2013: A Quick Review

In almost six hours it will be 2014 in my little corner of the world. So there’s still time for me to do a review of 2013!

The year didn’t start well for me, with me being ill and having trouble doing things I really enjoyed – like blogging. In July I came back to this blog and started writing Three Sad Wizards. Most of the posts I made in July and August were about this module. I really like how it turned out and, judging from reactions I got, other people do as well.

In September I completed the 30 Day Challenge. Not all questions on the list were interesting, but I tried to make something of every post, and most of the time I succeeded. And after a year of not being able to blog, this did feel as a real victory.

I also started a series inspired by the Planescape book Uncaged Faces of Sigil. I did six entries in the series Faces of Pretomournon. So far I’m pleased with how the series is turning out, but I think the entries may be a bit too long. Faces of Pretomournon will return in the new year.

In October I wrote my most popular post from this year: Orc Babies. It was a commentary on D&D Next’s “story elements”, that threaten to be completely uninspired and boring. To put money where my mouth is, I showed how I do orc babies in my campaign. Apparently, people liked that.

In November I participated in NaNoWriMo. I hoped I could continue blogging, but that proved to be unrealistic. However, I did write 50K words on my novel that is now almost finished.

So what will 2014 bring?

I’m writing a module called Lost Library of the Death Speakers, which is on hold until I figure out a way to make it less boring. I’m also outlining Valkyries vs. Amazons, an module which can be summed up as Female Fighters in Unreasonable Armor – the Module. However, I also have my Nanowrimo novel to finish, so it may take a while before I have time for it.

I’m also writing the DSA game, a clone of the first edition of Germany’s most popular roleplaying game. So far, I have most of character creation, about half of combat, and a lot of spells done. Still a lot to do though, so it will take time.

Happy new year to everyone, and see you next year!

D&D 30: I Made It, and What Now?

So I completed the 30 day challenge this Monday – precisely on schedule. I managed to post every day, and I didn’t skip days, so I didn’t need to catch up.

I had a fun time telling stories about my favorite PC, NPC, and events from previous campaigns. I play D&D in one form or another for almost 25 years, and it was nice to reminiscent about successful games in the past. Looking back, I saw we had some awesome campaigns.

I think everyone agrees the list is a bit dry and repetitive, but all-in-all most questions are good subjects to blog about. The only questions I couldn’t answer satisfactory where the two dice questions, and the one about energy. I endured the repetitive days of monster questions by drawing each monster. They became my favorite questions on the list. Making an illustration takes a lot more time than writing a post does, but I ended up with some nice drawings.

I really liked reading the posts of the other participants. Everyone’s posts were different from each other, making some nice surprises, or “oh, that’s cool”-moments. Although, I didn’t understand the answers on day 6 (favorite deity). Tyr? Chauntea? Where’s Vecna, or Tharizdun?

The most boring thing about the challenge were the people complaining about the challenge. Of course everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but I don’t understand the need for macho posturing and silly insults. Oh well, it’s over now.

What’s Next For This Blog?

“Faces of Pretomournon” has begun, and three of the NPCs are posted. I’ll keep posting the write-ups about one every weekend, but with 30 NPCs, that will take a long time. Maybe, if I manage to get ahead, I can speed up posting a bit.

Further, I’m still writing “Lost Library of the Deathspeakers”. To be honest, the 30 day challenge took a lot of time away from writing the module, but I’m now returning to it, and thanks to the challenge there’s a gibbering mouther in it. I’ll post some things like new spells, books, and magic items from the adventure on the blog.

D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 30 – Best DM I’ve Had

Last day!

It’s impossible to name the best DM out of the DMs I’ve had. They all were very different, and they all had good moments.

My cousin Rutger was my first DM. Actually, we always ran our campaigns together. We would take turns DMing and playing. Sometimes we would prepare our own separate adventures, but more often we would prepare for the game together, and decide who would DM two minutes before we began.

My friend Alex was my DM for most of my time at art academy. Alex was a big horror fan, and read a lot of Stephen King. He was attracted to Ravenloft, and ran adventures in that setting exclusively . 

Being both an art student and a horror fan, it’s no surprise Alex was very good at building atmosphere. His Ravenloft game often went beyond the gothic horror the setting usually provides, and our PCs encountered scary dreams, serial killers, and a rusty petrol station from another time. He often used out-of-game elements like music and lightning in his game

My friend Martijn was a believer in The One Way: the DM providing the railroad and the player’s staying in character as much as possible. His favorite setting was Al-Qadim, and for the most part he ran published adventures. I have written about those before (here and here), because I’ve used them for my own Al-Qadim campaign as well, and sometimes I could see he had difficulty making the adventures work. That’s not to say he was a bad DM, it was the adventure’s fault. He was especially good at using props: clay amulets, handwritten documents, that sort of thing.

Martijn was running his Al-Qadim campaign when 3^rd Edition came out, and converted the campaign to the new rules. In hindsight, the shift from a more story-oriented game to a more combat-oriented game was very clear. The story elements were still there in 3^rd, of course, but because the characters had more combat-oriented abilities and the fights took a bit longer, there was definitely more combat in the game than before.

My brother Jorrit DMed Dark Sun for a bit, decided he didn’t want to play AD&D anymore, played and ran a lot of games in the Storyteller system, and came back with 3^rd Edition. When 4E came out we started a campaign together, each of us running adventures in turn, but he quickly decided 4E wasn’t for him and left our group. Now he mostly plays Pathfinder.

I’ve played in two of Jorrit’s campaign: the Banewarrens campaign and his Castle Greyhawk campaign. Both had the same faults, pretending to be large megadungeons but really being 3.5 adventure paths. However, both have enough fun set-pieces, and Jorrit is especially good at those. He was also good at managing a big rule-set like 3.5 and Pathfinder.

So all of the DMs I’ve had were the best in some aspects. It’s interesting to note all of them were especially good at things I don’t do in my games. I don’t use music, and my games are more about ideas than about atmosphere. I hardly use any props, and while I’ve had long miniature combats in my 4E game, of course, I’m not really that good at the tactical side of the game. Maybe it’s because I’m not very good at those things that I admire their skill with them.

D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 29 – What is the number you always seem to roll on a d20?

Okay, the maker of this list truly was out of ideas at this point. Thank God the challenge is over tomorrow. We wouldn’t want him to suffer for much longer.

How am I going to answer this? 3? 4? I always seem to roll low when I want to roll high, and I always seem to roll high when I want to roll low, but I think everyone has that problem.

D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 28 – A Character I Will Never Play Again

I’m with Christopher Eccleston on this one: when I stop playing a character, I never go back to playing it, even if it would be for a 50^th anniversary celebration.

Usually, when me and my group end a campaign, we start up something else entirely. For example, now I’m playing Vampire. If we go back to D&D we’ll probably start at 1^st level, so previous characters are often too experienced. Also, there are many different character concepts, and returning to the same character means I can't play them.

I do use favorite previous PCs as NPC in new campaigns regularly. Sometimes they’re given a new name, appearance, and role so the players don’t recognize him or her. At other times, the character is pretty much the same. I like to have some continuity between my campaign worlds, even if they're not really in the same universe. For example, Quinzel is the character I played in my brother's Greyhawk campaign, Saldoran Gorst is from my Dromenon campaign, and Kata from an old 2nd Edition campaign all exist in the Weird Opera world in one form of the other.

D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 27 – A Character I Want To Play In The Future

I’ve been DMing for most of the past 6 years, and before that I played an Ice Witch and a bard/jester. I haven’t played a thief in about ten years! And it is my favorite class! So for my next character (not my Next character, mind you) I’ll probably roll up a thief. To be more precise, I’ll play her:

Her name is Blasphemy Battleship (now where would I have gotten that name?), and only steals so she can provide for her poor, sick mother.

Or so she says...

D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 26 – My Favorite Non-Magic Item

As we approach the end of the 30 day challenge, the questions become more and more dull. The imagination of whoever wrote these questions didn’t reach very far. Oh well, we knew that going in.

Anyway, my favorite non-magical items are books. Of course, there are many magical books, tomes, librams and manuals in the game, but regular books can be just as much fun.

Spellbooks: Can be found in adventures when the bad guy is a mage, or when adventuring in a library. Found spellbooks are the most common source of spells for PC mages to add to their own spellbooks. For the DM, they’re also the best way to introduce new spells into the campaign.

Exposition: Books are a good way to fill in your players about certain aspects of your campaign world, or, if you’re into that kind of thing, the plot of the adventure. For this kind of books handouts can be nice, representing interesting pages in the book and detailing one of the campaign world’s forgotten legends, or pages from the vampire’s diary.

Traps: Books make great traps, because when PCs find a book, they’ll want to read it. Any book kan be firetrapped or inscribed with a sepia snake sigil. The adventure “Ex Libris” from Dungeon Adventures # 29 had Abishai devils imprisoned in its books that were freed when a book was read. The letters on a page can be an entity existing of ideas, that jumps into the reader’s mind as a parasite, or they could be a spell that casts itself.

Mythos Tomes: Books that slowly drive you mad while you try to decipher the mad ramblings of the writer are always a favorite. These books are somewhere between a spellbook and exposition. Realms of Crawling Chaos from Goblinoid Games has a good system for reading Mythos Tomes and learning spells from them. And the Madness rules from Call of Cthulhu are actually in the 3.5 Unearthed Arcana, which means they’re available through the OGL.

D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 25 – My Favorite Magic Item

My favorite magic item is the wand of wonder. There’s a number of items of random magic in the game (bag of tricks, deck of many things, etc.) but none of them strike me as whimsical as the wand of wonder. The wand has a nice balance between effects: they are funny (turning permanently purple), useless (grass grows), damaging (a 6d6 fireball), and useful (invisibility).

I use the wand often. Recently, I gave the apprentice mage Lessie in Three Sad Wizards a variant wand of wonder. For her wand I removed the more damaging effects to make it less deadly and more humorous. Quinzel from Faces of Pretomournon has a wand of wonder as well.

Why WotC thought they needed to change the wand into a rod of wonder is beyond me. Just another case of fixing things that aren’t broke. Wand or rod, this magic item is always fun.

D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 24 – Favorite energy type

Gosh, finally an interesting question on this list! I love energy types, they’re my favorite part of the game! I can’t imagine how we ever managed without them. I mean, when a fire giant that is immune to fire is attacked with a torch, does he get damage? How do you know if the torch is doing fire damage? Leaving it to the DM seems unfair and untrustworthy. Fortunately, energy types were introduced in 3^rd Edition, and 4E made them even better! And I'm liking what I've seen so far in Next.

Anyway, my favorite energy: I ‘m a big fan of Necrotic energy and Radiant energy. Necrotic comes from the negative energy plane, and Radiant comes from the positive energy plane, but the designers were smart enough not to call these energy types “positive energy” and “negative energy”. That would have been stupid. “Necrotic” sounds much awesomerer!

However, the very best energy and my true favorite is Fire energy, because it can set things on fire and burn things. Now that’s what I call awesome!

D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 23 – Least Favorite Monster Overall

I’ve said I dislike dragons. But I dislike dragonborn even more. I hate them.

Excuse me for ranting a bit.

To me, they personify lack of imagination and making everything boring that was cool. They make the fantastical outright mundane, and that’s never a good thing. The existence of dragonborn severely undermines the mythology of dragons. Apparently, WotC wants to make dragons truly legendary. Well, if people see dragon creatures in the streets every day,  that just isn’t going to work.

Dragonmen were around in the game before 4E. In order of most interesting to least: Dragonlance had draconians, born out of corrupted eggs stolen from metallic dragons. There were different kinds of draconians, and they were pretty cool. For example, the Aurak draconian would explode when it reached 0 hp, and another one turned to stone, trapping his attacker’s sword. Dark Sun had the Dray, a race created by an undead dragon king, and the Forgotten Realms had Dragonkin, barbarian dragonmen under the control of the Cult of the Dragon.

So it might have been a good idea for 4E to combine them into one dragonkin race. But did the designers make them barbarians created by an undead dragon king, born from corrupted dragon eggs who explode upon death? No, they made them boring paladins.

I hate dragonborn.

D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 22 – Favorite Monster Overall

It makes sense that today’s monster is one of those I wrote about this week. It’s between the shambling mound and the harpy, but I went with the one I used most often of the two.

I’ve used harpies in my three most recent campaigns, and they’re already inhabiting at least one dungeon I haven’t run yet. In the BECMI campaign I ran a couple of years ago, two harpies were nesting in a dungeon. The magic-user managed to put one to sleep, but one of the monsters was enough to kill the thief and severely wound the others in the party. In a short-lived 4E campaign, the party’s flying ship was attacked by harpies. There’s also a pair of harpies in Three Sad Wizards, and there’s a harpy nest in Castle Verge.

Like I said last Friday, my love for the harpy comes from exposure to the monster at an early age. Astrid Lindgren’s Ronja Rövardotter, and it’s atmospheric illustrations by Ilon Wikland, had a big impact on me, and they still are the foundation of what I like in fantasy.

The bird-witches from the book always tried to claw out the eyes of their victims. Harpies in the D&D game could use a good Claw Out Their Eyes rule. Maybe something like this:

Claw Out Their Eyes: When the harpy’s attack roll is a natural 20 and she rolls maximum damage (4, in RC), she claws out one of the target’s eyes. For the remainder of the fight, the target suffers penalties as if he was blind (in RC, -4 to saves, -6 attack, +4 to AC).  After healing or first aid is applied, these penalties are reduced by 3 (so in RC, -1 to saves, -2 to attacks, and +1 to AC remains). The eye can be restored with any form of regeneration, but not by cure blindless.

In addition to the harpies in Ronja, these were very influential . Lindgren may have put bird-witches in my imagination, Carl Barks made sure they stayed there.

D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 21 – Favorite Dragon

I really dislike dragons. That’s why I changed them to Xaoclost. The drawing is the one that will show up in Lost Library of the Deathspeakers.

I used to like dragons, back when they were the most terrifying monsters in the Monstrous Compendium. But over the years, the designers at WotC made them boring and dull.

D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 20 – My Favorite Humanoid or Fey

I went for a monstrous humanoid with this one. I think my love for the harpy comes from reading Ronja Rövardotter by Astrid Lindgren as a kid. The “bird-witches” in that book scared the hell out of me. They wanted to claw out your eyes, how terrifying is that!

Either that, or  The Golden Fleecing by Carl Barks.

Originally, in ancient mythology harpies where beautiful women with wings. Only later they were mixed up with sirens, and became ugly bird-women. I tried to design a harpy that can be both, and in the Weird Opera world beautiful harpies with colorful feathers exist. No matter how beautiful, however, all harpies are evil bird-witches that want to claw out your eyes.

D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 19 – Me Favorite Plant Monster

Ahoy me hearties! Today be Talk Like a Pirate Day! Now we pirates usually don’t no speak ‘bout monsters other than t' kraken, but t’day is ‘bout me favorite plant monster.

Me didn’t really notice t' shambler at first when ah got t' Monstrous Compendium. But me do remember an issue o' Dungeon Adventures which included one, and me be a fan since.

At first, me wanted t' compost heap in Three Sad Wizards t' be a shambler, but alas, it would ’ve been a bit too tough for cabin boy-level characters. But me am sure t’ have a chance t' use it again sometime. Arrr!

D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 18 – Favorite Outsider

Of course I like modrons. In Monster Manual II they were silly-looking geometric shapes with legs, but for Planescape they were redesigned by my favorite artist to include steampunky clockwork elements. They were still silly looking, of course, but in a good quirky way.

The first chapter of The Great Modron March was the last Planescape adventure I ran. After that, 3^rd Edition came out and the modrons were no longer the primary inhabitants of Mechanus, being replaced by centaur ants and robotic giants. The boringifying of D&D’s monsters began there, and continues to this day.

D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 17 – My Favorite Vermin

Searching for reference for this drawing made my skin crawl. If normal spiders are that creepy, imagine one the size of a horse!

D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 16 – Favorite Aberration

The first issue of Dragon Magazine I bought had “The Ecology of the Gibbering Mouther”. It was the first time I encountered AD&D’s brand of weirdness, after being exposed to the Tolkienesque fantasy of Das Schwarze Auge. I liked the creature ever since, even though I can’t remember ever using it. I don’t know any published adventures that use a Gibbering Mouther, but this post inspired me: Lost Library of the Deathspeakers will have one.

D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 15 – My Favorite Undead Monster

I like ghost stories. I like it when the protagonists of the story must research the history of the ghost in order to lay it to rest. In my campaign, ghosts can be beaten in a fight (with magic weapons), but it will reappear the next night. The only way to get rid of a ghost is to find out what keeps it on the mortal plane.

D&D 30 Days Challenge: Day 14 – My Favorite NPC

Saldoran Gorst (you can call him “Sal”) was a NPC from my Dromenon campaign. He was a trader in souls. In the very first adventure of the campaign, the party came into the possession of a shard of glass, actually a piece of the soul of Zebulon, a disciple of the messiah who killed Iscariot (and was responsible for the rebirth of the Ashen God).

At first, the PCs knew nothing about the shattered soul of Zebulon, and Sal came to them wanting to buy the ‘magic piece of glass’. When they found out what the shards of glass were, they soughed Sal out to buy shards from him.

Sal was a yugoloth, but the party never found out what kind, since they met him only in human form. This being 4E, I statted him and his Marut bodyguards three times, but every time I thought the party would fight him they didn’t. They would rather negotiate with him.

Sal was originally inspired by A’kin the Friendly Fiend (from Uncaged: Faces of Sigil), but he quickly took on a personality of his own. He was a shrewd businessman, but he was amazingly fair (for a yugoloth). He reasoned that customers would come back if he treated him fair. And he was right: the PCs did business with him again and again, and Sal made a lot of money from them.

Saldoran Gorst trades in souls no longer. Now, he sells dreams and nightmares in Pretomournon’s nightmare market. He will make an appearance in Faces of Pretomournon, here on this blog.

D&D 30 Days Challenge: Day 13 – Favorite Trap/Puzzle

‘The Face of the Great Green Devil’ from S1 – Tomb of Horrors is perhaps the most famous trap in D&D history. And with good reason: it has everything a good trap needs.

1. It’s deadly: who leaps into the mouth of the devil is completely and forever destroyed.

2. It’s easy to detect: any PCs taking the time to examine the devil’s mouth will certainly detect the sphere of annihilation almost immediately.

3. Examining it is still dangerous: the PC examining the trap shouldn’t put his hand in. This is why you have a 10-foot pole.

The 2E module Return to the Tomb of Horrors improves the trap, and makes it even better, in my opinion. In that scenario, anyone stepping into the devil’s mouth with dust from Acererak’s discarded physical form in hand will not be destroyed, but is transported to The City That Waits.

Tomb of Horrors is often cited by new school players as the foremost example of an “unfair” module. Although it certainly was designed to be deadly, examining everything, having a thief to scout,  and detecting magic or evil regularly saves a lot of trouble. It seems to me in new school games, the most common way to interact with traps is falling in them. Instead of teaching players not to walk into traps, traps became less and less dangerous.