The Kobold Drinking Song

An oldie, but a goodie. This is a 1st edition AD&D in-joke, but it still makes me chuckle.

Twenty kobolds stood together

Gathered in a field.

The mighty Fighter saw them there and dropped his magic shield.

A plus five long sword in each hand, Plate mail shiny bright.

He confronted all the kobolds, Thinking slaughter, not a fight.

The Fighter is an impressive sight, Some kobolds seek to flee.

But the kobold chief, in a commanding tone, Barks, “Kobolds, follow me!”

And so the score of kobolds charge Towards their fearsom foe.

The Fighter calculates their exp. And waits to fell them all.

The DM merely smiles at him, and rolls a single die.

The result was only seven, but “You go down beneath the tide.”

“What?!” The Fighter yells, outraged, “They need a twenty to hit me.

They’re armed with shitty swords and knives, There’s no way that this could be!”

“Kobolds are small” The DM replies. “So all of them do their stuff.

Since they’ve only teamed up to overbear, Lucky seven is high enough.”

“Big deal!” Is the fighter only retort. “I unleash my Swords of Doom.”

“I’m afraid” The DM replies to him. “You no longer have the room.”

“The kobolds have you grappled now. Your weapons are too large to bear,

If you wish to fight back at all. You’ll have to drop them here.”

“Fine!” He cries in an angry huff. “I’ll punch them in the face!”

“Your one attack hits.” The DM informs. “But another quickly takes its place.”

The kobolds call for surrender then, or they’ll have him for their meal.

The Fighter tells them where to go, and swears at them with zeal.

“They can not pierce my armored skin.” The Fighter cries in a fit.

“It says in the rules.” The DM replies. “‘Held opponent’ equals automatic hit.”

“Half of them now hold you down, Half now use their knives.

You take twenty points of damage. Are you sure resisting’s wise?”

The Fighter gnashed his teeth in rage. “My strength’s eighteen double zero!

I’ll throw the half off with a mighty heave. They’ll see why  I’m  the hero!”

The DM, a fair and impartial soul, says “Fine, your will be done.

Just roll the die, you want low.” (‘Course, the Fighter ‘rolls’ a one.)

“Ha!” He cries, as kobolds fly. “Now the tides have turned.

I hack and slash and chop and cleave, and dash and crash and burn!”

“With what?” The DM says concerned. ”Both swords!” The Fighter vents.

“The ones you dropped?” The DM says. “You wonder where they went.”

“Then I pull out my Two-Handed Sword of Instant Vorpal Death. It’s right here in my other pocket, I’m sure I mentioned it.”

“OK” Sighs the DM. “You draw your sword. But the kobolds are quite fast.

They all jump on you once again Until down you go, at last.”

And thus the melee continued on. Until the Fighter fell.

His mail still shining brightly, His swords still sharp as hell.

Of the kobolds, all were well, A few nursed knicks and scrapes.

And in the end, they had a feast, With the Fighter on their plates.

Incongruous characters – a failure to get on board

In the old days when I actually used to take part in and GM conventional role-playing games I recall coming up against a bizarre event. This almost always occured at the start of a campaign set up, or change of setting. No matter how much the GM of the moment would describe the coming setting, or provide background material and books of art to illustrate what the cultural, technological and historical basis for the game was, there would always be someone who would choose to be a character that could not possibly exist there and/or call themselves something that was glaringly incongruous.

It seems I am not alone in finding this strange phenomenon. As I was reminiscing about Runequest I went surfing, as you do, and found a lovely site that a GM had obviously put a lot of work into. The games sounded as if they were fun, though I noted the sad comment that no game had happened for 158 days. This pricks my heart in sympathy – there is nothing worse than having a labour of love, as an RPG campaign is, just wither away through lack of interest/committment/availability.  

Runequest is clearly designed to be viewed through a bronze-age, heroic classical Greek lens. The original sources all confirmed this. The art of the site in question really hammered it home.

I looked at the character lists. There were characters named Alansar, Cleombrotus and Darkos. These seemed within the general mood. Then, sure enough, I found one called Grant McKielsen. Very Greek. Very bronze age.

It reminded me immediately of the time I tried to start a similar bronze age camapign. I layed out books of Greek architecture and art, described the fashion and weapons of the time, brushed over the stories of the Illiad. Then I invited the players to think about the characters whey might want to portray in this setting. Most got it straight away. We discussed hoplites, senators, physician/philosophers, and priestesses. All seemed to be going well.

Then one of the players declared that he wanted to be a bard. With a lute. And a big floppy hat with a feather in it. Armed with a rapier.

I can still hear the crickets and see the tumbleweed around the table as the rest of us digested this information.

What is the psychology at work here? Conceit (didn’t hear a word anyone esle said – too busy being a hero in their own mind), misguided sense of humor (see, it doesn’t fit, that breaks the suspension of disbelief, cause we’re not really heros, we’re just playing a game. Get it?), ignorance (back in the ancient days, like before flat screen TV everyone blah blah blah sword, last movie I saw), or something else?

Comments?

Savage Dwellers of the Forbidden City

Few things are more boring than reading a blow by blow account of some one else’s role playing experience. Wargame reports can be marginally more interesting because you have photos of the little toy men on the table. But RPGs. Unless the writer really has the talent for writing, are just dull. You had to ‘be’ there.

So it that vein I will not give a blow-by-blow description of the session that Greg and I played recently: Savage Worlds game where we actively attempted to meld RPG and skirmish miniatures gaming.

This probably comes as no great innovation to the vast majority of players who have been brought up on, particularly the modern version of, D&D. It’s all just skirmish gaming, right? Well, no. We have come from a world where the two forms of game have been poles apart. So this use of Savage Worlds to swap between the two modes of play is new – to me, anyway.

The attached image shows the tools we had. The action was set in the 1930′s – an Indianna Jones antiquities hunting adventure – the treasure being found in the classic AD&D module ‘Dwellers of the Forbidden City’. The Call of Cthulhu and Realms of Cthulhu were there to give us more info on the period. I also have Thrilling Tales (not pictured as Greg has made off with it to study), but for all the wealth of period detail it gives very little equipment information. RoC, similarly, has a nice list of guns. But what we really needed for the first session was info on other pieces of equipment that would be available to an adventuring party in 1930. Such as torches. For this we referred to the master of all source books, CoC (4th ed, in this case).

Slipstream sat ready as well just in case any super-science artefacts should turn up. But in the end none were, so it will stay on the shelf next time.

So to cut a long story short, the initial role-playing session went as expected. A little banter with a local chief, some scene setting. Some hints of the coming story. Characters were explored to find out who they are. Greg and I are of the school that start off with minimal stats for characters and allow them to find their abilities in play. For example, Bud, a college undergraduate and assistant to the professor, had only a d6 for shoot and was armed with a conventional .38 revolver. But where he fired he Aced and then Raised, knocking the pygmy beastman on his arse. We knew immediately that Bud had the Marksman Edge, and we developed a background around him being on the school pistol shooting team.

But when we came to the scene that was a skirmish war-game with miniatures, the action just fell to… fighting. Penny the journalist could do nothing but find a .32 in her garter and blaze away, and this was not how we had imagined her at the start. A war-game implies fighting, and diminishes – or at least taxes the imagination – to find a role-playing activity.

Or so it seemed last night. With a little more practice we may be able to see more.

This was the first session in what I hope will be a mini-campaign to move through this classic module.

Hân campaign map redrawn

HÂN – campaign update

It is one of those campaigns that I come back to every now and then with a wistful attitude. There is every chance that it will never be played, but the material is there. Call it a pet project.

Here is a Mind Map I made of some of the material.

Voila – a bar

Just picked up a couple more of the Paizo maps, and also a couple of the D&D modular terrain. Using the Harrowing Halls set I overlaid the Bandit’s Outpost to make a tavern. Here it is:

Mythic Hân – map update

I felt the need to cartographise. Here is an update to the geography of the Empire, continuing the policy of making the representation abstract. This time I have included the idea of Judicial Circuits: those regions that are under Imperial Administration and can expect a high ranked Judge and other administrative staff to be active in running the areas.

In a nutshell: each province has its own Governor. This may be an appointee from the capitol, or it may be some local king or warlord. Groups of provinces are joined together in a Judicial Circuit and a Judge is appointed to this next higher level of command. His job is to tour his provinces and act as a ‘High Court’ for any matters of law or policy that cannot be handled at Provincial Government level.

However, not every ‘province’ is a Province of the Empire. Some remain outside of Imperial law for various reasons – which we will find out during play.

So far we have only explored province 01, Parangaricutiro.

From Mythic: is this a province contained within an active Judicial Circuit? Somewhat Likely; 78, No.

This is consistent with our finding in play that no Governor was in place, which was why the demon prince was attempting to achieve some legitimacy. However, after I had rolled I realised the question was ambiguous. What did I mean by ‘active’. I decided that province is a Province – since this is consistent with what we found in play – but that there is something not only wrong with the Provincial Government, but with the Judicial Circuit as well.

Has a Judge been assigned to the Circuit that Parangaricutiro belongs to? Very Likely; 39, Yes.

So there’s a new thread: what is the reason for the Judge of that Circuit being so lax? Why had the region not been visited for so long? Why had he not appointed a Governor?

Mythic Ravenloft – time to get back to work

There has been a long pause in this story while I have been bringing other writing and gaming elements forward. I am now starting to think about this story again and I wonder what has brought it back to the surface.

The odd conclusion I am coming to is that it has to do with the weather. Ravenloft is a winter story – the way I am telling it. As the days became longer here I could think of nothing to say. Summer in Australia is about long long days and hot hot temperatures, interspersed with the odd thunderstorm and imperilled with bushfire. Hardly the kind of inspiration I need for a story about snow and ice, and Vampires,  zombies, and loves lost…

But now the threat of fire is receeding, and the mornings are darker. It’s still pleasantly warm, humid even. All the indications are that it will not be a particularly severe winter. Still, I am anticipating that the reduced light and the morning fog will get me thinking black thoughts again.

Now to get the juices flowing. First: I need to reacquaint myself with the characters, and I need to appreciate what important thing has just happened (in the last scene) .

In true Mythic style, I rolled against my tailor made Mythic Focus chart and found ‘Remote Event’.

Next entry: what Remote Event pushes the characters into action?

Simplified D&D

With all the buzz about 4E D&D I feel even older than usual. The talk concerning what the rules can do; whether they have dumbed the game down to the level of video games; whether ‘fairness’ has been enforced at the expense of fun – or indeed the reverse; whether the new has set in concrete that D&D is now a skirmish fantasy wargame rather than a role-playing engine: all of these things have been debated before.

The fact is that Gygax and Arnesen designed the game to be a skirmish wargame and it grew from there. That it is going back to that should not be so much of a surprise. The writing was on the wall with 3E. The redesign to level out everyone so that every character has exactly the same chance of survival and the same huge range of options is most definitely a learning taken from online gaming. Personally I see this as a political development, albeit unintentional: everyone is as good as everyone else. The subversive reverse of this was in The Incredibles, however: ‘if everyone is special, then no-one is’.

But I’m off topic already. Personally, I say good luck to the youngsters debating the merits of the new version. All power to them for getting into it. But me? I’m over trying out the latest and greatest. I cannot be bothered replacing decades of support material for another set about the same topics. Because, at the end of the day, the system does not matter. There: Ive said it. Any game is fun if the players are engaged in the theme and want it to be fun. If everyone is genuinely playing then you overlook the system.

So I’m settled on 1st edition, basically, but with the very logical simplifications that came from such games as Castles & Crusades. And at this level we forget all about skills and traits and abilities and proficiencies and all that hoo-ha. A character class is a cliche. Everything that the cliche could be expected to do, the character, your character, can do. Simple as that. It is a role-playing pencil and paper game, and I do not need to have miniatures to play it as the spoken word is enough to create the escape in my head.  When I want to play miniatures, I’ll play a set of skirmish wargame rules instead.

Here is a link to a C&C site, and I commend you particularly to the unofficial revised 1st ed Player’s Handbook. This is now my official PHB.

http://homepages.nyu.edu/~dp58/cnc.htm