Horror Movie Alignment

BX DnD does some funny things with alignment. Moldvay calls the three alignments "ways of life" and implies a link to morality but glosses over life and death choices of good and evil. I believe this is an attempt to keep things light for the intended gamer, "adults, ages 10 and up" and at the same time it allows for a simplification in the game. The alignments sorts monsters and NPCs into groups: the ones that are here for you to kill and take there stuff, ands the ones who aren't.

I don't use alignment in my games. The folks I play with aren't in it to act out sadistic fantasies, but their also not going to flinch at harsher tactics so it's not really an issue. I like the idea of the kind of cosmic alignment that LotFP uses, but by requiring Magic-Users to be chaotic and making Lawful characters rare (and boring) LotFP reduces the number of decision points that relate to Alignment and I think that's unfortunate because Player decisions are what make role playing interesting.

Looming large in the background of old school DnD are the old Universal and Hammer Horror flicks.  From the monster list to the equipment list and the Cleric's primary power it's pretty clear that these movies were a major inspiration. I think the mileu of classic horror could help inform the alignment system in an interesting way.

The following alignment system was made with these goals:

1. Make explicit what is only implied in Moldvay BX because we don't need to worry about what moms in the 1980's are going to think anymore.
2. Help to make the choices that are made in game interesting by having consequences for those choices.
3. Redirect the imagined spiritual foundations (the gods and their impact on morality) of the game back towards something that would fit right in a classic horror movie  as opposed to the somewhat bland pantheism that has become the default for DnD. 

There are three alignments: Good, Neutral and Evil.

Good characters: 

• Will talk or take other non-deadly action first before resorting to violence unless facing a known enemy or unintelligent creature.  
• Will not torture.
• Will not kill a helpless foe.

Neutral characters:

• May kill to achieve goals.
• May kill or torture enemy combatants.
• Will not kill for fun.
• Will not torture or kill innocents.

Evil characters:

• Are bent on dominating or destroying their surroundings.
• Will kill or torture for any reason.

Any character committing an act prohibited by their alignment must change their alignment from Good to Neutral or from Neutral to Evil. The DM must warn the Player of this prior to the character completing the action.

Good characters with a belief in God may pray for temporary Protection from Evil. By making a Saving Throw - the Evil foe's Level or HD a Good character will be protected for 1 round. Praying with a Holy symbol will allow a roll with advantage and the duration will be the Praying character's Level.

Evil characters with a belief in an Evil God may make a Saving Throw upon death to return as malicious undead. After animating they may Save again to remain as permanent undead. (At the DMs option this may be reserved for special creatures or creatures with one or more Levels in a character class)

Good and Evil characters receive a +1 to reaction rolls with similarly aligned creatures and -1 with creatures of the opposed alignment.

BX Dungeon Generation - Improved!

I'm a big fan of generating Dungeons in the manner described in the Moldvay Basic book pages 51-52. I use it to get the DM juices flowing. After  drawing the map and rolling for each room I'll work it over, moving and changing things, adding details. It's really quick, and because the room table is simple enough I can do it without referencing the book. There's one problem though: the process screeches to a halt with Treasure generation. All of a sudden it goes from a quick and easy roll to a bunch of percentile rolls just to figure out what other rolls I need to make.  I've started experimenting instead with this system that uses just one roll of a D20 and one or two D6 rolls.

I use a Silver standard, so if your using the old gold standard multiply by 10.  In the table below D6X or D20 X means the dice is exploding, on a roll of 6 or 20 re-roll and add the result.

D20 : GP
D6:
1:	x10 GP
2-5: -
6:	Magic/Map/Gems (re-roll D6)
D6
1-2:	Magic	MAGIC ITEMS
3-4:	Map	TREASURE MAPS
5-6:	Gems	D6X Gems worth D20X x10GP

The way I use this is to roll once per level of the dungeon for all monsters and unguarded treasure. The results are swingy enough that not differentiating between one monster or the other or between guarded and unguarded treasure doesn't bother me at all. Your mileage may vary of course. Also, as I add detail the nature of the treasure is defined. Sometimes a bag of gold is just a bag of gold, but as often as not it's actually furnishings or other objects the the PCs may miss as treasure. This along with moving things around as necessary once the basics are generated makes for what feels to me like a realistic Dungeon, but with variation that I might not arrive at if I was just making things up without the random rolls.


Usually after the rooms are keyed I go back and add doors as I feel necessary, but I think door placement could also benefit from a simple random system. I'm going to try this:

Between each room roll 1D6:
1: open
2: shut
3: stuck
4: locked
5: blocked
6: secret

This, like the room table is simple enough I can remember it without the book. The results will be varied and details can be filled in making each door as unique as necessary. Generally speaking here is how I would define the results:
Open: either an open doorway, an arch, or a door that has been left ajar.
Shut: a door that is shut but not locked. Could also be a curtain or screen.
Stuck: a door that must be forced open, usually a 2/6 will do the trick.
Locked: only a trained thief will have much of a chance at opening these without force.
Blocked: there used to be a door here but it has been bricked over or the tunnel has collapsed.. It would take quite a bit of work to make this passable again.
Secret: good old secret doors. There needs to be some kind of tell to give the PCs a clue that the door is here. In some locations they may have to declare that they are carefully examining the area just to find the Tell, in others it may be out in the open.

Trapped isn't on here. When a trap is rolled for a room it may actually be on a door into the room. I have some ideas for traps tables but as far as I'm concerned the best simplest way to randomly determine traps is the Dismal Depths Traps Table.

One Page Town Template

I've been thinking about towns lately.  Timrod's recent post about the lack of description about the town of Saltmarsh got me started, then I remembered this excellent post from Brendan.  I liked the aspects of the town Gorgonthorn that Brendan chose to write up, he focuses on being evocative and game-able.  The one thing that he leaves out are rumors and hooks to get you back out of the town which I think is important.  You could also add more info about factions and intrigue if that's your flavor.  Where I'm going with this is that I think we need a one page template for towns.  We have one page dungeon and wilderness templates, but I have never come across a one page town so I made one!

I've used Brendan's description of Gorgonthorn as the model for what should be included and added a place for rumors and adventure hooks.  Then to see if his three pages of description can fit on a single page I filled out the template:

I think i managed to distill the important information that would be handy to have while running a game, and there is room to spare.  To save space I decided not to make a separate key.  Instead, anything keyed to the map is described elswhere on the page as appropriate.  I put all the keys under "NPCs & Organizations" but you could have locations keyed in other sections.  For example, if one of the rumors is that at the edge of town there is a old haunted house the key for that could be under rumors instead.



Here are links to the template:

One Page Town Template (word file)
One Page Town Template (pdf)

Four House Rules of the Apocalypse

Four house rules that I've been contemplating:

1.  1/2 share of GP/XP for Hirelings, even if they die. 
I've talked around this issue before.  We run through a lot of hirelings, they're fun mini-PCs and when PCs croak they get upgraded.  We currently give hirelings the half share now.  If they somehow don't make it back to town though, some gold goes to the family maybe but the PCs keep a bigger portion and the XP.  I've realized that this actually provides incentive to killing off the poor mooks.  I don't think the players actually play to that incentive but it would be nice to flip it and incentivise keeping them alive.  That might mean fewer mooks get hired but I doubt it.  Or it might mean the PCs try to enter into working relationships with NPCs which usually provides lots of opportunity for shenanigans.

2.  No negative attributes.
I use the basic D&D -3 for a 3 to +3 for an 18 modifier scale.  It's pretty common to have characters with some -1s, and I don't really mind, one of my favorite characters recently had more minuses than pluses.  He was a chickenshit backstabber, he was smart and he was fun to play.  I say was, because shortly before he made it to 3rd level he had a change of heart and tried to save the world.  He died and failed, setting a Godzilla sized fire elemental loose on the world.  The fire beast went straight towards the nearest metropolitan area and the surviving PCs went the opposite direction!  Anyway, It seems to me that negative modifiers only make it easier for 1st level characters to die and they don't need any help in that regard.  So, what if instead of the normal minuses we change what it means to have a low score , like this:
STR:  1 handed small weapons only
INT:  fewer languages, bad at speaking languages, this is pretty much Rules as Written
WIS:  Player has to make up a paranoia or dumb thing, like the PC doesn't know how to count over 10.
DEX:  takes a round to switch weapons.  (we normally go from missile to melee without loosing a round)
CON:  Save or passes out at 1, 2 or 3 HP.
CHA:  DM gets to make up an enemy NPC.

3.  It seems entirely reasonable to me for the DM to base the HD of monsters & NPCs entirely on how entertaining or enjoyable doing the NPC or Monster's Funny Voice is.

4.  Cleric's, Undead and Alignment:
Lawful Clerics: Turn Undead
Chaotic Clerics: Command Undead
Neutral Clerics: Speak with Undead

The Law and Chaos is normal, but I've never played with the Neutrals getting anything cool or unique.  I think in most versions they have to choose to be like Lawful or Chaotic Clerics.  I think it'd be fun to have a Neutral Cleric in the party and have Kurosagi's Corpse Delivery Service inspired adventures.

Monster Action Tables?

I called the tables I sketched out in my last post "encounter tables" but that doesn't seem like the right term. One table answered the question, "what are the monsters doing when the PCs encounter them?" and the other answers the question, "what are the monsters going to do this round?"
I've used Telecanter's brilliant and all purpose 'what' are the monsters doing' table, but having a quick little table like this for specific monsters seems like a good way to jazz up encounters in a way that gives a particular monster a unique flavor, as well as making combat more exciting, cinematic and interesting. I think I got the idea for the "what do the monsters do this round?" table from the 4th edition thing where instead of encounter or daily powers, the DM rolls a d6 to see if a monster does a special attack. So a dragon, for example, instead of getting 3 uses of their breath weapon in a day, they let it loose on a 5 or 6 on a d6 that the DM rolls ever round. This takes a decision out of the hands of the DM in a way that I think can be interesting, at least sometimes. Another way to do this would be with 'Kung Fu dice' which is a thing that I'm pretty sure I first read about on D&D w/ pron stars, but I don't know that Zak invented it. This uses the d20 attack roll instead of a separate roll, which is pretty slick, but I don't think it's a big deal to roll another d6, you can roll it at the same time as the d20 attack roll and read the results at the same time. With the d6 you can also use the to hit roll if you need to.

This kind of table seems like a really good tool, I wonder why I haven't seen it more often? Or maybe lots of folks use it in published adventures and supplements an such, I just haven't picked them up or heard of them...

Moon Beasts and Ghouls

I feel like celebrating the return of the Dungeon Dozen to the internets so here's a few super specific encounter tables:

These use regular old d6s rather than the exalted dodecahedron.


What does the Moon Beast do this round?
1 run away. They'll stop in the next room and attempt to ambush anybody who follows.
2 knock stuff over, onto PCs if possible. If the only thing available is a person, they'll knock them over and stand on them. Save vs paralysis/fortitude/yeti stompin or take d4 dmg. Save again to act or wrestle free.
3 amazing leap onto the largest inanimate object nearby and screech/howl loudly. The following round a return call of screeches/howls may be heard. Another 1-3 Moon Beast 4-6 two Moon Beasts shows up in d6 rounds.
4 pick up one PC and throw them at another PC. Both PCs Save vs paralysis/fortitude/yeti stompin or take d4 dmg
5, 6 attack w claws, two attacks: d6 dmg. each.

Moon Beasts are big uni-horned, white furred yeti type critters with a primitive inteligence. (stat as bugbears exept as noted above)


What's up with the Ghouls in this room?
They are:
1 Ravenous. as many as possible will attack and attempt to devour whoevers in front. Attacking them back will draw their attention away.
2 Curious. They're throwing everything not nailed down around as if they were 2 year olds. If spoken to they will grunt back in imitation, and speak Ghoulish. they'll continue this for d3 rounds at which point they'll realize the PCs are food an attack.
3 Sullen. Theyll fight but 1-2 on d6 chance of running away every round.
4 Fighting eachother over a 1-3 live 4-6 dead thing.
5 Stalking something else, roll another wandering monster.
6 Awaiting the PCs in ambush.

All Ghouls used to be elves. They are 1-12 feet tall, and are from an invisible moon, where the elves sent them. They are not very bright, but they do have their own language, Ghoulish, which is a gutteral perversion of ancient elvish.
Their claws cause paralysis just like the book says.

Normal Men and XP?

In my current game, we just finished a multi-session adventure back in town with a fair amount of loot. There's three Joe Schmoe/Jimmy McRedshirt type hirelings with the group and we decided they should get a half share of gp/xp. This amounted to something in the neighborhood of 400 gp. Quite a big pile for 'ol Meatshield Mcfarlane and his pals! Now, the question is: is that 1 gp=1xp rule true for these normal dudes? How could it be? They don't level up. Or at least, I don't want them to. For them leveling up would mean becoming first level, but most of the PCs are still first level and it doesn't feel right to have the PCs and the hirelings on equal footing like that.

Then I was reminded that there ought to be some morale rolls in here between adventures. My first inclination was to give them a bonus to the morale roll because of the gold earned, but instead I think they should get a penalty for each comrade that died. There were 4 other hirelings who died along the way. If there's a -1 for each death, it seems quite likely that these guys will cut and run en masse. That sounds good to me. In my experience, hirelings are either faceless mooks who get no respect from the players or the players love the hirelings as much or more than their PCs with no middle ground. These guys were solidly in that first category.

Maybe the combination of giving Hirelings a half share of gp with the -1 to morale rolls per death with get these poor folks some respect.

They'll only earn xp if they're classed characters, and if a PC dies the player can take over a hireling and give him or her stats and a class if they dont have those already and convert their gold to xp then, so the new PC doesn't start at 0.

Session Log

I want to organize a bit the game I'm running.  It's not that I forget things from one session to the next, but I'm accumulating a mess of notes.  I've never been interested in this kind of bookkeeping but the idea of having one piece of paper from one session to the next to keep track of things sounds like a good idea.

So I put together this log and filled it out for last session:

Here's the file:

Session Log Excel
Session Log pdf

Now is the best time to be a gamer ever

A while back there was a thing floating around about the ten gaming books you'd most like to have if you could only have ten.  I recently did some gaming/camping (my favorite kind of camping involves gaming and my favorite kind of gaming involves camping) so I got to actually make this decision.  I didn't need ten.  We brought:

Moldvay/Cook B/X.

tucked into  Moldvay Basic was this.  It came in handy.

That's two.

We also brought:

Raggi's Random Esoteric Creature Generator.

The 1e DMG, but mostly because since we were camping I thought it might be useful to have something hard to write on.

We brought this:

Everything in this I either made or found on the internet! Here's a breakdown of the indispensable dungeon master tools in here:

Pages 1 & 2:
megadungeon missions

random swords and sorcery name generator 

movement, encumbrance, light & vision, reaction roll chart, foraging & hunting, xp

Pages 3 & 4:
the Ravaged Ruins charts from Wilderlands of High Fantasy (worth three bucks for these two pages alone)


Pages 5 & 6:

MegaDungeon Area Name Generator

MegaDungeon - Doors

Page 7 & 8:
the Dismal Depths Trap Tables

random rooms and d100 things in a pit from here

 Pages 9 & 10:

MegaDungeon: Random Trap Disarming Table

Pages e11 & 12:

Trick effects and "big ol' list of tricks from C

Pages 13 & 14:

Wilderness and dungeon wandering monster tables 

Pages 15 & 16:

Creepy combat commentary and "what are the monsters doing" from Telecanter

and a list of Shakesperian insults, just in case!

pages 17 & 18:

od&d castle inhabitants, my Treasure Map Generator, and Redbeard's Faction Connection Diagram  

Pages 19 & 20

My treasure hoards, looting and random magic item charts.

pages 21 & 22:

Talysman's 20 sided quickie tables 

 We also had my Arcane Stress and Spell Mutations (which got used by the DM, there were no M-U PCs. There was an Elf, but he got taken out by a black pudding before he got to cast any spells) and my critical injury table. 

 

I buy gaming books, adventures etc. but I sure don't need to.

Fast & Loose Lovecraft City Generator

So I just discovered the Fighting Fantasist blog. He has this series about dungeon design/stocking using a Free Association technique.  (basically write down 100 words then roll d100 three times and make a room or encounter out of that)  I've been enjoying playing around with this idea of his.

Also,

It reminded me of the Mega-Dungeon Area Name Generator that Al at Beyond the Black Gate put together. This is one of my favorite things that anybody in the OSR has made.  Seriously.  I've incorporated it into my Impromptu Basic D&D DMG.  (I'll likely talk about that more later)  My goal is to use it as a Fast Table, which I don't think was Al's intent, but if have to pull a dungeon/adventure out of thin air I would soooo much rather have that set of tables in front of me than not. 

then I thought about this:

And I thought, all those great descriptive words in there, what if you made a table like Al's or Coopdevil's that used Lovecraft's very own words.  So, I flipped open the book and started writing down nouns and adjectives to make a chart.  The chart below is made with just the first paragraph.  If you were more selective about the words you picked I think you could make something more dungeonesque.

In one throw the D4, D12, D8 & D6 are coming together in one table to impersonate a D24 to generate two words for you to begin building a Lovecraftian Dream City.  If you haven't read Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, you should. 

Now, this has me thinking.  A good number of the tables I've made are open ended.  Maybe not as open as The Fighting Fantasist's free association lists, but more open ended than the Fast table that Zak describes in that post above, and there is a fair amount of filling in the blanks that the DM needs to do.  I'd say that in addition to a distinction between fast and slow there are tight and loose tables.

The table above is Loose.  It gives the DM something to work with, but it's just the beginning of whatever the hell the DM is going to describe to the players.  Why are there silver trees?  what about the peaked gables are fabulous?  What do you mean the temples are almost-vanished?  Unvisited clouds?  This table is like something that an audience member would shout out at improv theater.  Some results from the table above are harder to run with than others.  Some might be unusable even.  Maybe for some DMs every table is a loose table.

A Tight table does more to answer whatever question caused the DM to roll on the chart.  You roll on the chart and then move on to the action.  There are of course always details that a good DM can fill in, but the tight chart doesn't really leave holes for the DM to fill or connections to make.  These are easier to use in play.  I'd guess that these are also way more common in published products.  

Here's a little rundown of the kinds of tables I've posted on this blog:

Treasure Hoards and Magic Items	Slow & Loose
Starting Equipment	Tight (doesn't really have a speed because it's made for pre-game)
Space Fantasy Castle Inhabitants	Fast & Tight
Arcane Stress and Spell Mutation	Slow and Tight
Slimes Molds & Jellies	Fast and fairly Tight
FeyBeasts	Fast & Loose
Fey Humaniods	Fast & Loose
Orc Cult Names	Fast & Loose
Orc Cult Rituals	Fast & Tight
Orc Cult Schemes	Fast & mostly Loose

Most of those are linked over on the right.  Not as many of them are Fast and Loose as I thought.  I'm thinking it's good to have a mix...

ORC CULT CAVES

So I have this back burner project about orcs.

In it I am re-imagining the beloved/reviled humanoids a little.

Orcs are more like this:..                                                      

...and less like this (although I love this picture)


















Anyway, here are some bits of the project.  The idea is that orcs are amphibious and they live in one huge interconnected cave complex that is partially under water and they are loosely organized into a whole bunch of cults who worship everything from the big amphibious monsters that they share their caves with, to the "Ancients" who long ago lived in a city which is entirely buried and coincidentally right under the Orc Cave.

These first two charts you are meant to simultaneously roll three different dice to get a result.  (you can note which color die is for which column right there on the chart)  I've used this (during play) and it works pretty well and quickly.  Each cult has at least one scheme and maybe some rituals... and an enemy cult or two.

What I'm setting up here is for the Characters to get involved in all sorts of nefarious cult schemes, and kooky cult politics, kinda like this:

Starting Equipment

Here's a way to quickly generate starting equipment (with some randomness and some player choice) for Fantasy Roleplaying.  This was inspired by The LotFP equipment generator at Hill Cantons, and I suppose DCC a bit, with those random free items at the end.  Characters made with this will tend to be kinda LoFi and broke, though occaionally you can get a high roller.  Either way this adds a bit of flavor to character generation and it's fast!

Download Here:

STARTING EQUIPMENT

Lamentations of the Flame Princess Language Variant

I really like LotFP's rules on languages.  I tend to run smaller groups when I play though, and I feel like the rules as written are meant for or work much better with larger groups.  In a larger group, you are sure to have a specialist and/or a wizard or two, and odds are somebody is going to roll a 1.  In a small group though, the by the book rules can cut down on your number of social encounters, so I've come up with the following variant.  The purpose of these rules (both this variant and the rules as written, as I see it) is to randomly give a different PC the spotlight when new creatures are encountered.  This variant just increases the chance if not guarantees that someone will be able to speak to an NPC or monster.

(because I like it when the players can talk to the mud people/giant spiders/pirates from the blood sea)

Languages:

 When making language rolls, every player rolls a D6.  With normal languages the low rolling PC understands the language with the number rolled being an indication of how well they speak and understand the language.  The lower the better.  Example: three PCs encounter a swamp troll who is trying to tell them that the cave to the north has a group of harpies living in it.  They roll 3, 3, and 5.  The two who rolled 3 can both understand the swamp troll, but not very well.  Maybe they get that he's warning them about the cave, but they don't understand the word for harpy.  Characters who have an INT modifier or specialists with ranks in Languages can roll an additional die for each pip or plus, and take the lowest.  Stranger languages, or languages of creatures from other planes may require two or more low rolls and a maximum roll of say, one or two.

Treasure Hoards and Magic Items

The first table allows a treasure hoard to be generated very fast.  Roll all the dice in a hoard at once and there you go.

The second set of tables for Magic Items is the same idea, but it requires a bit of interpretation on the part of the DM.  For example, what does an amulet that detects healing do?  Maybe it allows the wearer to know the HP of other characters and creatures in it's presence, or to know the location of the nearest shrine or healer, or to know the location of every shrine or healer on the continent.  how about a dagger that creates/summons undead?  That's easy, any creature killed by this dagger rises from the grave! 

What this set of tables does:
It takes the sort of familiar magic items and effects you might find in your favorite fantasy game and forces the DM to creatively remix them into unique items.

It might be better to roll on this beforehand rather than in game to give yourself time to determine the exact nature of the magic item.  Multiple magic items could be randomly generated and placed as needed.

Here is the pdf:
Treasure Hoards and Magic Items