Role-playing reviews

Time to say your prayers!

While prepping a new adventure for Gods & Monsters, I’ve been watching a lot of movies and reading a lot of books involving haunted, shifty houses.

One of the things that makes horror houses appealing to me as an adventure guide is that they are mini (or not so mini, in the case of Rose Red) dungeons. Often, little ideas—creatures, traps, hauntings—can be pulled straight into a dungeon room.

The descendants of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House are the most RPG-friendly. A group of people, each with special skills, are brought together to investigate unknown phenomena; they do so by walking into an ancient structure and searching the rooms!

Werewolf by Night

The inspiration for House on Crane Hill is this multi-issue story from the seventies comic book Werewolf by Night. Marcosa House scared the crap out of me as a pre-teen. It is clearly influenced by The Legend of Hell House, right down to the name of the ghost. This is from when the Werewolf was mostly an excuse to highlight different eerie phenomena each story; you could pretty much remove the Werewolf from the story without losing anything except the big fight at the end. Which, incidentally, I only saw recently; part of the reason the Marcosa House storyline has stuck with me for such a long time is that I didn’t know how it ended, and the ending is the only thing that turns it into a superhero comic.

Penciler Don Perlin seems moderately influenced by Ditko in these issues, which adds to the eeriness.

As a Hill House descendant combined with superhero aesthetics, this could be used almost verbatim as a dungeon adventure.

Phantasm

Its been a long time since I last saw this movie; about all I remembered about it was the shiny things and that there was something other-dimensional about it. The latter meant it might be a good source for the adventure.

Phantasm is possibly the first reality-bender I watched. The ending is very reminiscent of the later Nightmare on Elm Street ending. Unlike Elm Street (which doesn’t quite count as a horror house, though it shares many similar features), Phantasm is centered around a mysterious funeral home run by the very odd Angus Scrimm. I enjoyed this low-budget movie more now than I remember enjoying it in college.

In my quick review of Fight On! I said there were three places I go when I’m looking for stuff to use with our Gods & Monsters game. Number three is my favorite old-school indie right now, Lamentations of the Flame Princess. I’ve got the first two Green Devil Faces and recently picked up Death Frost Doom.

I ordered directly from James Raggi, before Noble Knight Games started distributing his work; the shipments came from Finland faster than some orders from the mainland United States. I’ll be grabbing Green Devil Face #3 and No Dignity in Death soon, and am looking forward to Insect Shrine.

Death Frost Doom

Death Frost Doom is a 23-page adventure with a wrap-around map, just like the old days. It’s A5, which makes it like a 6x8 book. The cover is a removable map—just like the old TSR adventures. The front of the cover has very nice art by Laura Jalo. She also has a sickeningly well-done piece at the end, which you can see in the preview at their web site. The map (which I assume is by Raggi) is a bit hard to read because the underground is not filled in; impassable rock looks just like open hallway.

Doom is meant to be a moody horror piece with more (dungeon) investigation than fighting. The list of inspirational authors indicates Lovecraft and his minions were the heaviest influence, but on reading it is obviously inspired by Evil Dead. Since I read front to back, I didn’t see the “thanks to Sam Raimi” until I got to the back cover.

It reads like a well-written Judges Guild module. It can be used in any of the old-school D&D clones, and can definitely be used in Gods & Monsters. Like the adventures of old, there is no flavor text, so more preparation is required to ensure I don’t describe what’s not immediately obvious. It’s meant for 1st to 3rd level characters, which means I won’t have a chance to run it for a while, but I am adding it to my short list of third-party adventures.

The book also includes a short, deadly, 4-page adventure at the end, a version of which appeared in Fight On 4.

Green Devil Face #1 and #2

LotFP’s1 Green Devil Face #1 was originally “Fantasy Fucking Vietnam”. The entire 26 page booklet is one adventure, a satirical quagmire of the OD&D dungeon.

17. Jailer Room

The door to the north is labeled “3tards,” and the door to the west is labeled “4ons.”

I’m sure I’m not getting all the jokes; most of them are quite funny in an enjoyably sophomoric way. I can’t but like an adventure that includes references to an old guilty pleasure from college:

There are three places I go when I’m looking for third-party resources for Gods & Monsters. I’ve mentioned one already: Dragonsfoot. I’ve mentioned a fourth if you count The Grognard’s Lawn’s Castle of the Mad Archmage. If you’re looking for new resources for Gods & Monsters, there’s a wagonload of stuff coming out from the Old School Revolution. The Grognard’s amazing Castle is only the tip of the iceberg.

I don’t know why I haven’t mentioned it before—maybe I was expecting it to die like similar projects in the past. But Fight On! is an amazing magazine focussed on D&D and similar old-school games. Most everything in it is usable for Gods & Monsters.

I bought the first two issues of Fight On! several months ago, and have just received my order of issues three through six from Lulu. It was like Christmas morning, and it just keeps getting better and better as I read through them.

Fight On #1 and #2

A Lulu shipment arrived just before heading out to Madison for Forge Midwest. It included issues 1 and 2 of Fight On!, “a fanzine for the old-school renaissance.” Contributors include Jeff Rients, Paul Czege, Geoffrey O. Dale, and Vincent Baker. It is reminiscent of The Strategic Review and the first “Best of The Dragon”. It’s a simple two-column word processor-style format on glossy paper. Black and white inside, issue 2 has a nice color cover. The front is a dragon summoning and the back is a rough hand-drawn map.

Each issue has adventures designed for early D&D; there’s the beginnings of a megadungeon in issue 2, “The Darkness Beneath”, and a lot of weirdness. For example, issue 1 has cleric spells. Here’s the “Tentacles of Demogorgon”:

A dread demon of the terrible abysses beyond lends the invoking priest the power of his tentacles, by transmuting the priest’s arms and legs into similar wormlike extremities.

Paul Czege describes a campaign seed in which wizards cast spells by tapping the power of Space Wizard corpses they carry on their backs. Vincent Baker has a “monster machine” for creating monsters, traps, and other dangers. There are rules for panicked mounts, Pickled Orc Eyeballs, and a random inn generator (first try: The Rich Wench). There’s an article by Greg Svenson recalling “The First Dungeon Adventure” under Dave Arneson.

I’m reading Richard Barber and Juliet Barker’s Tournaments and ran across this great idea for a Gods & Monsters adventure in a feudal fantasy world:

The tournament, in its strictest sense, was a mêlée fought out over several miles of open countryside encompassing rivers, woods, vineyards and farm buildings—all of which provided useful opportunities for ambush and sortie. The boundaries were unmarked in the early days, though the field was vaguely designated by reference to two towns: tournaments were thus proclaimed ‘between Gournai and Ressons’, for example, or ‘between Anet and Sorel’. The only formal limits were certain specially designated areas which were fenced off as refuges where knights could rest or rearm in safety during the combat.

Several companies of knights took part, under the leadership of the same lords whom they followed and served in warfare, and often as many as two hundred knights participated on each side. At this early period there were no rules to distinguish the tournament from real battle: there were no foul strokes or prohibited tactics and, even if there had been, there was no-one to supervise or enforce them. It was thus quite common for several knights to band together to attack a single tourneyer: there were instances of tourneyers being attacked despite the fact that they had lost vital parts of their armour in the skirmishes and occasions on which any weapon to hand was used—including bows and arrows and crossbows. The only concessions to the sporting nature of the combat were the provision of refuges and the sine qua non that the object of the game was to capture and ransom the opposing knights, not to kill them.

Often in tournaments, a vanquished knight gave up their horse and sometimes equipment to the knight who defeated them. In the heydey of this style of tournament, a skilled knight could make a decent living going from tournament to tournament.

In an RPG, the in-world rules might specify ransom amounts, perhaps 100 monetary units for every ransomable (read: captured and not dead) opponent, with perhaps a special prize, worth several thousand monetary units, for the group who captures the most opponents. Such a tournament could be opened up to more than knights in a fantasy world, providing opportunities for “strike teams” (adventuring groups) to gain honor and experience.

The ransoms are expected to be paid by the captured individuals; depending on the finances of the area, there might also be an entrance fee to officially join the tournament.

In the Encounter Guidebook, I wrote that the chaotic mist and the dry city were:

…loosely inspired by some of the writings of Stephen King, some of the comic book work of Grant Morrison, some science fiction novels by Frank Herbert, and the Alice books of Lewis Carroll.

“Some of the writings of Stephen King” were mainly a short story from an anthology called Dark Forces; that short story is now a movie, Frank Darabont’s “The Mist”. Atmosphere-wise and creature-wise, it’s a fairly faithful adaptation. If you want to see what the chaotic mist looks like, Darabont’s film of King’s story gives you a pretty good idea. The mist isn’t quite as dense as theirs, and walking around in it isn’t quite as immediately deadly, but it’s close.

The speakers fit easily in my gaming case.

The adventure I’m currently working on—The House of Lisport—has a couple of short audio files among the props I’m making for it. Nothing special, but they should make the adventure more fun. The problem is, how to play them? Managing a stereo remote and a CD, or getting up and walking over to the stereo, does not make the adventure more fun.

Enter portable speakers designed for MP3 players. I bought these Logitech speakers for traveling, but the moment I unpacked them and plugged them in, I realized they were perfect for tabletop gaming.

These aren’t the only option. There are a whole bunch of really nice, inexpensive (around $20) portable speaker systems. I chose the mm28 over the more beautiful Audio Source DB5 speakers because they were somewhat less expensive, and because they came with an AC power adaptor.

The mm28 box claims a whopping “over 45 hours” of battery life; it takes four AA batteries. I haven’t had the opportunity to test that yet. But it definitely works for game purposes, and it has a plastic shield for its speakers to keep them safe from cheese and tomato sauce (the plastic cover is really meant to be used as a stand, mind you).

It turns an iPod or other MP3 player into a game accessory, as long as the player has a 3.5mm input jack. All I have to do on my old 1G Shuffle is make sure my game tracks are at the beginning of the playlist, and triple-click the play button to move to the beginning when I’m ready to play them.

Sound quality, at least at the levels needed for tabletop gaming, is great. It’s very clear even at very low volumes. It also maintains clarity even at very high volumes—volumes higher than I’d normally want to use in my apartment.

It’s a very simple setup. There are no volume controls: volume is controlled through the MP3 player. It has an on/off button, and it turns itself off after about eight minutes of inactivity. Note that some people have had problems with the auto shut-off feature when listening at low volume or to quiet passages of music.

Owning this makes me want to add a soundtrack to my next adventure!

I was browsing around looking to see what kinds of things went into manor house cellars yesterday in order to finish off the maps for Lisport Manor and ran across The Gentleman’s House, an 1865 book by architect Robert Kerr. It appears to be a guide, with floorplans, for a variety of eleventh through nineteenth century noble homes! It’s a 603-page monstrosity including plates of real floor plans such as Bridgewater House (1849, plate 19) and tables of accommodation and cost (see page 396, or page 471 in the PDF). For a really nice adventure map, look at plate 20 (PDF page 130) for the 1863 map of “West Shandon, Dumbartonshire”.

Looks like a great source for game masters in need of realistic maps, or who want to know what goes into building one of these things that player characters destroy with a single fireball. You can download the PDF from Google Books. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell the text version is not downloadable, which makes it difficult to search the document off-line. It’s still a pretty cool resource.

It is very easy to find pictures of ancient castles, kings, and temples in popular history books. But the small things are often forgotten in such overviews. This makes Val Horsler’s Living the Past especially useful: the living museums it describes try to recreate all levels of society.

While it certainly has lots of pictures of castles and grand halls, and kings and nobility, it also has pictures of people as they would have lived in or visited those places. Game masters looking for a description of, say, an Anglo-Saxon peasant’s fenced-in home can turn to page 67 and describe that scene.

Written for and with the assistance of English Heritage, the book covers English historical re-enactments in Britain. However, as I wrote in Populating England, that land has seen many cultures. The island has seen Celt, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Viking, and Norman invasions. Much of the first section of the book is useful for any European-based fantasy gaming. (It goes all the way up to World War II.)

Every page has pictures. The photos of soldiers, hovels, peasants, and families are useful resources for the adventure guide looking to write flavor text.

People from various levels of society feature in the Weald and Downland Museum’s recreation of life in a Sussex parish in 1626. The Clares, a prosperous yeoman farming family at Pendean Farm, employ labourers to bring in the harvest, bound in authentically shaped sheaves.

Each era is broken into three sections. It begins with a short “approaching” the era, one or two pages long, that describes the historical background. Then, a longer “visiting sites” of the era covers places that still exist and can be visited. Finally, a “recreating the past” section covers the living museums and “interpreters” who attempt to recreate this era through costume and role-playing.

“Many people think that the most difficult thing about medieval cooking is using the open fire. But for me, the strangest thing is the lack of forks; you just have to hang on to your knives.”

This is not as densely useful as other books I’ve reviewed. Much of the book is about the people taking part in the re-enactments and how they fare in these living museums. But there’s still enough about the re-creations themselves to make it useful for gamers.

Bede’s World offers real, hands-on experience of life in the Anglo-Saxon era. Interpreters in costume demonstrate a wide range of crafts: spinning, weaving, dyeing and embroidery; pottery-making with a hand-turned wheel; hurdle-making, bead-making, basket-making, forging and leatherwork.

In a couple of places it shows some step-by-step examples of things that people did, such as how a warrior puts on his armor.