About what happened last session

Illustration of a goblin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

* the thief lies dying on the ground after an attack, slowly bleeding out, the goblin cleric was just hit with a critical and lost his ear. What is the most reasonable thing to do? Heal the ear first of course! Stupid human weakling is  not as important as a good goblin ear.

* they have cornered the wererat and his minions who have taken over the dwarven cave and killed all it’s inhabitants. What do they do? Parley of course. So they get another job: bring us one of the bouncing bears from the surrounding forests because we are hungry.

The end result: the orcish warrior now has a nemesis in a purple gummi bear who swore to avenge his brother. And I just wanted this to be a bit of comic relief.

* I dropped a deck of many things on them, and what does the thief do? Draw five. How bad did it end for him? Well, he is more dexterous now, more experienced, and got a treasure map and a magic weapon. So the goblin cleric tries the same. He lost all his experience but gained a bit more wisdom.

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[Tools] Old School Tool

Now that is something nice I came across today when looking through the categories at Sourceforge (I was looking for a task managing tool that could sync with Google Tasks, I ended up in the Games section…): a Java based  GM screen tool for AD&D or OSRIC (although it can be adapted for 2e and 3e). Java-based means it will run pretty much on every system that has Java on it, and GM Screen tool means it is supposed to replace the usual paper one with some additional functionality.

Even better it is actually quite customizable, with all the tables in the program being changeable and extensible as far as I have seen. So if I wanted, for example, to use the whole thing for my campaign and I had specific armour for my campaign that was not in the OSRIC book, I could add it easily via the main window to have it accessible in the GM screen window during actual play.

That GM screen window is actually what this is about: the window can be used as a convenient GM screen that allows to look up stuff and calculate things on the fly. The combat and save tables can be found in there, as can the magic item tables, and the latter ones can generate treasures on the fly. Neat. I might think about using this during my next game.

What the whole program is not is a replacement for actual rules, or for a real campaign planner. This program is only there to help during the game. Considering that I already have been using my notebook as a DM screen I think this program might make the whole thing a bit easier.

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[Labyrinth Lord] The Unseen Shadow

I was going to use this in the PBEM game I was doing right now.

The Unseen Shadow
A strange phenomena appears to you as you investigate the workbench in the old forgotten dwarven smithy: situated in the middle of the large stone table, just over the edge, is a sword’s handle that by all means appears to be levitating in thin air, with a finger’s breadth of air between itself and the bench. As you investigate further it appears to be a whole longsword invisible to the eye, except for the handle and a barely noticeable disturbance of light where the blade should be.
The invisible blade is a weapon of duergar manufacture made as a tribute to the inhabitants to the castle above the dungeon. This one seems to have been forgotten or lost when the workmen of the smithy were driven off or killed. The blade is invisible (except via magic) and attacks as a +2 weapon. A small engraving in dwarven runes only traceable via touch proclaims this to be the “Unseen Shadow”.

This one is actually based, believe it or not, on a local legend from my home village. Or at least on something that claimed to be a local legend from my area.
I used to work in a cave that was situated right under a former castle/nowadays church, that had a genuine secret passage through parts of the cave.
We cave guides used to dig local history a lot (and all of us were kind of involved in it) and during one of my many exploits into the legends of the region I came upon an interesting book on local legends that claimed (in not even half a paragraph) that the existence of the secret passage (and the castle’s track record of failed sieges) was veiled by fabricated legends about a pact between the lords of the castle and the dwarves from under the hill. Obviously the dwarves gave the castle’s owners supplies and invisible swords.
That kind of stuck with me, mostly because it sounded so D&D to me, and because I grew up in the place and never had heard that story before, ever. I still think the author of that book might have totally fabricated the legend himself (not an unknown occurrence in local history) or heard it from someone with a very vivid imagination and some interest in old Germanic legends. Considering the cave was just 30km from Bayreuth, and with that from the place of the Wagner festival, I blame the influence of the Wagneranians.

[Labyrinth Lord] Chocobo

Chocobo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Chocobo (Riding Bird)

No. Enc.: 1d4 (1d20+4)
Alignment: Neutral
Movement: 60’ (30’)
Armor Class: 6
Hit Dice: 2 +4
Attacks: 1 (bite 1d8+2 or claw 1d6+2)
Damage: 1d4+2 or special
Save: TH4
Morale: 7
Hoard Class: None
Large birds looking like a cross of a giant chicken and an ostrich. With long necks and intelligent eyes they can be found in flocks in plains or isolated forests.
They can run quicker than any other bird, even when carrying an armored man.
On average 7 feet tall and about 400 pound heavy they often react to paladins’ call for mounts or Summon Nature’s Ally III
Black Riding Birds: rare variant that can be bred by selective breeding of other variations. They also have a fly speed of 90″

I have been playing Final Fantasy IX for the last two weeks or so. My mind might be affected negatively. On the other hand: this is not a first. There was an article on Chocobos in some old issue of Dragon Magazine.

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[Labyrinth Lord] Chupacabra

Chupacapra
No. Enc.: 1d6 (3d6+4)
Alignment: Neutral
Movement: 40’ (20’)
Armor Class: 8
Hit Dice: 5 +1
Attacks: 1 (claw 1d4+2, grapple)
Damage: 1d4+2 or special
Save: MU5
Morale: 7
Hoard Class: None
Small, elusive creatures that feed on the blood of mammals (hence goatsucker). Normally they life in small communities in warm woods and grasslands. They sneak into civilized areas at night (they are stealthy and have excellent low-light vision) and drain entire herds of farm animals in days; some have acquired a taste for humanoid blood as well. They generally are seen as half-intelligent: they are not tool users, but they show crafty tactics while hunting and hiding.
They prefer to attack enemies from behind, drain as much blood as possible, then try to flee to digest their meal.
They normally attack by grappling enemies from behind (additional +2 for grappling attacks), then sucking the blood out of their victims. Every round they are attached they can drain 1d4, up to 12 CON points

Converted from an old Dragon article for 3.5 (Dragon #343). I think they might be a bit hardcore.

[Labyrinth Lord] Viking

English: An illustration of Vikings on a boat. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Requirements: CON 9
Prime Requisite: STR
Hit Dice: 1d8
Maximum Level: 12

Vikings have a reputation to be great seamen, great drinkers, and often inclined to appropriate other’s property if it is not defended properly. Often a Viking ship is both trader and raider in one. They often test the waters first to see if the place they arrived in is defended, and will try to raid it if it isn’t.
They are proud and tall humans, more often than not blonde or redhaired (although their travels take them far and wide and bring back quite a lot of other blood). They value the sea and often will settle somewhere close to it.
However, they can use any weapon or armor, but they prefer axes, swords, and shields.

If professional skills are used they automatically gain the skill seafarer in addition to any other skill.

They have their own tongue, even though all of them are versed in the common tongue as well (as it is an important trade language). Because of their frequent interaction with them, Vikings often also speak dwarvish, gnome, and elvish.

Reaching 9th Level: When a viking reaches level 9, he has the option of creating a stronghold that will attract other vikings. Most of the vikings and their families will be of his own clan, but there always might be some others that settle around this new stranghold.

Viking Level Progression
Experience Level Hit Dice (1d8)
0 1 1
2,187 2 2
4,375 3 3
8,751 4 4
17,501 5 5
35,001 6 6
70,001 7 7
140,001 8 8
280,001 9 9
400,001 10 +3 hp only *
540,001 11 +6 hp only *

660,001 12 +9 hp only *

*Hit point modifiers from constitution are ignored

Yes, this has been based on the dwarf. The class is technically not really needed… but I had to remember the fun we had with DSA’s Thorwaler.

D&D and the Colossal Cave

Print terminal output of Will Crowther’s original Colossal Cave Adventure aka ADVENT (1975-76) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I don’t know if I came across this information earlier, but I think I might have: it sounds vaguely familiar.

The very, very classic game ADVENT (or Colossal Cave Adventure, or just Adventure), the game that inspired the adventure genre as a computer game genre as such, is obviously directly inspired by D&D. Not only that, it also started as an early way of computer assisted playing for a group of 8 players that didn’t have the time to meet often enough.

In a post in rec.arts.int-fiction from Oct 1994 Bernie Cosell wrote:

Well, Will Crowther made the game up after we had been playing D&D
for a few months.  A new arrival on the ARPANET project was also a
housemaster at Harvard at the time and D&D had pretty much just
appeared.  He dungeounmastered up a dungeon and a bunch of us from
the project team got sucked into playing.

Due to our inclinations, we were almost zero interested in the ‘battle and
monster’ aspect of the game, but rather a lot more interested in the
cooperation/innovation/puzzlesolving aspect.  And so quite against the
tide of the D&D world at the time, our dungeon turned into more of
a group problem-solving expedition than an every man for himself
hack-em-up.  Anyhow, it was great fun but VERY difficult for folk
who had any sort of a life: getting the eight of us together at the
same time and in the same place with nothing else to do for four
hours or so was a nontrivial problem.

So Will had the astounding idea that he could cobble up a
computer-mediated version of the game.  We mostly thought he was
nuts [but had long-since learned not to underestimate what Will
could innovate].  Given our predilections in the real game, in
ADVENT puzzles and cleverness were more of a premium than quick
reflexes and keeping track of hit-points.

[...]

No words on how well that worked though. The computer-mediation I mean. But the game itself soon spread over the servers of Arpanet and inspired other people to do similar things, or even go further than that. The genre of text-adventures/interactive fiction derives directly from this game, so do graphic adventures, and so do MUDs and by extension also MMORPGs.

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[Tools] OSR Search

By the way, did anyone already mention the OSR Search to you?

It’s a search engine that searches only Old School Renaissance sources (mostly blogs). So if anyone would like to find if anyone else has already written about a specific topic already (very likely by the way…), it might be interesting to look here first.

Not that it should keep you from writing about the topic, but it might give some insight into what other people have said about that topic before.

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Where do all these undead come from?

mausoleum (Photo credit: andrewpaulcarr)

One of the ideas I just was having while thinking about the Wilderlands and their inherent danger was the amount of Undead one might encounter.  Where do all these come from anyway? There is not really a necromancer around everywhere, is there?

No, there isn’t. But what we have is ruins and lost villages, thorps that never had a chance, and the remains from battles long forgotten who never received a proper burial. And even if the dead received a proper burial their people might be gone now, and nobody would take care of their graves anymore.

In a lot of cases it might be that burial rites in a fantasy culture are not so much about giving people some closure about the loss of a loved one, but also to prevent their loved one to come back wrong. If graveyards and other burial places are not taken care of, if the spirits are not satisfied with the care they are given, they might just decide to come back. Alternatively if the empty bodies of the dead are not protected by reverence over time it might be that other, malicious spirits slip in and decide to use the body to fulfill their cravings  and desires.

d10 Why is that Undead around Table

1. Necromancer
2. The stars are right
3. Desecration, intentional
4. Desecration, unintentional
5. The lonely dead
6. Bodyjacker
7. Hell is full
8. Ancient battlefield
9. Wandered off
10. Escaped Slave

Explanations
Necromancer: he/she is training the art of necromancy, local authorities might offer a small amount to catch the graverobber
The stars are right… well, right enough for some dead to come back at least. The rest of the apocalypse might wait a bit longer, but for tonight the characters might meet 2d6 other undead of the same type around
Desecration, intentional: someone desecrated the gravesite, intentionally. Of course they might not have thought that their actions would make the dead walk again, but who would have thought? The gravesite needs a small ritual or cleansing performed to keep the dead from walking. A cleric might know what to do here.
Desecration, unintentional: someone desecrated the gravesite, unintentionally. “What do you mean our inn is build on an ancient Elvish graveyard?”. Technically a ritual would be needed here as well, but finding out what ritual that might be can be an adventure on it’s own. Turns out the tribe that lived here emigrated to the other side of the country, last century or so…
The lonely dead: nobody took care about the right rites for too long, now the dead feel lonely. So they come out of their graves to see their relatives. And then scold them for being so negligent in their duties. This might be solved by holding some simple rites to appease the dead.
Bodyjacker: these bodies were just lying around without an owner, so something (bad spirits, demons, etc.) decided to use them. Now they either need to be exorcised, or the bodies need to be made unusable
Hell is full, the dead walk the Earth. Oh, well… tonight town is full of them, for no reason at all it seems. But pretty much every more or less decent body (and some of the worse off) are on the street. 1d100 zombies and skeletons
Old battlefield: hundreds of warriors fell here, and nobody had time to bury them all. Now that just pisses off some people. There they died for their cause and now they are left to rot. As a twist on this the adventurers have been hired to lay a certain body to rest, but that one has wandered off in the meantime.
Wandered off. Somewhere in the area is a large tomb/mausoleum/dungeon full of the undead. This one just managed to walk past all the traps and doors into the outside.
Escaped Slave: someone in this area has been using the local dead as a cheap if gruesome workforce.  Now that might be of interest to the local authorities. Or it might be just what people do with the dead in this area.

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[Labyrinth Lord] Easy Multiclassing

The only game I found which handled multiclassing in an elegant and simple way was D&D 3.X. And I had my gripes with that as well, the least being that it demanded a complete rewrite of the system and it’s classes to be feasible.
That was… a bit over the top I guess. But well, the game was a success, and despite the bloat rather playable.
It doesn’t work with the older editions though. In the older editions we have the awful concepts of dualclassing and multiclassing, which both kind of work, but are so artificial I wish they wouldn’t. So this is my way of fixing the whole mess for my games. It’s not an easy system for the characters. It punishes people for focussing too much on one career path, but that is actually quite ok I guess. The more someone advances in a class, the harder it is to learn something new. At a certain point it becomes more feasible to just start over again.
Requirements: this should work with race-as-class classes as well, but of course the requirement here is that the character has to be the actual race to take up a race class.

Divergent Classes
Characters can gain levels in up to 2 other classes after they already started a character if they 1) fulfill the requirements and 2) pay XP amounting to the highest level threshold among all the classes. So a character gaining a level in a new class will have to pay XP as if he was gaining a new level in his original class.
The characters uses the best abilities, saving throws, spells, and attack rolls available to him.
[yes, that means if a level 10 fighter wants a level of thief he has to pay 480,000 XP for each level of thief until both his careers are the same level]

Example: William the Wizard is a level 5 magic-user. He travels through the wastelands with his companions, fights quite a bit with strange creatures, and in the evening he lets Fred the Fighter teach him some martial arts. When the time comes to gain a new level William’s player decides that William might need some fighting prowess if he is to survive the wilderness. So he gains a level of Fighter. If he decides to level up his Fighter levels instead of his levels as Magic-User he will continue to pay XP as if he was levelling as a Magic-User, until the cost of the next level of Fighter is higher than that.

Synchronous Classes
Characters whose levels of classes are the same may level both classes together after gaining enough XP for both classes.

Example: William the Wizard is now a Fighter and a Magic-User of level 5. He decides that this is exactly what he is, a fighting mage, and decides to pursue this path of advancement. It’s harder for him now (he has to gain experience for both his careers) but the benefits are larger (he can roll twice for hit points after levelling).

Dual Classing
Characters can change careers and level in another class for the normal cost of advancement from level 1 on. For this the lose all the benefits gained by their previous class (including saving rolls, spells, and hitpoints), as they now focus exclusively on the new class. They gain the old abilities again after they reach the level of their previous class with their new class. After this they can level according to the above rules.

Example: Fred the Fighter learned a lot during his time teaching William. After teaching him a long time he gained some appreciation for the arcane arts. So much actually that he decides to learn magic for himself. When they reach the next city he searches out the local wizard and becomes his apprentice for a while. After a few months the wizard has taught him everything he could teach him, and Fred goes forth, searching for new opportunities to get better in his new craft.

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