A bit late with this one, holiday season was way too busy for my taste, and I got distracted by some retro-computing projects (like my irrational fondness for Usenet and setting up a TTRPG-focused Synchronet BBS on my Raspberry).
Free Stuff
Troika for free (including an adventure). Well, nearly free, for signing up to their newsletter
d50 more memorabila to loot (Seed of Worlds) – how do you even use a d50 table? I think there’s a second half to this I haven’t found yet
Podcasts
Podcast find: Radio Free Muncie goes through all the issues of the Knights of the Dinner Table comic book. I conclude: I have to reread the Bag Wars saga, again.
Did you know there is an online forum for tabletop role-playing games that has been around since the early 80s, and which still is active and operating?
Admittedly in a much diminished state than at it’s heyday.
I don’t know if you ever heard the term Usenet before, and even if you did, if you don’t just connect it with data piracy. Because that’s what it is mostly used for nowadays.
What it started out as were discussion forums.
Back in the late 70s, after ARPANET had been created and email had been invented, a few programmers came up with an idea for an electronic bulletin board that could be read asynchronously. This was the time when computers still were only in big institutions like universities, big companies, and the military, and the whole idea was to create “a poor man’s ARPANET”. Connections between computers were rare and expensive , but possible. So these “news” started as a way to propagate articles and messages along servers that were not constantly connected to the internet. Some of the servers involved would only connect once a day to the network to transfer messages in and out (often at night because charges were lower then). A message might travel for multiple days before it reached all nodes in the network, and some of the earliest were messages about a nascent hobby popular among the people using this network: fantasy role-playing.
From what I can see the first two messages on the brand new group net.games.frp were sent out on the 12th of January 1982.
To give you an idea just how early this was: it was before the abbreviation RPG became common, people were still talking about Fantasy RolePlaying instead, so even today the group-names use the abbreviation FRP.
It’s quite a fascinating system that over time has become ever more complex and popular, before the ascent of html, hyperlinks, and the world wide web pushed it into the seedy corners of the ‘net.
Instead of having websites, Usenet is organized in newsgroups, and those groups are organized in hierarchies. There are the so called Big Eight that have a certain standard for group creation and posting (e.g. rec. for recreational topics, and comp. for topics concerning computers), and there are others, organized in one way or another (famously alt. which had lower standards for the creation of new groups).
Messages are sent to one or more groups (crossposted), distributed around the network, and people respond to these posts. Interesting discussions and arguments ensue, people get angry, flame wars ensue, other people learn something new, weird in-jokes develop, stuff happens.
All that can be read via archives, the biggest of which is Google Groups, which both is a boon and downfall of the service: Google purchased the old newsgroup archives of DejaNews back in the 90s, and integrated it in it’s Google Groups service. In a picture-perfect example of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish the users of Groups had a web interface that allowed them access to their old newsgroups, access to new groups that only existed on Google, but also allowed spammers to flood the connected newsgroups with loads of unmoderated spam. Spam that recently was quoted by them as a reason to cut the connection with Usenet, bringing this phase of the network to an end.
But Usenet still is running, and most likely will be running as long as there are people willing to run servers for it. But the biggest Usenet servers nowadays are piracy servers that keep the text-part of the Usenet as more of an afterthought. At one point someone came up with a way to use the text-only format of Usenet in a way to distribute data that was binary, i.e. not purely text. And this took over most of the system.
But I am not really interested in that and never was. What I am interested in are the fantasy roleplaying parts of that network.
rec.games.frp.*
I said that the forum has been running since the late 70s, but that’s not quite correct. The original structure of Usenet grew organically from the beginning. People were creating new groups when it suited them and it seemed logical. Which soon caused some hierarchies (specifically the net. hierarchy) to swell with groups that could barely be maintained. In a great upheaval in 1987 all the groups were renamed and restructured.
Some old hands are still angry about it and will bitch about it for days. That also is Usenet.
One can argue that the fantasy roleplaying group has existed since before that time. One also could argue that it only exists since 1987. Which still is older than the World Wide Web.
Usenet is divided into hierarchies, and the frp-hierarchy is part of the rec. (recreation-hierarchy) and .games. sub-hierarchy.
There are currently 11 .frp. groups in that hierarchy:
rec.games.frp.dnd
of course… it’s the hierarchy for Dungeons and Dragons. Always one of the biggest topics of the whole FRP forums this one got it’s own group.
rec.games.frp.misc
for basically all other kinds of discussions about roleplaying games
rec.games.frp.cyber
for cyberpunk systems (e.g. Cyberpunk 2020 or Shadowrun).
rec.games.frp.super-heroes
for superhero games
rec.games.frp.live-action
anything LARP goes here.
rec.games.frp.announce
announcements and news about products go here
rec.games.frp.industry
for all kinds of discussions about the rpg industry
rec.games.frp.storyteller
yes, this was created when the World of Darkness was big enough to demand it’s own forum
rec.games.frp.gurps
For GURPS, this part was created because while never the most popular game, it’s fans flooded the main group with so many messages about builds that it was decided to give them their own place.
rec.games.frp.advocacy
all kinds of discussions about roleplaying games as such and how they work. This is where the Forge came from back in the day
rec.games.frp.market
I guess this is for selling stuff. I have literally never seen a message in there.
Most of these lay fallow right now, with me and a few others being the only ones posting there every once in a while. I do have to admit part of it is because I don’t want to lose the that part of ttrpg history to a random deletion request for non-use.
Other TTRPG groups
The main hierarchies are not the only ones. Most normal Usenet servers carry at least the Big Eight, but most also carry others. The big other hierarchy is alt. (…definitely not named for Anarchists, Lunatics, and Terrorists, all evidence to the contrary…), which makes it easier to create groups. This means there are a few other groups here that might be of interest, if they ever would get someone to post in them. Their structure though is not as organized as the ones in the Big 8.
alt.games.frp.adnd-util
about utilities for playing ADnD. I would say, a general groups for RPG utilities.
alt.games.adnd
for ADnD. I am not sure why this exists, maybe because the main one was too stodgy, or it was created because someone thought ADnD was sufficiently different than DnD to warrant it’s own group
alt.games.earthdawn
for Earthdawn. Remember Earthdawn?
alt.games.x-files.rpg
For the X-Files RPG. Remember that?
alt.games.whitewolf
I guess a group for White Wolf games, which is also already covered in rec.games.frp.storyteller
alt.games.tolkien.rpg
a group about playing in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth
There are also local and language dependent groups around. Many languages and regions have their own hierarchies for exchanges between locals and/or in other languages.
uk.games.roleplay
group for roleplaying in the UK
de.rec.spiele.rpg.misc
general group for discussions of RPGs in German
z-netz.freizeit.rollenspiele.dsa
originally this was an Echo in a mailbox network, by now z-netz. is a small alternative German Usenet hierarchy. This particular one about Das Schwarze Auge/The Dark Eye
pl.rec.gry.rpg
Polish-language group
es.rec.juegos.rol
Spanish-language group
se.spel.rollspel
Swedish-language group
dk.fritid.rollespil
Danish-language group
fr.rec.jeux.jdf
French-language group
it.hobby.giochi.gdr
Italian-language group
hr.rec.igre.rpg
Hungarian-language group
aus.games.roleplay
Australian group
There are more, some of which I might not even find that easy because they are not on the servers I frequent (not all servers carry all groups) or are so specialized they might not be of interest to anyone but locals (e.g. saar.rec.rollenspiele exists, but I doubt many people in Saarland (the smallest of Germany’s federal states) still know Usenet exists)
Ok, ok, but how do you actually ACCESS this Usenet thingy?
That’s a bit more difficult, but not much. It used to be ISPs were all running their own news servers, this was actually the REASON you might want internet access as a private person, but that isn’t the case anymore. Google Groups is also going away, so that’s not a real option.
An easy way to check out what is being talked about on the FRP-hierarchy is campaignwiki.org/news. This server makes it possible to read and post on his own small server via a web-interface. The server is only running roleplaying-related groups, including the global FRP-hierarchy, and a few local ones that do not get carried in many other places.
Another way to access it via web browser is via web gateways. There are a few around, e.g. NovaBBS. There are a few of those around, but they might not carry all the groups (NovaBBS e.g. only rec.games.frp.dnd and .misc, because those are the ones with most activity).
The proper way to use it is of course by getting an account on a news server and adding it to your feed reader of choice. True hardcore users use terminal-based readers like tin or Gnus, but many Email programs like Mozilla Thunderbirdallow you to subscribe to newsgroups.
But where do you get a news server?
Well, there are multiple free options (these are all technically text-only, although a few have some basic binary groups that allow pictures):
Most of these have instructions on how to connect on their websites.
Note: This is a redo of an article I wrote 13 years ago. Originally I thought I could just let that one stand like that, but just briefly reading through it I noticed things had changed dramatically in some areas. So I rewrote the whole thing from scratch.
I am currently going through a lot of trainings, and specifically I am doing something to work on my SQL knowledge. I only have hovered around the edges of the topic before. Some of my previous jobs involved making some basic database queries, but I never really looked further than basic database structures and simple queries.
But that got me thinking about doing a campaign database in SQL, with a better way to track all those elements that might be interesting to know for a campaign.
Now to be fair, I am not thinking about the usual wham bam 20 levels in a campaign thing 5e seems to have going on, I am talking about a multiplayer campaign in the OSR/West Marches vein where every single session might be played by different players. I think I should actually write about this ideal of a campaign I have.
But anyway… when thinking about it I remembered that years ago for my idea of a Harnworld campaign in my own Harnworld B/X derivative that got derailed quickly by parenthood and everything involved in that I made a campaign tracker spreadsheet in Google Sheets that was supposed to do a lot of this already. This was inspired by multiple other sheets I found, e.g. the old ADnD ones or the Hackmaster one. I found it a bit cumbersome to use, but mostly I was waiting for the campaign to continue which it never did, and forgot about the existence of the spreadsheet. I fully intended to improve on it, but haven’t gotten around to it for years now. It mostly is a layout without any formulas.
I did put some thought into it though, it has some Harn specific things (e.g. a tab about Godstones, which are dimensional gates in the setting), so if someone else might find it useful have a look. Maybe give me some feedback while you’re at it.
I actually have not had much time this week for blogging, even reading my feeds was an issue. Which is sad because there was a rather juicy amount of stuff to be found in them. Here are the most interesting:
Garhelt: we are outfitting an expedition up the river…
Tronde: Mother…
Garhelt: we need the best of our warriors, the best equipment, the best of our scholars, and we are going to discover the Orkland!
Tronde: Mother *sigh* Mother I am the hetman now.
Gerhalt *not listening*: I think we will need 4 dozen horses!
Tronde: you can get a mule.
Gerhalt: And I need the Giant’s Thumb!
Tronde: … tell you what mother, I will let Olaf put up some posters when he’s in Havena next week, deal?
Gerhalt: I knew I could put my trust in you! (exit to right)
Aide: Tronde, is that really wise?
Tronde: I don’t care. Let Olaf put some posters up. Either we get some foolhardy idiots who actually do the trip, or some scammers that are gonna turn back immediately. We can suffer the loss of a mule and some equipment if it gets me the chance to get rid of that disgusting thumb. I’ve wanted to kick it into the sea since I was a kid.
So let’s go through Das Schwarze Auge scenario B15 Im Spinnenwald (In Spiderwood), part of the 3-part campaign Die Entdeckung des Orklandes (The Discovery of Orkland) from 1986.
This should be the first we have from that year.
The Discovery series his is a small starter campaign written by Ulrich Kiesow (again…) and unlike the previous attempts at starter adventures this one wants to be a wilderness adventure.
Now when I say a wilderness adventure you might expect a hex crawl, but this is DSA and it was written for a German-speaking audience, so we instead are dealing with squares.
Kiesow did this already with B13. There already was an actual hex map in Werner Fuchs’ B8, but obviously they didn’t like that. So squares it is.
Also: considering this is supposed to be the discovery of the previously undiscovered wilderness, there are quite a lot of roads on that map.
Anyway, the heroes get hired by the former leader of the Thorwal Pirates (and mother of the current leader) Garhelt. After finding a public notice on a wall somewhere in their hometown.
Garhelt wants to leave a collection of maps of the known world for her country, but one part is missing: the Orkland.
Which is just up the river from Thorwal. You gotta wonder why they have maps of every other part of the continent but are missing their own neighbourhood.
Ok, there’s orks, but still.
The whole expedition has a homespun pet project feel to it. Oh sure, you are working for the former leader of Thorwal. But not the current one. So you get a mule. And a few life-saving pills.
And the thumb of a giant.
Have fun.
…
Thumb of a giant?
Yes, some ancient hero of the Thorwalians once brought home a thumb he cut off from a giant and it has been in their hoard ever since.
That sounds like Garhelt just took off with whatever nobody wanted.
Anyway, the fun thing about this thumb is this: it works.
Orcs have a justified phobia of giants, and showing them this thumb will make them run away.
That is until you meet that one village who thinks giants are just ancient superstition.
Har Har.
So we get our characters dropped off as far up the river as the dragon boats can go, and then we and the mule have to make our way to the other side of the country.
Ok, that’s not quite true, we do get whatever we want in equipment. but no ranged weapons except bows, or heavy armor. I guess that would be a bit too much for some people about to die miserably in orc territory. And as I said, only a mule. And this is a starter scenario, maybe if you pool your money you might get a second one.
Fair enough. The giant thumb actually leads to the odd feeling that despite exploring the “Ork”land, there’s not actually that many orcs to be seen. After the first few encounters with them word spreads and they leave us alone. What we have instead are lizardmen, spiders, three-headed dragons, and lots of wildlife.
Now I have to say I actually like this adventure, but despite being a squarecrawl it also is… uhm… heavily railroaded. Or maybe the word is gated. The simplest way is to follow along the roads (well, paths I guess) that already exist. If you try to cross open plains you are bound to get accosted by a bunch of narmy Lindwurms (three-headed dragons) that you have no chance in fighting.
The adventure has both random encounters and necessary encounters for woods, plains (well, the lindwurms), hills, cliffs (huh), and swamp.
Of interest is maybe the Firun priest who might counter aggressive PCs with a hail storm miracle and dies that way.
Awkward.
Also there’s a unicorn that just looks at them and then goes away (dare I say it? sequel hoooook)
Trolls are quite nice and give valuable information, but if the PCs talk too long with them they get the idea to rob them.
Swamps also have ork gadflies on basically every field, in addition to monsters, nicely keeping the PCs off those as much as possible. and the rest of the denizens (besides the lizardmen) are not much better.
And Kiesow clearly states this is exactly how it is intended: the heroes after all are supposed to reach the Spiderwood and not trot around along the river.
Sigh.
Anyway, lizardmen. Or lizard folk. Achaz in DSA parlance. By 4th edition they ended up as playable character races (the same as orcs and goblins). But in 1st edition so far we encountered them in some of the earlier scenarios (B1 and B4) on the side of the antagonists.
You most likely read over me mentioning them and assumed that we’d be set to murder our way across a tribe of poor scaled folk living there off the land.
Nothing could be further from the truth, the lizard people are actually quite friendly.
Unless the PCs really fuck up the encounters this is a purely social challenge, with the biggest threat being one of them getting married to a (presumably very attractive) lizard princess.
Actually no, there’s also the feast they are served as guests of the Achaz. Not that their hosts intend to hurt, but their cooking is of such a quality one might gain or lose permanent hp.
It seems orkland Achaz cooking is… interesting.
Anyway, it’s not necessary that one of the PCs gets married, but king Azl Azzl is very intent on getting his daughter Tili Tiki hitched.
This is presented as a roleplaying challenge to get out of this predicament, but Kiesow does acknowledge that some players might be totally ok with getting married to a lizardgirl.
For what it’s worth Tili Tiki is deadly afraid of violence, and living in a swamp in the orkland that’s not a good condition. I guess it does make sense the king wants to get her to a place where not every day is a struggle to survive.
I don’t know if this is what was intended, but it’s quite heartwarming
After this and a bit of overland travel we need to get the heroes into the Spiderwood, so there’s two encounters to do that. Technically there are roads that lead around the forest, but to the west is a giant called Orkeater who will also branch out into eating foolhardy adventurers, to the east are the lindwurms Skyflame and Skysparkling, who refuse any attempts of characters to cross the plains. Skyflame is presented as a helicopter parent who doesn’t like humans (or other small folk).
Both encounters are of course much more powerful than the heroes, leaving the forest as the only option.
Sigh. as I said, gated
I mean of course it’s called Im Spinnenwald, so we have to go to the Spiderwood at one point. But it’s kind of pointless to start a wilderness exploration adventure and then railroad people into going where you want them to.
anyway, the main part of the scenario:
The Spiderwood.
Guess what’s all over the place?
If you were thinking “spiders” you’d be wrong. what actually is the most annoying part is a kind of plant (the so called Basilamine) that has nice red flowers and exploding seed pods which destroy equipment and give tenths of damage points and oh my god there’s a whole page of rules for these fucking things I think I need a spreadsheet to track all this garbage. DON’T GO INTO THE FLOWER FIELDS IS WHAT I’M SAYING!
Effectively every part of the forest that’s full of those flowers is impassible, coincidentally making the forest into a… you guessed it… open air dungeon.
Sigh.
There’s another encounter table here, containing mammoths and boars and wolves… and horny big bugs that fight rival bugs by bumping into them. hmm… Also red dwarves. which are dwarves with red caps that don’t talk and might go berserk if interacted with. huh. These are still canon by the way. I just saw them in the 4e book about dwarves. One might assume they are supposed to be redcaps, but they more seem to be some variation of wood-dwelling gnomes and dwarves in Germanic mythologies. But that all isn’t quite clear, and unlike everything else besides animals, these guys cannot be talked to. So we don’t really learn what they are about at all.
Considering this is in the middle of the “undiscovered orkland” this forest turns out to be much more human-inhabited than expected. there’s multiple log cabins, one of which can give you a free dog and has a magic artifact that just says “if you can read this you can read’
(it grants you the ability to read if you don’t have it yet, which is necessary later)
we also can meet an invisible human mage (ok, debatable, but the heroes can’t know her current physical form), a bunch of trolls, at least some poor ork villages, and at least one more whole abandoned human village, now full of goblins (and the question what a Nivese tribe was doing that far south to begin with, living in otherwise very standard medieval buildings).
So what about the spiders the forest is named after?
They will kidnap one of the characters at one point. So now we hopefully will try to find that character again. Lets hope the group doesn’t have issues with each other and just decides to leave the character to his fate.
As a replacement for the player who just lost their character we get Grisbart, a dwarf, who just shows up and is very greedy. That’s his character.
This is the first time the negative attributes are introduced. Grisbart is a dwarf with a Greed for Gold attribute of 8, meaning whenever he sees gold and wins an attribute check HE NEEDS IT RIGHT NOW.
I guess the idea was popular enough to become a standard for 2nd edition DSA. The later editions introduced a rather specific set of negative attributes like this, one of which always was Greed for Gold. Only 4th edition changed this and made this an optional drawback to buy in a point buy system.
He will join us rescuing the other character. well, if the heroes want to. who knows.
Anyway, how about having at least a single Orc NPC?!
I know I can just introduce some, but I might be mentioning it a bit much, this is supposed to be an expedition through a region where orcs are the predominant people.
Lets cut this short. The spiders that kidnapped the PC are not technically a bad sort: They are a colony of intelligent telepathic spiders who discovered that people reading to them gives them interesting telepathic pictures in their head. so they kidnap people, let them read, and then lose them to scurvy.
They aren’t evil, they just don’t understand that this is no way to deal with humans. After a few scenarios by Kiesow I recognize his streak of dark humor again. The spiders just don’t have a clue how humans really work, they just know that they can read to them. And they feed them and try to keep them alive, but humans just can’t survive on a diet of nothing but fish and water. So multiple people have been kidnapped (some maybe from that Nivese village, and some others), used as a reader for the female spiders (the males only know enough to know that the females like those humans for some reason), and then they died of scurvy.
There’s opportunity for some roleplaying here, or just a simple dungeon crawl. It’s not a big dungeon, and Kiesow presents it appropriately alien. In one room we find a couple of spiders post-copulation, the female trying to eat the male one. As one does I guess.
I actually like this adventure. There are some bizarre setpieces in there which I think could be fun. In fact there is a nice actual play by the current publishers of the system which is quite fun and which I enjoyed listening to. I want to play it with people. But damn does it have issues. It is certainly full of interesting ideas and roleplaying challenges. I think outside some random encounters it doesn’t demand fights anywhere. but it also wastes the possibilities of both the exploration section and the forest section by gating like crazy. This would have to be reworked.
One certainly could introduce something about orc culture here instead of basically everything else.
It occurs to me that there is a good business reason for this particular campaign: up to now most releases have followed along with the levels that could be expected for a normal group. I.e. if you started with B1 and played maybe one official scenario a month you’d end up around the level range for the advanced line of adventures by now. So how do you sell more? Start over again and tell people this adventure is for experienced players with new characters.
In a way this is the true end of the first phase of DSA adventures. Previous adventures were already mentioning some of the advanced classes, this is the first that places the events on the map from the advanced box. The world soon would start to get filled in with detail.
Both here in the B series and soon in the A series exploration adventures would become more common, with much more social roleplay challenges and less dungeon crawling.
This also received a French version, from what I can see only in the Schmidt trade dress though. No Gallimard version from what I can see for this one.
I might need to point it out, but this and all the other adventures I have been talking about lately recently have been reissued, so they currently can be found in shops again. During my last visit back at my parents’ place I found a whole shelf of them in the local comic store. They are generally near faithful replicas, with only the Schmidt logo replaced.
People don’t really differentiate between authors’ voices when discussing roleplaying game scenarios. There’s a bit of it when people are really into it. They will talk about Gygaxian naturalism, or JaquaysingXandering dungeons [note check this Alexandrian post regarding the name change]. If it’s a Hickman scenario there’s gonna be railroads. That stuff.
Stephen Bourne is not one of those greats, but I feel like his scenarios have authorial voice dripping from their pages. He has a style. And all his adventures have similar feel that lean into it. He likes to mix heavy medievalism into his scenarios, even the clear fantasy ones, and use a limited palette of monsters for specific purposes.
When it works it’s pretty brilliant, when it doesn’t you feel like you just lost the money you spent.
I especially notice it in his early Role Aids scenarios: he tries to mix historical facts with D&D’s approach to fantasy worlds, and in some places this absolutely doesn’t fit. The Throne of Evil is the worst of the lot, being a weird mix of a political intrigue scenario in medieval England and a bog standard dungeon crawler for early D&D at the same time. A pretty horrid scenario altogether. I know it was supposed to me rules for medieval wargames, but no.
Evil Ruins is much less so, even though I am still bothered by how disjointed the setting is in places. On the one hand he establishes the setting as Castle Tintagel, which is a real world place in Cornwall, and even establishes that it has some connections to Arthurian myth. Then he proceeds to create an elaborate backstory without any obvious ties to Arthurian myth at all, but featuring Saxon kings and vikings. Fair enough.
Maybe I am just not knowledgeable enough about Arthur and his myth cycle. But then the adventure basically is a generic AD&D scenario, and the maps don’t fit the real world location of Tintagel at all.
It would have been better if he either took care to play into the medieval fantasy situation and actually present it coherently, or just replace all the real world references with some generic fantasy terms. The way it is right now feels disjointed.
Why the hell is there a priest of Zeus in medieval England trying to establish a temple? Why is Tintagel on the East Coast?
Sigh.
That said, that’s the setting.
I actually always have liked the rest of the scenario, even though, or maybe because… it is incredibly generic. But it is generic in a naive way you just don’t see done that often.
The backstory is too long (2pg for a 36 page scenario), but the basic situation is this: there were two brothers born to the same mother, one the son of the king, one the result of an affair with the king’s brother. The first son was supposed to inherit the throne, but when he came back from a journey his brother murdered him and took the throne. Then stuff went belly up, the usurper basically lost the kingdom and established a death cult in the castle (…as you do…), and his murdered brother came back as a wraith out for revenge. So there’s two separate evil forces in the ruins, and the struggle between both comes to a head just at the same time as a bunch of adventurers come to clear out the castle because it keeps the property values down or something.
There’s a bit of subterfuge going on. First the heroes have to travel to the castle with a guide, but he intentionally misleads them for his own goals, and they have to rescue the heart of the forest. Who is a giant spider.
I love that. There are potentially friendly natives in the forest that will gladly help the party, as long as the group doesn’t immediately murder them for just happening to be giant arachnids. The guide also will steer them towards a different location than they want, so they take care of a lycanthrope for him (not actually a werewolf) while he steals the treasure. The idea is a bit railroady, but ok.
By the way, did you know the term black panther actually refers to two different variants of big cats of different species? I didn’t know until I read this adventure, and then only after I read the statblocks of the lycantrope and his pet leopard properly. The term black panther is never used in the text, but that’s what they both are supposed to be. The text introduces him as a were-leopard. A term that evokes different images in me than black panther would.
I assume the reason for the black panthers in here was because they got the rights for a Boris Vallejo painting for their cover and they needed something in the scenario that fit to that. Or they chose the painting because the were-leopards were in the scenario and missed what color they were supposed to be.
Then when one finally arrives at the castle one has to deal with death cultists and monsters maddened by the wraith, but it’s not necessarily clear that both are against one another from the outset. The dungeon is a bit lackluster, but the author took care to put a sort of investigative scenario in there. One can find out the backstory for what happened when following the clues, and find out there is a second evil influence at large. If one cares to do so at least.
The castle itself is presented as a 4 level dungeon, but the 1st level is just the castle yard (also doesn’t seem to resemble the actual Castle Tintagel), and level 4 is rather short.
One interesting bit is that the short boxed text that is given seems to assume the players do indeed not know what these creatures they encounter are. So orcs are “ugly brutes”, hobgoblins are “rather large and ugly creatures” and ghouls are “terrible figures”. Which is nice in that way. It doesn’t give away what they are, one easily could play this as an actual fantastic medieval scenario in a fantasy Britain, and have them all encounter these creatures for the first time.
And that’s actually the way I would run this adventure: as a slightly longer introductory module, to get some people into the game. Maybe not necessarily really in the fantasy Britain environment the module supposes, but one easily could find at least some equivalent region in another world. Or just, you know, keep that little duchy it takes place in it’s own self-contained world.
This scenario was released by Role Aids, a line of supplements by Mayfair games that were more or less compatible with Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. There were a few lawsuits involved, but they were rather cheeky about it. This module claims it is suitable for use with ADnD, and the stat blocks are roughly equivalent, but not the same. Certainly enough to run it just like that, mapping to the ADnD rules nearly 1:1.
The illustrations in the text were by Hannah Shapero. I don’t know if she did so much more work in RPGs, but I like the illustrations we get in here. They have a very dark quality, and manage to get over the whole feel of the place perfectly. I am not quite sure if they were actually made for this particular scenario though, or if the author just had to use some illustrations they had lying around.
An aside about the German edition
The first time I came across this scenario was in the German translation. This one was published by Truant Spiele (Truant is the owner’s last name) in 1989 as Ruinen des Schreckens (Ruins of Terror). So at least the title got an improvement. I got it more than ten years after, when Truant and Welt der Spiele decided to get rid of some unsold stock by bundling them together in anthologies. Actually I got that one even later, because it took a few years for me to actually get my hands on it when that anthology ended in the bargain bin. I find this translation interesting: unlike the original English version this is not compatible with AD&D. The scenario was translated faithfully, but a page about “Universalabenteuer” (generic adventures) was added with adaption notes. All the stats in the scenario have changed to a weird percentile system that does not seem to be directly mapped to anything. Midgard was the first German roleplaying game, and it used a percentile system (it was derived from Empire of the Petal Throne), so that might have been a reason for that. Some characters also have skills that sound very much like Das Schwarze Auge skills from that game’s 2nd edition. What it doesn’t resemble at all is Dungeons and Dragons, which at the time was barely a blip on the German roleplaying market. Also interesting:
Tolkienesque Ologs were present in the original (as modified orcs), but were replaced with Half-orcs. Very tough Half-Orcs. I wonder why. The other half-orcs come out weaker in comparison, even the supposedly elite guards in the dungeon.
the copyright notice claims this was a translation of Mayfair Games’ Pinnacle, which was another of the scenarios in the anthology I got this from.
It turns out “Gantlet” is an archaic form of “Gauntlet”, still technically in use, but I assume most people coming across this might not recognize this. Not even native speakers.
I got this module for free as a community copy, which puts me into a bit of a bind. Can I really review it unbiased? Complaining too much about it sounds a bit like beggars being choosers (although I didn’t really beg for it). Not reviewing it feels wrong as well. Andrew certainly put work into this, even though, at points, he might have put in a bit (or a lot) more.
I know, I know, this is supposed to be one of those punky releases that do away with artificial standards, and give you the proper gonzo experience with bad formatting and art. But the art is not even that bad, besides the maps that is, and in a lot of ways proper standards of formatting are there for a reason.
Now, I actually like this scenario. It is supposed to be an OD&D one, but I don’t quite see that. I think it might be great for a one-shot, maybe a challenge scenario you give to people multiple times. It’s a bit long for a proper tournament scenario, but is anyone really doing RPG tournaments still?
It’s not all that creative one though. The players are captured by a fire giant and his hobgoblin army. Now they are being made to run the gauntlet in his dungeon, with the giant pointing and laughing every once in a while via magic. It feels like I played this before. Or seen the movie. And the Saturday morning cartoon.
It’s been done before I mean to say.
But that might be cool as well. Everyone knows what this is about. Go through the dungeon, find the key, slay the monsters. Survive or look good trying. If you add some stuff from previous attempts every time someone tries this it might be a fun recurring scenario for different people to try.
It does have an alien mantis monk and a giant mouth on legs though, so there’s that.
Is this worth the 0 dollars I paid? Yeah, it has a some good stuff in there. Is it worth the 2.50 it normally costs? I would have to think about that. But the drivethrurpg link has the whole document as a preview, so you can check out the whole thing.
Let’s go through Das Schwarze Auge adventure B13 Der Streuner Soll Sterben (The Vagrant Shall Die)
It has the secondary title Das Blutgericht von Thalusa (The Blood Court of Thalusa) which is one of the few times when both titles are equally evocative.
Ok, let me preface this: I utterly adore this scenario, even though it has it’s problems (dare I say it? some parts are quite racist). But I would say this is where Ulrich Kiesow shows real promise.
Now at this point MOST (but not all) of the DSA scenarios were written by him, or in cooperation with him. This included A1 which I really liked, and A2 which I found at least ok. But it also included the whole rest of the scenarios which contain some bad railroads, even if their premise might be good. But this one is one where I really see what he is going for. This is intentionally pulpy, in the way that 19th ct. adventure stories were.
Unfortunately this includes some rather unfortunate tropes that come with such stories. For one the setting is quasi-oriental. And of course it involves arranged marriages, beheadings at the drop of a stone, and an evil looking coal black executioner.
On the other there really aren’t any really bad people involved. The executioner just happens to be coal black from a magical accident and is otherwise doing his job, and the one actual antagonist is coded as German, and even he has reasons to behave like he does.
Lots of bad decisions that come with the choice of setting and NPCs. I guess for the 80s it was fair for its day, but even in the 90s I remember this module as being discussed as “the racist one”.
But anyway, the plot concerns Prince Selo of Khunchom who had the really bad idea to have just a small peek at his fiancée Shenny of Thalusa. [that name tho…]
You see it’s tradition in their culture that enfianced people are not to see each other until the marriage rites are concluded. Which is all fine for Selo, except he HAS seen her parents and now fears his future wife might take after either of them. So he makes the plan of… sneaking into the palace of Thalusa and having a look at her.
And if it’s really bad, can a life as a vagrant on the roads of Aventuria be quite so bad?
Yes, Prince Selo is an idiot.
In any case he even is successful in sneaking in, and quite enamored with Princess Shenny. And Princess Shenny for her side is quite enamored with that handsome stranger she just encountered.
Unfortunately while they are both very enthusiastically consenting with each other (at least that discussion we don’t have to touch), he is captured by the guards and immediately sentenced to death by his prospective father in law.
Your mission now, if you choose to accept it…
Well, you should accept it, the Prince’s father promises you riches if you manage to make it to Thalusa in time with a document of his hand that can rescue his son. Unfortunately Thalusa is about 300km away, easily a 10 day trip over land, and the execution is set for in 14 days.
And even if you get there on time with the document (which is not a given), and hand it to the wrong person, then you are back at square one. Well, square whatever Thalusa is in.
The heroes are given the choice of going by sea, which might shorten the journey to three days, but has a problem: it’s a the stormy season right now, and it might make things worse. A single ship is willing to make the passage on the off-chance of arriving in one part at their destination to make a killing selling hard liquor.
(I realized afterwards that I am not quite sure which season it is supposed to be, the text is talking about Frühjahr being a storm season in that part, so the early year. In our world this commonly would be spring. But in Aventuria the early year is autumn. But was this already established at that point? When does this actually take place?)
Despite Kiesow’s known fondness for railroads he does not actually go for them here. With a bit luck of the dice the PCs can indeed reach the halfway point, after which the storms become no problem anymore. It’s not likely, but it’s possible.
Then they are attacked by pirates though. Which also can be circumnavigated with proper care (the scenario contains a specifically designed boardgame here), and even if they board your ship they only will steal the document.
(they are not actually real pirates)
If luck is not with them, or if they decide to go there from the beginning, they end up having to go by land. But at least they might have gained a day or two.
This would be the place where a DnD scenario would pull out the hexmap. And we saw a hexmap in B8 already. Kiesow instead decides to use squares, for a squarecrawl, basically. There are also no permanently keyed encounters, all the encounters are on random tables.
This includes meadows which have an encounter on a roll of 7 on a d6.
Oh yes, did you see! Did you see?! He made a joke!
What’s interesting about the encounters is how… stock medieval fantasy they all are. One would assume that with a setting where he uses all kinds of orientalist tropes he would do the same for the wilderness section. Instead it seems like he just took the monster descriptions from the rulebook: wolves, trolls, boars, a tatzelwurm. The closest to the Arabian Nights scenario you might be expecting is an Earth Spirit that can give you some healing.
(I guess no budget for illustrations…)
But it’s really the city adventure part where this scenario shines. For one: there is an actual city adventure part with an actual map of Thalusa. For the second: you are given free reign how to actually deal with the situation. Now you were supposed to deliver a document, but you likely lost it either on the sea journey or over land. If you didn’t you most likely handed it to the wrong person at the palace and he lost it for you instead.
in the meantime the prince is in his prison in the middle of the market square of Thalusa and the players are left free reign in how to deal with the situation.
Springing the prince might not be easy, but can be possible. Sneaking into the palace is possible (it’s worked out), but finding the right person there is difficult. Dealing with the executioner and his tools is also another option (the tools need to be in top order according to tradition).
Here is when the bog standard fantasy scenario all of a sudden turns into a heist. most likely the heroes will have to do something to save the prince, but what and how is their own choice. The scenario gives some valid ideas, but I bet some players would have more.
You could have an infiltration/dungeon crawl through the palace, but you don’t have to.
For what it’s worth if you are breaking into the palace you might encounter a scribe you can blackmail by threatening his favorite calligraphy.
And if you break into the executioners house you might encounter a Ulmenknecht, which seems to be a treant kind of being? I don’t think this being is still canon in DSA. It’s not the proper treant equivalent (that would be a Waldschrat), more like a wood golem?
And then there is Dolguruk, the executioner of Thalusa.
Who is black. Coal black even.
Which is the result of a rather sinister human sacrifice he and a druid wanted to perform on a magician who managed to hit back with a transformation spell. Which caused him to turn completely black.
For some reason this story is the longest of all the NPC bios, despite being otherwise a rather incidental character. And one who doesn’t actually do anything bad as such while the PCs are around.
I think Kiesow is very much going very much for the image of Der Schwarze Mann here, a “Kinderschreckfigur” (character to scare kids with? Man, we Germans have weird concepts sometimes) that is quite widespread. I still remember playing both the associated kids game and the card game based on it.
In a wider sense it was a depiction of (black) death and/or the devil.
But here it manages to keep all the bad connotations that made this game… inappropriate in polite society.
Dolguruk is I think still an active NPC in current DSA lore, he usurped Shenny’s father at one point and became ruler of Thalusa, and being an elf he also doesn’t seem to be easy to get rid of. He also had his backstory modified to have gained his look from a pact with a demon. Not sure if that’s better or worse.
So…what do I think about it?
I don’t think Kiesow intended for this to come across as it does, but he nevertheless managed to write some really unfortunate implications in here.
Which might explain why this adventure never got the re-releases that other adventures from him got, despite being, from a design standpoint alone, one of his best so far. There is considerable freedom of choice both in the wilderness and the city sections, and room for player creativity, all under time pressure. I really like this and I want to play this with people. I might need to prepare people that it was written 40 years ago.
Other languages
This gets into the times when the DSA adventures were no longer translated into many languages. The only translation I can find is the French one, in both the Schmidt and Gallimard version.
Still not sure why there were two versions. According to one commenter on dice.camp one was the Schmidt version, like in German, the other was the same format as the Gallimard gamebook translations and would have been sold in bookstores instead of toy stores.
In any case they used the secondary title for that, Le Bourreau de Thalussa. Not the worst choice.
@gonzohistory had a great idea in one of his last few podcase episodes: a game of Lexicon where the players create a fantasy bestiary as a handout for players. That sounds like something I might want to try. You could integrate this with a game of #dnd or so, where players get some extra xp or something for bestiary entries. https://monsterman.libsyn.com/special-episode-medieval-bestiarieshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicon_(game)#ttrpg
here's an idea I had for a #shadowrun campaign a while ago: use an actual #bbs as a job board/contact/forum for runners between runs. the idea would be that they have to login to a specific address on a machine to get infos about their runs. should be doable with a very basic setup of e.g. synchronet
A Monday Miscellany of Links Pt. XVIIITroy under Siege by François-Louis Schmied Play your PCs like they're stolen cars. Die horribly. Roll up a new one. -- Enthusiastic Skeleton Boys Blog Good Stuff TTRPGs for Trans Rights - West Virginia (itch.io) - 529 TTRPG items for a good cause Free Stuff Warlock Class for OSR (PWYW on drivethrurpg) Muster: a primer for War (PWYW on drivethrurpg)https://gmkeros.wordpress.com/2024/05/20/a-monday-miscellany-of-links-pt-xviii/
trying out #xmpp with @lkh right nowamazing technology that seems... somewhat deserted. am I missing something? are there really that few people on there?
anyone want me to link to some of your free or cheap ttrpg stuff on my blog?drop me a DM(it's not like I have that much reach and I don't promise to do it if I don't like it)#ttrpg
some variation on Carousing rules (which I adore)http://whosemeasure.blogspot.com/2024/04/why-are-you-so-emaciated-and-your-face.html#osr #ttrpg #blogospherefind
"Play your PCs like they're stolen cars. Die horribly. Roll up a new one."https://enthusiasticskeletonboys.blogspot.com/2020/04/d-isnt-fun-enough-or-enthusiastic.html#blogospherefind #dnd #ttrpg
[…] englischsprachigen Blog Stuffed Crocodile gibt es eine neue Retro-Rezension. Besprochen wird dieses Mal Der Streuner soll sterben. Das Abenteuer kommt dabei gut weg, aus […]
@gmkeros.wordpress.com I only know vaguely this game, which I cannot easily read (I'm Spanish, I only speach Spanish, English, and Galician), so I love this reviews. Thanks!
Stuffed Crocodile 
3 responses to “[The Dark Eye] Retrospective: B13 Der Streuner soll sterben”
[…] englischsprachigen Blog Stuffed Crocodile gibt es eine neue Retro-Rezension. Besprochen wird dieses Mal Der Streuner soll sterben. Das Abenteuer kommt dabei gut weg, aus […]
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totally agree with you , it’s definitely one of the best adventures that were available at this time. probably the first one that was not railroaded.
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@gmkeros.wordpress.com I only know vaguely this game, which I cannot easily read (I'm Spanish, I only speach Spanish, English, and Galician), so I love this reviews. Thanks!
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