Speaking of geomorphs...

On the very slight chance that you haven't seen this guy's work, you really should give him a visit. Dyson does the coolest dungeon geomorphs. I recommend them — and him — most highly.

He pumps out a new tile every day or so (usually) and colllates them into weekly sets like the ones to left and right.

To be completely honest, I can't say that I've made any real use of them myself as yet. But the idea of a geomorphic tile-based dungeon appeals to me as a planning aid, and I really should get my act together to print them out on card and start shuffling.

Geomorphs

Some while ago, I sent my players up against a wizard who had, as a defence for his lair, a moving strangler-vine hedge maze. It shifted when nobody was looking, so unless there were enough people in the party to keep their entire route under direct observation, they could never be sure that things would be the same if they had to retrace their steps. The maze is not a barrier, but a trap – anybody entering without the appropriate passkey should end up wandering aimlessly until they starve to death, are killed by any of the various denizens of the maze, or are retrieved by the wizard for use in various nasty experiments.


I decided the easiest way for me to run this would be by randomly drawing from a set of geomorphic tiles as the party moved through the trap, and to that end I designed this tile set. There are, I found, a few useful tile configurations missing; I may (or may not) get around to filling those in one of these days.

Each tile is about 170mm square, and is superimposed with a 25mm hex grid. You can grab a PDF of the whole set here (approx. 2.41MB).

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As it turned out the party managed to get through by a combination of accident and brute strength – one party member was partially petrified and enormously enlarged, so when she fell down under her own weight she took down many of the hedges as well, and being mostly stone, she was immune to the constriction of the strangler-vine. That got them most of the way through, and gave them the idea of using tubes (I don't actually remember where the tubes came from) pushed through the remaining hedges and enlarging them enough to crawl through.

De-Freudianizing Teensy-Tiny Tanks

As some of those who have read the wargaming section of my website will be aware, I like to replace the barrels of my microarmour with sturdier wire replacements. With simple barrels, lacking barrel-sleeves or muzzle-brakes like the 3-pounder of the Vickers Medium Mk.II it's no big deal, but for more complex barrels like the 88mm of the Tiger I shown here, things get a bit more involved.

The photo to the right shows a 1/285 scale Tiger from C-in-C. The one to the left has had its barrel replaced, and the one to the right shows just why I like to go to all this trouble to do so — the metal these miniatures is cast from is very soft, and gun barrels are very vulnerable to damage. A soft, bendy, drooping gun barrel is just too Freudian to be permitted anywhere near a wargames table.

My favourite barrel material come in the form of 16mm brass sequin pins, about 0.65mm thick. They're soft enough to be able to work easily with files and wet-&-dry emery paper, but stiff enough to be reasonably resistant to inadvertent bending. A 16mm pin is just long enough for a Tiger I's 88mm, which is about 11.5mm long in scale; I'd have to source some longer pins for guns like the 88L71 of the Tiger II or the Elefant, or the long 122mm guns of the later Soviet tanks.

I start by mounting the pin in my Dremel and working the head down to a square ridge with a fine-toothed file. The muzzle-brake is built up by wrapping a piece of fine wire around the pin and sticking it in place with super-glue gel.

The muzzle-brake is more of an indication than an accurate portrayal of the specific type used on this gun; now that I come to look at it, I could probably get away with taking the pin-head right down flush with the shaft of the pin and building up the cone of the brake with a ring of wire and gel glue.

The sleeves are made from lead foil salvaged from a wine bottle. The foil is wrapped around the pin and secured with super-glue — the hardest part about it is getting a close, even fit; I expect it's something that gets easier with practice. At least, I hope so. You do have to be a bit careful to make sure that the seams are hidden away on the bottom, where nobody will see them.

Note: I've seen this done with cut-down hypodermic needles; they come in a pretty wide range of gauges, and its possible to get tubing that fits together like these foil sleeves. The effect is very good, and being tubing there's no seam. Unfortunately I have no idea where I'd go to get them, nor how much they'd cost.

The resulting gun replacement is a little more massive than the original, which was modelled closer to actual scale. However, in this case I think that's an advantage — it makes the gun look more impressive, as an 88mm should be.

This first one took a while — maybe an hour. I expect that time will drop with practice and some sort of production-line process, but even so it's not a quick-fix job. Nevertheless, I think the effort is worth while.

Just give me money, that's all I want

A while ago, my longest-lasting character, Sir Fnord the Totally Awesome (I've been playing him off and on since '81) managed to fight his way through an army of demon-cultists and an avatar of the Demogorgon to a hoard of millions and millions of gold pieces. That's a lot of gold pieces.

Prior to that, the game had revolved largely around scrabbling for enough cash to survive and (hopefully) to replace vital equipment, with the occasional windfall allowing us to break loose once in a while. Though never really at starvation levels, it was a pretty hand-to-mouth existence. Suddenly having effectively unlimited financial resources changed the nature of the game quite substantially, because it removed at one blow the major motivator for the party up until that time.

All of a sudden we were on the Other Side. Now we became just the sort of juicy target we'd been looking for before we became ludicrously wealthy. It also meant that all of a sudden, we had to think about what it was that we wanted from life, instead of just going with the flow and reacting to circumstance, and hoping to survive.

So where am I going with this? What I'm pondering on is the issue of character motivation.

When the characters are poor, motivation is easily attained by the offer of a potential material reward. Even for supposedly upright and morally uplifted characters like paladins, getting money and magical gee-gaws is the main aim, and moral or ethical issues tend to be sidelined. It's a pretty simple matter for the GM to shunt the party from one dungeon to the next, and his or her main problem is to keep the party poor enough to make them readily manipulated.

If the party starts getting well enough off that they can afford to pick and choose adventures to avoid risking themselves (an attitude I find difficult to understand, frankly — what's the point of playing this game if you're afraid to risk your character?) then the GM's options become somewhat restricted. Some of the options are:

1. They can increase the potential rewards to overcome the chicken-heartedness of the players, but that risks falling into a Monty Haul spiral; exactly the same problem will recur, and it will only get harder to deal with.
2. They can start laying track for a railroaded game, but that's an inelegant solution to say the least. The players will tend to feel manipulated and may become unsettled and rebellious, and the GM is likely to come to see his players' characters as glorified NPCs.
3. They can rob the party and make them poor again. This can work pretty well, even if the party aren't reduced to absolutely pauperish levels, because if there's one thing players hate it's having their precious stuff nicked, and revenge is a powerful motivator. This is a good opportunity to introduce a recurring villain, a Party Nemesis, somebody they can really get into hating. It can add an ethical dimension to the campaign if the Nemesis is not actually a Bad Guy, but frankly for most parties it won't matter a damn whether he's evil or not — they'll still cut his gizzards out for having the effrontery to steal the most worthless of their posessions.
4. They can remove mundane wealth from the equation completely, as was the case with Sir Fnord, and throw the issue of character motivation back into the laps of the players. This can be risky; there are quite a few players who really don't want to have to make those sorts of decisions, and it may make them a tad uncomfortable.

There are, no doubt, other options available to the GM, but those are some I can think of off the cuff.

Of the four options I've delineated here, number 3 is probably the most useful I think. It leaves the GM with a good deal of control over the development of the game, and a recurring villain is a very useful source of plot hooks for later on down the track when one is feeling a bit uninspired — just reintroduce the Nemesis and watch the party respond like a rabid pack of Pavlov's dogs.

Number 4 is a good option if you feel that the party is getting into end-game territory since it provides an opportunity, for those who want to, to semi-retire their characters. New characters can be introduced as the old one's henchmen, guarding their master's huge wealth and so on. And for those who don't want to retire, not having the aquisition of money as their primary motivator means they can start concentrating on the ethical and philosophical development of their characters.

Even more abstract combat

There are a couple of D&D combat-related things I've read on message boards and blogs lately that intrigued me.

First, somebody pointed out an obscure rule buried deep in one of the manuals (the DMG? I don't recall exactly) that suggested that in a multiple-opponent melee, the actual enemy attacked should be selected randomly from all those within reach. The rationale, as I recall, was that the one-minute combat round encompassed and abstracted a great deal of maneouvre, feints, parries and blows, and that the nature of hand-to-hand combat is such that it is seldom possible to concentrate on a single opponent and that attacks are made whenever an opportunity arises as the combat moves to and fro.

I've never (consciously) read this rule, and I don't know if it is meant to apply to PCs as well as NPCs and monsters, but it does seem to me that it suits an abstract combat system. It would make it harder to work systematically through a group of opponents, since one couldn't be sure that one's attacks would be directed against a foe one had already damaged. If fighting alongside comrades, the party wouldn't be able to reliably spread their attacks among the available targets.

What I like about it is that it would make combat less mechanical and predictable. What I don't like about it is that it removes a degree of tactical control, which is not neccessarily to everyone's taste. I find the idea intriguing from a game-mechanics perspective, but I don't know that it would actually make playing more fun — and that's really the aim of the game, after all.

I think, if I were to adopt this style of play at all, I'd probably tend to use it in a miniatureless combat situation, and I'd modify it somewhat so that a character could concentrate on a specific foe at the cost of an AC penalty against any others.

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Another thing that interested me recently is the idea of doing away with the attack roll, as proposed by JB on his B/X Blackrazor blog as a means to radically speed up combat. It's an idea that seems to me to fall into the same camp, conceptually, with my ideas about doing away with the initiative roll.

He points out that when a magic-user casts a spell at somebody, there is generally no to-hit roll required and the victim (usually) gets to modify the effect with a saving throw. He suggests that a similar sort of thing be applied to physical combat — I'm over-simplifying enormously here; it would be a good idea to go and read his actual words (there are a couple of other of his posts that expand on the idea; the one I've linked to is the first of the series).

Again, this is an idea that I think suits a highly abstract combat system, but I don't think it's an idea that many players would find all that attractive, for one main reason: people just love rolling dice. They may complain that playing out combat takes too much time (though in truth that's a problem I've encountered more in other systems, not so much in D&D) but when it comes down to it, they like the suspense of rolling a die and seeing whether they succeed or fail.

The Wall

I've hit a wall when it comes to GMing. Not burn-out per se, but rather a sudden gloomy loss of enthusiasm — our roleplaying group has had a lot of postponements lately, which makes keeping continuity going a bit difficult, and for the last couple of weeks I just couldn't make the effort to get things back on track.

I'll sort out a decent weekend playing session to get things to a good stopping-point, and then put the campaign on hiatus for a while I think.

I'd quite like to be able to play for a while instead of GMing all the time, but nobody in our group either (a) wants to GM at all, or (b) wants to GM any of my favourite game systems.

Hey-ho.

Fall in a Feather-Like Fashion

Feather Fall (or the Magic Parachute spell) is an astoundingly useful spell, especially when you're plummeting to a grisly doom on to nasty, sharp, hard, pointy rocks. It's a spell that (as far as I can find) doesn't exist in OD&D or B/X, but it does turn up as a 1st level magic-user spell in AD&D. The closest thing I can find in OD&D is Levitate, but the chances are that by the time you get to casting that, you're already going to be smushed on those nasty sharp rocks.

Anyway, Feather Fall is one of the AD&D spells I'm bringing into my S&W game. In common with my usual habit though, I intend to make it a bit less convenient in some ways than its original incarnation. Here'a the original spell description from AD&D1e:

Level: 1
Range: 1"/level
Duration: 1 segment/level
Area of Effect: Special
Components: V, M
Casting Time: 1/10 segment
Saving Throw: None

When this spell is cast, the creature(s) or object(s) affected immediately assume the mass of a feathery piece of down. Rate of falling is thus instantly changed to a mere constant 2' per second or 12' per segment, and no damage is incurred when landing when the spell is in effect. However, when the spell duration ceases, normal rate of fall occurs. The spell can be cast upon the magic-user or some other creature or object up to the maximum range of 1" per level of experience of the spell caster. It lasts for 1 segment per level of the magic-user. The feather fall affects an area of one cubic inch, and the maximum weight of creatures and/or objects cannot exceed a combined total  equal to a base 2,000 gold pieces weight plus 2,000 gold pieces weight per level of the spell caster. The spell works only upon free-falling or propelled objects. It will not affect a sword blow or a charging creature, but it will affect a missile. The material component is a small feather or a piece of down somewhere on the person of the spell caster.

OK, that's what we have to work with. There are a few things about the spell I had never really considered until I typed it out just now, one of which is that although it's a 1st level spell, it's going to be pretty useless to a 1st level magic-user since it will only work for 6 seconds over a whopping 12' drop. Woo-hoo. OK, so a 1st level M.U. could easily be killed by a 12' drop, so he'd probably like to feather fall that distance, but then again it has a casting time of 0.6 seconds, so even if he started to squawk out the verbal component the very instant he starts to fall, he's going to have landed before he's finished speaking. Ow. Poor, pathetic 1d4 hit-point fool.

Another is the phrase "immediately assume the mass of a feathery piece of down". That may not be a big issue in a calm, still subterranean dungeon environment, but outside in places where a feather fall spell would be really useful — like mountain climbing, for example — it tends to be a bit windy. Often, in the mountains, quite windy. That means that your person-sized, down-massed individual is quite likely to be blown far, far away, until the spell duration ends and they plummet to their doom somewhere else, instead of just falling from where they were. Come to think of it, that could be quite hilarious.

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Anyway, on to my rewrite of the spell. The first thing to do is to do away with that 0.6 second casting time. One of the things I like about D&D's Vancian magic system is that it requires some forward planning (and often plain guessing about what's coming up), and I don't like the idea of instantaneous spell-casting. I'll replace that with a casting time of, say, a minute, but have the spell activated more or less instantaneously later on.

It would have a double duration: first, the time in which the spell can be activated... let's say an hour per level, and second, the time the feather fall effect actually lasts once activated... let's make that one round per level (note: I use ten second rounds), so that will let our 1st level M.U. fall 20 feet without fear.

I'll make personal activation automatic rather than by command word; that way the spell will still protect someone who has been knocked out. I'm kindly like that. The activation circumstance will be any free-fall further than 10', so the spell won't be wasted by jumping down from a 6' wall.

I will keep the "...immediately assume the mass of a feathery piece of down" thing, because I think it has great game possibilities.

I will make the spell a multiple-effect, in the same way the Pyrotechnics is a multiple-effect spell. The spell caster can learn it in either an active or a passive mode; in its active mode he or she can voluntarily activate its effect against a falling object or creature within range, while in its passive mode it can the spell is cast on him/herself and/or others and will then be activated automatically, as above.

So then:

Feather Fall

Level: 1
Range: 10 yards per level
Duration: 1 hour per level; target feather falls for up to 1 round per caster level.
Area of Effect: Special (see text)
Components: V, S, M
Casting Time: 1 minute
Saving Throw: None

This spell reduces the recipient's mass to that of a piece of feathery down for 1 round (10 seconds) per caster level, and slows a creature's or object's fall to a maximum of just 2' per second.

The caster may learn this spell in either of two forms:

Active: At any time within the spell's duration, with a single word and gesture the caster can activate the spell effect on a falling creature or object within range. The spell caster must make a successful attack roll against an AC of 10 (plus any range modifiers) to affect his or her target. The spell's energy is vitiated regardless of whether a successful hit is made or not.
Passive: The magic-user may cast the spell directly on him or herself, and/or on any number of other creatures up to a maximum total weight (including his or her own) of 200 lbs per caster level. Each spell recipient is given a magically activated feather; as long as they are carrying the feather, if they fall more than 10' any time within the spell's duration the spell is activated and their mass (and rate of fall) is reduced as described above. The spell being activated on one recipient does not end the spell for any of the others.

Note that a human-sized creature with the mass of a piece of feathery down is very strongly affected by air currents, and in any sort of breeze they may well be carried a very long way before landing. Updrafts may even carry them higher than they were before the spell was activated.

A feather-falling creature has no footing and nothing to brace against, and falls like a piece of down — that is, in a swirling, haphazard fashion. Therefore, attempting any sort of melee combat, missile fire or spell-casting is likely to be futile.

When the spell recipient lands, he/she/it immediately regains their normal mass. Once the spell's duration ends, normal falling resumes.

Material component: a handful of down, which is distributed among the recipients of the spell.

OK then, so that's my version of the Magic Parachute. I don't think I've forgotten anything.

Saving Throws

Saving Throws — die rolls used to attempt to avoid or ammeliorate some effect or situation — have been around in D&D since the dawn of time, but they change and morph and distort from edition to edition. They've kept some things in common though; they've all varied by both character class and level.

OD&D (the little brown books) used these categories:

• Death Ray or Poison
• All Wands - including Polymorph or Paralyzation
• Stone
• Dragon Breath
• Staves and Spells

All fairly self-explanatory except for the somewhat cryptic "Stone" entry. Does it refer to stones hurled by giants or trebuchets? Does it relate to the chance of avoiding being turned to stone by a gorgon's gaze? Remaining cool under the influence of ganja? Or does it mean the chance of avoiding bashing your head on the low ceiling of a mine? Anyway, I never played OD&D so it was never an issue.

B/X D&D shuffled things about a bit with these categories:

• Death Ray and Poison
• Magic Wands
• Paralysis and Turn to Stone
• Dragon Breath
• Rod, Staff or Spell

Again, I never played B/X. I just recently (last year, in fact) managed to get my hands on a copy of the D&D Rules Cyclopaedia, which is pretty cool I must say, although most of the illustrations are pretty boring.

My main contact with saving throws was via AD&D1e (and my bastardized combination of 1e and 2e), which had separate save categories for:

• Paralyzation, Poison or Death Magic
• Petrification or Polymorph
• Rod, Staff or Wand
• Breath Weapon
• Spell

The saving throw mechanism is all very well in its way; it's nice for the characters to know that they might, just maybe, be able to mitigate or even avoid the dire effects of a spell or glyph or something. It's a formalized Luck mechanism.
As it was presented in The Old Days though, it was all a bit arcane; the reasoning behind the categories was never actually spelled out. Exactly why a fighter should find it harder to save against an effect from a spell than against the exact same effect via a wand was never actually explained (as far as I know); it was left to the individual GM to rationalize backwards from the data. And it was open to ambiguity — if one was attacked with a wand that squirted out a roiling, roasting cone of fire exactly like red dragon breath, should one properly save vs. Wands or vs. Breath Weapon?

When D&D3e came along, all those effect-based categories were swept away, and instead three characteristic-modified categories replaced them:

• Fortitude (modified by your Constitution bonus or penalty)
• Reflex (modified by Dexterity)
• Will (modified by Wisdom)

This system is much more rational and less arbitrary than the old saving throws, and it is a system much better suited to being applied to unforeseen situations. If an effect could be dodged, obviously a Reflex save would be appropriate, and so forth. Its fault, if fault there be, is that compared with the old saving throw categories, it's a little colourless — which tends to happen with any generic roleplaying system, I've found. The more genre-flexible a system becomes, the less evocative it becomes of any given genre. But I digress.

I don't play D&D4e (boo! hiss! spit!), so I don't know how saving throws are dealt with in that system.

Note: Geoffrey, in the comments,describes the D&D4e saving throw system. It has the sole virtue of simplicity, but it doesn't encourage me to bother with that glorified over-hyped version of Descent.

As I've mentioned before, my game of choice at the moment is Swords & Wizardry, which discards all saving throw categories and uses a single Saving Throw target number for each class and level.

I believe that in its 3rd printing it states that the save be modified against various effects according to class (e.g. a cleric gets +2 to their save against being paralyzed or poisoned). It's not a terrible idea, and it does help to further delineate the individual classes, but then to a small degree it also compromises the Single Save's main virtue, its simplicity and I don't use it myself.

Although I do miss the baroque splendour of the old AD&D Saving Throw Matrix, I've found S&W's single save number to be very workable and flexible in play. I tend to use it as a characteristic save a lot of the time; for example, if a character trips a trap in which he finds himself dodging a multitude of poison darts like Indiana Jones in the first movie, I can call for a DEX save and have the character modify the saving throw by his DEX bonus (or penalty). If they trip a mysterious, non-obvious magical trap, I can just ask for a saving throw.... and because there are no verbal clues (i.e. not a save vs. paralysis, or a save vs. poison, but just a save) it adds to the tension when nothing obvious happens.

I like the concept of the saving throw a lot. It means there's always a chance.... maybe a very slim chance, but a chance, and where there's hope, as they say, there's life.

For that reason, I'll almost never not allow a saving throw in any situation, no matter how hopeless it may seem. Even if it does no good in the end, it makes people feel better, and that means a more enjoyable game.

Detect Stuff

Because I am a mean and cruel GM, I've never really been very happy with the definition of various D&D detection spells which allow a magic-user to cast their spell and go "Aha! That, and that, and that are all magical. Grab them, ignore the rest, and let's get out of here", or "Aha! He's evil, we're allowed to cut his liver out!".

D&D magic is surprisingly flavourless in many ways. It's always reliable, it almost never costs the spellcaster any effort (other than the time it takes to prepare the spell). It tends to be treated as just a list of, y'know, stuff this dude can do once or twice a day. I guess my gripe is that it just feels too convenient, rather than Meddling With Forces Mortal Man Ought Not To Wot Of.

Now as far as playability goes, that's OK. If you make magic-use too dangerous or difficult, people will just choose not to play magic-users. However, there are a few areas where I believe a bit less convenience can make for more fun and interesting game play, and the area of detection spells is one of them.

To that end, I've rewritten them. Pretty nearly all of them — detect evil, detect traps, detect booty-call, etc. — follow the same pattern as detect magic, which I present below as an example:

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Detect Magic
Divination
Level: 1
Components: V, S
Casting Time: 1 round
Range: Personal
Area of Effect: 60’ cone
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 round/level
Saving Throw: None
Magic Resistance: No

You detect the presence of magical auras in a 60° cone up to 60’ long, within your line of sight.

Although the spell will alert you to the presence of magic within that area, it does not specify which object, if any, is actually magical.

If you continue to concentrate on the same area, the second round of concentration will give you a direction to the most powerful magic source in the area of effect. A third round will give you both direction and range to within a 5' diameter area of the most powerful magic source, OR you can discern the direction to the next most powerful magic source. Successive rounds of concentration will allow you to home in on other magic sources within the area of effect.

To focus on a specific object, you must actually be touching it, though if you have narrowed the detection down to a 5' circle, and there's only one object in that area, it might be safe to assume that that object is the source.  Then again, it might not.

You may turn to face another 60°, or focus on another object at hand each round.

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This rewrite makes detect magic less easy and convenient, but it doesn't really fundamentally alter the workings of the spell. You can still isolate magical auras — you just have to take a bit more time over it. Of course it does make the spell a lot less useful for 1st level magic-users... but screw them. Wimps.

Why Rolling For Combat Initiative Is Pointless And Wrong

A little while ago I was reading yet another long discussion about just how to create yet another new, playable, accurate combat initiative system for D&D. It's something I've thought about off and on pretty much forever.

Then I had a blinding epiphany that left me stunned and gasping for breath so that I had to go and have a bit of a lie down.

In an abstract game combat system, where a round of combat represents an exchange of blows, parries, and offensive and defensive maneuvre, there is absolutely no point in wasting time and dice rolls on determining who goes first. All that matters is determining how much damage a combatant can dish out over the course of that round.

That's already dealt with in the hit+damage dicing system. Roll to see if you manage to do any damage at all, and if you do manage to damage your oponent over the course of the combat round, roll to see how much damage you achieve. Fighters with multiple "blows" simply have a greater damage potential within the combat round's time-frame.

Even six or ten seconds in combat is a long time.

The surprise roll, now that's still useful in an abstract combat system — being able to do damage without taking any in return is basically what combat tactics are all about. I'd definitely retain the concept of a surprise round; in fact it would become even more important if initiative were removed from the equation.

Where an initiative determination system is valuable is in a system where one combat round equals one blow (or grapple, or throw, or whatever). Then it actually becomes important who goes first and who has to react. Otherwise — it's a waste of time.

NOTE: It has been pointed out to me that the initiative roll has a valuable dramatic impact on D&D combat — that's a valid point, and I concede it. It's probably worth retaining for that reason alone. I still think it's structurally pointless though .

Danger! Danger! There is treasure here!

In the past, I haven't ever bothered with placing much in the way of randomly-generated treasure in my adventures. I've generally been reasonably discriminating about what I let out into the wild, ever since an incident with a well-equipped (helpful) NPC who went down to a few lucky hits from a roper and immediately made the PC he was supposed to be supporting rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

As a result, I've achieved the reputation of being a mean, stingy GM who takes magic goodies away, but never gives anything good in return. That has turned out, through circumstance, to be kind of true, but in my own defence I note that several juicy hoards of goodies have been passed by completely unnoticed due to the feeble, cowardly behaviour of players who are too chicken to go into danger.You know who you are.

Lately though, I've resolved to run things a lot more by chance. I'm letting the dice decide what treasure is available to be scooped up, and though I can't quite bring myself to accept a +4 Godentag of Awesomeness just lying unguarded in the middle of a passageway, I am experimenting with a much freer hand with the gee-gaws. I use whichever treasure tables happen to be closest to hand when I'm plotting something out, whether they be from Swords & Wizardry, Labyrinth Lord, LL Advanced Edition Companion, AD&D1e or AD&D2e.

I've noticed something that had never been an issue when I was carefully choosing precisely what to put where. There are a lot of cursed items in those lists.

Or maybe it's just that I've been rolling an unusual number of cursed items. Whichever the case, they seem to be coming out surprisingly regularly. On the one hand, that's kind of a pain, but on the other hand it might — not likely, but it might — start to teach my players not to rush in like a bull at a gate looking a gift horse in the mouth while throwing stones in glass houses (what?).

Last night a character got his hands on a nice, shiny magical helm. A Helm of Opposite Alignment, naturally. First chance he got, he put it on and went from being a Lawful Good wannabe paladin to a slavering Chaotic Evil psycho.

Now, I really don't like things that enforce radical character changes on players; it's very, very seldom that one encounters a player who will take it as a roleplaying challenge rather than as a vicious GM-enforced outrage to be resisted to the last breath. This particular player is one who is unusually resistant to that sort of thing; if anything happens to change his character without his expressed consent and intention, he's more likely to just abandon the character and start a new one than to try to find some in-game way of accommodating or ameliorating the change.

In this case though, I have some sympathy. If it was me, I'd try to find an in-game way to incorporate a missing leg, or a change in sex, or even a forced change in class. I wouldn't be happy, but I'd give it a go. But a radical alignment change is something else; it means that you have to change your whole atitude to life, the universe and everything.

It goes to the very heart of roleplaying gaming for me — I'm not an actor, and I'm not one who likes to use roleplaying to experiment with different psychological outlooks, and again, I'm not an actor. I like the pastime for its action and the problem-solving aspects (and of course for its socializing aspects), and I play as if it were me in that situation, though usually a me with much bigger muscles or a much bigger brain, and a much stronger stomach. As I've mentioned before, I really don't like playing Evil characters. My heart just isn't in it.

Anyway, in this particular situation a plan has been formulated to get the character back to his old self, hopefully with a reasonably low body-count and in a fairly timely fashion. Being the bastardly GM that I am, I fully intend to throw the occasional spanner in the works, but the plan is a pretty good one and unless things go horribly wrong, I expect it will bear fruit before the player becomes utterly disheartened and rolls up a new character.

As I mentioned earlier, I really dislike alignment-changing curses. But that doesn't mean that I won't use them if the dice tell me to... until I decide to end my aleatoric experimentation.

Lava Children and their ilk

On page 61 of the 1st edition of the Fiend Folio, there appeared an entry describing creatures called Lava Children.

It was one of the many critters in that book illustrated by Russ Nicholson, an artist whose work I really like for the most part, but I cannot find it in me to feel the love for this particular illustration. It's been described most often as "Alfred E. Neuman in a bondage harness".

The description of the creatures is pretty lack-lustre; they're pretty much just another humanoid monster with a bit of a gimmick — in this case they're "immune" to metal. Whack one of these guys with a sword and it just passes right through without even disturbing that stupidly vacant grin, and of course they can just reach straight through your wonderful plus one-gazillion Plate-mail of Awesomeness and rip out your spleen.

Meh, boring.

---

Later on, in one of TSR's modules (Slave Lords, I think) and then in the Monster Manual II (p.82), there appeared a critter called a Magman. It was a bit more conceptually interesting than the Lava Child, being a non-aggressive but mischievous creature that would most likely run away from a fight and would probably only cause major problems for a party of PCs if they were acting like pricks.

Which, let's face it, most PCs do, most of the time.

This is another illustration that I find pretty underwhelming, along with most of the pictures in the MMII. The illustration of that book was reasonably competent I guess, but I can't think of any images that really rang my bells. A couple of the grues maybe. Overall, the illustrations were boring.

---

The Monster Manual 3e reintroduced the Magman, but called them Magmin — I'm not sure, but I think that's supposed to be the collective noun for them. Again, they made them mischeivous rather than malicious, which can introduce some interesting moral quandaries for Good-aligned PCs who are being dangerously inconvenienced by their fire-play. They also made them a tad more interesting from the DM's point of view by leveraging their fire-elemental nature to make them more interesting combat opponents.

The 3e Magman, being as hot as the lava in which it plays, is actually damaging to get close to, and if you whack it with your sword or axe or whatever, there's a good chance that it will actually melt away.

That's the sort of thing I like when I'm being a bastardly GM, because of the howls of outrage from players when they realise they just ruined one of their precious posessions, and better still because they did it to themselves by attempting to brutalize creatures who were really just playing with them.

I like the 3e illustration of a Magman a lot better than the MMII version, though in my opinion it looks less like a playful elemental creature and more like a deformed dirty old man leching around a hot-tub.

---

I don't know exactly where I found this illustration (Maybe a Dragon or Dungeon mag?) but to me it evokes a much greater sense of playfulness than the MM3e illustration. It also feels a lot more innocent than the MM3e dirty old man.

It inspires me to rewrite the Lava Child more in the Magman mould.

I'd play up the sense of friendly, playful innocence, and make them actually child-like in character. Unlike the Magman, which is actively mischeivous and enjoys setting things on fire, these things would do so purely from ignorance and playfulness. They would be literally unable to conceive of how they or their molten environment could possibly be harmful, so they might playfully splash PCs with lava or throw magma-balls at them — but only to make them laugh. If actually told that their actions were hurtful, they'd assume it was some kind of pretending-game; they might go along with it as long as it amused them, but without any real sense of the situation. I'd run them pretty much like very young children at play.

I see this creature as being only semi-solid, and so rather than making it actually immune to metal (like the Lava Child) I'd give it a high rate of regeneration to reflect the way in which its molten-rock body could reform itself. Perhaps the regeneration would reduce over time if it leaves the lava, and eventually actually turn into progressive damage unless it gets back to its magma home.

I'd keep the 3e Magmin's possibility of melting any metal stuck into them, and its damage-causing heat aura. They'd ignite any flammable material they touch, of course. Grabbing a spear shaft would burn it through in an instant, and cotton clothing would go up in flames if they just brush against it. Thrown oil would ignite before it could even touch them, and if they handled a ceramic flask of lamp-oil it would probably explode — no doubt causing them to collapse in a giggling fit at the pretty lights.

The creatures could come out of the magma in which they live, but normal solid rock would feel icy cold to them; they'd be uncomfortable, and if they stayed out too long they'd risk the equivalent of frostbite and could potentially even freeze to death. They might treat solid rock as we'd treat snow, and might dash out to play in it for a while, maybe scooping up handfuls of rock for "snowball" fights before heading back for the comfort of their lava stream.

Their nature would make them terribly vulnerable to cold-based attacks; a bucket of water — even boiling water — would hurt them badly, as if a bucket of boiling oil had been thrown on a human being.

---

My aim here is to create a hazard rather than a monster, a creature which might potentially do great harm, but which would do so not just from ignorance, but from a desire to please. I think it might make an entertaining moral problem for a more-or-less Good party who have to get past them without going all mad-slasher-in-a-kindergarten on them.

Styx Boatman - Grenadier, 1988

This is an old Grenadier figure, bearing a copyright mark for 1988, which would have been pretty nearly when I bought it. It's been sitting around ever since then. I found it while I was rummaging around amongst my old unpainted figures and thought I might as well slop some paint on to it.

I was a bit half-hearted about it from the start, and that lack of enthusiasm really shows. It's rather a half-arsed paint job, and I pretty much hate it, but I'm buggered if I'll do it over.

There was a fairly serious casting line running right down the middle of the figure, which I wasn't entirely successful at removing. You can see it running up the chest and over the face of the corpse in the bow of the boat in the image to the right.

I'm not normally in the habit of buying non-utility figures, though I have splashed out on the occasional one. This particular one could conceivably be useful in some sort of 9 Hells scenario, but I doubt that I'll ever get any actual gaming use out of it, and I expect it will go back into a drawer and probably never see the light of day again. It could maybe be useful on a vignette base or in a diorama, but that's not really my scene these days and hasn't been for many, many years.

Being Evil

All my current players are, in theory at least, playing Good characters. Apart from taking a wholly unseemly pleasure in chopping other sentient creatures into gobbets of meat and stealing all their stuff, they generally stay more or less within the lines.

That means that Being Evil is up to me. I'm the GM. I get to play all the Bad Guys.

The trouble is, I'm not very evil. I hate evil people. They really piss me off. Also, it makes me feel distinctly uncomfortable to pretend to be evil.... which is a bit of a problem when most of your job consists of Being Evil.

I'm not talking about muahahahahah!!! hand-wringing dastardly-plan Adam-West-Batman-villain Cartoon Evil here; most of those guys barely make it up to annoyingly naughty. Their so-called Evil tends to be at about the level of a sniggering schoolboy slipping a fart-cushion on to the teacher's chair, and so presents no particular moral or ethical problems for me.

Huge-scale institutional Evil isn't that much of a problem for me to GM either, because it's all so impersonal and regimented. Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin were all undeniably evil (not to mention completely fucking insane), and they instituted some very unpleasant regimes, but I don't generally feel any immediate personal ickiness about GMing that sort of thing. I'm removed from it; it's all just bureacracy with jackboots.

When it comes to your individual evil shit-bag though, the kind of guy who will expoit people face-to-face, who will go out of his or her way to make people's lives more miserable, who will torture and murder both for the fun of it and because it will make other people sickened and afraid.... I have a real problem GMing those arseholes. It may all be make-believe, but I still have to get enough into that mind-set to come up with a believable course of action for my little imaginary psychopaths.

I don't like it. It gives me nausea of the soul to think like that, even peripherally, so I tend to wimp out and go with adversaries who may be savage and brutal killers, who may very well hunt down your children for the purpose of feeding them to their children — but at least they have some sort of rational reason for acting that way.

A side-effect of this attitude is that there's a lot less capital-E Evil around in my campaigns than in a lot of others, a fact that (I think) is tending to piss off the paladin(s) in the party a bit since it makes their Evil-o-Vision™ rather less frequently useful than it might be. Orcs may have a savage, brutal culture, and goblins may be sneaky, treacherous little shits, but they're not Evil. Bad, yes. Evil, no. Maybe some of them are Evil. OK, almost certainly.

Anyway, one of the reasons I like to be able to take a break from GMing every once in a while is because just once in a while, it's nice to be the Good Guy. Being Evil actually kind of sucks.

Thwarted!

My gaming has not been coming together at all well lately.

Last week I had a terrible cold that had me in bed coughing, sneezing and complaining incessantly, so GMing wasn't really feasible. This week a PC crucial to the current mission is away visiting the USA, and he'll be away next week too; NPCing him isn't really a realistic option.

That'll be three weeks without a game, and I'm jonesing already. I'm expecting to start seeing the baby crawling on the ceiling^[1] any time now.

[1] That's a Trainspotting reference, for those who haven't seen the movie. And if you haven't, you really should. It's great.

Knockspell #4 now available

Knockspell #4 is available now from Black Blade Publishing in both PDF and hard copy. I haven't had the chance to read it yet, but issues 1-3 were pretty damn good, and I don't expect issue 4 to be any other.

I did the cover image for this one (and for issue 2 too, back in the distant past).

Demogorgonoid

This is an old Grenadier figure from the mid-'80s (I think). I don't recall it actually being sold as the AD&D demon-lord Demogorgon, what with TSR being so litigation-happy back in those days, but it bears more than a passing resemblance to the illustration and description in the Monster Manual, and I've always thought of it as Demogorgon. It's roughly 65mm tall, to the top of its horn-fin-crest-thing.

Grenadier were always one of my favourite figure manufacturers, and certainly the best of the lot that were available locally (in New Zealand) in those days. Now that we have the internet, our options are substantially widened, thank goodness, but in terms of detail and casting quality, many of the old Grenadier figures stand with the best of the modern manufacturers. I certainly prefer them to most of the hideously cartoonish and overpriced garbage coming from GW.

I painted this some time ago, and just touched it up today with some washes and a hint of dry-brushing, and re-based it on to a 30mm steel panel washer.

I've taken to basing figures on steel washers for two reasons: first, because it makes them more stable when in use, and second because I can then store them on magnetic mats, and be confident that they won't rattle around against each other and chip all their paint off.

This is a drawing I did of that miniature.
Rotring pen on cartridge paper, about 150mm tall.

Eeeeevil kobold babies? I think not

Leafing through various monster books, one will note that often enough an entire race or species of creatures will be described as being of Evil Alignment. This is something that irks me somewhat, though I can see that it might simplify matters for some people; after all, if all kobolds are innately Evil (with a capital E) then for somebody like a paladin, slaughtering them indiscriminately is not only OK, but a positive duty.

For me though, I think it's just Lame. With a capital L.

I prefer not to go with species-based Alignments, because I feel that it dilutes the concept of Alignment as a character-driver. Alignment (in my campaigns) is pretty much always a choice, unless you're playing a class like Paladin that has a specific Good Alignment restriction, or encountering outsider-creatures like demons, or undead, which are innately Evil (and in the case of demons and what not, probably also pretty evil).

In other words, for the purposes of detection, I make a distinction between Evil and evil, and between Good and good.

Having said that, in races/species like orcs there will likely be a higher proportion of Evil individuals than in some other races, due to there being more initiates of Evil cults and so forth.

Also, I'm not enamoured of the idea of evil/good detection acting like a pair of "Evil-Vision™" goggles. I prefer to run it as a fairly non-specific emotional awareness, with maybe a rough indication of direction if it's someone or something actively Evil (i.e. "there is Evil here.... " rather than "the third button down on that guy's waistcoat is an Evil button...")

If players in my campaigns want to go slaughtering infants, well that's fine I guess, if that's what floats their boat, even though I personally find it rather despicable. But I want them to make a moral choice to engage in that sort of behaviour, and not just leap at it because the Rules Say It's OK.

Just because you're Good, it doesn't mean that what you're doing isn't evil.

---

Postscript: I've noticed a few people on one of the message boards I frequent saying, on this subject, that they like having black and white racial stereotyping in their games because they don't want to bring "modern morality" into them. Several people said they preferred it because they play to "escape from real life". I may be generalizing here, but it sounds to me like the sub-text is "I want to act like a complete arsehole, but I can't get away with it in real life, so I want to be able to play-act it at least".

Of course, that's just my opinion.

The Rules and Me

As I've mentioned before, these days I'm running my game using the Swords & Wizardy rules, modified fairly extensively by an increasingly huge bunch of house-rules.

I've played with a fair number of RPG rulesets over the years, and have never yet found one that is perfect. A perfect ruleset, in my mind, would be one that can be learned well enough in half an hour for fun gaming purposes by a complete neophyte (while creating their first character), while sumultaneously allowing absolute flexibility and covering every conceivable eventuality in every conceivable genre. Surely that's not too much to ask?

My first gaming experience was with AD&D in 1981, and that has coloured my gaming preferences ever since. I loved the D&D milieu, but became increasing frustrated with the restrictions imposed by the game framework — restrictions like making it effectively impossible for any character to pick a lock or a pocket unless they actually had a level as a Thief, or to track anything unless they were a Ranger, and so on. They were restrictions that were implied rather than stated; nowhere (that I can recall) did it actually state in the Players Handbook or Dungeon Masters Guide that nobody else could attempt these tasks, but the fact that only Thieves had a specific success or failure mechanic stated implied that, since nobody else did, only they had any chance of success at thiefly activities.

All this is a consequence of the design decisions Gary Gygax made when he was putting together the altogether more regularized AD&D after the earlier, more free-wheeling years of OD&D. I have no idea whether he intended those systems to be proscriptive, but that was the effect.

Anyway, around the time that I started playing AD&D, Champions — the point-buy skills-and-powers based superhero RPG that eventually turned into the Hero System — was first published, and I was introduced to it by my friend Mark. It was a little while before I decided to adopt it myself for my fantasy campaigns, but adopt it I eventually did. With a break of a couple of years when D&D3e came out, I used Champions, and then the Hero System pretty much exclusively for all my campaigns — fantasy, space opera, cthulhoid horror, western, and so forth. I used it for longer than any other single system; in fact for longer than all other systems combined. I must admit though, that when it came to fantasy roleplaying I spent a lot of time trying to replicate the D&D experience.

The construction-kit nature of the Hero System meant that if a player wanted to build a lock-picking tracker with spell-casting abilities, they could. That seemed to me to be a huge advantage. There was hardly a situation I couldn't deal with using the rules as written, with the exception of absolute invulnerabilities (the Hero System doesn't do absolutes), and they were easy enough to work around. However, some situations required some pretty creative accounting with the construction rules to accommodate.

So why change?

Mainly because of that word — accounting. Character and monster building ended up becoming an exercise in number-juggling; sure, there was an initial creative spark required to come up with the concept, but then it was just a lot of fiddling and optimizing and accounting to build the thing. Later on, when it came time for the character or monster to meet each other in mortal combat, there was a whole lot more accounting to be done to determine the outcome. It's customary for proponents of some other RPG systems to mock Hero for the supposedly excrutiating length of time it takes to resolve even a few game-minutes of combat; that mockery tends to vastly overstate the actual complexities involved (and there's a pot-kettle situation there too with D&D3e — attacks of oppportunity or grappling, anybody?) but the criticisms do contain a kernel of truth.

In an attempt to explain and regularize the rules more fully, in theory (I think) to make them more accessible, the Hero System has become HUGE. The 5th edition core rules were a massive tome heavy enough to form their own gravity well; the new 6th edition is split into two volumes, each of which is about the same size as the whole 5th edition book. Then there are genre books and other supplements, some of which are almost as extensive as the core rules. That's a lot of information to absorb, even for someone as familiar as I am with the rules, and for a newcomer to roleplaying it's flat-out terrifying.

D&D has suffered from the same syndrome. In an attempt to regularize the rules so that there can be no ambiguity (a goal which has not, in my opinion, come close to being achieved even yet), and to cater to wider and wider player desires and expectations, the rules have become bloated beyond belief. The rulebooks certainly look a lot prettier and more colourful than they used to back in the '70s, but they've also become a lot less accessible.

A common criticism of players of older editions and their clones — or observation, call it what you will — by proponents of the more recent versions of D&D is that we're only playing them out of some misguided sense of nostalgia. Taking aside the pejorative intent, in my case that's true, but only to an extent. I'm not trying to recapture the glory days of my youth in roleplaying; that's never going to happen. The joy and wonder you experience when first learning to handle this rather bizarre hobby isn't replicable unless you suffer some kind of brain injury and forget everything you've already experienced. I am trying to replicate the experience of playing D&D, just as I did when I was using the Hero System exclusively, and that experience isn't satisfied (for me) by D&D3e, and even less by 4e.

The reason I'm playing Swords & Wizardry instead of AD&D is because, as I mentioned before, I found AD&D too proscriptive. I could be using the original little OD&D booklets, but frankly I find their organisation and layout awful. I was tempted by the D&D Rules Cyclopaedia (of 1991, I think), but by the time I got a copy I'd already pretty much sorted out my house-rules for S&W (and I do prefer ascending AC) so there didn't seem much point in changing the campaign over again. S&W gives me the D&D experience I'm looking for, but with more freedom of action for both players and DM.

Is it the perfect fantasy roleplaying ruleset? Not yet. That's why I keep tinkering with it. Maybe one day...

Traveller

As has been mentioned in oodles of other points on the Internet (the Great Mother, at whose Mighty Teats we daily suckle), the starter rules for classic Traveller have been released as a free download from RPGNow. Note that although they're described as "Starter" rules, they're by no means incomplete; these are, to all intents and purposes, the complete original rules plus some material from later editions.

There are also a bunch of supplements available for a couple of bucks each — Randall at RetroRoleplaying has links to some that he thinks (and I would tend to agree) are essentials.

Unfortunately, the PDFs are all just collections of scanned pages — they haven't been OCR'd, and the scanning quality is a bit variable. From what I've seen so far they look as though they're generally readable at least; I haven't tried printing any yet. If I get really enthused, I might try OCRing them myself so that I can reformat them to A5 and get decent-quality printouts for myself, but that will take a bit of effort, and I'm not (yet) sure that I can be bothered.

I always really liked Traveller, though we didn't play it very much back in the day, being mostly focused on AD&D. Most of my sci-fi gaming in more recent years has been in the Hero System, using their excellent Star Hero and Terran Empire supplements, but I adopted several of the tropes popularized by Traveller into my Hero campaign.

I'm also a huge fan of Joss Whedon's Firefly TV series, and the movie Serenity, and have for some time had a growing urge to run a campaign based, if not actually on Serenity, at least in that milieu. Traveller would be a perfect fit for it, I think, as it (as I remember the game) always seemed to concentrate on the seedier underbelly of a shiny technologically-advanced future.

I'm quite looking forward to actually reading the rules for myself, as I never owned a set of my own when we were actually playing the game.

---

Postscript: I printed the Rules and Charts & Tables booklets digest-size, and they printed out just fine. The text prints a little coarse; it would have been better if it had actually been text rather than a bitmap of some text, but I guess beggars can't be looking gift horses in the glass house. Or something. The originals appear to have been formatted with fairly small type on letter-size pages, so the text is pretty microscopic when shrunk down to digest-sized pages; I won't be reading much of it without my glasses I suspect.

Game report: Against the Giants... er, Kobolds

The party:

• Zosia, a tiny (but perfectly formed) elf, a fighter-mage
• Able, trying (with only erratic success) to be a paladin of Tyr, but lacking a mentor, having to figure it out as he goes along. Currently on probation, having failed to rescue a maiden in distress (he thought it was an illusion)
• Heidi, a warrior-maid who recently found herself hag-rid and eventually died of it. She got better, but is still rather floppy and is in recovery at Rath Donnan
• Morgan, a ranger and undead-hunter
• Siegfrida, a valkyrie, sent to oversee Able's probation and atonement quest

Our valiant crew have plunged into the depths of the earth (again, having been driven ignominiously off from their first attempt) in search of the hapless maiden seen being carried off by an ogre, and the cause of Able's fall from grace.

They battered their way through various traps, massacred their way past a delaying force of kobolds behind a barricade, chased their way after the sole surviving kobold, and found themselves in front of a pair of massive figured bronze-clad doors, behind which (as Zosia learned via a Clairvoyance spell) lies the Hall of the Kobold King, full of highly-agitated kobolds.

Subtlety has not, thus far, been their strong suit.

You will observe the haunting beauty and painstaking precision of my carefully-crafted dungeon map :)

Anyway, Able's brute force having failed to budge the massive doors, Morgan the ranger elected to use his brains instead of his Mighty Thews, and went looking for some sneaky kobold-tunnel by which the kobold they were chasing might have by-passed the door. Success! He found a cunningly concealed tunnel to the right of the door.

Note: it should have been to the left, but I wasn't looking at my map when I described it to the party. Hey-ho, it made no real difference anyway.

Zosia, being the most petite of the crew, crawled into the tiny 2' by 2' tunnel and found a Cunning Trap by virtue of falling face-forward into a concealed pit and on to some nasty and insanitary spikes. Fortunately her wounds were relatively minor and the rest of the party by-passed the pit successfully, though the passage being so restricted they had to take off all their armour and gear to get through.

Able bravely led the way into the hall, which he found to be pitch dark and (as far as he could tell by the light of his lamp) deserted. He soon came under arrow fire from out of the darkness, and began running about trying to come to grips with an opponent — with no success, and looking more and more like a porcupine as more and more of the tiny arrows found their target. Noting that the arrows seemed to be coming from above, he hypothesized the existence of a mezzanine and tried climbing the huge, figured bronze doors....

Zosia was next into the hall, and she too came under arrow fire. Fortunately, being so small, she had not had to doff her armour and immediately cast a blinding Pyrotechnics spell, using Able's lamp as the flame source. It worked beautifully; there were shrieks of outrage and surprise from the kobolds behind their arrow-slits. Unfortunately it also blinded Able, who was left clinging half-way up the door. Being a PC and not a Real Person, he dropped the fifteen feet or so to the floor without a second thought, and stumbled away (still blind) without so much as a sprained ankle.

Back to the report again after a  break of a couple of days. I'll summarize the rest:

• Zosia put Protection from Normal Missiles on Able and Morgan to protect them while they struggled back into their armour.
• Kobolds dropped jars full of very angry hornets among the party.
• Zosia isolated the hornets with a Wall of Ice spell.
• Party investigated the dais and throne at the far end of the hall, with Able and Morgan acting as arrow-shields for the other two. Able found a secret shaft leading straight down to a nasty funnel-pit, into which he accidentally dropped his lantern. The resulting flare revealed a small tunnel leading off to one side of the shaft.
• Zosia Polymorphed herself into a pixie and flew down the passage, finding that it descended down a couple of short flights of stairs and ended in a dead end. Suspecting a secret door, she searched for, and found, and opened one.
• Able climbed down his grapnel-rope and, by virtue of his acrobatic ability, managed to wriggle into the rather claustrophobic passage. About twenty or thirty feet in, he tripped a nasty spring-spike trap that skewered him in a dozen places or more — OW!
• Siegfrieda, coming behind him, retrieved his hacksaw form the Bag of Stuff he was dragging behind him and started cutting him free from her end. Being a PC and not a Real Person, Ables remained staunch and stoic through the process instead of squealing and crying like a little girl. I myself would squeal and cry like a little girl. OW!
• Zosia finished cutting him free from the other end, and dragged him out, down two flights of stairs and around a tight bend. Again — staunch and stoic.
• Morgan, more or less forgotten up on the dais, fended off a massed rush by kobolds with nets and mancatchers by hurling molotov cocktails at them, and slid down the rope and into the passage.
• The party have emerged into what looks like a garden. There is grass underfoot, flowers and fern beds about, and what appears to be daylight coming from above, though the "sky" is a featureless haze. The walls of the garden-chamber are tiled in large, faience plaques bearing an arabesque design in greens and browns.
• Zosia and Siegfrieda extracted the sawn-off spikes from Able with a pair of pliers — still remarkably staunch and stoic. Amazing what these imaginary people can endure.
• Zosia healed Able somewhat. Still no sign of the kobold king they were looking for.

That's it for that session.

Full Canvas Jacket

I've been a fan of the WW1 aerial combat sim Red Baron since I first played it back in the dim dark past. When Red Baron II (and then Red Baron 3d) appeared I got that too and played it a lot; RBII was less fun as a game than RB1, mainly because the flight model and so forth was much more accurate, so everything got a lot harder, but it was much more satisfying as a WW1 flight sim.

When the games were released, the graphics were pretty good (the image to the left is a Sopwith Snipe in Red Baron II) especially if you had a Voodoo Glide video card. But RB3d was released back in the '90s, and things have moved on since then. They started looking very dated.

Anyway, a few years ago (about '05 I think) the Full Canvas Jacket superpatch was released, and I just bought a copy. Oddly, in this age of fast high-bandwidth internettings, I couldn't get it as a download, but had to buy an actual physical CD via Ebay... pretty quaint, huh. The disc took about a month to arrive in New Zealand from the States.

I installed it a few days ago, and started playing. It improved the graphics incredibly — see the screenshots to the right compared with the Sopwith Snipe from RBII above — and also made flying (and shooting other planes down) much, much more difficult. If RBII was harder than RB1, this is even harder again, and is probably a lot closer to the actual experience of new pilots (minus the bowel-loosening sprays of castor oil and sheer terror, of course). The aircraft models and textures are exquisite, and the landscape and sky actually looks like landscape and sky rather than an approximation of them knocked up in MS Paint. Screen resolutions are higher, and aircraft and objects are identifiable at longer ranges than in the original game. Anti-aircraft fire, smoke and fire effects look pretty naturalistic. As far as the graphics go, I'm highly impressed. All the sounds have been redone too, and engine noise now varies depending on what plane you're flying, and different machine-guns make their own characteristic sound. Bullet hits sound different depending on what they strike — wood, canvas, metal... or a pilot or observer. It's a big improvement over the original game sounds.

Unfortunately, it comes at a price (apart from the $35 I paid for the disc). For some reason it throws a fit whenever I finish a mission or exit out of the "Fly Now" instant-dogfight thing, and crashes the game to the desktop.

That makes the overall game a lot less interesting, since it means the results of campaign missions aren't saved, and unless you delete the mission files, next time you have to start the same mission all over again. Therefore there's no progress, and even if you delete the mission files so that the game has to generate a new one, the game is reduced to a series of dislocated episodes with no continuity.

From what I've read in various parts of the internet, this appears to be a pretty common problem with the Full Canvas Jacket superpatch, and although plenty of guesses and suggestions have been made as to how to fix it, none of them have worked for me. Unfortunately I suspect that it's to do with the fact that the game was originally written for much older hardware, and OS and video software, so there may in fact not be all that much that can be done.

I guess I won't be playing any campaigns then, which is sad.

Unfortunately I know so little about game graphics software and hardware that I have no chance whatever of sorting it out on my own.

If you don't mind not being able to play a campaign, and don't mind having to delete mission files and restart the program after every mission, FCJ is pretty sweet. Otherwise, I really couldn't recommend it, even though it really does look and sound fantastic.

Technical notes: I'm running Vista on an Intel 2.13GHz Acer machine with 2GB RAM, and a Nvidia GeForce 450 video card with 256MB onboard. I'm using the latest version of the OpenGlide wrapper.

Hurricane

Pretty much on a whim, I bought this Airfix 1/48 scale Hurricane Mk.I the other day.

I haven't built a plastic model aeroplane for many, many years... about twenty years, in fact. I was a bit interested in WW1 aeroplanes for a while, and I slapped together a few of them in various scales, but that was some considerable time ago. I still have a few either still pristine in their boxes, or half-built and abandoned at the point when my stringbag obsession suddenly evaporated (I seem to have a hobby turnaround time of about five years). My skills are rusty, to say the least.

One of the problems with building display-scale models is where to put the blasted things once they're done. Our house is already overflowing with knick-knacks covering every flat surface. Maybe I'l hang it from the ceiling by a piece of nylon fishing line, the way I used to do in my bedroom when I was a kid... though I suspect Annette might have a word or two to say about that idea.

Ah well, I'll deal with that problem when (and if) I come to it.

Denied!

In theory, we play a weekly game of Swords & Wizardry. In practice, our gaming group is so small that if a couple of people can't make it, the game goes bye-bye for that week. We've just expanded to four players, which makes a single absence just workable usually, but having two away at once guts the group too badly. And, all being grown-ups with real-life obligations and crap like that, absences aren't that uncommon.

This week is one of those weeks. Dang!

I'd like to find a couple more players so that this real-life-intrusion doesn't affect the progress of the game so badly, but Old-School roleplayers are even thinner on the ground around here* than regular run-of-the-mill roleplayers. We're an older group (our youngest is getting towards 40), so we're not that attractive a prospect for the youngsters who are, in any case, generally more interested in the WoW-like razmatazz of 4e and the like.

Ah well, I guess I can always Turn To Drink.





* "Around here" is Christchurch, New Zealand.

Conflicted about my toys

I love miniature figurines. I have ever since I was a child; one of the great Christmas presents, and one that I've always remembered, was some sets of Airfix 1/32 scale polyethylene toy soldiers.

I have to make a real effort to restrain myself from buying new figures all the time, even though I already own thousands of them (most of the metal ones are still, and will probably always remain, unpainted). I must have spent close to a thousand bucks on those WotC pre-painted plastic figures, even though I kind of hated the fact that I couldn't tell what I was getting in the box (I don't buy them any more, because the overall quality of both sculpting and painting has really gone down the toilet).

The drawers shown here are all full of figures, and they are but a fraction of my collection.

I'm really tempted by those DwarvenForge (?) modular dungeon pieces as well, but I know in my heart that I'd use those once in a blue moon too. So far I've resisted.

For all that I love them so much, I hardly ever use them in roleplaying.

Partly it boils down to laziness; quite often I just can't be bothered hunting through my vast, obsessive collection to find the monster I want. Also, I prefer not to have to break the flow of the game just as combat is beginning just to make sure that we're playing with exactly the right figures. If I remember to prepare beforehand, and separate out the monsters I'm intending to throw at the party, then maybe... but I'm seldom that well organised.

Partly, and in my mind more importantly, it's because the figures themselves are seldom perfect representations of what I have in my mind's eye, and the chances are they're not quite right for any of the players either.

One of the things I love about tabletop roleplaying games is that although we're all working in a common milieu, with more or less precise descriptions of the environment and adversaries from the GM, everyone at the table will be seeing something different in their own imaginations. Everyone pictures their own characters in their own unique way.

Miniatures, and things like the 3d dungeon mapping modules, erode that personalized vision. There's still some imagination at work, but it's going to be heavily influenced, for good or for bad, by the physical reality of the gaming environment. Illustrations and models are useful when description proves to be inadequate, but they're not as personally satisfying as the creations of one's own brain.

There are undeniable advantages to using some kind of tabletop tactical display though. It makes it clear to everyone just what the situation is from moment to moment, so the chances for misunderstanding are lessened — and that's not something to be sniffed at, when one's character's life is on the line.

When we do use figurines, quite often I'll go for something like this in preference to actual monster miniatures.

Actually, the Mr Man toy is probably a bad choice — who could possibly see that and be terrified? Even though I may be describing a foetid, tentacled, bat-winged maggot-demon from the Abyss, dripping with foul ichors and snarling at the characters with a huge mouth full of shark-like fangs, the players are going to see a happy smiling Mr Man and go "Awwwww...."

Bad choice, but good demonstration. That's what I mean by the physical environment contaminating the imaginary one.

I don't mean, by all this, to say that I never use monster figures. What I do mean to say is... I'm conflicted about the wisdom of doing so.

We do tend to use adventurer figures for characters, and they do end up merging in our minds' eyes with the characters they're supposed to be representing. A problem with that is that once that happens, the figurine becomes useless for any other purpose. This figure has been used to represent Annette's character, Zosia the elvish fighter-mage, for many years now. If I tried to use it to represent an NPC... well, it just wouldn't work. Through osmosis, that figure has become Zosia. It could be nobody else.

Ah well, if I can't use that figure, I suppose I'll just have to go and buy another one. Or ten. Or twenty.... just in case.

It's not my fault.