Things to do in Sigil and more on D&DNext

In between bouts of hayfever and lawn strimming, I've been having some fun planning things to do in Sigil for my hapless players.  Not all of these may come to pass, as their route is to some extent dictated by a bossy sentient sword, but the planning is wonderful fun.  At present, the group are newly arrived in a meat market.  As offal of various sorts parades past them, they're about to start their hunt for Vocar the Inexplicable, former exarch of Vecna.

Translation:  Vecna is an exceptional piece of bad news, even for an evil god.  His favourites are endowed with evil hands and/or eyes and use these to hunt down knowledge of all kinds.  Quite what Vecna wants to do with this knowledge is known only to him, but almost certainly involves taking over the pantheon.  Vocar claims to be a former exarch who survived, but might just be a dotty old man.

I have no idea who produced this picture and am thus unable to give them credit.  Which I'd love to do, so if anyone can identify it, please let me know.  It's the Hive Ward in Sigil.

In other gaming related news, I've been looking through the Wizards playtest material for D&DNext. Me and hundreds of other game-interested bloggers.  Voices are being raised all over the interwebs but the general trend seems to be cautious approval.

I think I'm a bit more enthusiastic than that.  The skeleton we've been given looks elegant and easy to manage with a distinct "old-school" vibe to it - which will please many.  I'm seeing the flexibility and simplicity of older editions mingled with the durability of 4e. 

The core mechanic (rolling a d20 and applying modifiers) remains unchanged, but the method has changed from a set of rolls made against specific defences or skills to rolls made against the basic stats of a character.  This makes good sense and streamlines a lot of issues.  I'll be interested to see how this feeds into character creation (those rules aren't out yet). 

With the new playtest material, there is far greater onus on GM and player alike to think creatively, leading to a more story-driven game for some perhaps.  I've always done that to a large extent, but it's interesting to see it made explicit.  For players who came into the game with 4e, it may feel too fuzzy and open-ended.  I'm really intrigued to see how it plays out with our home group - most of whom learned to play with 4e.

It's kept the options open for playing with or without a grid or map and there I'm a little less easy in my mind.  That's a purely personal issue.  I find combat quite hard to run anyway and without the aid of a map, would have no chance, but we'll see. 

So far it looks good, robust and promising.  Can't really ask for more than that at this stage. 

More home game

Recuperating from the cold-type thing I brought on myself.  Sleep and fluid are working their wonders.  Slowly, but steadily.

Baldwin having a contempletative moment

A bit of an update then, on the home game.  At present, we only have the one running.  It's a small party and we've just hit level 4.  This means we're starting to hit the gaming sweet spot - i.e. a lot of the stuff we do works and we can do major kicking if we have to.  That gives us a bit of extra confidence (or foolhardiness) going into situations and as a result we're more relaxed about trying out new things. 

Roger the Feegle, our Pixie skald.  Normally resident on Baldwin's horns for day to day travel.

I've got a vested interest in this campaign (apart from playing in it) because it is the sole creation of my son.  He does not have a particularly high opinion of Wizards of the Coast's adventure output, so he's built his own homebrew, complete with an entire bestiary.  This is fairly normal.

Where it gets interesting is his encounter design.  He tends to use his encounters a pieces of drama.  There is no such thing as an encounter existing in isolation.  Each is a mini-story.  A bit like a well-structured stage fight, we're learning more about our opponents and our own characters every time we run into people.  Encounter, in this context, does not necessarily mean a fight.  Our last session saw no combat at all.

All this makes the campaign feel very organic.  As a fellow GM I know what he's up to and admire it.  As a player I sit back and enjoy, knowing that whatever Baldwin comes up with will feed into the whole story.  Very satisfying.  What we do has consequences.  Unpredictable ones.

The cthonic water sample we decided to bring with us to examine at a later date might have been a mistake, mind you.  Asking about it has already got us turned out of a shop and brought worried looks from the local high priest.  Now we have to find some way to get rid of the stuff.   That and it seems to be alive and trying to escape.

The boy done good.

Who wants to play? (gaming for beginners)

Feeling heroic?

Siegfried having a normal day by Wilhelm von Kaulbach

 Want to tell stories?

Story-telling ape

Need some therapy for the general frustrations of modern life?

There are a lot of reasons people play RPGs but I'm convinced that the most basic is this:  we are story-telling apes.  While everyone encourages children to use their imaginations and play, once we get forced into adulthood, the emphasis changes.  You have to be a responsible person.  Playing gets lost in the mess.  The thing here is that the people we are at the age of 8 when everyone tells us to use our imaginations are still there when we hit adulthood.

That is where drama and gaming come in.  Two subjects very close to my heart.

An RPG* can be set anywhere.  A character can be anything.  Anyone.  There are systems for those who adore number-crunching and systems so loose they consist of two rocks and a piece of paper.  A game can run for a couple of hours or years.  They're all valid and what they have in common is the notion of interactive story-telling.

This requires actual communication between the referee* and the player or players and thus is not the same as a computer RPG.  However hard it tries, no programming can be completely responsive to the suggestions of a group of players.  Another human being can.

An important point to make here is that RPGs are not competitive in the sense that there is a winner or a loser.  It is not players v GM*.  While it is entirely possible for your character to die horribly, such death should be the result of story.  And dice.  Did I mention dice?

You can have skills coming out of your ears.  You can be equipped for all known situations.  You also have to have a little luck.  Chance comes into it.  Dice.  They represent the quirks of fate.  If you try to do something with an outcome that might have unpredictable consequences, you or the GM roll some dice.

Gamer sweets

All that sounds very pompous and optimistic for something that is just plain fun, but they are important things to note.  A lot of GMs tend to forget this in the face of a set of monsters that resolutely refuse to save their own sad-sack-selves by rolling above a 5.  A lot of players tend to forget this when they come up with a wonderful plan that falls flat on its face.

At a practical level, this means that I've somehow managed to talk Suze into letting me GM her through character creation and a solo adventurette.  We're doing this via the ancient mechanism of email until she finds her sea-legs.

So far, I've introduced her to the notion of rolling dice to create a character and offering her a choice of skills and background for this character.  We're working our way through the ruleset for Stars Without Number - which is sci-fi based.  The system is as new to me as it is to her, but I've figured out a lot of game rules before and this one is streamlined and easy to learn.

Today, I'm going to look at her PC (player character, not personal computer) and get her on the road to adventure.  I've no idea what will happen along the way.  Finding out is most of the fun.

*Role Playing Game
*Also known as the GM or DM - short for Game Master or Dungeon Master

A not-terribly-interesting update

Short roundup of what's happening in game world.

Den - the one-shot adventure I am running for a group of 4e novices - has gone well.  They've survived a horrible cult, a deranged halfling priestess and a selection of misguided mushroom people.  They've also acquired a meteorite shard of dubious origin and rescued most of the people they set out to rescue.  Result all around I'd say.  Even better is that the group wants to continue.  Makes me happy. 

Tombs I are confronting one of the more irritating opponents the Tomb of Horrors has to offer.  A gargoyle that turns itself back into impervious stone when you hit it hard enough.  Alas for them, it guards the way to their ultimate quarry, so they are currently surrounding it and waiting for it to come back to life long enough for them to hit it.

Tombs II are engaged in negotiations with a group of pirates as they attempt to make their way to Sigil.  Slaad eggs are involved.  Their tiefling warlord has been notably inventive.  It was her plan to take a brass band and mercenaries to a dock to create a large-scale distraction. 

Our home game is approaching a climactic encounter.  We get to play tonight and I'm looking forward to it.  This is a campaign devised and run by my son, so we're making the most of him before he vanishes into exam hell.

On the practical front, washing machine loaded with bloodstained shirts (fake blood, which I'm assured comes out with pre-washing, although I have my doubts).

Planning session for next years Youth Theatre productions.  With a team of two, it's extremely difficult to get all 150+ members on stage every year, so I think we may have to think again about how we do this.  And find plays.

What else?  Oh, yes.  Replace the burst tire.  Leaving the boot depot of dreams yesterday, I managed to burst a tire and ended up waiting for the AA in a garage forecourt while they fitted the temporary wheel.  All was well and the necessarily slow journey home was rather therapeutic.  Driving through the Dales in the rain is remarkably beautiful.  Soul food - which let's face it, I probably needed.

Boots, hats and treasure

Heading to York this morning to collect multiple pairs of boots.  To be accompanied by super-talented ex-student so that we can discuss poster design.   Hopefully she can also map read as this place is somewhere in the middle of a field if Google Maps is correct.  There is considerable getting lost potential here, I feel.

On my return, I shall hurl myself into hat construction.  Squashy, vaguely renaissance hats are a huge boon to a largely female cast, half of whom are playing men.  Long hair is not awful for the period, but the fringes need to be off the faces.  Hence hats.  Luckily they are not hard to make and are a great way of using up fabric scraps.  Waste not want not.  And here I suddenly turn into my mother, whose favourite saying this was.

In gaming news, it's treasure time for the Lost City crew.  Half of them anyway.  This split party have been battling insects and arachnids for the last six weeks.  The team charged with taking down a huge spider queen and her spawn have succeeded.  Their treasure has been consumed by said spider over the course of her long career.  Apparantly.  I'm not sure any spider, however huge, can reasonably eat weaponry, but so says the module.  I'll roll with it.  If the party want to pick through spider entrails, that's fine by me. 

Stuff to gladden adventuring hearts

The other half of the party are still effecting regime change among the Trignotarbs.  Their task is somewhat harder, but I am confident that they too will be collecting a treasure bundle and some valuable, level-raising XP shortly.  They have an angel on standby to hoist them up and down the walls, so all should be well for them.  If they can avoid the healing sapping larvae.

X is for XP

X

XP stands for experience points.

Experience points are a way of keeping score in an RPG.  Earn enough of those little bunnies and your character gets better, stronger and more awesome.  Win enough XP and you gain a level and get harder to kill.

Easy.

Or not.  As with many niche hobbies, there are a multitude of loudly voiced views on XP and the earning thereof.   The idea of course, is to encourage players to do things they might not otherwise consider doing.  Deadly and dangerous things.

Back in the early days of D&D it was extremely simple.  If you killed a monster, you earned XP.  If you picked up treasure, you earned XP.  Under the rules, only the person who delivered the killing blow earned any XP.  This lead to a lot of very grumpy fighters who had spent ages swatting at a monster to reduce it enough for the killing blow to be delivered by someone else entirely.  It also lead to the kind of larcenous behaviour that gets role players a bad name.  "Ooh, we're at the inn.  I take the candlesticks!  Worth 20XP."

Gaining levels was nigh impossible for classes who didn't kill things or steal things, especially as not all classes gained levels at the same rate.  A fighter only needed 1000XP to go up from level 1 to level 2, but a magic user needed 2,500.  Bit of disparity there as your average magic user was completely useless until level 3 and it took an eternity to get there.

Beware the might of the magic user

The theory here was that high-level magic users were so dangerously powerful that they had to gain their goodies slowly.  Tales abounded of magic-users who could demolish the entire campaign with a well-chosen spell.  Fighters, clerics and thieves became progressively less useful as they went up in level compared to the magic-user.  Those variable XP tables were intended to level the playing field.

Old school gaming has a lot of things going for it, but longevity of characters isn't normally one of them.

Later iterations have taken a wider view of how XP can be earned.  Quick thinking, disabling traps, cunning plans and fast talking are also valid methods of gaining those cherished points.  These are also open to abuse, of course, but it is a fairer system.  It encourages players to build more varied characters good at more than one thing for a start.  It encourages GMs and adventure writers to provide a buffet of challenges beyond killing things and taking their stuff.

Most games now allot XP equally to all players, regardless of the contribution they made to the encounter. The fighter who flubbed her diplomacy check at a crucial moment is not penalised any more than the cleric who failed to land a blow against the dragon.  Equally unfair you may say, but so much depends on the dice - and we all have horrible rolling days.  Or months, in my case.

Personally, I'm tending to bottle out of XP allocation altogether and decide when the players have done enough to gain a level.  In a PbP that works out at an average of five enounters.  In a table game, probably 9-10.  Encounters being any kind of interactive situation.

That covers a multitude of sins, but allows me to reward creatively minded parties as well as the more mainstream groups.  I currently have two parties traversing the Tomb of Horrors (the 4e version).  One party are currently earning their XP in the traditional way by wiping out the denizens of a dungeon and surviving traps.  The other group are prancing around Freeport with a brass band and a box of slaad eggs.  Both are earning XP.  They're just doing it in their own special ways.

W is for Way through the Woods

W

Path through the woods.  Pierre Auguste Renoir (1874)

THEY shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods.

(Rudyard Kipling)

About two years ago, I got involved in some play testing for Open Design's Courts of the Shadowfey.  I had enough time and cash to become a patron and got the opportunity to contribute fairly actively on the design.  At the early stages we bandied about a lot of ideas for how the thing should work - what made is strangely fey, what people feared about the fey and so on.  The picture and poem combo above was a trigger point for me. 

For anyone not aware of Wolfgang Baur's work and his inspirational patronage system, I beg you to take a look if you are at all interested in RPG design.  It offers a unique platform for development within a defined structure and I found it an incredibly helpful experience.  I would (and will, when funds allow) contribute again.

That, however, is not the entire point of this post. 

The other point is that looking for the way through the woods is a kind of symbol for the hunt for inspiration.  That moment when the spark hits.  All of us look for it.  All of us recognise it when it hits.  I'm not sure you can force it, but I am sure that continually looking doesn't hurt.  You never know what the trigger will be.  Mine tend to be images and words.

Ways through the woods.  So elusive, so rewarding, so frustrating. 

I is for Iggwilv

I

Iggwilv has never yet appeared in any game I've either played in or run, but she's a character I've always wanted to get into a campaign.  Possibly because she's bound up with so many bits of myth, partly because she just looks so much fun.  Evil, to be sure, but intelligent and never completely out of the game.

Iggwilv - by James Ryman.  An iconic image.  I've never been entirely convinced by the green lipstick, but this isn't someone you're likely to argue with.

Baba Yaga - possibly mid adoption process

Iggwilv is a lady with a mighty arcane pedigree.  Showing magical talent from an early age, she attracted the attention of Baba Yaga, no less.  The Witch's Witch.  Baba Yaga of the chicken-legged hut.  Baba Yaga of a thousand creepy tales and permanent frightener of Russian children.  Also, as it turns out, nurturer of  daughters. 

Iggwilv's cosy childhood home

Later in her career, Iggwilv developed an interest in demons and the Abyss and typically did the thing thoroughly.  Attempting to capture the Demon Lord Graz'zt, the pair fell conveniently in love.  It is not to be expected that two such beings would settle to a life of quiet domesticity, and so it has proved.  Variously betraying and double crossing each other, they have parted, but seem to retain some fondness and respect for each other.

Iggwilv and Graz'zt by Wayne Reynolds

Iggwilv can now be found behind many Abyssal plots.  It is unknown how many of them involve her ex love or her adopted mother, but some connection seems likely.

In my head, I see her living in comfortable luxury, writing new appendices of her mighty work, the Demonomicon.  Always to hand will be her notepad, her chessboard and her faithful messenger ravens as she berates publishers, hunts for fresh worlds to conquer and looks for opportunity.

One day we'll meet in a game somewhere.

The halfling and the barmaid

I've complained a goodly amount about technology and the internet, but in a small attempt to redress the balance, here's something I'm deeply grateful for. 

This is a story of an internet friendship. 

When we met four years ago, I was a barmaid with a suit of chainmail under her bed, and he was a halfling druid with a large dog.  It was an online game (what else?).  Some of us felt bold enough to divulge our real names and befriend each other on Facebook.

Halfling druid

Barmaid.  Chainmail under bed and therefore not visible

A conversation started shortly afterwards which has endured ever since.

Pat and I communicate almost every day.  I've watched him turn his life around in more ways than I can sensibly count.  He's watched me clamber through my various artistic traumas and teaching shenanigans.  We've both tended to be there for each other when the going got really rough at some points. 

Our ongoing conversation has taken us through politics, films, philosophy, gaming, more gaming, his work, my work, family, rules minutae, routes out of depression, character building and recipes.

We've met three times in the flesh.  Pat has come to visit the UK twice and has just walked through the door and felt like part of the family.    My son, who doesn't take to new people easily, immediately felt at home with him.  The home gaming group absorbed him instantly as a player.  He sat in our kitchen and broke up chocolate for brownies and peeled potatoes.

Husband, son and I went to Indianapolis for GenCon last year and met up again for a couple of meals.  As always, it felt like he lived next door and had just dropped by.

This good and lovely man met his soulmate last year, and on Tuesday, they eloped.  I'm using this post to say thank you to the internet for our ongoing conversation and to offer him congratulations and the best of good wishes.  Few deserve them more.  And yes, of course I asked his permission before I wrote this.

I am assured the elopement didn't look like this.

Slaadi and artistic rehabilitation

The slaad is much on my mind of late.  Creatures of chaos, lovers of entropy, beings with an unknown (and probably unknowable) agenda, slaadi are enjoyable nutbars.

They come in various flavours, and in the interests of finding a good image for this post, I googled them.  Hilariously, image search came up with the following as its first choice:

According to Google, this is a slaad.

Controlling my hysteria, I now present you with what I had in mind:

Actual slaadi, not actual size

There is something very beguiling about an utterly chaotic creature producing such a very random image. 

They are delightfully dangerous critters.  Part of their charm, of course, is that they look slightly daft.  Indeed, in the early days of DandD, they were regarded as a bit of a joke right up to the point that they infected you with some unspeakable disease.  Later incarnations spent quite a bit of time emphasising their horribleness despite their appearance, with successive artists working on making them menacing.  Largely succeeding as well.

This is a good trick if you can pull it off.  The immortal flumph is still waiting to become truly menacing, despite some good recent efforts.  For those unaware of this dungeon denizen, I present the original incarnation:

Flumph.  It falls on your head.

Not terribly scary.  The main danger has always been that an adventuring party is going to endanger themselves more by falling over laughing.  A more recent incarnation does somewhat better, but even so, the original is hard to shake.

Flumph you might be more worried about.

Returning to the original point of this post, one of my groups has just met a slaad.  We'll see how it goes for them.

Heads up for any of my players

Any players in any of my games checking in here - I am not abandoning you, I just can't get into the site.

Odatink Heiroing

Irritating as word verification is, I like their latest effort.

This has a bit of a ring to it, I think.  As others have pointed out, sometimes in their efforts to get us to prove we're not robots, Google comes up with a goodie. 

Odatink is a character waiting to happen.  I am starting to see him.  A slightly querulous dabbler.  A mage of some kind - it's not a name that screams "I have biceps and I'm not afraid to use them" - although I suppose he might be. 

"My parents gave me this stupid name and I've spent my whole life proving I'm packed with testosterone in response."

Who or what is Odatink?

Yes - I am procrastinating as I work out the opening scenes of Odysseus.

Otyughs - unsung heroes of garbage disposal

I've always had a soft spot for otyughs.

As you can see from the picture above, they are a kind of ambulant octopus/Venus flytrap hybrid.  Ecologically speaking, they're very useful.  There is nothing an otyugh can't eat.  These supreme scavengers can survive almost anywhere and are suprisingly common in urban environments. 

I have this mental image of tiny otyughs being given as gifts and then flushed away when they get too big.  The fantasy equivalent of alligators in the sewers, but more useful.  Maybe somewhere there is a society that works to rehome outgrown otyughs.  Or, as is the case in my version of Freeport (City of Adventure!  City of Thieves!  City of 1001 Surprises!  City of Pirates! - yes, Ankh-Morpok in a parallel universe) - in Freeport, the humble otyugh holds an honoured place.

If ever a city needed municipal otyughs, it's this one.  So Freeport has GarbageBeGone.  This is a highly respectable firm which makes a decent living hiring out otyughs as mobile garbage disposal units.  Each otyugh is accompanied by a team of handlers.  The creatures are trained to an extent (they are not completely unintelligent) and with patience can be taught to devour specific types of matter.

While GarbageBeGone prefer to get their otyughs young and train them up, they do have a capture and rehabilitation programme for feral otyughs.  Given sufficient time and patience, the otyughs will bond with their handling team - helpful when one considers some of the places a garbage disposal team might end up. 

It's all about passion.

Looking down my blog list this morning, I came across this interesting question from Charlie Warren, over at The Semi-Retired Gamer.

What follows isn't really an answer to his question, it's more of an early morning rumination on RPGs, why they appeal to me and what they attempt to do.  There is the slight proviso that  this has relevance to me as I'm attempting to add another setting to the towering heap in the form of Mikelmerck.  Let's leave the slowness of that process out of the equation for now.

RPGs are about drama and interactivity.  Communal story-telling, in short.  In order to tell a communal story, you need a shared world for that story to happen in - which is why there is such a plethora of game settings.

In the case of Mikelmerck, I don't yet have to make any really hard decisions about how much information is too much.  It's still evolving.  I am simply finding bits of intriguing story and putting them out there without much of an attempt to impose a system on them.  Looking at the work so far, what I have for the most part is a series of adventure seeds.  These are places players might go, people they might meet, events they might encounter and creatures they may run across.  Any of them could lead to a story.

If I was in a position to GM such a game, that might well be all I'd want.  I respond to story rather than system.  In fact I usually ignore system in favour of whether or not I like the setting.  It was designed for Runequest rather than 4e?  So what.  If it has images I like, people and places I want to visit, something I can feel passionate about, I'll use it.

Heading back to the original question, I'm slightly surprised to find that I don't need or even want that much information as a player or a GM.  What I do want is passion.  Information is just mechanics.  Mechanics can be got.  Imagination, passion and desire to be part of a world is something else. 

That's what I want.  There's a lot of it out there.

Splitting the party - everybody's doing it

Suddenly I'm not running four games.  Now I'm running seven.

Since the Lost City party decided to split up, the Tombs II team have followed suit.

There are valid reasons for those choices, but I now find myself attempting to run consecutive combats for Lost City.  This morning I made a crucial error when I thought one party member was dealing with Trignotarb royalty when in fact he was supposed to be several miles away fighting a spider invasion.

So far I haven't stuffed up the Tombs II  group who are mercifully  not in combat right now.  They however, have upped the ante yet again by splitting themselves into three groups.  Again, they have valid reasons.

At this rate, multiple personality disorder may be beckoning.

If the Den of the Slave Takers party decide to follow the trend I'll really worry. Luckily Tombs I have no good reason to split that I can see, but I may be underestimating them.

Craving

This is silly.

I'm up to my neck in stuff that must be done.

And yet ... and yet ...

The craving will not leave me.  My head is bursting with games I want to play in and games I want to run.  These are some of my current yearnings.  They're in no particular order.  Most likely the prospect of running or playing in any of them is very slight, but you never know.  Don't ask, don't get.

The Shab-al-Hiri Roach
This one is a charming tale of academic possession.  Players are staff and students of a university.  All are prepared to use any means possible to get ahead.  If that means ingesting a demonic bug, so be it.  I love this whole notion.  I grew up in a highly academic family and spent a lot of my childhood at various cybernetics conferences.  Believe me, the Roach is mild compared to the real thing.  Also more fun.

Castle Falkenstein
And here we have a wondrous swashbuckling mix of steampunk and romantic heroism set in an alternate Europe.  As a passionate advocate of Anthony Hope and all his works, how can I not want to play this?

Chronica Feudalis
Ah, Chronica Feudalis - you bonkers re-imagining of life in a 12th century monastery where monks gather in the cellar to play covert games.  The book is a thing of joy.  Beautifully presented, elegantly written and with an interesting rules system.

Dogs in the Vineyard
From the fertile mind of Vincent Baker comes a West that Never Was.  In stark contrast to some of the others on this list, players roam the country bringing the Word to the unknowing and rooting out injustice.  Injustice leads to unrighteousness and pride and that way lies doom.  Think of it as "The Crucible" with added patchwork coats.

Everway
A Christmas present from my old friend Chris (find him over at Bladesharp).  This is a box of unalloyed crazy and is begging to either be played or incorporated into something else.  Possibly both.  I mentioned I have a Sigil passage coming up for one of my groups.  Maybe, just maybe.

Houses of the Blooded
John Wick's world is one I've wanted to play in ever since I first read about the Ven.  In common with a lot of these, the book itself is a beautiful thing.  Immersive, wonderfully illustrated and with a glorious level of dottiness with the annotations attached to the illustrations and the quotes from old Ven literature.  Also appealing is the notion that players must operate within this world and by the rules of this particular society in order to survive.

Mythic Russia
I found this at UK Games Con about three years ago.  Love at first sight.  I have a lot of Russian blood and a long-standing love of all things Slavic and this takes me right back to my childhood and my mum telling me Russian fairy stories she learned from her father.  "Once upon a time, east of the sun and west of the moon, there was a different place, but not too different ..."

Any takers?

Where the worlds meet

The more I write about the mechanics of drama, rehearsals and gaming, the more I become aware of how close they are.  I am sure this should be obvious, but like many things, the realisation has come to me quite slowly.  Piecemeal, at least.

GMing and directing have an enormous amount in common.  In both cases, when it works well, you are facilitating creativity.   When it doesn't work, you are basically a tedious nagbag.

Naturally enough, I prefer the first option, but accept that part of the job will consist of doing the second.  My aim is to try to do as much facilitation and as little nagging as possible.

The only problem with this revelation is that I'm now quite likely to start demanding the players know their lines and telling casts to roll a save v daze.

This could go badly.

On PbPs - another basic primer

Over at Paizo, threads pop up fairly regularly asking how to run a PbP and I'm jotting down some thoughts about that here.

There are many more potential players than potential GMs.
GM dropout or burnout is responsible for the vast majority of PbP deaths.

So, how do you start one, how to you keep it running and how do you keep your own interest going?

Planning

However much you want to run a whole adventure path bringing the players from novice wet-behind-the-ears adventurers to super-charged world changers, accept right now that you can't.

Plan one adventure at a time. You can build from one adventure to the next and create a campaign that way, but if you set out to run all six modules of The Curse of the Crimson Throne you are setting yourself up for a world of heartbreak.

PbP is slow. In a three-hour live gaming session you can reasonably expect to get through at least one combat encounter and a certain amount of plot, negotiation and rambling around. In a PbP you may well be looking at 3 months.

Look at your material right now and prune it. Be ruthless. Read the adventure with a critical eye and ask yourself which encounters further the plot. Look at the maps and ask yourself which ones are necessary. On average, you will need to trim out at least one third of a pre-written module. If it doesn't progress the story, ditch it.

If you are running a homebrew, it's easier to make those cuts. However, it's your heart that breaks when all your carefully crafted subplots have to vanish. Trust me. They do have to vanish. You may be able to work some of them back in, but don't count on it. Running a homebrew requires a bigger investment from players and unless you live online, you can't possibly hope to answer all the questions that would take 10 seconds at the table and may eat a week of PbP time.

While this may seem like brutal railroading, be aware that the timescale of PbP means that a lot of plot points will be missed. If something is important, you need to say it loud and clear. And then say it again. Your players aren't stupid, but something mentioned in passing five pages ago can easily be missed. You will do yourself and your players a huge favour if you condense and telescope down to the essentials. If it matters, tell them.

16 archers may seem like a very cool encounter.  Just be aware before you run it that updating those 16 archers is going to take a lot of your time.  Maybe a couple of hours of it until the players start killing them.  Consider reducing it to 6 rather more awesome archers.

Brutal pruning makes room for your players to build their own bits of plot. More on that below.

You will get player attrition. The chance of the same party existing in 6 months time is negligible. Keep that in mind and have ways of getting new players into the game without breaking the flow. Easy in urban settings, not so straightforward in the middle of a dungeon.

Run something you like or can turn into something you like. You will be looking at this baby for a very, very long time. Starting a game you're only half-invested in is doom before you even ask for players.


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You've got your adventure. Now get your players.

At risk of stating the obvious, be clear from the outset. Include the following information as a minimum.

System - is it OSR, 4e, 3.5, Pathfinder, whacky thing you knocked up on the fly one drunken evening.

Starting level and character creation rules - self-evident, but important.

Setting - delving through the pygmy infested jungles of Rythortan is not going to require the same players as your high level diplomacy game negotiating with Grazz't. Players keen to build cavalier types will be justifiably unhappy if you don't warn them that they'll be spending a lot of time on boats. In an ideal world, any PC should be able to operate in any setting, but the reality tends to be that PbP PCs may only get the one adventure to show their chops. Don't let someone build a character they can't have fun with in your game.

Your own expectations - this is important. You need to state clearly what you want from your players. Posting once a day, 24 hour deadline or you get GMPCed in combat, notice of absence if possible. Whatever it is, get it out there. Corollary to this: stick to it. If you say you expect people to post within 24 hours of their combat turn coming up, make sure you do act on their behalf. (This is one of my rules and the one I try hardest to stick to).

If your game is something with obscure rules, can the potential players get easy access to them? If there's an online resource, post a link. Make it easy for people to find out about your game.


Tips to make your life easier

Ask your players to keep track of their own hp and conditions and to make sure that they have a complete character sheet available and up to date where you can see it. If you need to run that character, you need that information.

Consider asking your players if they will let you roll init on their behalf. Time zones being what they are, it can take two days to get into combat if you have to wait for everyone to check in and post. Nearly every player I've ever met would rather post a set of cool things they've done than an init roll.

If you provide maps, keep them updated. Players need to know where they are in a battle. I use Flickr which occasionally refuses to update properly. It's my biggest bugbear.

Try to post all the information the players need in some easy to read format. If 16 archers all attack, you are going to have to make sure that each of those attacks is posted clearly. If any of those attacks have fancy effects, you need to say so. Let the players know if they're injured or blinded, or drowning in toxic mud without making them wade through an incomprehensible paragraph.   Like this one.


Running the game and troubleshooting

Assume everyone is an adult and wants to have fun.

Your primary job as the GM of a PbP is to be available and to keep nudging. Let the players know if you're too tired to post. Tell them you're going to be without internet for three days. Post regularly. You have to. If you keep checking in to see what the players are doing, they will keep checking in to see what's happened to their characters. It also means that if your internet does fry for some inexplicable reason and you can't get a message to them, they tend to know something is wrong and you haven't just abandoned them.

If you are burning out, losing interest or don't have time to run the game properly, let people know.  If it's a temporary issue, ask the players if they're happy to accept a change of pace for a while - even putting the game on hiatus if you need to.  However terrible it feels to make those posts, it is far, far better to do so than to jump ship without warning.

Be prepared to be ruthless. If you have a group of four or five great players and everyone is constantly waiting on a single laggard, you may well have to boot the offending player. You don't have to be rude about it, but you need to deal with the issue. Some players just need a different pace or a different game. You are not going to be the ideal match up for every player every time. Accept it and don't berate yourself.

You will make mistakes, so be up front about them. In general unless the mistake is completely game-breaking, don't try to revise it. Just suck it up and move on, implementing whatever it was you got wrong from now on. Similarly, if players make mistakes, sort out the issue as quickly as you can and move on.

One of the wonderful things about PbP is that you and the players can develop characters much more organically and improvisationally than at the gaming table. Suspension of belief is easier when you can't see the large bearded gent playing the tiny girly halfling. This works both ways. Players give you a lot of clues about their PCs through their posts. Read them. Use them. It's game material on a plate. It is free plot. Pick up on their randomly expressed thoughts, file them away and use them. Make it personal.

Enjoy what your players bring to the table and let your own imagination roll.  You have time to look up the rules and world-build, so use it.

The home game

The home game is on the go again, which is a source of happiness.  Much as I love my PbPs, there is still something special about playing face to face.  It's the social aspect and the chat and the cheers and groans and general interactiveness that is so wonderful.  Nothing says D&D like rolling out the map, finding the biscuits and using random bits of tat to represent monsters.  We discovered long ago that anything edible is a bad idea.  "I'm sorry, I think I just ate kobold 7".  "Was the paperclip you or the enemy archer?".

Thanks to UK Games Expo and GenCon, we now have many more minis and paper models around.  In theory at least, it should be easier to identify who is who, but despite some serious attempts at labelling, combat is often held up while we hunt for the bag of orcs we know someone put somewhere safe last week.  After 5 minutes or so, we substitute.  "So, these kobolds are rats and the purple worm is a troll.  Everyone clear on that?"

Due to the various family commitments of the original players, the group is currently down to four (five if work permits) and son and heir is GMing it.  He's very good and the campaign is a lot of fun.  Son writes a lot of his own monsters.  I rather like this.  It adds a big element of uncertainty and makes sense of using knowledge checks.

Our group of four contains the following.  Anandor the eladrin wizard.  He lurks.  He lurks really, really well as he has a high Dex and his favourite tactic is to lean against a wall and pretend it isn't him firing magic missiles at minions.

Brian Flowerbuds the battlemind is our melee specialist.  Also, for some incomprehensible reason, our diplomat.  This makes no sense at all as his player nearly got us all killed by the Thieves Guild when we went on a polite visit and he diplomatically offered to fight them all.

Roger the skald is our healer.  As a pixie, he spends quite a lot of time riding around in backpacks, but when the dice start rolling, he charges into battle screaming warsongs.  It's terrifying.  He is clearly a feegle.

His best friend is the satyr pictured above.  Baldwin is a warlock.  His sole ambition for many years was the acquisition of a wine cellar.  Sadly, he and Roger were captured by agents of Vecna and spent some time not quite themselves.  Since their return, they have a strong interest in finding out exactly what happened to them.  They'd quite like whatever it was to not happen to anyone else either.

Thus are adventuring parties born.

Party time

A quick canter through the ongoing adventures of my various PbP games - as much for my own benefit as any dubious interest it may have for the casual reader.

The Tombs teams are both at a crossroads.  In the case of Group II, they have plunged through a portal and ended up in an alleyway stinking of fish.  Amazingly (and indeed for the first time ever), nobody is attacking them.


Group I are about to embark on the dispatching the architect of the Tomb of Horrors.  They have to get there first, which is an endeavour in itself.  Or should be.  I've already run this scenario with Group II and it was pretty tough for them. 

Group II comprise a well-bred tiefling warlord (almost certainly educated at Roedean), a lecherous wizard, a kickass halfling monk, a half-elf assassin and a rather insecure paladin. 

Group I have a serious masked avenger, a lunatic half-elf invoker, a deva attempting to atone for a lifetime as a rakshasa, a half-orc rogue raised by dwarves and a hobgoblin battlemind who moves like a tiger on vaseline.  With a flail. 

One of the joys of running the same adventure for two separate parties is watching the way they approach the same challenges entirely differently.

The Lost City gang have done something I would normally frown upon as it's generally reckoned insane.  They have split their eight strong party into two.  One bunch are dabbling in insect politics, while the other lot have discovered a bizarre race living in the ruins.  Both groups have a lot of information to take in and some interesting stuff to do.  I'm thoroughly intrigued to know how this will work out.

With four per group, it's probably not as crazy as it might sound to split up.  Plus, they're all good players and know the risks.  From my GMing perspective, it makes a lot of sense as between them they can pick up twice as much plot and information and it allows the individual characters a little more shine time - hard to manage with eight.

The 4e taster game (Den of the Slave Takers) is rattling along.  They sluiced through the first encounter with considerable ease and are about to enter the mushroomy depths of a crazed halfling priestess's hideout. 

Frankly, I'm agog with all of it.