Review: Dem Bones, Dem Bones

No, not a product called Dem Bones. One of the big timesavers for me is pre-painted miniatures, and here is a comparison of three lines. I’ve chosen skeletons since I have a skeleton figure in each line. Here they are on a 5mm grid:

Left to right:

• D&D B8, LE/CE3 Warrior Skeleton by WotC from the now-defunct D&D Miniatures range. This guy is a monster, 39mm tall if you add up the lengths of his limbs, spine etc. The paint job is basic – he was one of the early sculpts – but the pose shows the right aggressive attitude, even if his sword arm is in an unusual position. I think he is shouting “Die, adventurers, die!”
• Skeleton, 7 of 40, from the WizKids/Paizo range. Probably about 35mm high if erect. All of them are made of soft plastic, but this one is slightly stiffer than the other two; like many of his colleagues in the Paizo Wizkids range, he has a base, then little blobs of plastic under his feet, raising him by an extra millimetre or so. He has a permanently surprised look to him, as if unexpected adventurers have barged into his crypt from his right side, and reminds me of C-3P0. Probably the most realistic paint job. He is saying “What are you doing here?”
• Skeleton with sword from the Reaper Legendary Adventures range. Again, I estimate 35mm high if erect. Reaper is the only non-random line; you select your monsters singly or in small groups, and can see what you’re getting, whereas you buy the other two lines blind, in random booster packs. This fellow is also the only one who doesn’t have a full 1” disk base, his is slightly smaller and oval. However, a bit of superglue and a spare base will fix that. He is my favourite of the three, and in my mind he is saying “Oh yeah? Come get some, meatshield!”

Not for the first time, my cellphone takes a blurry picture, but you can find sharper images on the web, if interested.

Like all other miniatures, scale creep is rampant. Not that it matters that much, but I confess to a mild annoyance at seeing figures advertised as “28mm” or “heroic 28mm” when they are actually 35mm. The average miniature height was roughly 25mm in 1975 or so, and 35 years later it is 35mm. I hope still to be playing when I’m 100, but at this rate, “28mm” figures then will be nearly 54mm high.

Shadows of Keron–Intermission the First

The last session of Citadel of the Winged Gods started late, which meant we finished in mid-combat. A lot of players can’t make this weekend, and since some of their PCs may die in this fight, I’m waiting for them to be available again before we move on.

Meanwhile, here is some dance music and some tips and tricks I’ve developed or stolen over the last couple of months.

Poker Chips

These are widely used for bennies. I bought a cheap pack of 100 chips in four colours, and we now use blue for bennies, red for wounds, and yellow for fatigue levels. Until we switched to the No Power Points optional rule, we also used white for power points. Red and yellow chips are stacked under the character’s figure, blue and white near the character sheet. Blue ones in particular are thrown around the table as bennies are spent and awarded.

Generally, this speeds up play considerably and eliminates record keeping, except for experience points (and we only bother about those at session end). There’s one exception though: A couple of the players are compelled to fidget with their bennies, and every ten minutes or so somebody drops one, and has to dive under the table to get it back. They do this with their dice, too, but the benny chips give them more things to drop.

In a typical session I have five players, so there are 15 bennies with them, and 7 with me; so 25 blue ones isn’t really enough. Likewise when power points were in play, two spellcasters, one of whom had taken extra power points, meant I’d already run out. So I’d recommend at least 50 of each, and plan to get more.

Crib Sheets

One thing which slowed me down enormously for the first few sessions was the need to look up monster stats, which means flipping through the rulebook and setting book. I dealt with this firstly by printing out the bestiary section, and secondly by copying and pasting monster statblocks out of the PDFs of scenarios I’m using – I have a good feel now for how far the PCs will progress in their next session, so I can keep the list down to a couple of pages.

I also found that I had to ask players for stats about their characters frequently, which again broke the flow of play. So the key factors for each one, which turned out to be Charisma, Parry, Toughness, and Combat Rating, go in a table at the front of the monster cheat sheet.

I started with a full copy of the PC statblock, but this isn’t really necessary. In SW, because your skills and attributes are dice, there is very little to look up during play. It is useful to know the PCs’ Hindrances, as they determine who will react in what way, but for the most part players can be trusted to act in character during a session, and between sessions, Hindrances mostly come into play in exposition – see below – when I have plenty of time to look them up.

All of this gets stuffed in the display book I use for quick reference.

Exposition

Generally, sessions start and end with a piece of exposition explaining what happened between scenes of combat and PC decisions. Since I co-ordinate the group by email, after each session I send out a short update which summarises what they did, and sketches out what they do between sessions. That means the parts of an adventure where the PCs have no chance to influence events can be handled outside the session.

I need to keep an eye on this, though, as there is a danger it will gloss over the use of non-combat skills, and focus PCs in on a narrow skill set (probably arcane skills, Fighting, Healing, Notice, and Shooting). That would be undesirable.

Meanwhile, the only PC whose player doesn’t read the emails is The Warforged, and since we established early on that he is an amnesiac construct with a defective memory core, his being confused is entirely in character.

Character Sheets

For the time being at least, I’ve abandoned character generation software in favour of very simple character sheets maintained as word processor files. This makes it easy to print out a new sheet when the old one is lost, mutilated, etc. while making it easy to transfer sheets between computers. It loses the advantage of checking my arithmetic, but Savage Worlds is simple enough that I shouldn’t need that.

There are a couple of advantages I hadn’t considered, though.

I added an Advances table to the sheets, mainly so that I could track advances like attribute improvements, which can only be taken once per rank. The players quickly started filling in advances they hadn’t taken yet, to remind themselves how they want their characters to develop; some of them are clearly thinking 4-5 advances ahead. I’ve incorporated this into the sheets by adding planned advances in grey text.

I can also add in favourite rules to specific character sheets. For example, only Nessime is a Holy Warrior, so only she needs to know about repulsing supernatural evil; only The Warforged regularly uses a shield bash, so only he needs to know how that works. This saves me cluttering up my GM cheat sheets with stuff I don’t need myself.

Shadows of Keron, Episode 10: Temple of the Frog God

Most of the players couldn’t make this week’s session, so when one turned up unexpectedly I had 20 minutes to figure something out. The process went something like this…

SETUP

1. I can’t carry on with the current adventure, so let’s have a flashback. Buster has jet black skin and is kind of evil, being a drow originally, so he’s obviously a High Tricarnian. An earlier adventure together would work.
2. The last couple of things I looked at were the Pool of Endless Froglings in WotC’s Book of Challenges, and canals in the Dominions. OK, something is eating canal slaves in Tricarnia and the dynamic duo are sent in to sort it out.
3. I can use orc stats for the degenerate Frog Men and orc chieftain stats for the boss. I’ll make him a priest, so he can have AB (Miracles), Boost/Lower Trait, and Bolt.
4. Need a map. First thing out of the drawer is a pile of Wydraz hex dungeon tiles, they’ll do.

At this point I pick half a dozen tiles that look interesting and slap them on the table to make a map, like this:

Then I need to scribble some scenario notes, which look like this – you don’t need more than this unless you’re going to publish the scenario.

PLAY

Buster and The Warforged entered from the canal bank. Nobody in Tricarnia much cares about dead slaves per se, but fewer slaves means less rice, thus less food or money, and the local Priest Prince isn’t standing for that.

They walk brazenly across between the pillars in the entrance hall, and are noticed by the half-dozen Frog Men in the barracks, who attack immediately (neither PC knows this, but they are defending their spawning pool, so they’re in no mood to parley).

Six resprayed orcs was enough to get Buster down to two Wounds and one benny, and The Warforged down to one Wound and one benny, so the CR was pretty much bang on. I think I could have killed Buster with wild attacks and gangup, but he made good use of the pillars to restrict how many Frog Men could get at him at once.

Once the Frog Men were down, the crocodile in the opposite room decided to take advantage of the free lunch. The PCs locked themselves in the barracks, and since there was food lying around it didn’t have to fight for, the croc had no reason to pursue them.

It was at this point the PCs realised they had no healing magic, and only Buster had the Healing skill. Rolling at –4 didn’t help, so they waited for the croc to finish and then snuck back to town to get healed up, which drained the cash they’d found in the barracks area.

Returning, they pressed on to the pool room, where they found bits of missing slave floating in the pool while something they couldn’t see nibbled at them. The Warforged realised that as long as he had bennies, his chances of blowing himself up were very slight, so unleashed half a dozen Blast spells into the pool as a fantasy version of grenade fishing. Since one of them reached the giddy heights of 37 damage, I decided any swarms remaining would go and hide somewhere for a while. The Warforged walked across the pool bottom while Buster used his superior climbing skill to go around the sides.

Next up, the altar room, where the Big Bad and two minions awaited them – I figured while they were healing, he’d work out what had happened, and close up to protect the spawning pool. The minions parked themselves on either side of the door, and neither PC wanted to go through, so the Big Bad amused himself firing Bolts through the door at them (with a trapping of “big sticky frog tongue”).

After a few of those, The Warforged threw a Fear spell into the pack, causing the minions to flee, then charged into melee with the Big Bad, while Buster followed up the minions and killed them. A lengthy melee ensued, ending with the Big Bad bleeding out on the floor.

They discovered that moving the emerald Frog God statue made the whole temple shake in alarming ways, so put it back while they searched the rest of the complex. At the bottom of the chasm, I put an exceedingly large and angry Frog Thing (resprayed Giant Worm) as a warning that the scenario was over. So of course they tied off a rope to give them an escape route, and jumped on top of it, managing to Shake it with a violent Bolt first. Once it recovered, they started climbing back up. only to realise the Big Bad was crawling over to the chasm intent on chopping their rope before he died. Unfortunately, he died first and they got back out.

Completely failing to think of putting a weight on the statue’s plinth, they grabbed it and ran. The complex collapsed, making a huge hole in the side of the canal – this may be why they left Tricarnia in the first place.

My creativity must be recharging.

Review: An Echo Resounding

I see Kevin Crawford has written a book for domain-level play in Labyrinth Lord, and given that I’ve liked everything else he has released, it was a no-brainer to buy that as well.

This is Sine Nomine Publishing’s take on the presumed end game of OD&D, namely PCs in charge of their own fiefs.

Summary: 111 page Labyrinth Lord supplement covering the creation and operation of domains. Labyrinth Lord or some other D&D style game required; SNP’s Red Tide useful, but not essential.

INTRODUCTION (1 page)

This explains the contents and aims of the book. Key goals are that ruling a domain is optional for PCs, and that domains should serve as a source of adventures and consistent background for the GM whether any, all, or none of the PCs want to be a feudal lord.

DOMAIN PLAY IN A CAMPAIGN (4 pages)

This expands on the key goals, and recommends embedding domain-level play structures in a campaign from the beginning, emphasising the value of a clear political landscape. While traditionally OD&D assumes that everyone becomes a landholder at about 9th level, this book assumes that some will, some won’t; those who do will take up control at different levels; and those who don’t are still useful henchmen for NPC lords. More on how that works later.

Meanwhile, the book acknowledges that some players just want to stay freebooters their whole careers, and offers advice on handling their concerns – will they be forced into running a fief, will their PCs be edged out of the limelight by those who do? No, because adventures can be structured to retain their involvment.

It’s also notable that the recommended campaign focus is smaller for An Echo Resounding than for Adventurer-Conqueror-King, recently reviewed on this very blog. While ACK looks to the level of kingdoms and empires, AER focuses on a small border region of a few towns and maybe one city. (If you want to grow beyond that, the Domain Management chapter has ideas for it.)

CREATING CAMPAIGN REGIONS (30 pages)

This is the heart of the book; how to set up your campaign so that it will grow easily and naturally into domain-level play. As with all SNP rules, the GM is warned against burnout from overdoing the setting creation process. The design goal for this chapter is that you should be able to create a borderland region and its political structure in a single afternoon, elaborating on it later as play dictates.

The region is up to 300 miles on a side, and contains a number of locations, each of which is just a place the PCs might be interested in; locations are rated for Military, Wealth and Social values, and also have traits – similar to the tags in other SNP products – and obstacles. Traits are capsule descriptions of things that make the location unique, while obstacles are problems it must overcome, usually by hiring adventurers to deal with them. Finally, locations have assets, used in the Domain Management and Mass Combat rules later.

Region setup is simple. Start with a map, either a hexmap or a free-form sketch; the book notes in passing that a map isn’t really necessary, but by this point I already have one in mind.

On the map, the GM places one city of 10-15 thousand people, four towns of one or two thousand inhabitants, and five ruins or places of mystery for the PCs to investigate. For each town, place a Resource location – a source of some valuable commodity such as food, lumber, gems or whatever – a little way from towns or cities; this makes it easier for conflicts over them to develop.

Next, mark likely routes between cities and towns on the map. Halfway along each route is a monster lair, preying on the traffic; disposing of these is what adventurers do.

All of these numbers can be scaled up proportionally for bigger or more well-developed areas, or just because you feel like it; but I think this would give me enough to be going on with.

Each location (by now you have a couple of dozen) is fleshed out with traits from a table for that type of location. Each city, town or resource location gets an obstacle – initially, the obstacle is what has prevented a larger polity from seizing effective control of it. If you’re using Red Tide as well, this is where you roll up the site tags for those locations.

(PCs may well establish their own locations, even if they don’t control them; remember that a location is something that interests PCs, so expect to find more and mark them on the map as play progresses.)

Now the actual Domains appear; these are the towns, cities or other areas which are the movers and shakers in the campaign. Many of the towns and cities have neither the capability nor the desire to play a role on the regional stage, but you need some that are. Domains in AER consist of 2-3 locations which act together and are controlled by one leadership. Those leaders have somehow come to terms with the local obstacles, but anyone else wanting to take over will need to make their own arrangements.

Next, the Hall of Infamy. These are the regional-level Big Bads who are foreshadowed in early adventures, and may eventually be taken down by the PCs. They consist of the Prime Evil, a challenge worthy of the maximum level you expect PCs to reach in the campaign; two lesser threats, a match for 9th level PCs; and four villains who will give mid-level parties a run for their money, each of whom probably occupies one of the lairs placed earlier. Lesser enemies are bit parts, with no ongoing role in the campaign story.

Again, this approach can be scaled to give more foes if you wish.

Two special cases are considered; venturing afar, i.e. adventures which go a long way off-map, and retrofitting the system to an existing map.

If the party ventures afar on a specific quest, then all you need are a few locations they will pass through on their way. If they’re moving in for the long term, you need another region.

Retrofitting is for a GM with an existing campaign. Take your map, pick a region, and pick which towns and cities matter. The others continue to exist, but for whatever reason are not strategically valuable to Domains. The purpose of this is to focus the GM’s effort on a manageable number of locations. From this point on, proceed as if generating a new region. If you have existing power structures, they become Domains. In name, they might all be part of the same empire, but this just drives conflict underground.

ACK bases its domain generation on demographics; AER does not, but provides a page of instructions on reverse-engineering the demographics from the domain should you wish.

Next, a series of tables to flesh out locations; each outcome influences the owning domain’s Military, Wealth and/or Social ratings, usually by adding +2 to one of them. The city and town tables cover origin (why were they built?); activities (why are they still here?); and obstacles (what’s in their way?). The ruins tables cover its nature (what was it before?), its traits (why would you want to control it?); and obstacles (why don’t you?). The resources tables show the type of resource, and obstacles to obtaining it. Lair tables determine the lair’s nature.

Remember those pesky obstacles? As a Domain ruler, you have two ways of dealing with them – either commission a party of adventurers to rid you of them, or take us a Solve an Obstacle action and the correct unit type to have a crack at them. Until you have dealt with the obstacle, it reduces your Military, Social and Wealth ratings. This would have made more sense to me as part of the next chapter, but that’s not an enormous problem as it is the last section in this one.

DOMAIN MANAGEMENT (12 pages)

Domains are, in a way, a different type of character. Consider its Military, Wealth and Social scores as its attributes, and its assets as equipment. It has saving throws, used in overcoming obstacles. Domains are managed in domain turns, each lasting roughly one month of game time and intended to be handled in 10-15 minutes of effort at the end of each session. PC-controlled domains get two actions per turn, NPC-controlled domains only one.

Actions include making or destroying assets or locations, moving or repairing an asset, accumulating wealth, attacking a location, resolving an obstacle, punish a scapegoat for your atrocity, and so forth. Note that siphoning off funds for personal use is also an action.

Assets include shrines, military units, charity, friendship with demihumans, slaves, and many more. Each affects the domain’s Military, Wealth and/or Social ratings. Assets cost Wealth to maintain, which places an upper limit on how much power a domain can project. Assets are assigned by the GM based on the location’s role in the game.

Domains require at least one location as the seat of their power, and most wish to expand. They do this by resolving the obstacle at a new location, then persuading the locals to accept their rule. Multiple competing domains may be interested in the same location at the same time. Conquering a location by force destroys its assets, and it must then be rebuilt; if you use diplomacy, the location might give up some assets willingly.

If the obstacle can be resolved by simply throwing money, arrows or spells at it, then resolution is probably a domain action. Otherwise, it’s an adventure for the PCs.

Meanwhile, at home, it’s tempting for the ruler to hurry up domain actions by executing dissidents and committing atrocities. These give bonuses on the saving throw for the current problem, but penalties on Military, Wealth and Social ratings until the ruler dies or pins the blame on a scapegoat. (Is that a scenario I hear, offstage?) More gentle management, however, means any rebels who do arise are better equipped.

It’s good to be the king. The domain ruler (or rulers) get a cash income from their domain, and can call on its assets (temples, troop units, magical schools) to do things for him. Rulers can appoint viziers to do the boring parts for them.

Vast domains are handled by scaling things up. The city becomes an urbanised section of a province, the troop unit becomes a thousand archers instead of the usual hundred, the map gets bigger.

This chapter concludes with an example of domain-level play.

MASS COMBAT (14 pages)

Disputes between domains are often military in nature, and thus a simple mass combat system is needed. This chapter provides it; it has a turn sequence much like that for personal combat, and units representing about 100 humanoids, a lair’s-worth of other creatures, or individual champions such as the PCs, moving about on a rough map of the battlefield.

In effect, these rules use the personal combat rules, with each figure representing a unit. Heroes can fight alone, or join a unit to give it bonuses. Some spells can be used only against heroes, others can also be targeted at troop units.

Sieges are handled in an abstract manner. Assets can be destroyed, and may have to be rebuilt; troops can gain experience, which increases their unit’s attack rolls, morale, hit dice, AC and/or special qualities. Not very far, and not very fast, but it does.

HEROES (6 pages)

Once PCs reach a certain level, they begin to gain parallel levels as a Champion. Each time they gain a Champion level, they may choose an appropriate special ability or “gift” from a list of several dozen, which makes them valuable to a domain. (NPCs don’t get these abilities as a rule, to make them simpler for the GM to adjudicate.) In addition, they get one gift based on their race and class.

Gifts will bring you followers, give a troop unit you attach yourself to combat bonuses, or modify your domain’s MSW ratings.

The bonuses from gifts don’t stack, so there’s no point two PCs taking the same one, or one PC taking the same one twice.

I can immediately see assassination scenarios springing from this. (“Ragnar’s Martial Glory grants his Domain +4 Military, I want you lot to kill him so they become conquerable.”)

THE WESTMARK (38 pages)

This is a detailed example of the rules above, in the form of one of the regions in Red Tide, with a colour hex-map for the GM, a much less detailed black and white one for the players (or as a basis for a different region entirely) and 40 locations fleshed out with game statistics and plot hooks.  As well as being a how-to guide, it is usable as an “instant” region, or can be mined for locations etc. to insert into your own game.

The book closes with an index and the OGL. No forms for the GM this time; none are really necessary. Hex paper is optional, and you probably have a source of that already. If not, try Dragonsfoot.

CONCLUSIONS

The obvious comparisons for me are with OD&D and Adventurer-Conqueror-King.

Even re-reading OD&D with 35 years’ gaming experience, I can see that my PC could use his money to build a castle and clear a domain, but then what? It’s unclear. Yes, I could work it out for myself, but the 30-40 hours per week I put into RPGs in my twenties are no longer viable for me, and dropping another $10 or so to get much of the work done for me is a very fair trade.

Reading ACK left me with the feeling that I’d love to use it, but wouldn’t have the time or (frankly) determination to see it through.

Reading An Echo Resounding left me keen to start using it, right away, confident that it could grow organically in whatever time I gave it.

Overall Rating: 5 out of 5.

Quick Reference

No matter how I resist it, I always find myself making my own GM screen or quick reference sheets for any RPG I run, because I’m never completely happy with anyone else’s sheets. That time has now come for Savage Worlds.

I’m not sharing the sheets themselves, partly because of copyright concerns and partly because I use a brutally simple layout, since I have a habit of printing the same file on various paper sizes and using it on several different electronic devices; tables, bullet points and so forth do not survive such transitions.

Here is what I think should be on these sheets:

• Explanations of trait rolls and bennies.
• Combat summary, covering initiative, movement, Fighting, Shooting, damage, Soak rolls, incapacitation and injuries, combat options like ganging up and aiming, and the Fear table.
• Use of powers – most of this is on the character sheets, but I like to have the backlash rules with me.
• Setting rules, if any. (Not Multiple Languages, which can be covered on the character sheet – "speaks Common and three others".)
• NPCs. Stock allies, personalities, reaction tests, and a couple of monstrous abilities for instant monsters.

Earlier in my gaming career, I would have added character creation rules as well, but to be honest you don’t need character creation that often in the course of a campaign, and players can easily use an Experienced Soldier until they get around to creating a PC.

All of this fits on 4 sides of A4, 6 sides of A5, or 15 sides of 9×12 cm virtual paper for my Kindle. I think I’ll try running the next session from my Kindle, just to freak people out.

Laziness and One-Sheets

Setting chosen and matched up, I turn my attention to scenarios and adventures.

As an overall storyline, I think I’ll send the party on a quest from their current employer (the Minewatch paladins) to deliver the Holy Handkerchief to the fabled city of Gis, where they must deliver it to the master alchemist known only as the Ninth of Twelve. Experience teaches me that by the time they’ve got there, they will have forgotten about the city they set off from, and it can be quietly retired. The route will take them from the Independent Cities, through Kyros, Syranthia, Faberterra and the Borderlands, before arriving at Gis; based on the WHAA strategic move system, that’s about two years’ travel in game time.

The sort of episodic play we manage to fit in these days lends itself well to One-Sheets, the short tryout and convention scenarios Pinnacle makes freely available on its website. A quick snarf there yields me some 30 scenarios, plus I have four in the SWDE rulebook, one in the B&B book, and three free One-Sheets to go with the B&B setting. Scanning through those over the course of an evening, I think I can repurpose all the B&B, Solomon Kane, and Rippers One-Sheets, and most of the Deadlands or SWDE ones. The rest I set aside for future campaigns.

That gives me about 20 to run with before I need to start writing any; looking at my players’ commitments and my own over the coming year, we will have somewhere between 12 and 20 sessions depending on what crops up, so that will keep me going through the rest of this year, and probably into next year as well. I’ll start with The Carnival at Nal Sagath, I think, because I want to see how the dungeon generator works with players.

Laziness Knows No Bounds

Or so my wife tells me, bless her, when I don’t deal with her requests quickly enough. I’m feeling really lazy this year, so I shall start using a published setting and adventures. Setting first.

I like Beasts & Barbarians so much I’m going to shift my SW fantasy PCs into the Dread Sea Dominions; so, a few equivalences will be needed. Based on existing PCs and backstory, I need a couple of races, some languages, a couple of religions, and a map scale.

For races, I have one warforged among the regular players, and one half-orc, one evil hobbit, one dark elf, one vanilla wood elf, and one gnome among the intermittents.

Reading through the B&B book, it looks like good matches for orcs and "boggies" are Nandals and Pygmies respectively. Gnomes can also be reskinned as pygmies. The lady elf ranger can become an Amazon. The dark elf can come from a lost underground city.

The warforged is most easily explained as a construct from the Keronian Empire, who wandered across the Keronian Range into the Independent Cities. ("The animated statue is clearly Keronian work. How much will you take for it?")

These are just backstory changes, I won’t mess with the characters as generated. Future characters will probably need to be human, though, or I need to retcon the B&B setting to include other races, which is a lot more work.

Languages. Between them, the PCs speak…

• Common, Noble, and Elven, which all collapse into Imperial Syranthian.
• Scholar’s Tongue and Draconic, which both become Ancient Keronian.
• Black Speech, which becomes Nandal. B&B Nandals are less intelligent than normal SW orcs, mind.
• Tidecult, which I will replace with Valk.
• The boggie and gnome PCs also get Pygmy.

Religions. B&B notes that there are many minor religions in the Dominions which it doesn’t name or describe, so it’s easy to drop the Norse Pantheon and the cult of Athena in as minor religions worshipped only in a couple of Independent Cities; but even less work to call them the worship of the Lord of Thunder and Hulian, respectively.

For map scale, I’ll take a leaf from WHAA‘s book and just ignore it. Each month the PCs can move between the heartland and the countryside, the countryside and the border, or from the border of one state to the border of another.

I can switch the PCs into one of the Independent Cities, and put the dungeon and more D&D style monsters (e.g. goblins) in the Fallen Reign of Keron, which would explain why NPC expeditions to that blighted land never return. Why don’t the monsters emerge from Keron and spread across the world? I don’t know, I’ll see what the players come up with. However, I think probably only those with human blood can leave the Fallen Realm, which would explain why orcs and elves acquire humans in various ways to help them produce half-orcs and half-elves when they can – the children of these unlikely couplings scout out the world for their non-human parents, seeking a means of escape.

See how easy this is? It’s not just characters who have archetypes; monsters and settings do, too.

The Unbestiary

So-called because it isn’t really a bestiary.

We know three things from the Savage Worlds Rules As Written:

• d6 in a trait represents an average human, and d12 represents world-class capability.
• An average soldier has d6 in most relevant traits, while an experienced one has d8.
• The average PC archetype has a d10 in his or her primary traits.

So we can estimate trait levels as follows:

• d4: Below average.
• d6: Average for someone who does this for a living.
• d8: Trait level for an experienced professional.
• d10: Trait level for a hero (or antihero).
• d12: World-class trait.

Parry and Toughness can be worked out easily from the appropriate trait level, and melee weapons can be assumed to make best use of the character’s Strength.

Since this is all in the Rules As Written, at least in the Deluxe Edition, I no longer need the One Page Bestiary. Or indeed any Bestiary; I can make encounters up as I go along…

"Thinks: Ivan is a professional thief so he’ll have the Thief edge, and d8 in Agility, Lockpicking, Stealth and Streetwise. Everything else is a d6, including Strength, so he’ll have a shortsword to get the best damage he can."

Later:

"Since the PCs killed Ivan and he was reanimated by evil sorcerors, he now has the Undead attribute as well."

Or how about Pagurids? (Look it up!) Giant carrion-eaters of the seashore, not above producing their own carrion if necessary. Look like big hermit crabs, terracotta in colour.

Let’s see; d8 Strength, Vigor and Fighting, d6 in other attributes and Notice, +3 Toughness for the hard shell, and honkin’ big claws which attack for Str + d8. Job done.

Also, there is a lead to a further adventure once the PCs beat them off: Where do they get their shells from? Something pretty big, evidently. Possibly plate-armoured fighters, in which case the treasure is obvious, though they must then have some sort of tough secretion to fill up the holes they don’t want.

Pagurids took less than 60 seconds to invent and type (I was timing myself). This could even be the way SW was intended to be run.

Gotta love Savage Worlds.

One Page Bestiary Version 2

The One Page Bestiary is being reworked, as I reread Greywulf’s The Unconstrained GM and now have a better idea. Meanwhile, here it is, preserved for posterity:

“Less important NPCs, however, can be designed using a sort of shorthand. With this system, once the NPC’s career has been chosen, the referee merely decides whether the NPC is rated as Green, Experienced, Veteran or Elite. This ranking tells the referee what skill level the NPC has in Primary and Secondary skills related to his profession.” – 2300AD Director’s Guide.

My Savage Worlds games often use quick-and-dirty NPCs and monsters, and this is how I build them on the fly. It’s derived from the way that NPCs are handled in GDW’s 2300AD game.

STOCK NPCS

Stock NPCs have the same die type for any attribute or skill which is appropriate for their role in the scenario. (Use common sense here; a Seasoned soldier probably has Strength d8 and Fighting d8, but Knowledge: Archaeology d8 or Smarts d8 are unlikely.) Skills and attributes not relevant to the NPC’s role rarely come into play, but if they are needed, attributes default to d6 (normal human level) and skills to d4-2 (untrained). Stock NPCs are divided into four ranks, matching those for Player Characters:

• Novice (d6): Equivalent to d20 level 1-3. Arcanists have Bolt, Deflect, Healing, 10 Power Points. Fantasy fighters have leather armour and shortswords, Parry 5, Toughness 6 (1).
• Seasoned (d8): Equivalent to d20 level 4-6. Arcanists add Blast and have 15 Power Points. Fantasy fighters have chain hauberks and longswords, Parry 6, Toughness 8 (2).
• Veteran (d10): Equivalent to d20 level 7-10. Arcanists have 20 Power Points. Fantasy fighters have plate armour and greatswords, Parry 7, Toughness 10 (3).
• Heroic (d12): Equivalent to d20 level 11-15. Arcanists have 25 power points. Fantasy fighters have plate mail and greatswords, Parry 8, Toughness 11 (3).

In modern or SF games, Stock NPCs have the same equipment whatever their rank.

MONSTROUS ABILITIES

Add one or more Monstrous Abilities from the Savage Worlds rulebook to a Stock NPC to create an instant monster. Examples:

• Construct: +2 on rolls to recover from Shaken; not affected by called shots, Wound Modifiers, disease or poison.
• Undead: As Construct, but also has +2 Toughness.

EXAMPLES

• Mid-Level Dungeoneering Party: Three Seasoned fighters and a Seasoned arcanist.
• Warforged Sorceror: Construct arcanist.

FOR OTHER GAMES

There are several similar approaches for D&D 4E – if I still played that, I’d use either Greywulf’s version or the one from Sly Flourish.

Murad

I think the next session could well see the party back in town, so I need to work out what’s there quickly. Out comes Red Tide and its GM aids; we’ve already established that the Temple of Athena has influence and that there is a powerful wizard nearby, so I pick the city tags of Important Temple (p. 107) and Magical School (p.108). Much though I like Thegn Ragnvald as an NPC, nobody has gone near him since he was created nearly a year ago, so he fades into the background.

The Temple of Athena

The Temple is the local headquarters of the Order of the Minewatch, which sponsors paladin PCs. Like the historical Knights Templar, this is a religious fighting order established to protect travellers – in this case, those on the main east-west caravan route from Ezhdan to Skulos, and the river route from the Sea of Marenos north to Hjemland. The biggest danger in both cases was posed by the monstrous inhabitants of Irongrave, so the Order founded its headquarters and largest temple in the nearest town – Murad. Play has already established that friends at the Temple include Bishop Otus, high priest and Grand Master of the order, and his acolyte Galen; likewise we know that there is a relic, the Holy Handkerchief of St Veronica. Galen doesn’t fit into the “official” version of the tag, but useful as these GM tools are, they serve me, not the other way around.

As preparation for a scenario involving the Temple, should one be needed, I crack open Stars Without Number and roll percentile dice on the adventure seeds table on pp 133-136. A score of 44 tells me that “A librarian Friend has discovered an antique databank with the coordinates of a long-lost pretech cache hidden in a Place sacred to a long-vanished religion. The librarian is totally unsuited for danger, but necessary to decipher the obscure religious iconography needed to unlock the cache. The cache is not the anticipated Thing, but something more dangerous to the finder.”

No need to create another NPC, Galen seems perfectly suited to this. Galen has recently bought a scroll from a caravan merchant, and on reading it discovers directions to a lost shrine of Minerva, as Athena was known to the vanished Empire of the Wolf, in the depths of the forest north east of Murad. This shrine contains the Helm of Minerva, a powerful artefact. On fighting their way through various encounters to the shrine, the PCs discover the Helm long gone, if it was ever there, and some suitably heinous undead in residence instead. If they survive that, they can go looking for the Helm.

The Magical School

I know from previous sessions that Myrrdin the wizard lives near Murad, and that one of his former apprentices turned to the Dark Side. That gives me a Friend, again not one on the list in Red Tide but never mind, and a Complication, which is on the list.

Rolling again on the SWN adventure seed table, I get 41; “A Friend who is a skilled precognitive has just received a flash of an impending atrocity to be committed by an Enemy. He or she needs the party to help them steal the Thing that will prove the Enemy’s plans while dodging the assassins sent to eliminate the precog.”

Again reusing an existing NPC, I make Myrrdin the precognitive. Looking at p. 108 of Red Tide, I decide the head of a rival school will do for the Enemy, and a tome of forbidden lore for the Thing. That triggers an association for me with SPI’s Demons, which I’m using for the wilderness map.

If this scenario seems appropriate, Myrrdin summons the PCs to tell them that he has had a premonition that his old rival, Kyryl the Skulan, has acquired a copy of the forbidden Lamegeton, a tome of demonology, and that Kyryl plans to use this to kill him and loot his tower. The party’s tasks are to protect Myrrdin from demonic assassins (which fortunately can only be sent during specific phases of the moon) and recover the book (which Kyryl is bringing with him as he travels into Gardar in pursuit of his dark goals).

Job done, in about 15 minutes. All I need now is players. I’m now covered for one session if they turn around and march out of the dungeon, and two sessions if they don’t; time to down tools for the moment.