The Biblyon Broadsheet

The Greyhawk Grognard is looking at how to organize the various sections of D&D-style rulebooks. OD&D had Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, and Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, AD&D reorganized to the Players Handbook, the Dungeon Masters Guide, and the Monster Manual. Why separate the game master book from the player book? Why keep monsters separate as well?

The way I look at it is this: if it’s a rule, it goes in the Rulebook for all players to read. If it’s specialized, it gets its own book. And I like to keep each book that gets used at the table at 120 pages or below and in a format that flattens more easily.

So, I have the Gods & Monsters Rules in their own book; the Arcane Lore magic book, and the Divine Lore prophet book. I separate out spells and spirits because only some of the players need them, and they take up a lot of space. I’m trying to avoid the necessity of looking things up in an index (one of the reasons I’ve avoided even making an index) by keeping each book focused.

I used to make a “big” book available on Lulu¹ that combined the Rulebook, Arcane Lore, and Divine Lore. But nobody bought it—including me. At the table I found it more useful to be able to hand the Divine book to the prophet player, the Magic book to the sorceror, and not have them distracted by the rules that they don’t currently need.

There are a couple of oddities, currently. I have skills in the Arcane Lore book because they aren’t big enough to go on their own; I may end up moving them into the main rulebook since they are far more integrated into the rules than they used to be in previous incarnations. Specialties and psychic powers will stay in the Arcane Lorebook because they’re too small to go on their own. It’s all a tradeoff between playability and just plain having too many books lying around.

Several years ago, I wrote an article about making custom character sheets using downloadable fonts and any modern page layout software. I used Apple’s AppleWorks package to make the examples. I updated it later for Scribus.

It’s fun designing things like that. But when I decided to include these custom character sheets in the downloadable set of gaming sheets for Gods & Monsters, it wasn’t a joke when I added a third, “advanced” sheet that is just a blank page of ruled paper.

College rule, wide rule, graph paper, or just a blank sheet from a sketch book. In my opinion, those are the best custom character sheets.

This is why, even though I’ve started using the “professional” looking character sheets to portray NPCs such as Deanna Carmen in Helter Skelter, I never updated the sample characters in the main rulebook. Those are player characters, and as such they should be scrawled out on whatever paper you’ve got handy. Just like the Moldvay Red Book example. So I left the example characters in boring table format, hoping to someday do them up as if they were on normal paper.

Well, I finally got around to it last week in Scribus, using some downloaded fonts from Abstract Fonts. They look awesome, as you can see above. And each one uses a different font, because, of course, each player character is made by a different player.

I considered doing them by hand, but that would have meant either them all being in the same handwriting, or getting my friends together and then being unable to make changes when necessary without trying to match their handwriting. Also, it would mean scanning them as images rather than as text, which makes the documents less useful for alternative readers.

The only problem with the EPS files is that for some reason, Word really doesn’t like EPS files. Besides not displaying them onscreen, it also makes the RTF file size huge—about 90 megabytes uncompressed, and 36 megabytes compressed. None of the individual files even reach a megabyte; the math there is way off. A quick test with Nisus indicates that when I switch to Nisus, the compressed file size will drop down to a more manageable 13 megabytes. (The PDF, of course, is even smaller.)

The sample character sheets are also a part of the resources file—including the original Scribus document if you want to muck around with it.

One of the things I like to do is steal good poetry and rewrite it for Highland. I did this with The Lady of Shalott in The House of Lisport. I just did it again for a new adventure our group is currently going through, the road to the first city. I stole straight from one of the best: Rome Unvisited from Oscar Wilde’s Rosa Mystica. It turned out even better than the Lady of Lisport. The fifth stanza is probably going to be the highlighted text of the imprint page:

• And yet what joy it were for me
• To trod my feet upon the earth,
• And journeying toward Aira’s birth
• To kneel again at Drasoli!

The rest of the poem undoubtedly still has changes to be made, but I do like those lines!

Here for your enjoyment is Urbana Mystica: The Song of the City.

Northwest

• • The corn has turned from gray to red,
  • Since first my spirit wandered forth
  • From the drear cities of the north,
  • And to the solar mountains fled.
• • And here I set my face toward home,
  • For now my pilgrimage doth yield,
  • Although, methinks, yon blood-red field
  • Marshals the way to Aureum.
• • O Mesiemblé, who dost hold
  • Upon the central roads thy reign!
  • O Mother without blot or stain,
  • Crowned with bright crowns of triple gold!
• • O Meshiaské, at thy feet
  • I lay this barren gift of song!
  • For, ah! the way is steep and long
  • That leads unto thy sacred street.

Southwest

• • And yet what joy it were for me
  • To trod my feet upon the earth,
  • And journeying toward Aira’s birth
  • To kneel again at Drasoli!
• • And wandering through the tangled pine
  • That break the gold of Marsu’s dream,
  • To see the purple mist and gleam
  • Of morning on King’s forty-nine.
• • By many a vineyard-hidden home,
  • Orchard, and olive-garden gray,
  • Till from threaded Edekli’s way
  • The central hill bears up the dome!

Southeast

I love making up my own maps, keying them out, imagining ahead of time what the player characters are going to do, and then watching them tear it to shreds. Sometimes, of course, I need an adventure quickly, or I want to throw them a bit of a curve. There’s a lot of cool stuff out there for old-school games now to choose from. Here are some of my favorites. You should be able to use all of these with Gods & Monsters, and most of them can be easily re-skinned for your own game world.

Fight On!

Fight On! has some definite cool. It’s looking a lot like early Dragons; some of the Gods & Monsters-compatible adventures I’ve bookmarked for later use include the Fifth Circle of Hell in issue 3; House of the Ax and Mysterious Crystal Hemisphere in issue 4; the Lower Caves, Welcome to Slimy Lake, and Hell-Grave of the Tveirbró∂ur in issue 6; and while I haven’t gotten to issue 7 yet I certainly recommend Song of Serenity.

Castle of the Mad Archmage

The Greyhawk Grognard’s Castle is now up to eight levels, and it’s still growing. It is uniquely old-school and the maps are beautiful. Technically, it isn’t the castle, it’s the dungeon of the castle. It’s designed to go underneath a castle of your own design.

Dragonsfoot

Dragonsfoot’s archive contains both adventures and a sporadic e-zine, Footprints. Footprints #1 came out in early 2004; it’s now up to issue 16. Like Gods & Monsters, Dragonsfoot was old-school before it was cool, and the site design and general esthetic of the place reflects that. Plus, they now have Len Lakofka continuing Lendore Isle! They have separate sections for Original D&D, AD&D, etc., but you can mix and match easily. The adventures I have marked for future reference are:

• DF14: Goblins Tooth I: Moonless Night by Lorne Marshall, for 6-10 characters of level 1-3
• DF18: Where the Fallen Jarls Sleep, by John A. Turcotte, for characters level 3-5
• L4: Devilspawn, by Len Lakofka, for characters level 3-5
• DF21: Beneath Black Towen, by John A. Turcotte, for characters level 4-6
• DFT2: Battle for Gib Rus, by Michael Haskell, for 6 characters of level 5-7

Lamentations of the Flame Princess

Green Devil Face is a fun zine, but Raggi’s adventures really shine. Death Frost Doom is a very cool combination of Lovecraft and Raimi, and Grinding Gear and Three Brides also look very good.

Stonehell Dungeon: Down Night-Haunted Halls

I’ve been writing the rule books in Word. It generally has sucked, but it was the only choice. About a year ago, a new version of Nisus Writer Pro added outline navigation; Word’s outlining was the only reason I was sticking with it. Since then, all new documents have been created with Nisus; given the long lead time I have, you haven’t seen any of them yet.

But I have updated The Adventure Guide’s Handbook, and have just finished updating The World of Highland Guidebook. Using Nisus instead of Word makes it possible to include vector images (PDF and EPS) in the files and still have them be images on upload; it also means much cleaner HTML, which in turn means being able to use the new CMS to display them.

The new version is mostly the same. The big change is that I’ve completed updated the maps as well. I redrew them in Inkscape as all one image, and use clipping boxes to get the part of the map I want for each section of the guidebook. Since I was redrawing the map, I also put in the parts to the west and to the south that I’d never gotten around to redoing on a computer. You’ll also notice a huge unknown square in the upper left—that’s a piece I never got around to, period. I have no idea what’s up there. Except that it’s cold.

The source files for the maps and other images are in the ZIP Resources for The World of Highland Guidebook.

The opening text about the evils of kings—from which comes the title of this post—is from Samuel in the King James version of the Bible. I’ve changed it a little here and there to reflect the lack of any surviving Bibles in Highland—and the fact that the King James Bible wasn’t written until 600 years after the Cataclysm, which means it was never written at all in Highland. At the time of the Cataclysm, there were no complete English-language Bibles. For that matter, English itself wasn’t recognizable as modern English at the time of the Cataclysm. It’s a convenient fiction that the language developed similarly following the destruction and re-arranging of the world. It makes riddles a whole lot easier.

You have to wonder about the wisdom of the elders, who, seeing that Samuel’s sons were prone to bribery, corruption, and bad judgement, decided what they really needed was a king to replace non-hereditary prophets.

Robert J. Kuntz—yes, that Rob Kuntz—writes about the gaming style in the early days, in which player knowledge and ingenuity played a much greater role.

“Immersive play furthers creative thought. When a player substitutes intuition and creativity for game mechanics only, they are not immersing themselves in a growing experience through which they become better decision makers or strategists. This very lack summons a ground of clay that makes any stance for learning or achieving beyond a redundant and non-immersive pattern impossible. Such participants instead comfortably root to where and when they will choose to implement powers and repeatable strategies. They reach for dice with the knowledge that they have achieved a numerically advantageous position as they have before them all of the inputs in print to arrive at that calculation, so they are assured in most respects of a positive outcome. This is like opening a door. It takes little thought or planning. It is in a word boring; but the consequences for those who limit play under such a premise is more than just boring, it’s frightening.”

What words has Dungeons & Dragons brought to the English language?

“The first occurrence of *magocracy in print, anywhere, as far as I have been able to determine, is on page 89 of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide (1979), by Gary Gygax, in a list of forms of government. Many of the terms on my own list of governmental types are found there, naturally, such as gynarchy, oligarchy, and theocracy.”