (If you don’t have a poster, buy one now!)

I’d describe Dungeon Robber as the next evolution of D&D. It’s important because it has an open playtest, and tons of optional “modules” for changing the game experience. Wow! Download it now!

DOWNLOAD DUNGEON ROBBER

Play it! Test it! Send feedback to me, paul, at blog of holding!

Play Yourself

One of my favorite of the optional Dungeon Robber rules is “Play Yourself” mode, where you stat yourself up by answering a series of highly scientific questions (do you have all your wisdom teeth? Then you have high Wisdom!) and, unprepared as you are, enter the dungeon. I like it because it speaks to one of the central D&D fantasies.

What would you do if you – you yourself – found yourself at the dark entrance of a D&D dungeon?

Smart money’s on turning around and going home. But if I were feeling bold, I might take a sword from the skeletal hand of a dead guardian (not that I know how to use a sword), light a torch, and creep into the quiet labyrinth. I wouldn’t be looking to explore the whole thing. I’d just be looking to see if I could find a souvenir: a nice statue, or a few gold coins. Guys, gold is selling at $1600 per ounce now. That means a single gold piece is worth about $600 (or $3000 if it’s one of those big 1e ten-to-a-pound coins). Even the faded tapestries that D&D parties routinely ignore are probably worth something, or at least would look nice in my Brooklyn apartment.

With every room I entered, I’d be pressing my luck, because I, Paul, am no match for even a level 1 monster. The first time I saw a kobold’s whisker, I’d flee – and hope I remembered the way out.

Of course, this isn’t how D&D does dungeoncrawls. D&D takes all of the scary trappings of a haunted house – monsters, vampires, traps – and lets you and your well-armed friends punch them in the face. It’s like you’re a squad from a World War II movie that wandered into a horror film.

Dungeon Robber is a fear-drenched, cowardly, haunted house, press-your-luck dungeoncrawl. It uses lightly-abstracted D&D rules, with more emphasis on the OD&D fleeing rules than on combat. In an RPG, the level of rule detail lets you know what you should be doing. In OD&D, there’s a lot of rules about fleeing: your chances for losing pursuit by turning corners, passing through doors, and dropping food are specified. In Dungeon Robber, I tried to preserve those rules.

Dungeon Robber is a board game, so you can win or lose. You win if you retire alive and rich. If you retire richer than someone else, you’re more of a winner than they are. But really, if you survive your plunge into the dungeon, however brief, you’ve won.

Let me know about your experiences playing Dungeon Robber! Did you emerge with a handful of silver pieces? Were you killed by a rat? Did you retire with enough money to buy a kingdom?

DOWNLOAD DUNGEON ROBBER

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D&D is old-school, Chainmail is new-school

July 9th, 2012

OD&D? Pah! The REAL Fantasy game is Chainmail. And it is way ahead of its time. Here’s why.

As a new-school D&D player, there’s a lot of D&D history I’ve missed. Editing Cheers Gary, gaming with Mike Mornard, and illustrating the AD&D Dungeon Generator have helped, but there’s a lot in D&D that I still don’t understand. I’m going back to the OD&D texts to see whether they can help my new-school game. Right now, I’m reading Chainmail.

Chainmail has Dice Pools. When you attack some Light Foot with your Medium Horse, you roll 2d6 per horseman, and you get a success (kill) on a 5 or a 6. The dice pool mechanic wouldn’t be seen again until Shadowrun in ’89.

Chainmail has ascending Armor Class. Sort of. Chainmail man-to-man combat is run by crossindexing things on matrixes. On the melee table, there are headings for the different types of armor (No Armor through Plate Mail and Shield). On the Missile Fire table, the armor types are replaced with ascending numbers: 1 for No Armor, 2 for Leather, up to 8 for Plate Armor and Shield.

Chainmail has at-will spells. There are no spellpoints or rules for Vancian casting in Chainmail. A wizard can throw a fireball once a turn, if he likes.

Chainmail has rules for counterspells – and they’re simple: when an enemy wizard casts a spell, roll a target number on 2d6 to counter it. D&D 3e had counterspell rules that no one ever used because they involved readying an action. I don’t think any other edition has counterspells as part of the core rules.

Chainmail has rules for spell failure. A weak wizard (a seer) can try to cast a difficult spell – they just have a chance of failure. This was taken out of D&D, and generations of fans have tried to houserule it back in.

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treasure from Venus

July 6th, 2012

“Ruins. Cyclopean, strange, and alien in contour, half-destroyed shapes of stone were blurred against a dim background.” What’s waiting for us on Venus, according to Henry Kuttner’s science fiction story “Beauty and the Beast”, is a D&D dungeon crawl setting.

No dungeon crawl is complete without treasure. In “Beauty and the Beast”, astronauts find a jewel: “Oval, large as an egg, the gem flamed gloriously in the light of the electric torch. It had no color, and yet seemed to partake of all the hues of the spectrum.” Even more valuable, though, are the flowers that surround the ruins. “The new flowers had proved tremendously popular, and florists demanded them avidly. Lovelier than orchids they were, and they did not fade for a long time after being cut.”

If PCs travel to Venus and find beautiful flowers surrounding empty ruins, they probably won’t think to sell them to florists. If they do, they might get rich. They might also (spoilers ahead) plant the seeds of the destruction of civilization.

The egg-sized jewel turns out to be an egg (a classic D&D treasure trick). It hatches a Venusian, who, too late, tries to warn humanity about the beautiful flowers: “And now, the flowers grow on Earth. In a month, the petals will fall, and from the blossoms the virus will develop. And then, all life on Earth will be destroyed, as it was on Venus, and nothing will exist on all the planet but bright flowers and the ruins of cities. I must warn them to destroy the blossoms now, before they pollinate…”

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drow are from the 18th century

July 4th, 2012

July 4th is a time for Americans to celebrate the Founding Fathers, and what better way than with a discussion of the DROW?

Visually, what’s the most interesting thing about drow? Is it the ebony skin, which lures cosplayers into racially complicated situations? No! It is the WHITE HAIR.

Costume-wise, perfectly white hair usually implies powdered wigs, which imply, in turn, the 18th century: the founding fathers, Mozart, Marie Antoinette. What if we used the 18th century aesthetic to inform our concept of the drow?

While the United States’ national story has the Founding Fathers as unequivocal heroes, most everyone else in a powdered wig is creepy in some way: bad old King George! Debauched Mozart! Sinister Salieri! that creepy guy from Dangerous Liaisons!

Drow actually make a fine addition to this creepy collection. Therefore, drow should probably wear silk jackets and high heeled boots. They should carry sword sticks (that crumble if exposed to sunlight). Their beauties – men and women both – have white beauty marks. The drow attend masques and balls in which they exchange innuendo and assassinate their rivals. (Drow dances, like those of Melnibone, are to the well-tempered screams of tortured slaves.) Drow attitude to non-drow is a heightened parody of the pitiless indifference of French nobility for the lower orders.

Furthermore, drow worship Lolth, the Queen of the Demonweb Pits. Here’s a statue of her from Pax East 2012.

Throw a dress on her, and her silhouette reminds me of another queen, also famous for her indifference to the lower orders:

How to use drow in your campaign:

Make them charming. Witty, even. Have them take snuff. Play harpsichord music as background music when they’re around. They can be just as diabolical, unfeeling, and sinister as ever – more so, even.

Posted in fluff/inspiration, RPG Hub | 5 Comments »

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