Spes Magna Games

I wrote this piece for Game Geek 16, now available at the previous link for free.

In Game Geek 10, I talked about the importance of tailoring adventure scenarios to the player character’s strengths. My starting point was the ranger’s favored enemy class feature. The basic claim: If a ranger has undead as a favored enemy, then that ranger needs to encounter undead monsters often.

In my current We’re Not in Arkansas Anymore! campaign, one of my players runs Rob Braden, a former baseball player turned ranger whose favored enemy is fey creatures. Rob’s player Wes expressed concern that whatever favored enemy he picked would turn into that type of creature Rob would never bump into again. I assured Wes that would not be the case, and fey enemies continue to play a major role in the campaign’s events.

Most recently, the PCs have been investigating a criminal gang’s attempts to fix the upcoming first annual baseball tournament in Harvest, the region’s primary agricultural community. As part of their investigations, Rob and his allies have discovered that the renegade elves of the Wild Hunt are involved. At the same time, I introduced the Dark Taint into the campaign lore.

The Wild Hunt

My campaign has a few god-like beings known as Entities. One of these entities is the Wild Hunt, a chaotic neutral being whose followers can be chaotic neutral, chaotic good, or chaotic evil. The Wild Hunt’s domains are Animal, Strength, Travel, and War, and the Wild Hunt is the main entity worshiped by elves in the region.

Most elves are closer to the chaotic neutral and chaotic good spectrum of alignments, and the Wild Hunt’s influence among them can be volatile but is seldom malevolent. My campaign’s elves aren’t sophisticated, effete tree dwellers. Instead, they are a warrior people of strong passions ruled by codes of personal honor and divided into dozens of competing clans, each led by their own elfking and elfqueen. These elves value strength of arms, the ability to stalk and catch prey, and the comraderie of their elfsovereigns’s drinking hall.

The chaotic evil aspect of the Wild Hunt is different. Those who follow this aspect revel in strong passions but reject personal codes of honor. Instead, they see all of life as a battle to survive. The strong prove their worthiness by hunting the weak. Whatever happens is the will of the Wild Hunt. Those destined to prevail survive. Those not destined to prevail die.

The consequences for surviving on the chaotic evil side of the Wild Hunt are more than just spiritual and moral depravity. The monstrous acts also warp the adherent’s flesh and mind. Elves that serve the Wild Hunt’s chaotic evil aspect often become subject to the Dark Taint.

The Dark Taint & Quick Templates

The changes associated with the Dark Taint eventually lead to one of two transformations. Either the elf becomes a dark elf, or else he becomes a grimlock. In my campaign, both dark elves and grimlocks are fey creatures and degenerate forms of the Wild Hunt’s chaotic evil elven followers. Unless noted otherwise, transformations are cumulative.

Initial Stage Dark Taint – Dark Elf Transformation
An elf on the road to becoming a dark elf first passes through a first stage transformation. The elf’s appearance changes slightly. His flesh darkens. His hair become lighter. His eye color fades. Elves in the first stage of the dark elf transformation have the following modifications:

* Ability Scores: -2 Int, +2 Cha.
* Senses: Lose low-light vision. Add darkvision 60 ft.
* Spell-Like Abilities: The elf can cast dancing lights once per day, using his total character level as his caster level.
* Special Attacks: The elf gains the Poison Use special ability. This lets the elf use of poison without risk accidentally poisoning himself.
* Weakness: The elf suffers from light sensitivity.

Final Stage Dark Taint – Dark Elf Transformation
An elf that survives with the Wild Hunt’s chaotic evil aspect long enough becomes a full-blow dark elf. Apply the following modifications:

* CR: Increase CR +1.
* Type: The elf’s type becomes fey (elf).
* Ability Scores: +2 Dex.
* Senses: Increase darkvision to 120 ft.
* Defensive Abilities: The elf gains DR 3/cold iron. He also gains Spell Resistance equal to 6 plus his class levels.
* Spell-Like Abilities: A dark elf can cast dancing lights, darkness, and faerie fire each once per day, using his total character level as his caster level.
* Weakness: The elf no longer has light sensitivity. Instead, he suffers from light blindness.
* Lost Racial Trait: The elf no longer has the Elven Magic racial trait.

Not all elves who acquire the Dark Taint become dark elves. Some become grimlocks. These two templates represent this gradual transformation.

Initial Stage Dark Taint – Grimlock Transformation
The elf becomes more muscular. His facial features become more bestial, and his eyelids grow thicker, turning his eyes into squinty slits. Apply these modifications:

* Ability Scores: +2 Str, +2 Con, -2 Cha.
* Senses: The elf loses low-light vision. He gains blindsense 40 ft. and scent.
* Tough Flesh: The elf gains a +2 natural armor bonus.
* Lost Racial Traits: The elf no longer has the Elven Magic and Keen Senses racial traits.

Final Stage Dark Taint – Grimlock Transformation
The elf’s transformation into bestial grimlock is complete. His eyelids have grown shut, and the eyes behind them have atrophied. He becomes strongly muscled and monstrous in both appearance and appetites.

* CR: Increase CR +1.
* Type: The elf’s type becomes fey (elf).
* Ability Scores: +2 Str, -2 Int, -2 Cha.
* Senses: The elf gains a grimlock’s heightened nonvisual senses. Lose blindsense 40 ft., and gain blindsight 40 ft.
* Defensive Abilities: The elf gains DR 3/cold iron. The elf also gains immunity to gaze attacks, visual effects, illusions, and other attack forms that rely on sight.
* Racial Hit Die: The elf gains one racial HD (1d6). He acquires skill points equal 6 + Int modifier. The following are class skills for the racial Hit Die: Acrobatics, Bluff, Climb, Escape Artist, Perception, Sense Motive, Stealth, and Swim. Also, add Will +2 to base saving throws.
* Tougher Flesh: Increase the natural armor bonus to +4.
* Lost Racial Traits: The elf loses the Elven Immunities racial trait.

Tags: drow, Game Geek

I recently entered the One-Page Dungeon contest. It’s my first time. I’d read about One-Page Dungeons here and there over the past year or so. I’d checked out a few examples, including those found in the this free download. The idea fascinated me, but left me with two questions: Stick an entire dungeon on one page? Why?

Well, the answer is rather simple. It’s not too different from the Five-Room Dungeon format. The goal is to provide a usable framework for an entire game session that is generic enough to let the GM customize it to fit the needs of his particular gaming group. A One-Page Dungeon is the opposite of hyper-detailed adventure paths that not only offers an adventure scenario, but also strive to plot out an entire campaign, if not an entire campaign world.

Since I gave up Facebook for Lent, I found myself with much more time on my hands. I decided to give the One-Page Dungeon Contest a try. I came up with a hook quick enough. The hard part came with the actual writing and layout. I’d chosen to outline a five-story, magical pagoda full of ninjas suitable for a site-based adventure. I had to include maps, background text, area descriptions, et cetera. All of this had to fit on a single side of a single page of paper in a format and font-size that would be legible. I went through three different maps. I wrote and rewrote and re-rewrote. I ended up beating the deadline for contest submissions by under 24 hours.

While I doubt I’m going to win anything in the contest, I do think that The Lure of the Jade Throne is a fine first try at a one-page dungeon. You want to take a look at it? Well, click here, and you can download your very own copy. Neat, huh?

Tags: One-Page Dungeon

Well, another Quid Novi? has been e-mailed to subscribers. Here’s a sample of what you missed if you’ve not signed up for this free, twice-monthly e-letter.

The furniture’s disarray, the broken table, the scattered personal effects, including various knitting needles and mouldering yarn. This sewing room once hosted violent events. Indeed, that dark stain on the rat-chewed rug could be long-dried blood. As you move into the room, you spot a dessicated corpse curled into defensive posture behind a tattered loveseat.

The Unsightly Sewing Room was the site of a horrible murder. The victim’s corpse rots behind the loveseat. This poor soul was killed by knitting needles wielded as improvised weapons. One of the needles is still lodged in the corpse’s left eye socket. The unspeakable violence has combined with the victim’s undying thirst for vengeance to haunt the chamber.

CR 4; XP 1,200
CE haunt (20-foot square sewing room); persistent
Caster Level 4th
Notice Perception DC 12 (faint spectral knitting needles appear in the air)
hp 18; Weakness triggered by touch; Trigger touch; Reset 1 day

Effect The haunt remains inactive so long as the contents of the sewing room remain undisturbed. Should any living creature touch the contents of the sewing room, however, the malevolent spirit manifests itself as a pair of spectral knitting needles that unerringly strike at the eyes of the offending creature. The victim must make two DC 13 Fortitude saves, using the lowest total. Failure means the victim is struck blind as if targeted by blindness/deafness modified by the persistent spell metamagic feat. Since the haunt is persistent, it continues to attack those in the sewing room once per round on its initiative rank until destroyed or it no longer has a target.

Destruction The haunt must be reduced to 0 hit points via positive energy. The sewing room must then be subjected to a consecrate spell, which permanently destroys the haunt.

This haunt doesn’t appear in Quid Novi? alone. It is accompanied by an infernal hound as well as some recommended reading for GMs. Speaking of recommended reading, take a gander at this:

Prep-Lite Wireframe How To by DNAphil

Prep-lite master DNAphil offers his latest installment on how to construct great adventures with minimal prep time. This article looks at prep-lite NPCs. For me, it’s full of win because it embraces one of my GMing rules, namely that the GM doesn’t have to follow the same rules the other players do. As DNAphil explains, “[A]s a GM I do not have to create an NPC with the Character creation rules that the players used.” He then gives examples of how to streamline the NPC creation process by distinguishing between what is important and what isn’t.

Tags: NPCs

For the last Quid Novi? of February, I just had to do another haunt. I’m intrigued by the idea of haunts, a sort of cross between an undead monster and a trap. I’ve taken a few liberties with the haunt rules when creating the Deadly Doll.

The Deadly Doll
NE haunt (effect limited to humanoid creature who touches the doll); persistent
CR 5; XP 1,600
Caster Level 9th
Notice Perception DC 18 (the doll whispers to the holder)
hp 22; Weakness triggered by touch; Trigger touch; Reset 1 day

Effect The haunt is triggered by picking up the doll. The target must succeed a DC 17 Will save or be dominated as per the spell dominate person. The dominated person must use the doll to lure a child and then murder the child.

Destruction The doll must be burned after succeeding with a remove curse against DC 20. Otherwise, the doll will reappear 1d6 miles away from the burn site after 24 hours. Casting break enchantment against DC 20 can free a creature from the dominate person effect.

Background Once upon a dark time, an evil man crafted toys in order to lure children into his deadly clutches. Eventually, the outraged and vengeful community upon which the evil man preyed uncovered his wickedness. He suffered horribly at the mob’s hands before dying. Unfortunately, his death did not end his terror. The evil man’s basest desires survived death, infecting one of his many dolls. The Deadly Doll now serves as a focus for the evil man’s monstrous appetite for murder.

In other news, the new What Is It? contest for homebrew monsters lairs over at this EN World link. Also, voting for What Is It? 2 takes place here. Monsters for What Is It? 1 and voting results are here.

(From Game Geek 15, which is free this issue.)

Way back in Game Geek 4, I mused about my experiences at OwlCon XXIX with my son Giant Boy. It was his first gaming convention, and it gave me an opportunity to look at the experience with fresh eyes. My Game Geek 4 musings focused mostly on this advice for players: Be on time, use prep time wisely, don’t hog the ball or be a wallflower, and roleplay before you roll dice.

This time I want to focus more on the other side of the GM screen. Giant Boy and I arrived about an hour before our first event was due to start. This gave us plenty of time to get our registration packets, don our spiffy OwlCon XXX shirts, hang official badges around our necks, and engage in some people watching.

Our first event was “Scooby Scooby Doo, What ARE You???” run in one of the latest iterations of Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu. I got to play Fred. Giant Boy was six of the Harlem Globetrotters, including Curly, Sweet Clyde, and Bubblegum Tate (those last two being ‘ported in from Futurama). The other three Globetrotters were unnamed, which struck more as lazy than funny. Four other players filled the roles of Daphne, Velma, Scoob, and Shaggy; the latter two were played with impressive vocal imitations by their players. The final player did a great job as Sheriff Don Knotts. The event started more or less on time at 3:00 p.m. Although it was generally enjoyable, two convention GM no-nos reared their ugly heads.

Start on Time; Finish on Time

If an event is schedule to start at 3:00 p.m., then the GM needs to start at 3:00 p.m. If an event is scheduled for four hours, it needs to run for at least very close to four hours. The people sitting at the table almost all paid to be there, and if a GM short changes paying convention-goers on their time, that’s a lot like stealing.

“Scooby Scooby Doo, What ARE You???” started on time, but it finished nearly 90 minutes early. There we were, all having a reasonably good time roleplaying our respective cartoon characters. Five of the six Globetrotters had been mind-controlled by fungi from Yuggoth. We had rescued Snidley Moneybags from bloodthirsty cultists on an alien planet. We had finally cornered the spawn of Shub-Niggurath. More or less without warning, the event ended. Daphne unmasked the spawn, revealing first Old Man Winters and then Nyarlathotep.

It wasn’t even 6:00 p.m. Giant Boy and I had been cheated out of more than an hour of gaming fun. I cannot help but think that the Keeper could’ve kept the game going for its full time had he managed to follow this next bit of advice.

Prepare and Playtest

Our Keeper’s prep for “Scooby Scooby Doo, What ARE You???” was noticeably lacking. The character sheets had incomplete information (such as missing stats) and appeared hastily scrawled, but perhaps that was just bad penmanship.

The entire Call of Cthulhu mystery was minimally outlined in the same hasty scrawl on a single page of notebook paper. Torn scraps of paper marked several places in the rulebook, which was frequently referred to without giving the sense that the Keeper knew what he was looking for. It was obvious the Keeper was making up a lot of it as he went along, and the ingenuity of his improv skills was quickly exhausted. Several incidents turned into hard core railroads where we players had minimal to no chance to influence events. More than once, the Keeper was just flat out dismissive and ignored or countermanded player intentions.

To provide one example, when a fungus from Yuggoth abducted some of the Globetrotters, the only dice rolled were Spot Hidden checks, as if it made any sense at all that a monster could enter a brightly lit room and snatch three six-foot-plus basketball players from under the noses of five other people without being extremely obvious. When Giant Boy had his remaining Globetrotters give chase, it quickly became apparent that no action could possibly affect any sort of rescue.

All of these — the way too early ending, the incomplete character sheets, the overuse of GM fiat, the insufficient notes for the adventure and relevant rules — indicate a lack of preparation on the Keeper’s part.

Since Giant Boy and I now had about two hours before our next event started, we settled into comfy chairs, ate dinner, and engaged in more people watching. While doing this, I noticed what might have been another convention GM no-no.

Keep Your Players in the Game

During “Scooby Scooby Doo, What ARE You???” I once got up to get a couple of drinks for Giant Boy and me. On the way to the cafe, I passed by a table full of people playing Pathfinder. One of the players was a tall, dark-haired fellow with a poor attempt at a goatee. When our event ended way too early, Giant Boy and I settled into our comfy chairs and ate and watched people.

One person I watched was Poor Goatee Fellow. He packed up his stuff, shouldered his backpack, and left the Pathfinder game table, not to return even though that particular event was still going strong. This made me wonder: Why had Poor Goatee Fellow left the game? Perhaps he just got bored. Perhaps he had to leave the convention. Or, perhaps, his character was killed during gameplay and with nothing left to do he had left the table about an hour before his game actually ended.

Since I didn’t see Poor Goatee Fellow rush out of the convention, it doesn’t seem likely some emergency had called him away from the table. Other folks at the table looked like they were having fun. So, via process of elimination in my limited options scenario, Poor Goatee Fellow’s character had died during gameplay. Thus, with no way left to participate, he abandoned the table. If this is so, all I can say is, “Bad GM!”

As already pointed out, most people pay to game at a convention. My payment creates certain reasonable expectations, such as the expectation that I get to play the entire round for which I’ve registered. If a player’s character dies with more than just a few minutes left to play, a good GM will have a back-up plan. A good GM gives that player another character, let’s the player help run the monsters during fights, et cetera. What a good GM doesn’t do is say, “Sorry about that. Better luck next time.”

Once Giant Boy and I finished dinner and people watching, we strolled over to our second convention game: “Crisis of Infinite Batmen” using Green Ronin’s DC Adventures. This event started on time. It ended on time. Everyone got to participate for the entire period. The GM was obviously prepared, understood the genre, and gave us players opportunities to shine. I was Dick Grayson acting as Batman. Giant Boy was Batman Beyond. Other players were Kal-El Batman, Wolverine Batman, Batwoman, and Cyber Batman. Owlman had absorbed Bite-Mite’s cosmic powers in an attempt to rid the multiverse of all the Bruce Waynes. We had to stop him during a climatic battle in Arkham Asylum verus oodles of Jokers (including Lego Joker!).

“Crisis of Infinite Batmen” was a well-run event with only one identifiable flaw:

Don’t Over-Explain

The GM often broke the suspension of disbelief by explaining the game mechanics and inspiration behind his various villains. While I understand that he was justifiably proud of way-cool villains such as King Solomon Grundy and the Twenty-Eyed Man, the metagame explanations about the villains’ capabilities weren’t always tied to things our various Batmen would’ve known. As a result, the GM robbed us of some of the surprise and mystery.

This is a minor complaint with “Crisis of Infinite Batmen” since the overall quality of the game made up for the mild let downs. I’ve certainly seen GMs (including myself) do much worse.

The rest of OwlCon XXX the next day went swimmingly. Giant Boy and I played one last event, namely Eric Seagren’s top-notch “Scavenger Hunt of Dooooom!” wherein my son was the jedi Obi-Gyn and I was the Hulk, a half-ogre/half-clay golem. Other players included the likes of the Amazing Driderman, Snake Plissken, and Holy Cow. We romped through an Outer Planes city looking for pun-related items in order to win fame and fortune. Out of the several groups that had played this event during the convention, we placed second.

Throughout the event, it was obvious the GM was well-prepared and had playtested the adventure. The players were kept involved, and, best of all, the GM didn’t go out of his way to over-explain what was going on. Seagren respected our skills and smarts enough to let us figure out (or not) the various clues on our own.

Tags: Convention Gaming