Author: Peter R

Imagine this set up.

It is a small walled town or more accurately a settlement. To the east of the market square is the manor house, to north at ground level are a few shops to cater for trade caravans and above them a hostel or flop house for itinerants. The west has the gate house and the south facing on to the market place is a taverna with seats spilling out into the square.

Our characters should ideally be sat at the taverna, outside. Maybe they are waiting to meet a patron or even waiting to get paid? We will come back to the characters later.

The sun is just coming up over the town walls and it is going to be a fine day.

Let us take a look behind the closed doors and behind the shutters.

In the manor house we find a home is shock and disarray. During the night the master of the house has been assassinated and the only living heir is missing. Guards were killed at their posts and often without any sign of struggle. The women folk are in shock and the men are split between the hawks who want to turn the town upside down to find and kill the assassins and the doves who are only concerned with the safe return of the missing heir. A runner was sent to the gate house before dawn to tell them there were assassins in the town and to not let anyone in or out.

Across the square the gatehouse is filled with pent up energy. The gate will not open today. Eyes are scanning the horizon outside the town looking for any trace that armed men and a hostage may have escaped during the night while others scan the town looking for suspicious foreigners.

At the flop house on the top floor we find a group of eastern looking assassins. Maybe they are of some ancient holy order dedicated to refining death to an art maybe they are masters of infiltration.  right now they have look outs watching the market place looking for the first signs that their work has been discovered and of the heir who is still to die. Three storeys below them one of the shops is that of a weaponsmith and pawnbroker. The owner was wakened not too long ago by the missing heir who was looking for a safe place to hide. The last thing his dying father had said was run and protect yourself, you must survive. Our young heir has no experience of weapons, more adept with a pen than with a sword. As it is easy to use the young heir is shown how to load a heavy crossbow. The weapon is heavy and awkward for the young man and whoops! A loosed bolt shatters a pane of glass in the shop front and flies across the empty square towards the taverna.

So our characters are sitting their minding their own business, just waiting to get paid when the crack of breaking glass grabs their attention. Does the bolt hit anyone? Who knows?

So what happens next? The party draw weapons and head across the square? Do the assassins see the heavily armed players charging their hiding place? I have the assassins suddenly rappelling down to the square on silken ropes, a blur of scimitars and curved daggers.

What do the guards do when they are suddenly faced with a market square filled and erupting battle? Out into it all rushes an embarrassed and somewhat ashamed young heir who can only stammer “I am so terribly sorry, it was an accident…” knowing he may have hurt someone with his errant crossbow bolt.

All of this attracts the attention of those in the manor and the first sight of the young heir is enough to bring the remaining household guards from the manor charging out to save the son.

So how do your players react to this? Obviously the entire powder keg situation here is contrived and the trigger is applied by you the GM.

Even if the party does not charge into the attack the second the young heir steps out into the square to apologise the assassins are going to leap into the attack.

So can the party work out who are the good guys, who are the bad guys and who is completely innocent? Can they resist letting off fireballs in a now rather crowded market square?

Will the heir survive?

There is no real point to this post other than that I was reminded this week that the original reason for starting this blog was to provide playable material so there you go, a little town encounter for you.

One of the requirements of my unfolding story is that the party have a long and fruitless search for Randall Mourn in the Spiderhaunt Forest.

The challenge is how to make that exciting to play?

The adventure as written says that the party are pretty much looking for someone who cannot be found until the villain of the piece wants to draw the party in.

I am inclined to really draw this out with entire side plots and adventures rather than trying to emulate such a long search and then resolve it in a single weekend of gaming.

So here is a question for you all. If you were on a quest to find Randall Mourn would a period of side quests none of which actually find Randall be off putting?

I have been thinking about game design a bit recently, triggered by the comments about realism vs abstraction. All game systems are inherently compromises between realism vs abstraction, complexity vs simplicity or rules ligth vs rules heavy.

I have seen a lot of articles that imply that simple rules and rules light go had in hand whereas the reality has in my experience been the opposite. If you have a very simple rule for each situation then you can easily end up with tens of hundreds of simple rules, one for just about every situation. AD&D is a prime example of this with just about everything being handled in its own unique way.

I have complained in the past that RM2 was totally inconsistent with the way it handled skills with different pricing structures for musical instruments and weapons to the way you buy martial arts to the way you buy most other skills. Some skills give +1 per rank and others +5/+2/+1/. Some skills cancel out penalties while others have built in failure penalties such as failing your quickdraw roll. The whole skill system is a hodge podge of different mechanics.

Intothatdarkness’s firearms rules sound the opposite of that in that they are based upon one core metric, the energy of the prjectile based upon muzzle velocity and mass which should mean that any and every possible firearm should be able to be modelled with just one mechanism. The firearms tables I have seen before worked on the idea of one table per ‘type’ and a mk 1 would be a very light version, mk2 would be a pistol, mk3 a carbine, m4 a rifle and mk5 some kind of support weapon. I think the idea of a table for pistols, one for rifles and so on makes more sense and most combats could be carried out with just one or two tables. so very little page flicking between combat charts.

Into is also using a 2 second combat round which is my preferred interval. Cutting a round down into such small chunks makes what is possible in a round more limited so and so player declarations become simpler. I like this as trying to protect someone while they spend 5 rounds trying to pick a lock can be quite intense under fire.

It sounds like Into has also solved the critical issue with firearms. Under bought and paid fore Spacemaster or modern day RM all projectiles were doing puncture criticals and soon enough every possible critical has been delivered and recieved and the excitement of ‘what will the critical say?’ is lost. By having a critical table by location rather than by weapon that should give loads of possibles.

I am not a fan of adding in additional rules but these sound right up my street.

Also relating to comments made this week Brian said that he had rolled all magic into essence and I am defintely heading in that direction myself the more I tinker with spell law. I definitely agree that magic is magic and the false barriers between the realms do not seem to add more than they detract.

Well, that is about the sum of my musings this week. It has been one of those weeks with no gaming on my part and the next planned session is so far away that it in itself is not stoking the fires of the imagination.

I missed my regular post last week as I was away on one of my gaming weekends. This time I got to play my 1st level Lay Healer as well as GM my Forgotten Realms game.

I have been accelerating my players progress so far and this time at the en dof th esession they finally broke 5th level. This is where I wanted them to be and now the game starts to get serious.

There were a few interesting things that came up over the weekend.

Firstly is the sequence of dice rolls in this posts title. I really, really try not to fudge dice rolls. roll in the open and my players know that.

Any weapon, in any combat those three numbers you really do not want to come up in that order. That was the one and only contribution to a combat by my Hobgoblin chieftain with his ‘trusty’ scimitar. You can work out for your self what happened to him.

I have been working on pushing the limits of how big a force you can throw against low level characters before the sheer number of random rolls will overwhelm them. If you have twenty archers then the odds are that one will get an open ended every single round (I haven’t done this, it is just an example).

The party were making their way up a single track goat trail into a mountain range. They were approaching the tree line when up ahead they could see a flock of monstrously large birds dive bombing something out of sight. The elves in the part could see the birds taking to the air again with dripping lumps of meat in their talons and eat rising bird was being mobbed by the other members of the flock. One character has no maths skill at all so for him there where ‘a great many’ birds. The other elf was better educated and put the number between 70 to 80 individuals.

The creatures were Gorcrows and I had used them to replace the Stirges specified in the original D&D module that was the backbone of the adventure. The birds were feeding on some horses that they had killed. The horses were an important clue for the players as they were looking for a lost patrol and these were their horses.

I wasn’t going to throw 75 beasties at the party in a single shot. I had a few Gorcrows spot the party and break away. This gave me 15 to play with against 5 characters. The birds circled a bit like your classic vulture and then first few peeled away to dive into the attack. These first few were dealt with using a sleep spell. This gave the party some confidence that they could tackle them. The next wave was 5 or 6 gorcrows and a combination of sleep spells and thrown weapons brought them crashing to the ground. Finally the third wave of 7 dived down to attack, too many to sleep even when fast casting without prep. A few got through the barrage of magic and thrown weapons but the birds didn’t stand a chance. A few hits of damage were done here and there a single A crit.

The fight and scent of fresh blood had attracted the attention of the main flock. As the party saw the cloud of birds turn into a stream angling towards them you have never seen players evaluate their options so quickly!

The used what cover they could find to hide them selves from the birds (who fell upon their fallen comrades) and made their way into the next valley where they had their first encounter with wild magic. This is not too dissimilar to an Essence storm.

Wild magic can produce a great number of different effects and have different manifestations. This particular one was very large and actually covered the entire area that the main adventure was going to take place in, several square miles of mountain range. At the first encounter all they got was tingling feelings and hairs standing up on their arms or the back of the neck but as they continued they saw the full scale of the anomaly. In game terms they started to recover power points almost by the minute. The further in they got the more power they regained. It was only when they tried to cast a spell that things were not so good. Every spell cost no power to cast but it did deliver a Stress critical equal to the spell level (1st = A, 5th = E and a 6th would have been an A + E critical).

As a GM my objective was to make the players seriously consider each and every spell they cast. It certainly did that.

The adventure I was basing the session on had two major features, the first was a terrible D&D style trap that had no connection the time or place that the adventure took place in and a collection of monsters.

The monsters were supposedly in a sealed tomb that had not been disturbed for 300 years before a landslide revealed the entrance. The doors were magically sealed so no monsters could wander in from outside.

I removed everything that should have starved to death. This left just one encounter that the players fully understood and chose not to engage in. As it was with magic doing as much harm to them as to anyone they were attacking that was probably the right answer.

I was worried that this would be an anti climax but actually the players enjoyed a relatively easy win for a change and a nice clean “we had a task and we completed it” session.

The next encounter was another mass battle. one thing had lead to another and the players know they have to meet someone in a monster infested forest. Everyone one knows this is a monster infested forest and the party are well armed and provisioned.

We had the players trying to ambush and war band of goblins and hobgoblins while they [the goblins] were trying to set up an ambush. The goblins spotted the party so decided to set an ambush. So the party were trying to sneak into position when the goblins got the drop on them.

I had about 30 goblins to play with but I decided the chief would not commit his entire force against just 5 travellers. So 12 of his toughest attacked the party. The party reverted to type again and sleep spells flew about willy nilly accounting for over half the attackers. Once melee was engaged the superior level of the party soon took its toll on the goblins.

I then allowed the party to turn the tables on goblins. The odds were 18 to 5 or more realistically 18 to 4 as one of the party is a non combatant. The result was again more goblin mince meat.

All of these mass battles were really won by the parties use of sleep. They have two casters who can cast up to Sleep VII. In addition the party are now feeling more confident in their own abilities and starting to work more effectively as a team.

The party are all now 5th level and I think at this point they are growing into their strengths, the sorcerer is starting to diverge from the warrior mage who is diverging from the elemental warrior and so on.

Next time though they will need to find a new tactic as the monsters will be getting significantly tougher!