Are magic words hiding in your crappy spell lists?

"Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically"
-Sol Lewitt

LS had a cool idea. I liked it enough that I took the spell list for first level Magic-Users from Moldvay and started rearranging. Then today he said magic words are hiding in the dictionary. Of course they are!

But back to Moldvay:

These are color coded:

green = The ones that I think are the most promising, or in other words, that I could actually think of a spell for.

grey = In the book!

Are there great spells in here that I'm missing?

charm	person	In the book!
charm	magic	Counterspell – cast as a quick reaction against an attack spell.  Time slows for the Caster and the spell only. The Caster has 5 seconds to convince the spell to do what he wants, then the DM makes a reaction roll to see what it does.
charm	disc
charm	portal	A door that this spell is cast on will open,shut,lock, or unlock anytime in the future in the presence of the caster or one other person. Permanent.
charm	light
charm	missile
charm	evil
charm	languages	I want this to do something cool but I’m not sure what yet.
charm	shield
charm	sleep	When cast on a person as they go to sleep they will sleep incredibly soundly and either: not wake up until forcibly shaken no matter how long they lay there, or in the morning they’ll gain 1d6 HP.
charm	ventriloquism
detect	person	Caster knows the direction of the target for the duration of the spell.  Must have a personal item of the target.
detect	magic	In the book!
detect	disc	Those wily discs can be hard to find. Maybe this could be used to find coins?
detect	portal	Find secret doors.
detect	light	If cast while lost in a cave this spell will whisper the direction of the above ground world until the caster finds it.
detect	missile	Caster cannot be surprised attacked with missile weapons. Is dispelled after the first time anyone does try to ambush them.
detect	evil	Caster knows who the bad guys are.
detect	languages
detect	shield
detect	sleep
detect	ventriloquism
floating	person	Kind of a lame levitate spell?
floating	magic	This spell needs a random table to see what it does.
floating	disc	In the book!
floating	portal	This is where the floating magic comes from.
floating	light
floating	missile	The summoned “missile” hovers at the Magic-User’s shoulder and will strike back at any creature that attacks and hits the magic-user with an equivalent attack. (both roll and damage)
floating	evil	Summons a bad feeling that hangs in the air. A dark cloud. Demon whispers. 120’ range. 30’ diameter area of effect. Everyone effected must make a reaction roll -1 and will be at best grouchy and at worst argumentative or outright physically combative.
floating	languages
floating	shield
floating	sleep
floating	ventriloquism	Like regular ventriloquism, but better because it can move around?
hold	person	In a book, but not the one I used to make this list.
hold	magic	Counterspell - cast as a quick reaction against an attack spell. Both casters are locked in concentration. Neither the attacker nor the caster can move or take any other action until the attacker concedes and cancels the original spell.  Each round both casters can attempt to throw another spell by successfully saving vs. magic - the opponents level.
hold	disc
hold	portal	In the book!
hold	light
hold	missile	Freeze an arrow, spear, etc. in mid-air.
hold	evil
hold	languages
hold	shield
hold	sleep	Target of the spell does not require sleep for a number of days equal to the Caster’s current Hit Points.
hold	ventriloquism
magic	person	Target of spell can punch or otherwise physically interact with creatures that can only be hit by magic weapons, incorporeal creatures, etc.
magic	magic	Yes.
magic	disc
magic	portal
magic	light
magic	missile	In the book!
magic	evil
magic	languages
magic	shield	Ensorcels a mundane shield. +1 per caster level for 1 turn or +1 for number of turns equal to caster level. It’s a tough call for the Level 1 Magic-User.
magic	sleep
magic	ventriloquism
protection from	person	Creates a magic barrier that prevents any one person from touching or attacking the Caster.
protection from	magic	Sounds handy.
protection from	disc
protection from	portal
protection from	light	The target of this spell may Hide in Shadows as a 9th level Thief (4/6 chance of success) until the next sunset or sunrise.
protection from	missile
protection from	evil	In the book!
protection from	languages	Renders any one intelligent creature dumb as an animal. Make a reaction roll to see if they are helpful, peaceful, skittish, defensive, or aggressive.
protection from	shield
protection from	sleep
protection from	ventriloquism	This spell shouldn’t be allowed because it will encourage power gaming.
read	person
read	disc
read	portal	This spell will provide the Caster with a detailed description of what is on the other side of a magic portal.
read	light
read	missile
read	evil
read	languages	In the book!
read	magic	In the book!
read	shield
read	sleep	Allows you to see what someone is dreaming?
read	ventriloquism

"Ventriloquism" and "Disc" are reeeeally hard to combine with other words to make cool spells. No disrespect to Floating Disc at all, I love that spell, but I just can't fathom how or why you would charm, detect, read or really do any thing to or with a disc.

"Charm", "Magic", "Person", "Protection from", those are way easy to combine with other words and come up with good spells.

This was a fun experiment and in my mind worth it for the counterspells Charm Magic and Hold Magic alone. I would not have thought of those with out this kind of process.

Fantasy Medieval Glamping

We allow for a roll of each character's Hit Dice to recover/heal every morning.  The way we've been doing it you get advantage or disadvantage dice for good or bad sleeping conditions. The idea is you get penalty or disadvantage dice if your roughing it and bonus or advantage dice when you stay at a cozy inn. Normally, when the PCs have been in town and resting up for a week or two in between adventures we just say their at full health rather than roll all those dice.  The thing I've noticed is that rolling Hit Dice tends toward the average so unless their really hurt they don't roll.  Also the bonus/penalty for accommodations seems minimal.  And Jeezy Creezy, my Players do not like to pay to stay in inns. They would feel perfectly Ok about camping right outside an inn.

So, I'm going to change how camping works juuuust slightly.  Instead of replacing your current total these Hit die are going to add or subtract from your current total, and instead of getting an extra die and dropping the highest or lowest like with advantage or disadvantage you actually loose or gain Hit Dice or Hit Points.

You gotta remember that in my book Hit Points are not physical damage. Whether it’s in a knife fight or a bad night’s sleep, your loss of HP represents getting tired, sore, and stressed out. Real physical injury is something that you are only at risk of when at 0 HP.

Here are the new camping rules:

For each of the Penalty conditions that are present, it's -2 HP in the morning.

For each of the Normal conditions that are present it's +1 HP in the morning.

For each of the Bonus conditions that are present, +1 HD in the morning.

You can't exceed your maximum and you can't go below 1 HP no matter how good or bad the accommodations.

HIT POINT RECOVERY
FULL NIGHT'S REST	Penalty   (-2 HP)	Normal   (+1 HP)	Bonus   (+1 HD)
Bed	Sleeping on the ground	Bedroll or Inn common room	Real bed
Weather	Camping outside in hot or cold, rain or snow, Camping in Dungeon	Camping with or without fire in warm weather, Camping with fire in cold weather, or with tent in extreme weather, Camping in a cave	Inside
Food	Spoiled standard rations	Iron rations	Home cookin
Recreation or Activity	If sleep is interrupted more than momentarily	Evening Recreation: Music performance, poetry reading, religious ritual, storytelling, etc. *Must make noise and only one per night (+1 HP)
DAYTIME REST
Resting in fair conditions		10 Minute Short rest, max. 1 per day (+1 HP) 2 hour long rest, max 1 per day (+1 HP) Full day of rest (+1 HP, cumulative w/ recreation)
Recreation		Daytime Recreation: swimming, napping, sport, gaming, good conversation, meditation, etc. *2 hours min. each activity. Up to two per day (+1 HP each, +2 HP Max.)
Recovery		Special: for Wounded characters, a full night and day of rest counts as 2 days toward their recovery time.

Examples:

Camping in a bedroll with a fire in cold weather, eating iron rations, but sleep is interrupted:

+1 HP

Sleeping on the ground, in the rain, eating standard rations (not spoiled):

-4 HP

Sleeping on a real bed, inside, with good food and some guy reciting sonnets:

+3 HD +1 HP

A full day of rest with swimming and napping: +5 HP

This got sort of baroque, I'd like to see if I can simplify it. It does make Inns great especially for higher level characters and the recreation bit encouraged common room and maybe even camp site shenanigans.  Low level characters with just one or two Hit Dice aren't so fancy and they can get by just fine camping with some good food and a bit of music. Roughing it can whittle you down, even higher level characters over time. And everybody likes to recreate but for the low level folks it's especially beneficial!  Also, tents are handy! Also, poetry gets you bonus HP, seriously? Sure -  I'm already planning on introducing a poet who's so bad you actually loose HP, Ha!

A Tale of Two Encounters

Or, overturned DM expectations and what to do about it.

This session I tried to run a scary encounter. I set the scene by having NPCs in town describe the place the PCs were going as deadly. The locale was a half sunken derelict ship and I happened to roll bad on the weather chart so they boarded the ship under dark clouds in rain.  All was going well and at first it worked. The monster creeped out of the dark, the players made the quick decision to run, everyone was engaged. But then a regular combat broke out. The players got some good rolls and they made their saving throws against what I thought would be its devastating attack. The monster, injured and inept, slunk back into the darkness and the PCs when on with their looting. (you know, like they do)

Later I thought about the previous session when a random monster encounter at night (a throw away encounter really) turned into a tense and deadly fight ending with the Magic-User casting her most powerful spell. The PCs were aboard ship and at anchor at night, when sea scorpions crawled onto the deck. Those scorpions got a string of amazing rolls.  There were five of them and they rolled 4 or 5 natural 20s in two rounds. 20s are criticals in our game for both the PCs and the monsters.

In light of the two above contrasting examples, I've got some advice for myself and anyone else who has had similar experiences.


How to make putz monsters entertaining but not necessarily deadly:

Monster Maneuvers:
I've made inconsistent efforts to give monster "maneuvers" to spice up combat.  Maybe for putz monster encounters a natural 20 is a good opportunity to exercise this. Since my Players are used to monsters getting the same critical damage they get, I don't think they'll complain too much when something besides them loosing extra HP happens. In the example above, the scorpions could have grabbed the characters and started to drag them off the deck. That would have made the fight more gripping (ahem) and less deadly at the same time.

Monsters are Dumb:
The really scary villains are the smart ones. If some monsters aren't supposed to be all that scary by all means make them dumb. For example, when the sea scorpions rolled the first 20 against the hireling, sure that drops him but then they all move in to eat him and/or fight over the food! That makes it easier for the PCs to take them out with out putting on kid gloves, because mechanically it may be less deadly (in terms of the number of attack rolls made against the PCs) but it's still grisly.


How to make the Big Bads truly Big and Bad:

Area Attacks:
Multiple lower powered monsters can be more deadly than a single Big Bad because of the sheer number of attack rolls. One way to address this would be to give the Big Bad an area attack.  Outside of a dragon's breath weapon this is 4e style thinking that I'm going to try out in my B/X game. Sacrilege!

Dead if you don't Save, half dead if you do:
If a monster is really fearsome and it's attack causes a saving throw to be rolled, something bad happens even if you make your saving throw.  The first PC who makes a successful save may be incredulous, but if you tell them something worse would happen if they hadn't made the saving throw, then they'll be scared. And there's precedent in old school D&D, half damage from a successful save vs. dragon breath.


How to make things scary:

Do it like the movies:
Scary things are half seen in the dark before they attack.  Give them the chance to run, struggle with the door, all the horror movie stuff, and when they attack they're deadly fierce every single time. See above.

Warn them:
When all of the villagers tell the PCs how terrible and nasty the thing they're heading of to face is they'll listen.  Even if they don't, they'll remember what the villagers (or whoever) said when things go south.

This is a DM's diary kind-of post. I realize none of this is a major revelation but after having both of these encounters go the exact opposite of the way that I intended or thought they would I wanted to collect my thoughts. Of course it's not the DM's job to be set on encounters going a certain way but I think if I can implement the above I'll be able to make encounters more consistently exciting and interesting without tweaking die rolls or sacrificing player agency.

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.

5e: settling for the geek ghetto when they should be owning the airwaves

Al recently posted this really fascinating list of mods to B/X D&D that Mike Mearls made to his home game in the genesis of the 5e rule set.  This got me thinking about what makes me frustrated with 5e.

Rant follows with otherwise unforgivable use of caps but I have FEELINGS:

WotC's whole marketing strategy seems to be to sell three $50 books to people who already play funny elf games.  There's no real effort to sell D&D to people who don't already have some experience with the game.  The Starter Set and the Basic Rules pdf marketed in game stores and on the internet where intended to poach players from Pathfinder, retroclones, and to pick up lapsed Gamers. You didn't get anything but a sample adventure to try out the rules and the pdf only of char gen was weird and inconvenient.  They were hoping that the geek in the game store would see the Starter set and think, "D&D, cool, I remember that.  Well I've gotten my kids into Settlers of Cataan, I bet they're old enough for this now"

And that's all great.  Invite the Pathfinder folks back into the fold.  make the OSR true believers again.  Sell to Geek Dad.  Great.  but that's not really a whole lot of folks, the roll out seemed clumsy, and what about EVERYONE else?

Oh Mearls, why didn't you throw your mods into a rewrite of Moldvay and take that 32-64 page pamphlet that has truly everything you need to play and sell it in every freaking store in America? 

If ten people buy that pamphlet for $15 that's the same as one geek who buys three books for $150.  And you know what?  go ahead and make the three $50 books.  Us geeks will buy them.  Anytime humanity is presented with a social phenomena with an inner and an outer circle there will be folks who feel they must be in the inner circle.  That's why there are hipsters.

And I mean every store in America, not just game stores and Barnes and Nobles.  Comic book stores. The magazine rack in grocery stores.  Freaking 7-11s and Circle K, heck sell to truckers at the flying J! Maybe a cardboard stand in the lobby of movie theaters.  I mean, when every movie Peter Jackson has made for the last 15 years is basically a giant ad for D&D and they've made millions and millions of dollars and Game of Thrones is as big as it is I can't help but feel like the folks at D&D headquarters are letting this cultural moment pass them by when THIS SHOULD BE THERE MOMENT.

And where are the ancilaries?  It looks like the VTT is up now, that's good.  And there is a Neverwinter MMORPG apparently to compete with WoW.  I don't know or care as much about the video game market as I do the tabletop, but it seems to me that D&D is the thing that WotC has that competes with WoW, and they might be better off making ancilary products that support it more.

 How about a web series or multiple web series? (Multiple would be great actually, to show how the game is different with different groups.  That would highlight the huge difference/advantage that tabletop has over computer games) Apparently I hit it with my Axe isn't going to be on the Escapist anymore, why not grab that up and make it official DnD?  Dead Gentlemen has made great work that is already essentially an ad for D&D.  Hire or license those guys.

Heck go all out and make a web series with Peter Dinklage, Mandy Morbid and Vin Diesel.  Put them on the cardboard stand with the Basic books in the multiplex lobby.  They'll sell like hot cakes.



Oh well, maybe for 6th edition?

Animals Remixed

Here's a little thing in my Monsters Remixed series.  This one is takes otherwise mundane animals and makes them a bit weird.

The idea here is that these animals are not necessarily a thing to fight, they're more a tool to figure out how to use.  They're the fauna version of the Telecanter's (geographical) Wonders.

Here's the pdf.