Inspirations from Vornheim – 1

First in a series of unknown length.

I like Zak’s urbancrawl rules (from the Vornheim City Kit) very much, but I prefer to work on a PC rather than with pen and paper. So I thought about a modification to make that easier, and came up with this: The main streets of your city, or corridors of your dungeon, are letter shapes which spell out the words for number. (Zak draws the numbers themselves in a semi-random way.) They interconnect where words share a letter.

Here’s an example; the main corridor layout for a six level dungeon.

   S
  FIVE
  OX
  U
THREE
W
ONE

The first level (“ONE”) has three main areas, each with a corridor. The westernmost one is built around a 20’ wide circular corridor. Level two (“TWO”) starts with an identical main corridor, although it has a different room layout, then runs off northwards into two other main areas. And so on.

There’s no reason this couldn’t be done with other words, for example the names of the boss monsters on each level, or the main NPC or industry in a town ward.

My PCs almost never map, so they’d never know.

Miscellaneous Ramblings

Being a selection of random thoughts which individually do not justify a post, but which I shall share regardless.

Knowledge skills: Surfing the Savage Worlds forum led me to Clint Black’s comments on these, which are essentially that Knowledge skills shouldn’t be taken unless they are a prerequisite for an Edge, or you expect to use them in every session of play; otherwise, you should use Common Knowledge rolls. I checked through my stable of PCs, and discovered that my players are way ahead of me here; so I swapped Arion’s Knowledge (Astrogration) for Survival, which all scouts should have. (Admittedly Abishag the halfling rogue has Knowledge (Poisons), but he is a nasty piece of work and I can well imagine him using it every session.)

Campaign lifespan: I can see that in about two years’ time my current group of players will dissipate; some will have babies, some will go to university, others are thinking about emigrating. So, that’s the probable lifespan of the current campaign; call it another 40 sessions, by which time the core PCs will have reached Legendary rank. Towards late 2013, then, I need to start setting up a new campaign, possibly with new players. I keep aiming for multiple five-year campaign arcs in a single setting, but actually I’ve never managed more than three years without changing both, so maybe that should be the goal next time. What can I say, I’m fickle; I like experimenting, and I find low-level PCs easier to work with.

Solo activities: I’ve started a face-to-face RPG group again, by the simple expedition of advertising that I will be ready to run a 4-hour session every week at a specified time and place, that whoever turns up gets to play, and there are no hard feelings for anyone who doesn’t. With a weekly session as GM, and one every 2-3 weeks as a player, I’m getting my gaming fix without solo sessions, so those are shelved for now.

Painting figures: I just can’t get back into this. I’d rather buy prepainted ones and spend my time on other things. However, this is shifting me towards fantasy gaming, as SF prepaints are hard to find now that WotC and Rackham have stopped doing them. My wife is tolerant of my gaming habits, but draws the line at me paying someone else to paint figures for me, which rules that option out. Maybe a shift into Lego-compatible minifigures is called for; they are robust, about 40mm scale, and available in Halo, HM Armed Forces, and Dr Who flavours from my local Toys-Ya-Us.

Review: Deal-a-Dungeon

The Deal-a-Dungeon starter set from Talisman Studios looked like a useful addition to my GM armoury, being aimed at creating a dungeon on the fly by dealing cards from a special deck.

As ever, I got the PDF download version, which weighs in at a chunky 40 MB for 37 full-colour pages.

Inside, I found two pages of instructions, 21 pages of dungeon tiles, and 12 pages of cards. The idea is to assemble the cards, shuffle, and draw to determine the next section of your dungeon. Once you know that, you lay the corresponding tiles on the table and off you go.

The dungeon tiles break down into four large areas, 16 x 16 squares (the D&D standard of 5′ to the square and 25/28mm figures is in force), and 32 small areas, 4 x 4 squares. These are a mixture of small rooms and corridors, mostly one square wide but occasionally two. There’s also a sheet of doors, stairs and other small miscellaneous tiles.

The large areas have subsections, either areas with particular terrain on them, or smaller rooms as part of a complex. You need to print out four sheets for each one, and assemble.

You can buy additional packs, each with a new large area and its associated card, to build up your deck. It would also be easy enough to add cards for treasure or encounters to the deck, giving you a complete dungeon generator.

All good enough at what it does, although the artwork is quite dark, in black and dark greens, and would be hard to make out in dim light. Certainly my usual practice of snapping a picture of the setup on my mobile phone when we call the session for the night wouldn’t produce a clear enough image.

However, it’s not for me. I prefer a set of room and corridor tiles which are all the same size, and use as much of the paper as possible. The smaller tiles typically used for corridors and stairs are easily disturbed, and harder to tessellate.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Masks: 1,000 NPCs

Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game is the second offering from Engine Publishing (i.e., the authors of the Gnome Stew blog); this one addresses NPCs rather than plots.

As the first (Eureka – 501 plots) was based on Georges Polti’s 36 Dramatic Situations, this one is based on an old Dragon article by C.M. Cline entitled "The 7-Sentence NPC".

Setting aside the foreword, introduction, and contributor biographies, the book has five chapters: Game Mastering Advice, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Modern and Indices.

GAME MASTERING ADVICE

This is the "how to use this book" section, and covers choosing an NPC, how they are described and grouped within the book, how to reskin one for your game, and how to make the NPCs memorable.

THE NPCS: FANTASY, SCI-FI AND MODERN

Each of these umbrella genres has its NPCs divided into Villains, Neutrals and Allies. There are more neutrals than allies or villains, as one might expect.

Each NPC has about a quarter-page writeup, with a name, a number, a one-line description such as "Eccentric Wizard", and paragraphs on his appearance, roleplaying, personality, motivation, background and traits. Roleplaying explains how to portray the character, traits are used in the traits index to find NPCs of a particular type, and the rest are what they say on the tin.

The book describes all the NPCs as human, but there is no reason why they couldn’t be "reskinned" as members of other races, and some of the interior art does so.

As for Eureka, I don’t want to give away the details, so I did roughly a 5% sample, evenly split across the three umbrella genres, to see how usable I thought the NPCs were…

• Wow! This one’s in my campaign, right now: 1.
• Hmm, that one’s pretty cool: 17.
• Yeah, I can use that one I guess: 26.
• Meh: 4.
• Drive on, there’s nothing to see here: 0.

Obviously, your mileage may vary; but if these proportions are representative, there are 20 or so NPCs in this book that I have to have in my games – probably as many as my PCs can cope with remembering anyway, with a month between sessions – and several hundred in the "pretty cool" bracket. With those kind of numbers, I can live with the occasional one that doesn’t tickle my fancy.

INDICES

There are four indices, allowing the GM to select NPCs by traits, name, author or groups.

The traits index is probably the most useful for selecting an NPC, but the names one I expect to be most useful in play – once I have noted down, for example, "Guard Captain is Erika Snodgrass, but male" I can look up Erika’s stats whenever the PCs encounter the guard captain, at least until the NPC sticks in my memory.

The groups index is interesting, because I can select (for example) Elite Thieves or Assassination Team and find a group of half a dozen NPCs who collectively would form that group. This is a nice way of setting up (say) rival adventuring parties.

CONCLUSIONS

This is a larger book than its companion, and more focussed at the print market – the PDF has no printer-friendly option, for example.

Like it’s companion, it isn’t going to replace my own stuff, but it takes up residence on my GM’s Shelf of Wonders, where I shall dip into it for occasional inspiration.

Eureka: 501 Plots

Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters is a 314-page book from the authors of Gnome Stew which does pretty much what the title would lead you to expect; it provides 501 adventure plots for you to use or adapt.

Setting aside the introduction, foreword, credits, and contributor biographies, the book consists of five chapters; Game Mastering Advice, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Horror, and Indices.

The plots are evenly divided between Fantasy, Sci-Fi and Horror, and subdivided by Georges Polti’s 36 Dramatic Situations, which Polti proposed were the 36 different plots driving all human stories and which are frequently referenced by all manner of writers and students.

(Tolstoy said there were only two; "Go on a quest" and "A stranger comes to town". But I digress.)

GAME MASTERING ADVICE

This chapter is about how to use the book, and is optional. It explains the underlying structure of the plots, how to expand them into adventures and adapt them to your campaign.

The book is rules-agnostic, but the plots rarely turn on a specific skill or spell, so if you have a handful of stock NPCs in your campaign file you’re good to go. (If you don’t, I recommend you change that.)

Most of the plots require no foreshadowing, and can be run in a single session, which will involve 3-5 encounters or scenes and perhaps 4 hours of playing time.

THE PLOTS: FANTASY, SCI-FI AND HORROR

On to the meat of the book; the plots themselves, each of which has a half-page or so of writeup and various tags.

Not wanting to give away the details of the plots, I thought I’d do roughly a 10% sample of each section (the first 15 plots) and divide them by how enthused I am about running them. This is entirely subjective and your mileage may vary. Out of the 60, we have:

• OMG I have to run this: 2.
• Hey, that’s cool: 4.
• I can do something with this: 25.
• Meh: 14.
• Not in a million years: 0.

Assuming those are representative, there are about 20 scenarios in the "OMG" category, which would keep me going for a couple of years at my current session frequency by themselves, and about two-thirds of the plots will be usable in some form. 340 plots will keep me going until well after retirement age at that pace.

I found that the Sci-Fi plots were generally weaker than the Fantasy or Horror ones, but that could be a sampling fault or just my personal prejudices.

INDICES

As mentioned above, the plots are divided into Fantasy, Sci-Fi or Horror. These are the umbrella genres and chapter headings, but the plots are also tagged by one or more of 19 subgenres ("Swashbuckling", for example); this is where the index by genre comes in, as you can quickly filter out only the plots which fit (say) a Steampunk game. Not to say that the others won’t. just that they’ll need more adaptation.

The index by tags allows you to filter for all combat-heavy scenarios, all intrigue scenarios, or whatever. I found myself wanting a pivot table which could select, for example, all Steampunk scenarios with religious overtones. I could know up a spreadsheet for that in a few hours, though, if I wanted to, and I’m not sure how you would do it in dead tree or PDF format.

CONCLUSIONS

This is a useful addition to my GM’s Shelf of Wonders, which I can turn to when other inspiration fails so long as I have an hour or two’s warning of a game session. The main value for me will be breaking me out of a rut by providing new ideas; the main disadvantage of the product is the time it will take me to sift through for the perfect scenario – this is what the indices are intended to handle, to be fair, and they may do so.

Marks are straight down the middle; it’s not going to take over this aspect of my gaming life, but I don’t regret buying it and will probably use it from time to time.

Review: Unbound Adventures

Unbound Adventures is no. 11 in the series of One on One Adventures from Expeditious Retreat Press, . Its objective is to provide rules for play without a GM at all levels; it’s aimed at getting into the dungeon sharpish, killing things and taking their stuff. If you’re looking for a detailed backstory, lovingly-crafted NPCs and a tortuous plot, you’re in the wrong place.

As regular readers will know, I’m a sucker for solitaire dungeons and random dungeon mappers, so I couldn’t resist.

One thing that wasn’t clear to me until after I’d downloaded it was that it assumes you have access to the D&D v3.5 Players’ Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Master’s Guide. I do, so that is not an issue for me, but if you don’t and it would be an issue for you, be aware.

HOW IT WORKS

Player Characters begin together in a randomly-generated settlement. Each day they stay there, they have a chance of a random encounter. When they choose, they set out to a dungeon and explore it to achieve one of half-a-dozen different goals, after which they can return to the same settlement or travel to a new one.

If they successfully complete a series of expeditions (one of each type) while based in the same settlement, the inhabitants hold a feast in their honour and grant them a title such as the Defenders of Wyvelrod*. These expeditions can be in the same dungeon, or different ones.

Travelling to and from the dungeon might involve wilderness encounters. The dungeon layout is generated from a set of random tables, using the D&D v3.5 for monsters, traps, and treasure – except for single-character parties, which need lower-level challenges than the Rules As Written provide; for these, Unbound Adventures offers suitable monster and trap tables.

IF YOU DON’T HAVE D&D v3.5

You will need some means of randomly generating:

• Towns and town encounters.
• Monster encounters, both in dungeons and the wilderness.
• Traps.
• Treasure hoards and magic items.

CONCLUSION

Basically, this is a means of generating a random dungeon map, reminiscent to me of Advanced Heroquest in scope and approach. It’s serviceable for that purpose, but a little expensive considering how much else you need to provide, and the price point of competing products.

If you’re considering this, I’d recommend you look at The Other Game Company’s Dungeon Bash, which does a lot more of the heavy lifting for you.

 

* Wyvelrod is an actual village near which I used to work at one time. I really have to use that name at some point.

Do Not Adjust Your Set

My experience so far is that solo dungeon crawls work really well without setting up the table at all, but I would like to have something prettier to post on the blog than my graph paper and felt pen scribblings. However, I can’t be bothered to learn any tool that takes longer than ten minutes to figure out, and I’m a real cheapskate, so the tools need to be free. Here’s my favoured option at the moment; what do you think?

Credits: Dungeon map extract by Crooked Staff Productions, used as an underlay in GameTable, with room numbers added using Photoshop. Pogs made from pictures of me and eM4 prepainted figures, using TokenTool; primitive speech bubbles made using the pog naming feature.

I think I need some pogs for room numbers, PEFs, and important furniture or dungeon dressing. That’ll keep me entertained for a while, I’m sure.

The Usual Suspects

I’ve been playing with GameTable and TokenTool recently, and one thing I’m doing is to create pogs based on photographs of my players. It’s immediately clear who they are, for one thing; and for another, they are transferrable between campaigns.

Here’s one of me as an example. I’ve used square tokens rather than round, since I plan to print them on giant sticky labels, stick the labels to foamcore boards, and trim them to shape – that’s a lot faster with square tokens than round ones.

Dungeon Generators Update

I think I’ve realised why the dungeon generators posts are so popular. People aren’t looking for examples of the generators in use, pen and paper style; they’re looking for online or downloadable tools to generate dungeons for them.

Sorry, guys. I can be slow sometimes.

So, here are some links to those very things… I have limited the list to those which will create the dungeon for you, which excludes mapping tools where you draw your own, those which stock the dungeon without drawing a map of it, and computer games which generate dungeons (because you can never print them out).

I’ve been tracking this topic for about 10 years now, and generators disappear frequently, as copyright holders object, programmers update their code, and websites are abandoned. So, if you find one you like, use it while it’s there, and download an offline copy if you can.

GENERIC

Gozzy’s dungeon generator is system neutral, and creates some nice-looking maps. No dungeon stocking.

D&D 4E

Masterplan generates 4E dungeons using official D&D tiles, stocks it with or without your help, allows you to link dungeons and encounters into an ongoing story arc, provides tools to help the DM run skill challenges and combat, portable app so you can run it from a USB stick, has a Facebook page about updates, brings you beer and nachos. OK, I lied about the beer and nachos, but it’ll do pretty much everything else. The only downside is that for copyright reasons you have to enter monster stats before it will use them – they are not pre-loaded. This is the one I’d pick if I were still running 4E, and every so often I wonder if I could use it for other games.

Random dungeon generator for the iPad; I don’t have one, so I can only go by the screenshots, which look like it generates the dungeon and stocks it, but without details of the monsters.

Dungen – similar, but for Android cellphones.

D&D 3E, PATHFINDER

Jamis Buck’s dungeon generator. Draws and stocks the dungeon for you. Offline version used to be available, but I can’t find it any more. This was my go-to generator for the pickup games I used to run for my kids. Also hosted here.

WotC Mapper generates and stocks the dungeon for you, similar functionality to Jamis Buck’s one but slightly prettier layout.

Donjon dungeon generator: Generates and stocks the dungeon, allows download of DM and player maps.

HEROQUEST, ADVANCED HEROQUEST, WARHAMMER QUEST

I got nuthin’, sorry; couldn’t find a generator for any of these online. Possibly because the games themselves are essentially dungeon generators. If you know of one, I’d love to hear from you.

CODA

I guess that pretty much closes the topic for me, so no more dungeon generator posts for you! Go forth, and use these tools!

Linguistics at the Gaming Table

Some people bring props to the gaming table; carefully drawn and aged maps, coins, letters, beautifully painted miniatures, and what have you. I bring languages.

I dabble in learning languages, and can speak a few phrases in half a dozen besides English, all though I’m by no means fluent in any of them. So, when my players encounter NPCs or monsters from another culture, and none of the PCs speak their language, I use another one. (If one of the PCs can speak the relevant language, well and good; play continues in English and that PC is assumed to be translating.)

In Irongrave, for example, the Common Tongue is represented by English, the Noble Tongue by French, Urosman by Italian, and Orcish by Russian. Those were selected partly because I can say appropriate things in them, but also partly because of what the likely players speak – in the UK, everyone has to learn some French at school, so like their PCs, the players have some idea what is being said in Neustrian even if they don’t speak it. The players most likely to play scholars know a little Italian or Latin. Nobody except me speaks any Russian, so I picked that for Orcish.

When last running Traveller for a face-to-face group, I used English for Solomani and Vilani, Russian for Zhodani, and Japanese for Aslan. Although I’m learning Turkish now, so if I ever run a game with Aslan in it again, they’ll speak Turkish.

In 2300AD, our campaign was in the French Arm, so English, German and French came into play. The kafers spoke German, because in-game that was the first human language they learned, and the pentapods spoke English with fractured grammar, heavily interspersed with random quotes from old adverts and famous films – “From far away have we come to see Famous the Bill, good to the last drop, Pilgrim.” During the course of the campaign, the players eventually figured out that an unscrupulous trader had sold them a box full of old DVDs, claiming they were language tapes.

Try it. It’s different, it’s very portable, and it links particular cultures or races to stereotypes without the players even realising it.

Haven’t studied any languages? You still know some Spanish (from watching Western movies) and German (from watching war films). Or you can use dialects and accents; see how many different types of English you can spot in Star Wars.