13th Age: Wyrd of the Wild Wood, Chapters 2-3

The last thing henchman Drogan saw before he was ripped in two.

I ran a group through the second and third chapters of "Wyrd of the Wild Wood" tonight. Attendance was low again: Sundays really do just bring out the board gamers. But we decided to persevere and go ahead with just two PCs. I augmented the group's numbers with a suggestion from the Google+ 13th Age community, giving them a panther animal companion reskinned as a human fighter henchman. If the players had rolled better, I think "Drogan the Fighter" would have been a bigger asset to the group. Unfortunately, while the players were rolling low all night, I kept rolling high. Given that the party consisted of two adventurers and a wimpy henchman, I tweaked numbers when necessary. This was especially the case with the "feral halfling" fight: the original number of "feral halflings" and "halfling madminds" appearing in the encounter was too high, guaranteeing some TPK action. But even with the correct numbers for a party of 2.5 adventurers, we felt that the "feral halflings" were too potent by half for level 2 mooks: their poison dart attack did both damage and "dazed (save ends)" on the first attack and then knocked targets "unconscious (save ends)" if they failed their first save against the poison.

The other fights went better . . . well, for certain values of better. The dark elf wizard found a ring of defense in the ruins of a blue dragon lair. Good. But in taking the ring he triggered the lair's magical defenses. Bad. The adventurers cleverly used a "Ray of Frost" ritual to cross a gaping chasm by constructing an ice bridge, and they deftly avoided the dangers of the Swamp of Flame Spurts (with its perilously close-to-copyright-violating Vermin of Unusual Size). Good. But the gnome rogue didn't see the otyugh in time and came within a single hit point of being swallowed alive. Bad.

The deadliest battle was the one with the emaciated owl bear. The creature was too much for a pair of adventurers and their henchman. So when it rolled a natural 20 on its attack against the henchman, I ruled that the owl bear treated the henchman like a strongman treats a phone book. The hungry creature got to return to its lair with half a henchman and the adventurers got to live to fight another day. Owl bears in 13th Age are creatures of respect.

I'm switching the game to Wednesday nights starting October 9th. We'll see if going head to head with the D&D Next Encounters crowd allows us to seduce a few folks to the 13th Age Side of the Force.

13th Age: You Know You've Spent Too Much Time Reading OSR Blogs . . .

. . . when your response to the umpteenth Internet complaint about the simplicity of 13th Age's Barbarian, Ranger, and Paladin classes is to note that people seemed to get along just fine playing even less complex Barbarians, Rangers, and Paladins in AD&D.

(For me, the meat of 13th Age are the One Unique Things, Icon Relationships, and Backgrounds. The various class-specific Talents and the like are secondary to my fun.)

13th Age: Wyrd of the Wild Wood, Chapter One

(The adventurers confront monsters disguised as dice.)

Today, as part of the Gamer Gathering celebration at Armored Gopher Games, I ran the first chapter of "Wyrd of the Wild Wood," the second in an ongoing series of organized play adventures for Pelgrane Press's 13th Age. The following characters made appearances:

Captain Nagal, Tiefling Fighter

One Unique Thing: "I'm the sole survivor of the Perilous Host, a mercenary company sworn to the service of the Crusader."

Icon Relationships: Crusader (Conflicted) 2, Diabolist (Negative) 1.

Backgrounds: Mercenary Captain +5, Nursemaid to an Ailing Mother +2, Hunted and Persecuted +1.

Gral, Human Paladin

One Unique Thing: "I occasionally gain glimpses of people's souls."

Icon Relationships: Crusader (Conflicted) 1, Emperor (Conflicted) 1, Priestess (Conflicted) 1.

Backgrounds: Courtly Upbringing +2, Fought for the Crusader +2, Student of Myth +2, Wandering Theologian +2.

Kadüm, Half-Orc Barbarian

One Unique Thing: "I'm the bastard son of the Orc Lord."

Icon Relationships: Orc Lord (Conflicted) 2, Lich King (Negative) 1.

Backgrounds: Black Dog Mercenary +3, Basic Imperial Training +2, Thieves' Guild Muscle +2, Banished to Abandoned Outpost +1.

Stick, Gnome Bard

One Unique Thing: "I'm the world's tallest gnome."

Icon Relationships: Crusader (Negative) 1, High Druid (Negative) 1, Orc Lord (Negative) 1.

Backgrounds: Has Performed in Every Slum in the Empire +5, Used to Life on the Road +3.

The adventure began on the floating island of Darkskye, a former magic crystal mine turned into an imperial prison. Gral and Stick were on Darkskye as investigators for the Priestess's Committee on Prison Reform (Gral because he believes in the Priestess's work, Stick because he had stolen the High Druid's stash and was trying to get as far away from the Wild Wood as possible); Captain Nagal was serving as one of the prison guards; and Kadüm was a prisoner (with a secret mission to mess with the Lich King's black market trade in Darkskye crystal dust).

Gral and Stick were asking Kadüm questions in Captain Nagal's presence about conditions at the prison when a powerful explosion shook the island. The floor of Kadüm's cell split open, nearly sending the half-orc falling into open air; only the quick reflexes of Captain Nagal saved him from disaster. Gral and Stick dove out of the way as a portion of the cell's ceiling collapsed onto the interview table, crushing it. The party decided that the best bet for survival was to stick together and make their way to the top of the island (rather than being crushed inside its bowels).

As they moved through the tunnels comprising the prison, they enjoyed scenes of disaster and madness. The explosion had supercharged the island's crystals, causing them to warp anything they penetrated. In one case, this meant a group of prisoners and guards from the mess hall. Transformed into hideous mutants, the unfortunate souls attacked the party. Doubly unfortunate because they were swiftly slain by the adventurers.

The prison continued to spiral out of control, and the adventurers were lucky to reach the island's top. When they did, they discovered that they were falling out of the sky above the Wild Wood. A stand of particularly tall trees stood within jumping distance of the lurching island, offering a means of escape. Before the party could take advantage of this fact, they found themselves facing a golem formed from the living crystals of the mines. Backing up the golem were a small hoard of crystalline minions. Things looked grim: the golem was laying into Gral, nearly beating the paladin into unconsciousness, and the other adventurers had suffered greatly from the razor-sharp storm of crystals swirling around the creature. But then Kadüm became a whirling dervish of death, destroying all of the minions and laying into the golem with his axe. The other adventurers rallied, making short order of the golem.

But they had no opportunity to celebrate their victory—the walls of the rainwater reservoir located on the island's surface crumbled with another lurch of the island, and a torrent of water rushed toward the party. Their only hope was the stand of trees. If they could leap over to them, then they would avoid the rushing flood and certain death by drowning.

Of course, every single character failed the DC 15 skill check needed to safely jump into the trees.

So the session ended with the party being swept over the side of Darkskye, plummeting to the Wild Wood below. Nothing like a good old-fashioned cliffhanger!

Some of the OOC highlights of the game: (1) the interview with Kadüm revealed that the Darkskye prisoners routinely dined on sky lobsters—caught with nets by flyers and cooked in delicious cloud butter; (2) barbarians are rough on mooks; Kadüm managed to crit his Whirlwind attack on the crystal minions for a total of 55 damage, singlehandedly wiping out all 10 mooks in a single standard action; and (3) a high-Charisma paladin can really lock down a big bad with Smite Evils.

I also felt that the simplified combat ranges of 13th Age (nearby and far away) worked quite well in play. As the photo at the start of this post indicates, we used minis for each PC and dice for the monsters. We didn't track exact position on a map, but used the minis and dice to indicate which combatants were engaged with one another. Everything else was "theatre of the mind."

I'm looking forward to running Chapter Two next weekend! Thanks to Pelgrane for a great game!

Beyond the Wall: Village and NPC Name Generator

Colin Chapman has put together Home by Any Other Name, a free PDF supplement for Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures. The PDF allows you to randomly generate medieval English names for both your characters' villages and their family members and fellow villagers.

Glenn Lord's Robert E. Howard Archive To Be Housed at the University of Texas

In awesome news for scholars, more than 15,000 pieces of Glenn Lord's Robert E. Howard archive have been donated by Lord's estate to the University of Texas at Austin's Henry Ransom Center. Lord's generosity to his fellow Texans (and, by extension, the worldwide Howard fan and scholar community) is touching. What a wonderful way to preserve not only Howard's legacy but Lord's as well!

The Dog Days of Summer

I don't want July 2013 to slip by without a post to the blog, so here's a little update on just how crazy the last month has been.

When I last posted on June 17th, I was days away from closing on both the sale of my current home and the purchase of my new home. Within twenty-four hours of that post, though, I was thrust into limbo: our buyers' lender indefinitely postponed the closing, throwing our planned purchase of a home into doubt (since we needed the sale to cover our down payment). Three weeks of misinformation, miscommunication, and general bureaucratic hijinks ensued. The end result was that the buyers had their loan application rejected—the sale was off.

We put our house back on the market and looked around at other real estate comparable to the house we had hoped to buy. Nothing was really a valid alternative for our needs. So we decided to take a risk: we have applied for a bridge loan on our equity to pay for the down payment on the house we wanted all along. The danger, of course, is that we will get what we want without selling our current home and thus end up paying two mortgages and two sets of utility bills. I'm confident that the house will do well as the real estate market picks up after the summer vacation, though. Fingers crossed!

The other insanity that's plagued me for a month is my fantasy-themed "Intro to Fiction" course. Not the students—the students are great, and I've enjoyed all of our discussions about the authors on the syllabus. (This class was especially amazing when it came to discussions of China Miéville's Scar.) No, the problem is that I underestimated how much work is involved in keeping up with the grading for an Advanced Composition course with a required total of approximately thirty pages of writing. In a regular semester, that's a lot of labor, but it's spread out over fifteen weeks. Condensed into eight weeks, the same amount of grading becomes a desperate race against time!

Class ends tomorrow (with a final discussion of Ursula K. Le Guin's Voices), so the end is in sight. I'll have to use the weeks between the end of summer school and the start of the fall semester to catch up on some of my own paper writing, but I should be able to resume a more regular posting schedule.

Beyond the Wall: Free Bestiary Available!

The ever amazing Colin Chapman has produced What Lies Beyond, a free, extended bestiary for the Beyond the Wall neoclone. The supplement has a nice selection of mundane and exotic beasts (e.g., the grindylow depicted above in one of my favorite Brian Froud images) as well as a template system for making unique undead (similar to the template systems already introduced in the BtW corebook for making unique demons, dragons, and goblins). Check it out!

P. S. I will be getting back to the BtW village blogtest soon. This week, however, I am up to my neck in packing for the move to a new home several blocks away. It's hard to believe just how many books my family owns—and how many boxes it takes to pack those books away!

Fantasy Course Now Underway

Although today was technically the second day of my Summer Session II ENGL 109 "Intro to Narrative" course, it was in actuality the first day that the students and I discussed fantasy literature. Our author for this week is Lord Dunsany, and our story for today's class was "The Sword of Welleran." I began by giving the students a mini-lecture on the concepts of liminality and threshold experiences in ritual and literature. There was much talk of weddings as liminal rites we all know from life, books, and mass media. There was also a nice exchange about Batman as a liminar. Then I shifted class into discussion mode by asking the students to identify all of the liminal elements in Dunsany's story. They did a great job of this and were also quite alert to Dusany's ironic conclusion to the tale (which I won't spoil here for those who might want to read it).

I won't bore you all further with regular updates about the class, but I thought that I'd at least mention it was up and running. Anyone who's interested further can look at my syllabus. We finish up Dunsany this week with "The Fall of Babbulkund" and "The Kith of the Elf-Folk," then it's on to Robert E. Howard and "The Phoenix on the Sword" next Monday.

Fate Accelerated: Mr. Baggins of Bag-End, Underhill

This is my one hundredth post on Vargold: The Wolf-Time, so I thought I'd dedicate it to J. R. R. Tolkien's Bilbo Baggins, the character who sparked my love of fantasy fiction back in the spring of 1979. I've never liked most of the RPG write-ups that I've seen for Bilbo; he usually ends up being awkwardly shoe-horned into a system designed for sword-and-sorcery action, something that's very far from his tea, cakes, and handkerchief-laden wheelhouse. Fate Accelerated does a much better job of accounting for this genteel fish out of water, so that's what I've used to generate the character sheet below.

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Bilbo Baggins

High Concept: Respectable Gentle-Hobbit
Trouble: A Took on His Mother's Side
Aspects: Would-Be Burglar

Approaches:

Clever +3, Careful +2, Sneaky +2, Forceful +1, Quick +1, Flashy +0

Stunts:

Because I am a Lover of Puzzles, I get a +2 whenever I Cleverly overcome obstacles generated by puzzles, riddles, and other conundrums.

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I decided to express Bilbo's fuddy-duddy Baggins qualities in his High Concept, leaving his suppressed Tookish penchant for adventure to his Trouble. Most of "An Unexpected Party" is about the conflict between these two sides of our protagonist. His remaining Aspect—"Would-Be Burglar"—reflects his position within Thorin and Company and will be repeatedly compelled by the dwarves' players to make Bilbo take the risks they hope to avoid. Because it's so perfect for his character, I stole Bilbo's Stunt right out of the main FAE rulebook (p. 31); at the start of the novel, it's encapsulated in his fascination with Thrain's map. My assumption is that Bilbo's remaining Aspects and Stunts will be determined in play. (In fact, I'd be tempted to skip ahead to "Inside Information" and make use of Bilbo's list of self-epithets to generate them.)

Thanks again to all my readers for sticking through my first hundred posts; I'm hoping to take much less than three years to produce the next hundred!

Beyond the Wall Blogtest: My Dwarven Adventurer's Raw Numbers

Everyone in the Beyond the Wall blogtest has agreed to first present the results of our playbook dice rolls and then to discuss those results before generating final character descriptions. Handling the process this way will also help us to collaborate on the village map and NPC list (rather than having to back away from decisions made in isolation).

Brett has already posted his dice rolls for his Would-Be Knight; Henry has done the same for his Self-Taught Mage. What follows are my results for my Dwarven Adventurer.

According to the playbook, my character has the following stats before any dice are rolled: STR 10, CON 12, DEX 8, INT 8, WIS 8, CHA 6.

The first set of tables answer the question "How did you come to the lands of men?"

In this section, the first subquestion is "What is the history of your clan?" I rolled an 8: "They have always worked the deepest mines, mining the richest veins of precious metals and gems." The mechanical bonuses for this result are +2 STR, +2 CON, and Skill: Mining. This subquestion comes with a map icon, indicating that I get to add a location to the village map. Since my character is from out of town, this decision is a bit tougher than the ones the human characters' players have to make. Perhaps there is a jeweler in town or a goldsmith who purchased the minerals dug up by my character's clan?

The second subquestion is "What drove you from the lands of your people?" I rolled another 8, getting the tragic result of "Your hold was destroyed by goblins." My STR gets another +2 bonus; my CON, a +1. Was my character the only dwarf from the hold to survive?

The final subquestion in this section of the playbook asks "When you left your own people, you found it difficult to live with humans. However, the other characters became your fast friends. Who else became your friend?" My roll of 3 on this table turned up a rather strange result: "Most humans found you too strange, and were frightened of you. You spent much time alone." Since this subquestion is supposed to generate an NPC for the list, it seems counter-intuitive for the playbook to produce a result that provides no hook for generating an NPC. My inclination is to roll again, but I thought I would consult with the group first about doing so. The mechanical bonuses for my roll are +1 CON, +1 INT, and +1 WIS.

At this point, I'm done with the first of the playbook's two major questions. My character's abilities are now as follows: STR 14, CON 16, DEX 8, INT 9, WIS 9, and CHA 6. He also has Skill: Mining.

Becoming a Level 1 Warrior, the character gains the class abilities Weapon Specialization and Knacks as well as a craft skill of my choosing. Since the specific nature of my class abilities will be decided by subsequent rolls on the tables, I initially thought that this skill would be as well. But that doesn't seem to be the case. Since the character came from a precious metals mine, I decide to make this skill "Goldsmithing."

Now I move on to the playbook's second major question: "What have you learned on your adventures so far?"

The first subquestion here is "How do you plan to build your hoard?" My roll is a 4, "You hold in your memory the location of the entrances to several lost elven tombs and plan to take their faerie gold." The mechanical benefits are +2 CON and Skill: Trapping. Can anyone say "plot hook for the GM"? I thought you could!

The next subquestion is "Like all respectable dwarves, you bear the weapon of your fathers. What is it?" With a roll of 2, my ancestors' weapon is apparently "A short but broad blade of heirloom steel." I get +3 CON and Weapon Specialization (+1 to hit, +2 to damage) with the short sword. I'm also supposed to add a building to the village map. Since this entire table is all about weapons, my choices here seem a bit limited: blacksmith, armorer, guardhouse. I'll take votes from the rest of the group.

(I'll also note that my character has run afoul of Beyond the Wall's maximum in-chargen ability value of 19. After these two tables, his CON should be 21—but it can't, so I settle for the 19 and hope I don't get another CON bonus.)

On the third subquestion table ("What was your first big hassle amongst the tall people? The friend to your right was there with you."), I roll a 1: "You were waylaid by a pack of giant spiders near the mountains. Your friend burned their webs as they descended from the trees, and gains +1 STR." My mechanic bonus is a +2 to STR and the Knack: Defensive Fighter (+1 AC). The friend bonus is a good one, given that the player to my virtual right is Brett's Would-Be Knight; he can definitely use a STR boost. We've also learned that the village is near the mountains.

The final subquestion is "What treasure do you keep that first drew the other characters to you?" My roll of 5 gives me "An untarnished silver chalice," a useless CON boost of +2 (that's four points of extra CON down the drain, boo-hoo), and a "cup which purifies its drink." I expect that the other players met my character in the tavern where he routinely drank from his own cup, the one family heirloom he rescued from the destruction of his hold. An NPC creation is signaled here. Since I earned a cup from this table, I think the NPC has to be the man or woman who fills that cup with strong ale: either the bartender at the tavern or the barmaid.

At this point, I'm done rolling. My character's abilities are STR 16, CON 19, DEX 8, INT 9, WIS 9, and CHA 6. My skills are Mining, Goldsmithing, and Trapping. About as classic a dwarf as you could expect (albeit clumsier than most—was he injured escaping from the goblins?). Time for the rest of the players to make comments and suggestions, I think!

Beyond the Wall: It Takes a Crowd to Source a Village

One of the best parts of Flatland Games' Beyond the Wall & Other Adventures neoclone is the way that its character playbooks seamlessly merge character creation and setting creation: as the players generate their YA-fantasy heroes, they simultaneously build and populate the heroes' home village. I thought it would be interesting to go through this process publicly, and so I asked for some partners-in-crime over at the Google+ OSR community.

Our premise is that the participants' blogs are actually players sitting at a table and going through Beyond the Wall character creation. Each blog is "seated" to the right of another blog, so the character it creates will take part in another character's backstory (as per chart 6 in each Beyond the Wall playbook). In addition, the locations and NPCs generated by each blog will be combined into a single village map and NPC key.

Here's the list of participants, blogs, and playbook choices in the order in which they're seated at the virtual table:

+Rob Barrett of Vargold: The Wolf-Time is creating a Dwarven Adventurer.
+Brett Slocum of The Eye of Joyful Sitting Amongst Friends is creating a Would-Be Knight.
+Henry Wong of The Campaign Expanse is creating a Self-Taught Mage.
+Pearce Shea of games with others is creating a Witch's Prentice.
+Anthony Simeone of Once More Unto the Breach is creating a Young Woodsman.
+Mike Lizardi of Fear No Darkness is creating a Halfling Outrider.

Brett is to my right, Henry is to Brett's right, Pearce is to Henry's right, Anthony is to Pearce's right, Mike is to Anthony's right, and I'm to Mike's right. Playbooks were selected in reverse order (i.e., Mike got first choice, Anthony second, and so on).

Before we begin, I'd like to thank the others for agreeing to take part in this exercise. Look for the first character post soon!