[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.

Poker Chip Ideas

English: Poker Chips (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Bennies

The idea comes from Savage Worlds, a benny is a single token that can be exchanged at one point during the game for a certain effect. Every player (GM included) gains a certain amount of bennies per session. In my game I was thinking about giving it the ability to 1. soak damage for one attack 2. change 1 1 critically failed check into a normal failure 3. Reroll a check and keep the better. 4. Make a normal attack into a +1 attack (including counting it as magical/blessed) The GM has it’s own pool of Bennies and may use them for Monsters and NPCs, or award them to players for especially cool moments

Hit Points

I was thinking about using poker chips for these. Every player has an amount of chips in the size of his/her hp. When damage happens they lose those until they reach 0. Alternatively the GM hands out red chips for wounds. The kobold hits? Here’s three chips. This actually might work together. With the rules I have in place to soak damage (Shields shall be splintered! and maybe the Bennies from above) I might just assign the red chips, and if the character doesn’t soak the damage next round the amount of red chips gets taken from the hp chips.

Mana

The idea also would work with spell points or, if that ever happens in my games, power points. I guess it would be easy to keep track of those with chips. Of course I use straight Vancian magic, so most likely not.

Experience Points

Here’s an interesting idea: have the players assign the XP in the end. Just drop a load of chips with the right amount on the table and tell them they can divide the XP among themselves. This actually might be useful even during the game. Character does something freaking awesome? Have an xp chip.

[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.

Related articles

• New Monster: Dire Turkey (towerofthearchmage.blogspot.com)

[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.

Related articles

• [Tenkar's Tavern] Free OSR Product of the Week – Shane’s Delve (Generic Dungeon) (tenkarstavern.com)
• [They Might Be Gazebos] There’s No Storytelling in the OSR (theymightbegazebos.com)
• Free Game of the Week – The Ancient Academy (OSR 1-Sheet Adventure) (tenkarstavern.com)

[Labyrinth Lord] Thief Skills for everyone!

A while back I was thinking about thief skills in D&D. According to the rules they are just for the Thief class, but how much sense does that make? Oh well, we are talking D&D, so it doesn’t have to make that much sense, but really, why should a normal hobbit not be able to sneak unheard around the troll lair?

Of course a lot of the basic abilities of the classes in D&D are not so much different from each other. The level 1 Fighter is a bit better in fighting and getting hurt. The Magic-User can do some parlour tricks. And the thief is a bit better than average in doing illicit things. So this one is more like guidelines for the times when the fighter in the group wants to sneak, or the cleric wants to sneak off to his date with the elf.

Thief Skills for everyone
Every character can perform thief skills as a level 0 human. Thieves are just a little bit better at these skills in the beginning, and improve this edge over time.
Pick Locks 10%
Find and Remove Traps 10%
Pick Pockets 10%
Move Silently 15%
Climb Walls 50%
Hide in Shadows 10%
Hear Noise 1 in 6

Related articles

• [Stuffed Crocodile] [Labyrinth Lord] Achievement System (gmkeros.wordpress.com)
• [Stocking the Dungeon] A few House Rules; Combat Mods and Weapon/Armor Restrictions (stockingthedungeon.blogspot.com)
• The Lowlife’s Guide To Being A Thief (ofdiceandmenrpg.blogspot.com)
• Thief Skills (untimately.blogspot.com)

[Tools] Creating soundscapes with Syrinscape

I was looking for some interesting programs a while ago, and this popped up on my radar. I came across it when I was looking for ambient music for my games last year, but right now the creator of the software promises an upcoming release of a new version with loads of new features.

Very well…

Syrinscape is a soundscape program that allows the creation of dynamic soundscapes for RPG games. There are a few of that kind around, but Syrinscape is both free and more or less easy to configure. A soundscape in Syrinscape can be created by dropping the sound effects and music one wants to have in it into a folder and renaming them slightly so they are associated with certain channels in the program. Seems a bit daunting at first, but is not really much work. I decided to create a Tavern soundset yesterday and behold, it’s nearly finished today. So, not really hard to use.

The website offers a few different soundscapes that should give a good point to start from, even though some of them are a bit weird (Battle for example has mostly animal noises, and Bells has…  bells). One of the nicer things about it is that ambient music for the game can be added by simply copying it into the soundscape folder and renaming it. In that way one could actually create nice variant soundscapes by simply replacing the playlist for different locales (e.g. music 1 for the catacombs and music 2 for the orc warrens, while both of them have otherwise the same soundset otherwise in it).

One feature that does not seem to see too much use yet are one-off sound effects, or rather: current soundsets barely have one-off effects in them. The only one that actually has nice ones is the Dungeon set that has interesting things like an alarm bell, fireballs, dragon roars, etc. I think it would be nice to have a certain one-off soundset at hand in a few places though, just to make my players jump when they hear it. The howl of wolves in the wilderness, the cackling of a witch in the  distance,  the sound of footsteps coming from somewhere behind them. Hmm…

Syrinscape (Website)

The unfortunate name of Hârn

I normally take pride in going against first impressions and looking at the core of things to see what these things actually are worth. A while ago I looked into Hârn as a system and saw a game world that might be a bit too detailed and low key for my tastes, but which had a lot of interesting ideas in it. I still wouldn’t play it. And considering that the only thing I ever heard about it in German RPG media were the reviews in some magazines I don’t think many other Germans would pick it up either. And that despite the fact that the only foreign language translations of the game were into German. The game world would fit quite nicely in that German style of low magic, quasi-historical worlddesign that seems to be so common in the German RPG mainstream.
It’s unfortunate, but hardly surprising with a name like that. The word Harn in German is a formal way to say “Urine”.
I guess not too many people would proudly admit to playing with Hârn products…

[Labyrinth Lord] Achievement System

I was lately thinking if it might be possible to have a bit more metagaming aspects in the development of my campaigns. Yes, I know, metagaming is EVUL! but I thought it might not be a bad fit for something like Labyrinth Lord. The main problem, in my opinion, is that people in the beginning of  a campaign are often given too many options which they don’t really appreciate or even understand. The idea I had was that I would only allow players in a campaign the use of a limited amount of classes, and all further classes have to be earned in play.
This is of course very metagamy. After all it would not be the character which would earn things, but the player. On the other hand this might be a good way to introduce people to a game world first before allowing them to take on characters they don’t have a clue about. At the same time I thought about connecting this to an achievement system that gives other benefits as well (titles and bonuses on reaction rolls), and a variation of the Dark Sun character tree. Labyrinth Lord, and the other OD&D retroclones, might be good for that, considering the amount of PC deaths that might be caused by applying the rules as written. So there might be both a constant need for new characters, as well as a reason to have a system that keeps people interested in the game even when their characters die over time.

Starting Character Options
Race: Human
Class: Fighter, Thief (or Specialist)
Optional (limited, only with special reasons, maybe stats): Priest of local god, Magic-User (Apprentice of NPC  wizard or witch), Hobbit

The Achievement Tree

Players (not characters) start out with only a few possible character options. Some of them are available to everyone (e.g. race: human or class: fighter), others are only of limited availability (e.g. a variation of cleric or magic-user). Further options have to be unlocked over play.
Players can hire minions/henchmen/retainers as usual.
Protégé
Starting from Level 3 onward a character gains the ability to train 1 protégé in a master/pupil or similar relationship. This character can be rolled up as a separate character according to the usual rules for character generation (limited by the players available choices), or can be taken from the ranks of the retainers following the character already. They count against the character’s count of retainers.
The character gains further protegees on level 7, 12, and 17. These protégés can adventure with the group as retainers/secondary characters, can be used as characters in their own right, or be left at home/on some secondary mission. If the main character snuffs it they will be available as replacement characters, even if left somewhere else entirely, within a reasonable amount of time. The highest ranking replacement character will take on the role of master from that point on (at least until someone manages to raise the former master).
Protegees themselves are limited in protegees, they can only take on one protegee of their own on level 7, that is until either their master is killed or retires. Retirees can be brought back from retirement by the DM’s discretion.

Achievements
Achievements are awards for certain deeds and situations that reflect in one way or another on the character. Achievements might be rewarded for the successful completion of certain tasks or quests. Some grant titles with appropriate bonuses. Most grant additional XP. All of them are subject to the DM’s wishes for his campaign. He might or might not make these public.
Bonuses might give an option to choose from for the sake gameplay (the second time a player receives a character option bonus it’s basically worthless, so he receives an experience bonus instead)

Examples
Dragonslayer
Participating in the killing of 1 dragon
Bonus: Title “Dragonslayer” +1 reaction roll from lawful folk, 400xp

Friend of Dwarves
Saved the life of at least 5 dwarves
Bonus: Title Friend of Dwarves, character option Dwarf (raceclass) or 100xp

Rescuer of Dwarves
Saved the life of at least 500 dwarves, Friend of Dwarves
Bonus: reaction roll +1 from dwarves, character option Dwarf (race/class) or 500xp

Saviour of Dwarves
Participated in saving a nation of dwarves from extinction, Rescuer of Dwarves
Title: Saviour of Dwarves, reaction roll +3 from all dwarves or 3000xp

Talk of the Town
Came back alive from an adventure
Bonus: 100xp, +1 reaction roll from local townfolk

Talk of the County
Came back alive from 5 different adventure situations, Talk of the Town
Bonus: Bonus 500xp

Local Hero
Reached level 3, Talk of the County
Bonus: 1000xp, title “Hero”

Arcane Scholar
Studied at an academy for wizards for at least one semester of courses (6 months)
Bonus: 1 spell of the academy’s specialisation, character option magic-user (specific Academy)

Magister Arcanis
Arcane Scholar, at least level 5 MU, added at least 1 completely new or 3 previously lost/unknown spells to the repertoire of the academy
Bonus: Title “Wizard/Sorceress”

Phantasist
Studied with an illusionist for at least 3 months
Bonus: 1 spell of the school of illusion, character option Illusionist

Graverobber

Studied the methods of necromancy with an appropriate teacher
Bonus: 1 spell of the school necromancy, character option Necromancer

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• Breaking the limits: Elves (thedragonsflagon.blogspot.com)
• [shortymonster] Character creation after the first session. (shortymonster.co.uk)
• Dungeon of the Month September 2012 (kaelaross.blogspot.com)
• Simplification and Complexity: Character Creation (echelond20.org)
• [Farsight Blogger] Basic D&D Meat Grinder Update (farsightblogger.blogspot.com)

Diary of the Doctor Who Role-Playing Games

Over the years there have been multiple attempts [1] to create a Doctor Who RPG. Unfortunately those were not as successful as one would expect. The last incarnation, Cubicle 7‘s Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space seems to have some success though, so much that they recently published the second edition of that game.

Nevermind that though, there is a fanzine for that: The Diary of the Doctor Who Role-Playing Games (what a strange little title…) is already on issue 18 and looks very promising. It supports all the commercial variations that were published so far and has some interesting adventures in there every issue.

I guess once you get past the obvious issue with such a game (so, who of you is going to play the 1100-year old alien with the magic spacetime machine and the sonic screwdriver, and who’ll play the kissogram and the nurse?) one is left with a very imaginative universe that allows pretty much every adventure possible. The big strength of the series always was that the science fiction elements are just the background used to drop the heroes into whatever setting the writer felt like writing this week. A plot device that I think would work awesomely with some styles of roleplaying. Some, not all. I can’t see it working with my Traveller campaign for example.

But considering that my girlfriend jumped on the idea of a Doctor Who RPG as soon as I mentioned the existence of such, and considering all my players are fans of the series as well, I guess there will at least be a one-shot like that in the near future.

[1] the latter link will lead to the Wikipedia article on the Timelord RPG btw, which is available for free online. Not too bad.

Related articles

• Diary of the Doctor Who Role-Playing Games #2 – 4 Months in the Making from Siskoid’s Blog of Geekery (siskoid.blogspot.com)
• GenCon 2012 Experience (journeymangm.com)
• Doctor Who RPG: Season 7 (siskoid.blogspot.com)
• Doctor Who RPG: Season 6 from Siskoid’s Blog of Geekery (siskoid.blogspot.com)

[Tools] How To Use Usenet: A Biased Introduction

trn usenet client (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Usenet was the first discussion board on the Internet, way before there were things like the world wide web or anything really graphical. Yes, there was a time when the internet existed that was there before there was HTML.

A lot of people seem to forget that, but the net did not just pop into being in the beginning of the 90s to provide us with the unlimited stream of cat pictures and porn that we have now.
Usenet is actually a very interesting concept, not quite the same as email technically, but not so different either.

When connected to a server one can download a stream of messages connected with a certain newsgroup, not unlike one would download mails, then disconnect, read through the messages, write responses that also would be posted to this group, and the next time one connected to the server those would be posted to the group, and then distributed to all other servers that carried the group in question. At the same time one would download a new batch of mails.
For me this is one of the most well designed technologies of the last 40 years. It is decentralized (one does only connect to a server, which in turn connects to others), it allows for discussions even with unsteady internet connections (less of a problem today than it was before), and it is low resource (all the messages are barely altered plain text and can be worked on in most email programs).
Unfortunately it also is a little bit more complicated getting it running that a simple click on the browser and navigation to some message board is. That is also one of the reasons why it has been dying a slow death for the last 15 years or so.
But then again, it’s still there. It still survived the onslaught of spammers and distractions by shiny new HTML pages over time quite nicely. Right now most of it is used for file sharing, so at least part of the Usenet is brimming with activity: One can, in certain groups, attach files (so called binaries) to the messages, and distribute them like normal messages. This is used as an easy and secure way for file sharing, but it is rather resource intensive for the server, so most of the services that allow this have to be paid.
I am not really interested in that part of the Usenet anyway, I am more interested in the discussion forums. So this article will talk about those.
There are a lot of them, and not all of them are active. Actually quite a lot of them are not and never were. Estimates as to how much of Usenet is  still in use vary, but technically there are hundreds of thousands of groups, and the amount of really active ones is about 800-1000, with around 10.000-20.000 having at least sporadic messages. But those statistics are a few years old, so take them with a grain of salt.
But even then, there are a lot of groups that are still active, in use, and which still get a lot of messages. Well, comparatively a lot at least. There used to be so much more each day, but that was a long time ago.