Thursday, April 7, 2011

Thoomp Thoomp Thoomp

The party spent the night in the ruins above the dungeon, nursing their wounds and preparing for their journey back to the Keep.  The two retainers - a magic user and cleric - had angrily quit the group, but agreed to travel with them through the wilderness for mutual protection.  This was their first dungeon together and things had not gone well, but they had all survived.

A few hours into their journey, as they passed through a clearing in the forest, the party heard a loud 'thoomp thoomp thoomp' sound in the distance, emanating from the treeline beyond their line of sight . . .

* * *

As I began to design my campaign world for Labyrinth Lord, I drew large scale maps and painted out a history and cultures and jotted down all manner of ideas for adventure.  I focused in on the maps, drawing more detail and went more in-depth about the cultures and lands.

Then I abruptly stopped.

For thirty years I have reveled in world creation, from top to bottom, bottom to top, side to side - what have you.  World creation is a love.  But something happened in my brain.  Re-reading the classic rules, devouring old school blogs, and listening deep in my heart - I couldn't do it.  I had to stop.  I began to hunger for something that only happened occasionally - something that was never planned - the excitement of what happens when the players go off the map.

At those points, I got to improvise.  I got to fly by the seat of my pants.  I got to pull crazy shit out of my ass.  During those times, I was much more willing to let the players come up with crazy ass shit that had deep impact, not only on the game, but in the campaign universe itself.

I realized, suddenly, that it was there all along - in the rules.  Random tables all over the place.  Monsters, dungeons, treasure, even harlots.  Crazy stuff to keep the DM on his or her toes just as much as the players. 

I'm going to rag on 4e now.  To feel like I was 'doing it right,' I had to prep 4e, and prep it hard.  Every adventure, I had to set up encounters that were balanced.  I had to understand in detail the intricacies of the fighting abilities of each monster and how they would act as a unit.  I could usually only offer the players a hand full of path options during a night as getting off track screwed up all of the planning and balance.  Sure, you can run 4e loosey-goosey - but it never felt right.  I never could pull it off.

But oooh boy, it's not like that in the old school.

NO PREP.  I don't have to think of a single thing before hand.  I can randomize just about every part of the game, and it flows smooth like butter.  Of course, It's hard not to think about things, come up with horrific trap ideas, fearsome beasts, and bizarre NPCs - but I can slap all of that into tables and surprise myself with the combination, no matter how off balance they are.


As the party travelled, I rolled that a wilderness encounter would happen.  I flipped to page 105 in Labyrinth Lord and looked on the Forest/Wooded Column under the Wilderness Monster Encounter Table.  Dan says right there above it, 'The Labyrinth Lord will have to adjust encounters to fit the particular environment and level of the PCs.  Further, this table should only be considered an example."

No . . . I like those tables for this section of my wilderness.  They are all over the place.  Scripting an encounter and carefully measuring it and balancing it is something I'm quite sick of.  Dan has wonderful tables.  Don't let him talk you out of using them.

I rolled a d20.  It came up as a 7.  Green dragon.

* * *

"A green dragon whooshes over your heads.  It's neck cranes, pointing it's beady little eyes back at your party and with a flick of it's wings, it cartwheels in the sky, lining up for an attack run."

The three players stared at me.

"So how young is it?  Juvenile?  A hatchling?" one player asked, used to the age ranks of dragons in 4e.

I shrugged. "It's a dragon - the first one you've ever seen.  Set down the die.  There is no skill check.  You have no idea how old it is, but it's big - about 30 feet long.

I saw numbers flash by in the player's eyes as they determined what the mini of the beast would look like.  Worry set in quickly.

"I run." they all said.  They scattered in different directions towards the trees.

It was glorious.  Some back story is needed here.  In two years of playing 4e - these guys never ran from a fight.  Sure, once they ran after a fight, just in case.  They trusted me to play fair and run things in the spirit of 4e.  In most games, they were on an offensive adventure path and had time to reconnoiter - but even when surprised, they trusted the magic of the balance.

Not this time.

The entire game session dealt with the dragon attack and the aftermath.  Everyone had a good time, even the poor guy who got killed and had to roll up another character.  It was one of the most intense and visceral sessions I've played in a while.

All because I rolled a seven on one of Daniel Proctor's Encounter tables.

- Ark

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Jesus Christ vs. Dungeons and Dragons

When I was growing up, my mother was a new-age hippie type - interested in the whole Erich von Däniken, Edgar Cayce, Ruth Montgomery, Charles Berlitz, Rosicrucian, reincarnation, Atlantis, crystal power, and the space jalopy of the gods kind of thing. Catty-corner to us lived my mother's good friend, who was a bona fide pre-'Wicca' witch, armed with incense burners, beaded curtains between doorways, mood rings, a pointy black hat, a real-live crystal ball, blank horoscope quadrant sheets, and a huge map of Middle Earth displayed prominently in the living room.

I loved that map. 

My grandmother, on the other hand, was an old time, bible thumping, tent revival, fire and brimstone, speaking in tongues, casting out demons, book burning, rattlesnake handling, warrior for Jesus.  Nothing was safe from her cleansing gaze.  She found a OUIJA board hidden under my mother's bed once and burned it.  My mother was 33 years old, married, with two kids at the time.

While I only saw the lady several times a year, this was apparently enough for her to gauge my personality.  My grandmother pronounced me a 'hooligan who would burn for all eternity in hell' at the age of eight.  I do not recall what I did to receive such judgment.  Perhaps my disembodied head appeared to her in a dream spewing fire.  I just don't remember.

Needless to say, Dungeons and Dragons was a huge issue.  If she would ever have found my TSR stash, it would have been up in flames faster than the lady could switch from speaking English to speaking in Tongues.  She knew I played it.  I was a friend of Satan, so obviously, I played it.  I had probably even attained the loathsome rank of 'Dungeon Master' in the cabal, she could just never prove it.

The thing I was interested in that she approved of was Star Wars.  It was obviously the story of Space Jesus versus Space Satan.  That kind of thing was okay.  But the Smurfs - no way.  Evil.  The Smurfs promoted homosexuality, witchcraft, and necrophilia.  It was obvious.

I was rather shocked when I discovered that other people began to agree with my grandmother.  Kids echoing their parents, mainly.

"If we could play Top Secret, that would be okay, but mom doesn't want me playing D&D.  It's a sin."

"My dad says I can't play with you because you play D&D."

"Dinosaur bones are actually whales put together wrong and when you burn D&D dice you can hear the the souls of the damned screaming."

God bless Texas.

So, years later and I'm pulling together a 4e group.  The open call brought in a guy who had the potential of being a tad late to the Saturday evening games because of church.  Well, that was a new one, but it was a good excuse as 'sorry dude, I just flaked' ever was.

Eventually, his ranger multi-classed into a cleric.  I noticed that he never put down a word in the 'Deity' field on his character.  He never did pick D&D deity specific powers like you can in 4e, either. 

It wasn't hard to figure out what deity his character was worshiping, though he never did say.

I really just wanted to hug the guy and tell him that it was perfectly okay for his character to worship Jesus, and if anyone at the table had an issue with it, I'd give them the smack down.  But being a dude, I just watched quietly.  He stealthily went around doing clerical things in the background and no one gave him any shit about it.  I have no idea if anyone really noticed.

It's funny how life works, isn't it?  I'd have let my Grandmother worship Jesus too, if she'd have ever asked.

- Ark

Monday, April 4, 2011

What Monster?


The muse has continued flitting about my head.  The muse is apparently the Muse of Kindergarten Refrigerator Art, but still, she is a muse, so you have to pay attention when she screams at you to draw something. :)

Enjoy.

- Ark

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Bee!

This has nothing to do with the A-Z Blogging Challenge, though it looks like Mother Nature wants me to participate anyway.  Mother Nature is crazy like that.

The Texas afternoon was nice, in the high 80s, and perfect for outside shenanigans.  The Boy was off with a friend having fun at the Legoland Discovery Center.  The Baby Momma was out sunning in her bikini, and I thought I'd get some sun on my pasty white nerd flesh as well.  So sitting in a plastic lawn chair sun-worshipping, I notice something.

There was a noise.  My first thoughts were that the wind had picked up and was rustling the leaves in the live oak behind me - a lot.  The rustle kept on getting louder.  I felt no wind on my skin, however.  I tilted my head back to look at the tree.

There were gnats in the air.

Now big clouds of gnats ain't a strange thing round these parts.  They happen.  If you have to walk through them, you just inhale and dash through the cloud so you don't suck a gnat up your nose.  No big deal.

The gnats were hovering above the back yard.  The cloud was getting bigger.  The gnats were getting bigger.  The rustling was accompanied by a buzz that was growing louder and louder by the second.

"Look!" I yelled at the Baby Momma and pointed above us.

"What?" she looked at me, then up.

It suddenly clicked in my head.  "Run!"

"What?" she looked back at me.

"Get inside!  It's a swarm!" I leaped out of my chair.

She looked back up.  "No . . ."  Her eyes widened and then we hauled ass inside.

With our noses pressed up against the sliding glass door, we watched the sky dim and the airspace above our house fill with bees.  Thousands of bees.  Perhaps tens of thousands of bees.  It's damn hard to count bees in situations like that, but to properly describe it takes a lot of expletives.

"Look on that branch," she pointed at the live oak.  Bees were . . . coagulating . . . on the branch, dangling in strings like some freaky form of bees-laden Christmas tinsel.  More and more bees created the bee chains until there was this massive, writhing blob of bees infesting the tree.

I'm still rather stunned by the whole thing.

Lots of internet searches and calls to bee wranglers gave us some information about what had happened.  These were perfectly normal Texas honey bees doing what they do.  A new queen left a nest, taking about 60% of the old hive's worker bees with her.  The swarm decided to use our backyard as a way-point in finding a suitable place to build their permanent hive.

Great.

Multiple experts said they will probably clear off the next day to their new home.  One slight problem would be if they discovered holes in our roof or eaves where they could set up shop.

Great.

We coated the eaves with Wasp poison and are hoping for the best.

Of course this lead me to thinking about such an event in game terms.  It was freaking scary!  But imagine if these were a couple of thousand D&D Giant Killer Bees.  Entire villages could be wiped out during a swarm.  Imagine a swarm decides that the capital city would be a good place to live.  The sewers would probably be an ideal home for the giant bees.

Okay, I think I've thought to much about this.  My skin is crawling and I need to go scratch my entire body. 

- Ark

Saturday, April 2, 2011

Dice Bonanza

Look what arrived in the mail today!


From top left to right bottom:
  1. A big-ass red d30.
  2. A big-ass d12 hit location die.
  3. A d30 alphabet die with 4 wildcard slots.
  4. A mythical rientsdie.
  5. A six-sided multiplier.
  6. An X/2X/3X d6.
  7. An eight-sided compass rose die.
Yeah!  I can officially join the Order of the d30 now!  I never realized, though, how freaking HUGE those d30s are.  And HEAVY.  You could put on of those in a sling and kill Goliath.  And they roll so strangely - like they can't make up their little minds.  It's a very odd beast.  But yeah!

Note:  Observers from across the house think that when I roll several d30s together on my desk, it sounds like loud farting.

- Ark

Friday, April 1, 2011

I've Seen the Future and I Repent!

It's official!

- Ark

A-Z Blogging Challenge!

Are you kidding?  No freaking way!  There is going to be too much good stuff to read that I'm not going to have time to write!

Time to set out the lawn chair, pop open a beer, and watch the eruditic correspondence pullulate.

- Ark