Board Enterprises

Worldly Weather

2012-02-11T13:09:00.000-06:00

I spend time trying to explain/write down/document the weather patterns on Fletnern. I do this both for an understanding of the “regular” weather, but also because a good storm can make for an adventure by itself. The problem is that I keep thinking from a scientific point of view, and Fletnern is a magical world. (Let’s not kid ourselves; it is not like Earth being a scientific world means that the meteorologists have any clue what’s going on.)
What does magic have to do with weather? Well, there are weather spells, but that’s pretty localized stuff. I’m talking about the gods and spirits and elementals. In Rhum, the wind should blow from east to west because of the way the world spins, but it blows from north west to south east. The explanation is that the mountains nearby upset the wind patterns, but it is more than that. The spirit of the north wind brings cold weather to Rhum and the people fear him. That fear strengthens him, and they must appease him. If they do not, he blows hardest and brings the cold down from the north. The spirit of the south wind is only remembered as an afterthought and does not receive much adoration from the Rhorics. For this reason, he is willing to concede the region to his rival and allow the “normal” wind patterns to change.
A huge nearly god-like-in-power earth elemental walks north underground along the eastern coast of Hughijen. He frequently encounters barriers that prevent him from continuing on his way. When he encounters such barriers, he starts pushing. It may take him decades, but eventually, the barrier gives way and he will move ten, twenty, maybe fifty miles north, before encountering another barrier. Then he pushes again, possibly for decades. When a barrier gives way, it causes an earthquake, some of them have been massive, including the recent one that sent Detheb refugees by the boat load to Drentae. (This is in some ways a mythic explanation for “earthquake storms”.)
So, I guess I can make up whatever weather I want as long as I can explain it with the right gods, elementals and magic. I’ll keep pretending there’s a science to it, but sometimes it really is an “act of the gods”.

Board Enterprises Reviews

2012-02-05T17:26:00.000-06:00

You know what - Some people get us and some people don’t. No really, we’ve had reviewers write things like, “I just don’t get where they were going with this.” You know why? Because they’re gold farmers. I’m not just trying to belittle people who write bad stuff about our products. But Board Enterprises products are focused at an underserved portion of the market - Those mature players who want help building their worlds and enhancing the role-playing aspects. Hopefully you can tell by most of our blog posts - We’re trying to get your players to become invested in their characters and your world. A little bit of passion there will go an enormous way to everyone having fun and coming back time after time. That is what I always strive for as a GM - To get the players to care at least a little bit.
There is an enormous segment of the market out there who see FRPGs as they do their video games - How much damage does it do? How much gold do I get? How quickly can I make my next level? If any of those three questions defines your style of role-playing, then Board Enterprises products are not for you.
We focus on role-playing - What happens to your character between missions? Who are the people who inhabit the world (the ones you are not out to kill)? Can a weapon be cooler than it is effective? Would my character actually agree to do this mission, and if not, what else would he do? If any of those questions appealed to you, check out our stuff, but be careful when you read some of the negatives reviews.

The Royalty

2012-01-28T22:31:00.003-06:00

The Royalty, our newest supplement is now available for sale. The Royalty is a combination of our Baker's Dozen and our 100s. There's A Baker's Dozen Royal Persons, 100 Noblemen, and 100 Castle Staff. That's 213 NPCs to fill any castle, palace or capital that you can use together, alone or as adds to your existing campaign. That's a lot for only $3.98. (Get it, $1.99 per book - so it's buy two get-one free.)
Click this link to learn more.

The Details of History

2012-01-28T22:30:00.001-06:00

I get accused of focusing on the unimportant stuff a lot. You can go back and see my opinion of role-players vs. gold farmers for more on that. A huge part of why I do it is simple - It makes everything else easier!
If you wrote the history of a small town you were creating and it went like this: First there was a mill on the river at Point A, but that place kept flooding, so they rebuilt the mill at point B. For a while the bridge at Point A was the only one, so everyone kept going by the old mill anyways. Eventually they built another bridge and then the Duke decided to put a wall around the community that had sprung up around the new mill.
Many people would find this pointless, after all, are any of the players going to ask you for the history of the mill? No, but now you know the name of the major roads in the area - Old Mill Road and New Bridge. You know there are two ways to get across the river - the new bridge by the town and the old bridge in the low country. The old bridge is probably in disrepair and may flood from time to time, but the new bridge probably has a toll.
Why is the town here? Because the mill found a good spot to harness the power of the river, and then they put up a bridge. This most likely implies that the river is narrower here, and therefore likely faster. What else do we know about the region because of these few lines of history? Well, that they have been growing grain here for a very long time, otherwise why would you need a mill? You know that either the mill or the bridge is considered strategic to the Duke, or he wouldn’t have bothered to build a wall. You know the river floods, but not so bad at the town.
By writing just a couple of lines, the rest of the stuff is really easy to figure out. Please understand that when I’m advocating GMs play as role-players, I’m not suggesting you need a 600 page document to run your world. In fact, if the doc is too long, it impairs your ability to run your world. But by having short notes that seem unimportant, you have the sparks you need to run anything off the cuff -and that is where a good GM needs to be!

How to develop your cities - businesses

2012-01-22T11:18:00.000-06:00

A lot of people have trouble coming up with businesses for their cities. I mean how many butcher shops or blacksmiths does a city need? The way I like to do it is to pick a kind of shop and then figure out how they might be different. In writing up how they are different, you will know what they are like.
OK - An example seems to be in order: I thought that the city needed some form of elementary education. Where were these kids learning to read or write before they went to those big universities? Well - a lot learned from tutors. I haven’t fully developed all the tutors yet, but how are they different? Well, some are strict and some are easy. The easy ones might simply be weak of will or they might be sycophants who want their rich employers to think they have brilliant children. That’s at least three tutors right there.
More importantly, I created two schools. How are they different? Well, just like in our world, one is secular and one is run by a religious order. Therefore one is in it for the money and one is in it to better the community. This also changes which classes they will teach or at least focus on as the religious one is definitely going to stress religion or theology. Both teach the three “r”s, but the secular one will get the children into much higher mathematics, because they are being trained for business. Likewise, the religious school will be teaching them more poetry and music, because their religious services include these. Both are strict, but the religious school is stricter. Why? Because the secular students are customers; the religious students are members of the flock, and their parents don’t want to be embarrassed in front of the local priest.
This compare and contrast works really well when you’re trying to come up with businesses. The more differences you can come up with, the more stores and shops you’ve just described. Good service or bad? Merchandise made here or brought in? Clean or dirty? High end or basic? If it’s a leatherworker, does he only work in cow hide, pig skin, lamb skin or horse hide? or all of them? If he’s a smith, does he work only on tools and ag (agricultural) based items or is he more interested in machinery? Is he secretly dreaming of being an armorer, but never got the chance? Even if you just come up with one business, think of how it could have been different, and you’ll likely have one or two more written up!

How many holes are in your maps?

2012-01-14T06:51:00.000-06:00

I strongly believe in something that will sound blatantly wrong: I believe that a GM should never finish his maps. I’m talking mainly about world maps, but it goes for regional maps as well. Leave some holes in them! By holes I mean certain areas that have never been described. You don’t need to put a big “Dragons dwell here” or “Mystery Region” on them, just leave them blank, for now.
You know what a completed map is? Stagnant. You can’t add anything else. You can’t place that really cool town you thought up or that evil cult’s temple or even the barbarian’s hunting range. Take a quick look at the map of Fletnern. See that spot on the right continent, above the lakes but below the mountains? Yeah - No clue what’s there. Pretty much the same with the area below the lakes. I know it is the transition region between the grasslands to the west and the desert to the east, but I really don’t know what’s there. Same with the northern most section - not a clue. You see most of the campaigns run on/in Fletnern have been on the left continent. There are very few open spots there. Oh I can always fit a small town in here or there, but most of it is considered “designed”. Now having said that, I still have the other three continents that are not on that map that I can always use for wilder adventures.
Without beating a dead horse here, I’m simply suggesting that you don’t detail out every single square mile of your world and determine who the feudal lord is. By leaving some open holes, you leave yourself the ability to expand your world, liven up your ideas, and keep the players entertained.

Going off the reservation

2012-01-08T07:47:00.000-06:00

Just because a spell does not exist in the rule book does not mean it cannot exist. One of the best spells I ever used was in a campaign where the high powered characters had begun to trust their fortune tellers to predict major events for them. Just as an army was invading one of their allies, the invaders had their fortune tellers cast a powerful spell. As long as the spell was maintained, anyone trying to use fortune telling or a similar style of magic to see what was going on would get horrible images of an old crone instead of the information they sought. Card readers saw the crone’s face on their cards. Crystal ball readers saw evil eyes staring back at them out of the ball. Tea leaf readers saw the crone’s face form and then dissolve in the leaves. Not only was this creepy for the players (and therefore fun for the GM), but it got them involved. They wanted to know how it was done.
By hitting them with a spell of this nature, they were at a complete loss. They had begun to rely on a power that had been unleashed in the game. Instead of trusting to fortune tellers, they had to trust their own instincts. Of course, the enemies had fortune tellers, and by that time, the GM had learned several tricks on how to use them (from the players). Never hesitate to use a player’s ideas against them. At least make sure you use one group’s ideas against your next group.

Who’s the Best GM?

2011-12-31T11:13:00.000-06:00

For those of you with community activist groups seeking to abolish role-playing games, don’t link to this post! This is not a very favorable look at role-playing games and their game masters, because it exposes the one kind of person who makes the best GM. That kind of person is a liar.
Successful liars and GMs share many of the same character traits. After all, fantasy is fantasy, whether you are creating a world of elves, trolls and magic or coming up with a story about where you just spent the last four hours. I am not suggesting that every marginal GM go out and start lying for practice, but maybe by watching a few less than honest people, you might pick up a few pointers. Let's do just that:
A good liar/GM has to be able to tell a story. Facial gestures (especially eyes) are extremely important. Tone fluctuations can also serve to make the story more entertaining and thus keep the listener from concentrating too much on the subject matter. Actors tell lousy stories, because they include too much detail. Liars, know just the right amount of detail to include to make the story pass inspection without raising suspicions. It is the level of detail and generalization that makes a great story.
Lying is an important part of GMing. How often has an inexperienced GM rolled to see if a thief can sneak-up on a party, only to alert them that something was amiss? Good liar/GMs roll often behind their screens and convince the party to be on their toes at all times. GMs also need to lie to the players to prevent their characters from knowing too much. Even if it is as simple as not telling them when they did not detect a secret door, poker-faced GMing is vital.

End of the Year

2011-12-31T11:10:00.002-06:00

December has not been a consistent month for us on this blog and we’re sorry. With vacations, holidays and general sugar comas, things have been a bit spotty. New Year’s Resolution: Get better about being consistent!
So the news of the day is The City of Rhum! It is available at RPG Now, now! Just click the link. e23 is likely on vacation, but we’ll post that link as soon as it is live.
This is the base for the other Rhum supplements. It is long on culture and generalities and short on details, prices and stats. We’re only charging $2.49 because some of the information in the book has been seen in the other supplements. Yes, we know some is a repeat - That’s why we cut the price on it! We’re hoping you will understand that and not feel cheated in any way.
This is also a reminder that if anyone buys all three of the Rhum supplements (Welcome to Rhum, Warrior Guilds of Rhum and Lost in Rhum), we will happily send you a combined price list from all three. The benefit here is that you can drop it into your spreadsheet program and search it or sort it, unlike our pdfs. I’d call it free, but you paid for the three books, so it’s not really all that free.
Early in 2012 - expect Royalty. Royalty is A Baker’s Dozen Royals, 100 Nobles, and 100 Castle Staff. Everyone you should need if your players go wandering into a castle or other noble event. We set them up as though there were two political structures - The one we use in Fletnern (The Council of Barons) and a more generic feudal one. Look, the hierarchy doesn’t matter. What you really want is a couple hundred NPCs that fit in a castle. Think of it as a wandering monster guide for the palace. Sure you could try and make up every noble cousin, uncle, and half mother in law as well as all their retainers, or you can take the easy way out and get Royalty!

The City of Rhum is now available on e23. Click this link to go there.

Council or Commission?

2011-12-10T14:52:00.001-06:00

We’re wrapping up Royalty and I’ve been thinking more about the Council of Barons. Why did I do that again? What was the point? I was trying to remember if I set it up like the NY mob’s Commission. After all, they replaced the boss of bosses with a council. Effectively a king was replaced. Not only that, but the other bosses have some say in who succeeds the current family heads. Oh and there is the thing about each baron having an heir (an underboss) and a vice roy (the consigliere). Sounds like it might be a direct lead in, huh?
Actually, I remembered where I came up with the idea. It was the NFL. The NFL owners set up the rules, but each is his own owner/king in his own city. But they cannot just sell their teams. They need to get the others to agree. That was the basis for the Council. I know – weird.
I think it comes down to the Iron Law of Oligarchy. (See, a little bit of research can yield some great results in game mastering.) Any way, the Iron Law says that (in my words) all organizations, no matter how democratic they may seem will eventual devolve into oligarchies – that is rule by an elite group of people. Take this as an example – Look at the Congress of the USA. Are there really two parties in Washington each representing their constituents or is there one party, the party of incumbents? Do unions represent their members’ interests or are they out there simply to increase their membership in order to benefit the small number of union officials? No matter what the original intent, in the end it is a small group of people who wind up wielding the power.
Who’s running your kingdoms? Not just the king himself, but the people who run the king. Are the nobles controlling who sees the king? Are the merchants in control of the king’s wealth? Are the generals controlling the king’s safety? Who picks the next king? I know it sounds like the king’s oldest son will, right? Not necessarily. Think about the whole Henry the 8th thing. His successor was a mess, but after him, it was even crazier. The only point is that even in an established line of succession is only as good the power brokers who allow it to run or not run. Besides, the political games can be almost as much fun as the other violent games!

Friendly Competition

2011-12-02T22:01:00.000-06:00

I’ve been thinking of a way to pit members of a party against each other without requiring them to duel to the death (usually bad for party harmony that death thing). It’s actually pretty easy. They are likely all members of their appropriate guilds - Soldiers Guild, Mages’ Guild, Thieves’ Guild, or whatever. All you have to do is find something they all want. Not something really important, something worth bragging rights. The queen lost her crown on a hunting trip. A thief stole the battalion’s colors. A rat ate the princess’ ring and ran off into the market. Something like that.
Well, the party really doesn’t care about all these bragging rights, but their guilds do. Instead of partnering up with their buddies, their party members, they join up with their guild mates to return the crown or colors or ring. More than likely they are running through the city, so even if they wanted to go around killing each other, it will really be frowned on. The whole point is to get them to use their non-killing skills to be the first to accomplish the task or retrieve the object. It’s all about the competition. Who will win? Who will come out on top? Which guild will prove itself the best, or at least the coolest?
They’re tough to run. You need to keep your players away from each other so one team’s clue doesn’t tip off the others, but you’re up to that. You have to make it difficult for each kind of team - combat, magic and stealth. But when it’s all over, they’re going to love you for it!

100 Professions

2011-11-20T14:17:00.003-06:00

In case you haven’t noticed, 100 Professions is now for sale on both e23 and RPG Now.
Buy it at e23 Buy it at RPG Now
Here’s how you know if you want this book:
Eons ago in one of the only rule books out at that time, there was a flat rule that said something to the effect of it costs 100gp per level per month for the character to live. Really? Based on what? Does that include the PCs steeds? Does it include the steeds if it’s a dragon or just a horse? What about if he owes 50 horses? What if he is experimenting in magic? What if she is a noblewoman? What if he is a beggar?
If a rule like 100gp per level per month either makes sense to you or seems to be a useless complication, please do not buy 100 Professions. You are clearly a gold farmer who is only playing an RPG for the action and really do not care about the story. That’s OK - Free Country and all. In the immortal words of Chuck Berry - Live how you gotta live baby.
For those of you who want more character development, more story line, more background, more PC/NPC interaction - 100 Professions was written for you. It gives 100 professions (surprising, right?) with descriptions, skills needed, how common they are, and how much you should expect them to pay. Why? Because every adventurer I have ever GMed for spends all their money on gear. No, really, ALL their money! They do not leave any for room and board. 100 Professions allows you to give them part time jobs when they are between the big mercenary work. Not a lot, but enough to keep a roof over their head and a couple of meals in their bellies. It also gives you as the GM a chance to give them contacts and lead them into all sorts of new missions, simply because you now know how they are filling their days. If you and your players are content that every single mission starts with - So you’re in a bar and this guy walks up to you, - well, I guess you don’t care how they fill their days.
Seriously, 100 Professions was written for the mature GM who doesn’t have a ton of time to handle these extra things. For $1.99, you can figure out what your players do with themselves during the in-between times. You can also think about each of these professions as being contacts that your PCs might need to get to know or NPCs you need to add into your world/city. As with all our 100s, this book is intended to give you the spark you need to fill a gap that you might not have worried about yet. With that spark - GMs really can run their games better and faster!

Need a ton of inspiration?

2011-11-13T22:56:00.001-06:00

Remember that song We Didn’t Start the Fire by Billy Joel? The whole song is him going through a huge list of people and events that shaped American culture over the last decades. I was thinking about that song and decided to challenge myself. I will be going through the entire song and creating some manner of reference in my world (Fletnern) for each of the references in the song.
For example: Marilyn Monroe - Actress, tragic, affair with president - in our world. In Fletnern: Ammora Villishephska was a famous opera singer in Parnania. She was young, beautiful, and gifted with one of the most powerful soprano voices ever heard. Not surprisingly, she caught the attention of the Prince Governor and they began an affair. When Garnock’s army showed up at the gates of Parnania, The Governor even had her brought into the palace for protection.
During the actual battle, the Governor’s wife became very disturbed that her rival was amongst those being protected. The Governor was not willing to throw her out in the streets, but he couldn’t take Ammora with him when they decided to flee, so this beautiful opera singer, star of the entire city was left in the palace, virtually unguarded when the enemy came storming through the gates.
Now the rumor is that the Governor took her with him or somehow had her safely evacuated from the city. But she disappeared after the attack. The Governor was set up elsewhere, but Ammora was never seen again. No one in the royal family ever spoke of her, and it was known to be a taboo subject, so the mystery remains - What ever happened to the famous opera star?
As Ammora hid in the palace, she was discovered by a troop of soldiers. Assuming she was a noblewoman, they brought her to their commanders without allowing any harm to come to her. One of the commanders recognized her for who she was and immediately had a detachment escort her back to his villa in Garnock. There she still lives today. She’s much fatter and older, but she can still belt out a song like nobody’s business. She has been maintained as a concubine - a “slave wife”, but her life has not been that horrible, and at this point she has developed a rather severe case of agoraphobia. She does not want to be returned. She wants to live out her life as the pet and sometimes lover of a rich Lat general.
OK - for all you gold farmers out there who couldn’t care less about history or interesting mysteries in the social culture, Ammora still makes a fantastic adventure spark. What if someone (magically or naturally) gets a hint that she is alive? You can’t send an army to get her back; that would attract too much attention. They’ll need adventurers to “liberate” her. But once they get to her, she will not want to be taken from the villa. Oh, and don’t forget this guy is a general. So he may be past his prime and an easy battle. Anyone taking her will find his entire regiment hunting them down.
OK - one down, a LOT more to go.
and when that’s over, I might give Tim McGraw’s Southern Voice a try.

Shopping

2011-11-05T10:33:00.000-05:00

It is my firm belief, after writing several books on fantasy economics and cities, that you cannot give the players a true shopping experience in game. No amount of effort would allow you to honestly list everything that could be purchased in a fantasy store in a fantasy city. OK, that is probably too broad a statement. The raw materials manufacturers would likely only have up to a dozen products and therefore could be detailed. This is the miller, the weaver, the brewer. Take the miller. Many people would think - The miller sells flour. Done. But even the miller would have wheat flour, probably in different styles, such as fine and course. He would also have corn meal, likely white and yellow. He might have buckwheat, grits, pancake mix, or even farina. What about rolled oats or possibly wild rice? While he’s at it, does he have his own farmland? Is he growing things himself, or possibly making maple syrup or honey? and that’s just the miller.
Imagine the cart of the common peddler. He has been picking up things for years, selling what he can. His cart would be filled with endless bric-a-brac. He would likely have things he bought from a tinker (forks, springs, hinges), stuff he picked up from the smith (nails, small tools, maybe horseshoes), some food items (jerky, fruit preserves, mustard), some leather goods (wine skins, belts, laces), some personal items (comb, brush, cup, pen), and a whole bunch of little wooden items that he carves while he travels from town to town (figurines, toggles/buttons, pipes). How do you decide what he has? Worse yet, what if it is a major store? What if it is a jewelry store? Are you able to document every stone, every setting, every bracelet, ear ring, bangle or bauble? If it could be done, it would not be worthwhile!
OK - so now what? Do you give up? Do you tell the players they cannot have anything, because you don’t know who has it? Of course not. My suggestion? Use a game system that allows for scrounging. Then, just let the player roll for his character. If he wants a ruby ring, have him roll to find one. Obviously it will be far more likely to find one in a jewelry store than in a feed store, so have him first scrounge up the jewelry store, then scrounge up what he wants within. If she’s looking for a leather long sword sheathe, she probably wants it custom made, but with a good scrounging, she may be able to find a serviceable one without waiting. Is she willing to take what she finds or does she have her heart set on a green dyed one? Well that affects the scrounging.
There are two advantages to this - #1 - Less work for you as GM trying to figure out your stores. Now you just say: Jewelry store, specializes in rubies and gold, but also carries other gems. That’s easy enough to use when they are scrounging. #2 - Since you’ll never write down everything they want, this allows you to be more capable of meeting their needs. When the wizard wants a robe made of purple linen, you just scrounge to see if he can find one. Oh, and by the way, just because they didn’t find it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Scrounging can be tough, and things sometimes get overlooked.

Killer Dungeon (Part II)

2011-10-30T15:15:00.000-05:00

So - back to the halfling rebel base:
The tunnels are well defended, so let’s talk about the rest of the complex. First off, the other rooms are not so completely cramped. There would be a couple of rooms where the ceilings might go as high as 5-6’, but offered the chance, the defenders would not fight in those rooms. What are the rooms for? Well, there are definitely barracks rooms. The rebels have some non-combatants down here with them, so women and children are housed. There will need to be some manner of kitchen, which requires that there be a smoke outlet. The thought was that the chimney would go up a tree, letting the smoke out amongst the branches/canopy, so it would be dispersed by the time it floated up, making the smell likely apparent, but not the tell-tale sign of smoke.
Most importantly, there are two laboratories. We said that everything in the complex could be explained. Now, we assume that the rebels could get weapons (spears, daggers, crossbows) but the labs build their traps and brew their poisons. Think about the advantages that the big adventurers have over the little halflings - They are faster - We took that away with the low ceilings. They do more damage - We took that away with the narrow halls. They are probably better fighters - We took that away with the narrow halls and the wider guard posts. The halflings are better with agility based weapons, thus we gave them the ability to shoot crossbows. Major spells will likely be slowed down by the twisting and turning tunnels - and explosions are as likely to kick backwards as they are to move forward.
So what do the halflings need to really even the score? They need to do more damage. How do they do that? Well, almost every weapon they’re packing, including their traps, is poisoned. It doesn’t have to be the killer kind of poison, just something that can bump up the damage when they hit, making every movement forward that much more dangerous for the invaders. The point is to be a nagging increase, not an all out death “spell”, but to be honest, either will work.
Meanwhile, the halls, the doors, the chests, the walls, everything is lined with traps. The traps can be simple: toothed jaw traps (bear traps), foot traps with punji stakes, trip wires to crossbows, nothing hugely clever, but add some poison, and all of a sudden, it’s a dangerous encounter.
That’s about the end of where I had gotten. The one issue I haven’t decided on is magic. How much, if any, would I give the halflings? Would they have some moderately powerful healers? Illusionists? In this crazy tunnel scheme, an illusionist can cause a lot more harm than a sorcerer. Alchemists? Don’t want to give the invaders anything they can use against the rebels, so that might not be right. I like the idea of some sort of “golem” that the halflings don’t care about. These weren’t supposed to be evil guys who were willing to kill each other. More like fanatics willing to die for their cause. Then, you could send a golem, skeleton, wind up robot, something out to fight in melee, without worrying too much if it caught a poisoned bolt in the back. With all the “evening of the scales” we’ve tried to do, the halflings would still be horrid in melee, so this could give them a better chance of fleeing.
What do we hope you’ll take away from this? Well, that if you think about it a little, moderately powerful defenders should be able to take on powerful invaders pretty easily. You just need to give them a chance to play to their strengths while taking away the strengths of the other guys. You don’t have to be out to kill every player character (and I was really out to do that with this dungeon). Just remember - the hardest fought battles are the ones the players remember the most!

Killer Dungeon (Part I)

2011-10-22T07:47:00.001-05:00

I think most (fantasy) gamers start by going into “dungeons”. Dungeons are actually easier on the GM. He knows everything, and the players are contained to a limited space. Pretty quickly, things move to a “wilderness adventure”. These seem more realistic, because we all know that nobody actually builds dungeons. But with the added freedom comes a lot more difficulty for the GM. Now there is terrain, and nothing to hold the players into a restricted area.
Having disrespected dungeons, I think we all remember them fondly. That’s why I ran “The Killer Dungeon” many years ago. I gathered all my best traps and encounters, put them into one dungeon, and held a tournament. (The prize was a tiger’s eye topaz - we thought it was pretty cool!) Immediately after running that Killer Dungeon tourney, I started writing the next one. I never got to run it, but here’s how it went. I still think this is the most deadly dungeon setting in the world.
The main concept is that this is a base of rebel halflings. They are living in underground tunnels based in many ways on the VC tunnels. Nothing was going to be included that could not directly be explained by the people in the base itself.
Let’s start with the tunnels or hallways first. Assume that the halflings are 3’ tall. The tunnels are triangular shaped (flat floors, peaked ceilings). From an engineering sense, this is supposed to be one of the strongest ways to build a tunnel. So the peak will be 3’8”. This allows a 3’ halfling to run down the middle of the tunnel without having to watch his head. It forces human sized people to crawl on all fours - you likely couldn’t even crouch. The tunnels are only 3-4’ wide at the base. This is intended to leave enough room for halfling shoulders, but prevent anyone from swinging a slashing weapon. No magic swords, no axes - should severely cut down on most any adventuring party. The halflings inhabiting the base rely on crossbows and spears, with knives as backup weapons. Therefore they should be able to fight in the confined spaces. Remember - the big invaders are on their hands and knees; they may not be able to use their hands for combat or possibly even magic in the hallways.
To protect the hallways, there are guard posts. Basically, they widen the hall to 10’, giving the guards the ability to hide behind the tunnel walls and shoot their crossbows. I also like the idea of a defender using a pole arm to fend or basically block the hallway. Should someone try to force past him, he can use the pole arm to stab and slash, and the invader would have a very difficult time trying to get past. Sure, he likely would have the strength to rip the pole arm from the halfling - IF he had the room to maneuver and was standing on two feet. In a confined space, he’s a sitting duck for the spear or blade.
The hallways are also trapped. We’ll get into that later. But assume that the invaders come down the tunnels, manage to storm a guard post, and the halflings go off running. First off, halflings should be slower than humans in a sprint, but the halflings are sprinting and the humans are bear crawling. That evens the odds considerably. As the halflings run down the halls, they avoid the traps, because they know where they are. Put enough corners into the design so that invaders learn quickly that blundering around a corner often means a crossbow in the face. This also prevents the invaders from seeing the defenders avoid the traps. Meanwhile the guys retreating are dropping caltrops or even broken glass. While the broken glass only helps against people in cloth or leather style armor, the caltrops will poke through chain mail - like the chain mail glove. This isn’t only a distraction, but a possibility of messing up a warrior’s attack hand.
Meanwhile, the halfings have stout doors and the previously mentioned twists and turns. They can hide their lights (or rely on that mystic heat vision that every non-human has in some games). This allows them to listen and watch for the invaders’ lights. Typically the invaders’ lights will give them away long before the defenders give away their position.
OK - This is already too long, so we’ll end here and finish up next time.

Coins of the Road

2011-10-08T07:56:00.001-05:00

Over a year ago, we promised that the next Grain Into Gold supplement was on the way: Coins of the Road. This supplement was supposed to expand Grain Into Gold and add all manner of additional products, mainly things that would be used as trade goods and therefore could be used as treasure, cargo, loot, or whatever (stuff adventurers care about). The problem is that every time we start developing the concept, we splinter it into several books.
Well, the Coins of the Road as a generic book was splintered too far. There just isn’t enough valuable information that GMs will care about. Most of the stats were already in Grain Into Gold, and the narrative read more like Wikipedia.
So - what do we plan to do? Well, to a point scrap that project, but not entirely. All the information about caravans and shipping is good stuff. We think GMs want that stuff, but it isn’t a whole book. So we’re going to forget about the generic book and publish Coins of the Road - A Guide to Fantasy Trade Goods. Sounds the same doesn’t it? But it isn’t. We’re going to put the good cartage info in the same book as all the brand name stuff from Fletnern, including some of the “fantasy” products. Fantasy products include everything from “dwarven steel” to mastodon ivory. We’re going to try and avoid the magic items, as that just doesn’t seem to fit, and it is typically game specific. We’ll likely avoid gem stones and alcohol as we covered booze in 100 Bar Drinks and will cover gems in Facets. However, we are likely to follow up Coins of the Road with 1000 Coins of the Road - a d1000 book basically giving you a random table for randomly determining what you would find on any caravan or ship.
OK - So we’re delaying the book again! But we’re releasing 100 Professions and Royalty in 2011. Urban Developments and City of Rhum could still be 2011 or early 2012. Coins of the Road will most likely fall mid-2012.
Oh - We’re plotting out the release of Legend Quest - Modern. The thought is publish the core rules (as last seen in The Forgotten Hunt), then publish source books for the three campaign worlds that were planned: The Forgotten Hunt (dinos), Convergence - An Alien Armageddon (yep, that would be an alien invasion), and Dark Hour (more of a noir with magic environment). Not sure that 2012 is doable for all that and the couple of 100s and Bakers’ Dozen books we’re hoping to finish, but we’ll see. We always bite off more than we can chew!

Sorry about that...

2011-10-03T15:08:00.000-05:00

For those of you who noticed, our blog went away for a couple of days there. Just a silly misunderstanding between us and Google as to how old “Board Enterprises” was, and whether the company was allowed to have a web site. Silly thing is that Board Enterprises was started in 1991, and should be allowed to vote. Don’t know how they’d draft it though.
Anyway - That’s behind us and everything should be running smoothly from here on!

Unlikeable Characters

2011-09-24T14:22:00.002-05:00

I’ve come to notice that I normally don’t use characters (NPCs) that I don’t like. I’m not really talking about not using straight warriors because I prefer magical types, but that happens too. I’m talking mainly about personalities. If I don’t like the mission giver, I tend to drop writing that mission in favor of ones where I like the known associates. I know I’m missing something here.
GMs have to include characters they don’t like. Think about most stories (TV, movies or books). The good guys do not always like each other. They may have completely different goals, but still want to do the same missions. More to this point, they might be completely different personalities. Even different personalities than the GM. Yep - you need to play against your own personality. If not, then not only do you become boring (a one trick pony), but you become predictable. That’s the big fear! You as a GM cannot be predictable. Kiss of death! If they know what to expect, every one of your twists and sub-plots will be telegraphed.
Covering more ground here than planned, but it needs to be said: GMs need to play against their type. Use NPCs that are different from you, different from your personality, different from your style of play. If you don’t remember to keep this sort of variety in your campaign, you’re doomed. (OK, that was a little overdone, but I hope you get the point.)

Assassins

2011-09-18T07:28:00.000-05:00

Some of the other bloggers are focusing on assassins this month, and I always have an opinion.
I respect that there are the sneaky, poison using bad guys willing to knock off a target or two, but history shows assassins in a different light. Obviously modern assassins use firearms, but I do like using the sniper crossbow guy. They only work if your critical rules allow for called shots - or extreme poisons, but nothing beats a bolt appearing in the king’s throat as if from no where. I’m also a big fan of the duelist who finds a reason to challenge the target to a duel and then kills him in a “fair” fight.
But I think the most useful assassin in life and in games is going to be the bruiser. Call it assassination, call it “saving the world”, call it execution - whatever; the best way to off somebody is to have some huge guy come barreling through the door and kill him with some massive amounts of damage. You know all those missions where the “good” characters go racing into the temple of some “evil” god and slaughter the priests, especially the high priest. Yeah - that was a “mission” and not an assassination. Whatever you call it, someone was paid to kill someone else.
I know what you’re thinking - This guy has it all wrong. We’re the good guys. Assassins are a whole different thing. But think about it really. If you are paid to go and kill someone, you are an assassin. Even if the bad guy is a dragon or a giant - you are still an assassin. Oh, we can dress it up in different names, but it’s still there. Just because you had to cut your way through forty guys and traps to get to in, you’re still an assassin.
So when you’re thinking about the rules that assassins follow - You need to be thinking about the entire range of hired killers, and not just the sneaky ones with poison.

What’s it All About - Part 2

2011-09-09T15:38:00.001-05:00

OK - so building on the last blog - how do you get your players passionate about their characters? I think you need to make them “cool” or at least quirky. So how?
Don’t give them a massively powerful magic item! Do give them a quirky magic item. What do I mean? Give them a new item with some history - either a historic relic, or owned by some historic guy, or maybe possessing the soul of some historic guy? Standard stuff from out of the book is easy, but if you can put something together that is going to be more fun, then you’ll hook them. I think items that either don’t always work right, or give incredible bonuses, but only in very restricted settings are great for this. Maybe I’ve always had masochists for players, but they love when an item produces the wrong effect at the wrong time. You’re the GM - play it up and make it funny! Plus - when it does work correctly in a tight spot - the tension the player feels when he’s figuring out what is going to happen really adds to whole game. Be warned - If you introduce five really cool items into a campaign, chances are that the party will sell two or three of them. Before they get into the fun of the item, it may seem like a nuisance, but once they “own” it, they’ll come around fast.
Have you put them up against memorable enemies? Just as the characters have to be interesting, so do the enemies. Not to be too much of an advertisement, but if you need memorable enemies - check out our Baker’s Dozen Villains supplement for some decent ideas. Or Baker’s Dozen Tribes for groups of cool enemies.
OK - so what else? Last week we said that the characters needed backgrounds. Use them! If the character is a veteran of some war, have the next mission giver be a veteran of that war, maybe even an old buddy. Or make the bad guy a rival who is an alumni from the same magic university. Have the victim be a priest from their hometown. If the backgrounds and histories of the characters are only sitting on the page and don’t come into the campaign, then they’re really not achieving their full potential. First, this makes the campaign come alive, in that the player can start to feel that things matter and the world grows. Second, by using their history, you are building their history. It doesn’t have to be every time, but every once in a while, it can really help. Make sure you rotate between the various characters too. If Johnny’s history keeps getting built up but no one else’s does, then it’s going to annoy the other players.
The last thing is to take this sense of building history and run with it. Whether it is the pre-generated history of the characters or what happened in their first couple of missions, build on previous campaign issues. If the characters go from one mission to another without any ties, they are going to start to see everything as separate, even if they use the same character. That’s not building a history for that character and not building the passion for that character within your players.

What’s it All About?

2011-09-02T19:31:00.000-05:00

So what’s it all about? What is the secret to being a great game master and keeping your players coming back time after time? There’s a lot to it! The interaction between the group has to be fun - typically because they’re friends. The atmosphere has to be fun. Not too tough for most people, but it’s just not as much fun playing in a crowded cafeteria as it is in the basement of your buddy’s house with maps and posters all over the wall. A really good campaign setting or location can bring them in too, especially if you as a game master have the gift of describing things well to make them feel like they’re really there. But I think the one thing that really makes a campaign memorable is the characters.
Characters make the game. They make the story. They suck the players in and hold them there. I strongly believe that there was nothing special about the Harry Potter stories other than some really compelling characters. I don’t know how she did it (or I would copy it), but she created characters that people really wanted to care about.
OK - So you’re not a billionaire author - How do you create characters that are compelling enough to keep your players involved? Well, first, they need to be more than “Fighter Level 3”. They need to have some substance to them. A little bit of background, a little bit of quirkiness - they go a long way! It’s one of the main reasons I’ve steered away from class based games and into skill level games - you can craft a character instead of flopping into an established role.
There are tons of tricks, and we’ll probably get into more of them in the next post, but there is one thing that so few GMs are willing to do: Kill off a character. If you see that one of your players is really not liking his character - kill it off! Maybe you work with the player - promise him a new character of the same level/experience if he lets you kill his character as part of a murder mystery or something like that.
Look, there are times, when a character should just walk away from the party. Maybe he’s a religious guy and wants good things, but the party keeps assassinating the enemy. Maybe he met a princess in an earlier adventure and proper role-playing would have the character go off to be with her. Maybe you just don’t like the character and can use some excuse like one of these to have him leave and be replaced. Maybe suggesting killing off the character was overdone - you can always retire him in a different manner. The point is - do not keep characters around that cause boredom, anger, disruptions, or just apathy. We’ll try to come up with more ways to grow interest next week.

Retcon as a storyline

2011-08-20T07:51:00.001-05:00

Want a cool new idea? Want to introduce a cool new mastermind bad guy but you can’t just have him appear out of no where? Think back to a couple of previous missions, better to use ones that your players might not remember as well (maybe because they are from a long time ago). The best ones are the ones where the players didn’t really get to the bottom of your real plans. Now, you just change the background.
Here’s the idea - OK, last year you set up this whole story line about slavers, but your players got all sword happy and killed everyone before they realized which one was the leader. They hacked him down along with the rabble and barely noticed he had better stats. Now you introduce the mysterious money man (bad guy) and he tells the players how upset he was when they busted up his slavery operations last year. See - now you have a new big bad as, and you built him a background that already makes him your players’ enemy. (Well, and him their enemy.)
It’s normally called ret-con: retroactive continuity. It’s like when they made up all this stupid stuff about Spiderman’s parents being spies. No one planned that when they started the story, but they thought it was a good idea later on. Please come up with something better than long lost parents being spies! You can always add stuff on to someone’s background. The players are seldom great at building full backgrounds, but adding to their background is #1 kind of a cheesy because it’s their background (you didn’t write it, and they often get territorial) and #2 the easy way out. By rewriting your own missions, you have far greater freedom and knowledge.
I’m a big fan of the “permanent” enemy. Now, if you never had an enemy that kept coming back, you can build one. Mr. New Bad Guy can now be really upset that your characters destroyed his slave operation and those bandits and that thief who stole the art work. You know you can hit it the other way too. The players think they were hired by a scared old lady, a sheriff and a knight, but in fact they were being manipulated by the powerful high priest who was testing the team to determine if they were both made of the right stuff and of the proper moral fiber. In fact he has controlled a major part of their adventuring career. It might upset them and make them feel like patsies, but it should still impress them, and there was no chance of them detecting the deceit earlier, because you just thought of it now.
Why? Why do this? Why make the adventures link together in mysterious and over blown ways? Because it is a campaign and not a series of unrelated “module” adventures. Because getting your players angry about what is happening to their characters gets them invested, invested in a manner in which they want to keep coming back to game sessions time and time again. Besides - It’s fun!

Winners or Losers

2011-08-06T08:35:00.001-05:00

I’m often conflicted about letting the “good guys” (the players) always win. First off, it seems odd. I mean nobody ever wins all the time. There should be times when they suffer setbacks. But these are the players, and truth be told, people don’t want to spend their entertainment time losing. So can you make it challenging enough to make it thrilling, but still allow them to win all the time? I don’t think so.
But then the problem is pride. If faced with a situation that they truly cannot win (at least with the strategy they are using), will they retreat? Will they blunder forward killing characters off, or will they move away to fight another day? Depends on the players, but there are a lot of them out there who will not bother to break off, no matter how bad it is. These folks are usually pretty pissed when their characters die too, even though most GMs would perceive this to be the players fault.
You want the keys to the kingdom? You want the best GM advice ever? Here it is: There are more of them than there are of you. What’s that mean? It means if you place them in front of an unsolvable puzzle - at least one that you don’t already know the way out of, then they are still likely to come up with a solution. This works! Challenge them, but not in a life threatening way. What happens if they fail? Well, in some cases, they may need to go get more guys - hire some NPCs that have talents that they don’t have. In a lot of situations, they will come up with some crazy way to use the spells or abilities that they already have in ways you never would have thought of and might be able to win through that way. (You can often be a little more lenient here, especially if it adds to the story line.)
If you know how to beat it, then the players who know you are very likely to figure it out. After all, they know you, and probably know how you game master. If it is more of a challenge, and not simply an unwinnable fight, then failure (should it come) is not lethal, so they lose, but their characters are still alive. Of course the challenge can easily be - How do we get past an army 1,000x bigger than out party? Let’s hope they don’t start by rolling for initiative.
There’s a cop out here too. If you know how to beat the trap/puzzle/challenge, but they don’t figure it out, then after the game, some players are going to see this as you taunting them. “You couldn’t figure it out! All you had to do was ...” OK, for some of you GMs, they might be right and you were taunting them. But if they get all frustrated and ask what they were supposed to do, and you say, “I don’t know. I thought you’d figure a way out that would make it work, but I didn’t have an easy solution.” How do they argue with that? In fact, you’re complimenting them and saying that they (at least collectively) are smarter than you are.
Into each life a little rain must fall, even PCs. Make them work a little harder for it, even if that means they fail. Unfortunately, this might mean that you have other stuff planned for them. If they give up on one mission because you made it a little too hard, they aren’t going to be too happy about sitting around staring at you. Oh, and don’t gloat! It’s bad for their egos!

New Products?

2011-07-31T09:24:00.001-05:00

Just a quick blurb about 2011 products - We’ve been in this small press arena for about 30 years now. When we went to GENCON, we made sure that our newest, hottest item was prepped and ready to debut at the show. Well guess what - so does everybody else. In order to avoid having our latest and greatest products lost in the mix of other debuts, we’re holding on to some stuff. Once the con season dies down a bit, expect to see several items come rolling out in fast succession.
Board Enterprises has continually provided high quality products without spending gobs of money on art and without spending gobs of money on advertising. You the customer who has found us benefits from that. The guys who have not yet found us do not, but we’re working to let them know about us too!
Just wanted you to know there is a plan; we have been writing and playtesting, but you won’t see it for a little bit more.

Going to the Bench

2011-07-31T09:10:00.000-05:00

There’s a thing I’ve always wanted to do, but never really succeeded at: developing a “bench” for an adventuring team. The idea is likely based on some of the superhero stories I watched and read as a kid. When the Justice League needs to go underwater, they make sure they get Aquaman involved. (OK - I hate Aquaman more than I hate Hal Jordan) If the Avengers are going to go into the Neutral Zone, they probably call the Fantastic Four to come along. If you’re playing Warcraft, and you need a tank for an instance, someone logs off their main warlock and comes back on as a Warrior Tank. So why don’t we do that in pen and paper RPGs?
Well, because we invest so much time and love into our characters. Also because GMs are hesitant to write missions that require certain character types for fear of annoying their players. Few of us have as much time to play as we would like. To spend time getting a less powerful character up to a mid range just so you can have a bench seems like a waste of precious gaming time.
But as a GM you can do it. Here’s what I mean: Let’s assume that your party is strongly established in some city, but they’ve moved into that realm where their missions are quite often world saving type things that have them wandering the globe. What happens in their home town while they’re off defeating a demonic invasion in a distant desert? Well, someone must step up, or their home town will be a ruin when they return.
Here’s what I think we all need to do - Establish an NPC party of adventurers who handle the small stuff when your PCs are away. Here’s why I think this is fun (but remember - I’m a role-player, and not a gold farmer): So your main party of PCs goes off and saves the world from demonic invasion by slaughtering hundreds of demons wholesale and then invading the pits of hell to destroy the gate opening device, barely escaping with their lives. They return home to find that their home town is having a parade in honor of a team half as powerful as they are, because that mid-powered team just captured an orcish warlord and drove off his men. Of course, they’re thinking - “Hey - demons are a lot tougher than orcs!) “And we killed them. Those guys just chased them all over the region where they’ll continue to cause little troubles.” But the issue is, that the demons and that battle were on the other side of the world. The orcs were here. The locals only know or care about the local orcs, even if the demons would have enslaved the world.
If you’ve been reading this blog you have likely seen that I love to torture my players. Making them the saviors of the world, but then have to take a back seat to some local group of pansies - ah, pure GM bliss. You can build anything you want off this. Maybe the moderates worship the PCs, but nobody really gets it. Maybe the PCs have to clean up the NPCs’ messes, but the NPCs’ keep getting the glory. Maybe they have to team up. Maybe they start working for different political parties and will clash, but can’t outright kill each other in the streets.
Drama! It can be wonderful!

Gods and Demi-gods 3 - Tricking a god

2011-07-23T08:35:00.002-05:00

So when I set out to write a blurb on gods, I was thinking about restricting a god’s knowledge of the world. I mean - Are they all omniscient (all seeing)? Odin had to give up an eye to become all seeing, and he was the only Norse guy with that power. Can gods only be “looking” in one direction at a time? If so, could a mortal create such a fuss in one area of the world that the god shifted his or her attention to that area and missed the fact that the mortal was stealing from them on the other side of the world?
Depending on how you handle the gods, maybe someone praying on the burglary side of the world could alert the god, though it might be too late. Maybe the god has a flock of angels or demons who are keeping tabs on things while his attention is diverted, but again, will the follower be able to warn the god in time? I love this concept - tricking a god. I mentioned the diverting of altar sacrifices before. Clearly that one stuck with me too. What about gods forming false alliances with each other? Wouldn’t their followers then form alliances too? Would the priests feel they had been misled by their gods if the joined with other, just to hear their god betrayed the other god? I guess those are the costs of worshipping an evil or untrustworthy god.
Just remember that gods typically have better or at least longer memories than mortals. They might be pretty vengeful if they’ve been tricked in an important way; oh come on, they’re going to be vengeful no matter how they were tricked. They might not be in a position to do anything about it, but they’re going to be mad. That should be fun too!

Gods and Demi-gods 2 - Communication

2011-07-23T08:35:00.001-05:00

The last line of the last post got me thinking - How do the gods communicate? I think most of us assume that priests and priestesses spend a lot of their time in prayer. Why? Well, in my game, prayer grants adoration to the gods, which is in many ways their food and energy. So by praying, the priest type person is feeding his or her god - give a little to get a little. OK, but in modern times, most of us religious types believe that our God hears and answers our prayers. Now I’m not suggesting that every morning during prayer time, a major god needs to pass along pieces of advice to each of his priests, but if the god wants something done, shouldn’t he communicate that?
In my game world, anyone who has spoken to a god is referred to as a saint. If you dream that your god wants you to retrieve a long lost artifact and you survive the mission - you get to be called a saint (assuming that your religious folks believe you). Dreams are good, but sometimes a little too blatant for these major players. Subtlety can work too. I have set out the various “tools” that the various gods use, so that their priests can better understand when their gods are actually speaking to them. A war god’s tool may be fire. Maybe his followers burn their enemies’ homes after defeating them. If this were the case, then a will-o-the-wisp type lure (flying fire, always too far ahead to catch) might be perfect for this god to deliver one of his followers to the site of a battle. Doesn’t matter why the god wants them there, just how he gets them there.
There are all sorts of ways this can work. A magical or knowledge god might see smoke or water as their tool, and then they show their followers images in the smoke or water when they need to let them know stuff. These tools work the other way too. If a war god’s tool is earth, then when he sends a message of his anger, it will likely be in the shape of 30’ tall earth giant, and not in the form of a plague of locust. Yep, they communicate things in bad ways as well as good ways.
Don’t forget the inadvertent or lucky communications either. True believers see their deities as controlling things that are most likely random events. Who knows, maybe they’re right. Maybe it was a god’s will that the tree would fall down in the wind storm and crush the house of that sinner. Maybe it was the will of a god that he got lucky at the card table just when he did. Just because most folks are non-believers and think it was just chance isn’t going to be enough to dissuade a true believer. Just because the GM and/or player knows that it was simply a die roll that caused something to happen, doesn’t mean that the character has to understand that in game!

Gods and Demi-gods

2011-07-16T08:29:00.001-05:00

There are all sorts of ways that games handle their deities. Some assign stats to them as though they were just really powerful characters. I hate that. I’ve read a lot of myths, and I don’t recall Hercules or any of the others killing any gods. Once you assign the amount of damage it takes to kill one, you are just asking the PCs to go and try (and probably succeed).
I’m all for limiting the powers of the divine. I wrote an article on it. (Find it here.) Unable to skew the game towards the player characters = good! Able to be killed = bad! At least in my measure.
So how do you keep them in check? Well, look at that article, I think that lays it out pretty well. If you want your characters to “kill a god”, I think you need to set up the god’s (or whatever) avatar on the world, and let them kill that. That way they have attacked and killed a divine creature, likely ruining his plans, but still they have not actually eliminated a divine creature that should be beyond such silly little things like death. Now if the king of the gods wants to kill a god, well, that’s another story!
I like the myths that treat the gods like they are a dysfunctional royal family with intrigues and enemies outside the pantheon. If one pantheon is in power (either in a region or across the world) I like putting in little upstarts who are looking to steal their piece of the pie without being assaulted by celestial hordes. In one campaign, the “god” of rats wanted to become the god of cities, and set out to diminish his rival’s power until he could usurp his place. In that campaign, there were also some tricks played where lesser spirits were sabotaging some of the gods’ altars in order to redirect the sacrifices to them, directly stealing power, though in truth relatively small pieces of power.
These are the types of power plays that mortal characters can get involved in (intentionally or accidently). Here is where the gods can play a direct part in the campaign, but without all the lightning bolts and thunderous voices.

What’s “Better” - Weapons

2011-07-10T08:06:00.001-05:00

Walk through a hardware store and you’ll find a row of hammers, a row of saws, and a row of power drills, all priced differently. So which one is better? The most expensive one, right? Why?
Let’s concentrate on the hammers and saws and other hand tools, because they are going to make a better analogy when I switch this conversation over to weapons in a fantasy game, which is clearly my intent. Why is one hammer more expensive than another? Most likely, it is in those things that are not immediately noticeable, at least not to the untrained eye. Is the grip better than the other one, less slipping? Is the steel a higher grade; is there less chance of it breaking? That’s the one we normally concentrate on. In our early supplement Legend Quest - Optional Weaponry (RPGNow or e23), we established four grades of weaponry: ornamental, standard, tool, and combat ready. Ornamental covers those “weapons” that were never intended to be used, like the swords old men wear at church functions or a “knife” that is actually a letter opener. The standard grade is what you would expect to find around a normal house - the knife you use to cut your steak. Tool grade is where they start to get tougher: the high quality knife a butcher or chef would have around their kitchen. Lastly, the combat ready is those knives you would expect Seals to have strapped to their thighs during a mission. The only major difference here is the sturdiness of the weapon - how well it resists damage. Let’s face it - a sharpened letter opener could be stabbed through someone’s heart and kill them almost as easily as a Seal’s blade. Damage isn’t the question - durability is.
We get back to the eternal “So What?” question. Why do you as a GM care if a weapon is standard or combat ready? First off, I have used these grades to help in loot. Do you want to arm some poor commoners, but you don’t want to hand over a treasure trove of resale steel to your PCs? Give them bows and hand axes that are of standard grade. No self-respecting weapons shop would take used, low quality weapons. Plus, it makes sense. Need to help your PCs get their weapons and equipment for those first few missions? Let them buy sub-standard weapons. They can always upgrade after they start to be successful. Should all their weapons be “combat ready”? No. Tomahawks and cudgels would almost never be “combat ready”. More likely tool grade. Not only is a cudgel made out of wood, making it weaker than a sword, but it’s barely crafted at all. Similarly, swords would almost never be crafted at standard grade, unless by con men in a traveling show.
Why else? Well to keep your adventurers on their toes. These guys are supposed to know what their doing when it comes to the tools of their trade. Have they neglected to train in skills like Appraise and Weaponcraft? Adventuring is not the same as fighting. Adventurers should be rounded in a way that soldiers and sentries never have to be, and even some of those guys would have the skills required to judge weapons. It’s really not about screwing your party over; it’s about maintaining an element of surprise and reality.

Nomads

2011-07-03T07:56:00.001-05:00

Well, home from summer camp, and you know what it made me think about? Nomads. No, really. Spend a week without air conditioning and you start thinking about spending your summers in cool places and your winters in warm places. I’m not talking about the nomads who walk their herds or flocks from place to place so they can eat (more “modern” and still in existence today). I’m talking more about the hunters who followed herds or the gatherers that move from harvest to harvest. Probably a lot of mixed hunters and harvesters there; that’s why they were called hunter-gatherers. (OK, it doesn’t really matter which type I’m talking about.)
How did it work? Well, at its most general level, they moved to where the food was. There’s a Sam Kinison joke in there for you old guys. Let’s say they ambushed the migratory cattle herds as they were moving north with the spring, then they shifted position to harvest the wild beans. Next they went to where the summer succulent fruits grew, but they hurried to the site of the wild tubers and then on to the winter squashes at their height. Before winter sets in, they’re canoeing through the swamps collecting the wild rice, only to arrive in the citrus groves for the winter. OK, I haven’t checked to see if that would work, but it sounds good. There could also be stopping to hit the salmon runs or gathering eggs and meat from some ground birds when they hit their nesting season.
OK - back to the ultimate question - Why? Why do you care? Well, it seems to me that established farmers know how much space they need, and likely have it. To go to war with another country would be a major issue, and keep them from their crops - not something they would want. Even their nobles, who gather taxes on the crops, wouldn’t want them away for long periods. But the nomads have to move from place to place in order to eat and survive. Boy would they be pissed if they have a two or three year wandering cycle and they return to find one of their required spots is now a colony of cotton farmers. They might travel through established fields. They might deplete a certain type of prey animal in a region, but only on a three year wander cycle, so the animal has a chance to build numbers again. If that prey animal is now part of the permanent settlers’ diet, they aren’t going to be happy about the nomads “stealing their food”.
It’s all about perceptions, and those conflicting perceptions causing strife. Two groups of nomads might vie for the same resources. Nomads and permanent dwellers might compete for the same foods or space or water. This would be far more likely to cause problems that need to be solved by battle than those of established agricultural cultures. In a way, it is the same argument fought by the cattlemen and farmers of the USA’s “Wild West”. The cattle herds needed to roam, but then the farmers started putting up all these fences that got in the way of getting the herds to water. Instant conflict - the kind you might want to hire some hired guns, I mean adventurers, to straighten out! Just an idea, or several.

Summer Time Fun

2011-06-25T08:42:00.001-05:00

Summer is here and thoughts turn to summer camp. (Just go with me on this one.) Summer camp - that time of the year when all of the urbanites and suburbanites all flock to the woods to experience that which they don’t know. You know the wilderness and all that.
So what would they have done in our fantasy world? They already know the wilderness and rural life. So you know what they did? They went to town. No really. They went to town - They went to the faire. OK - faires were more common in the fall - after the harvest, but they served much the same purpose as a summer camp. The rural folks would go to the big town (or city) and take part in the faire. They’d go to experience that which they didn’t know.
What did they do? Likely they competed. Who had the best apple pie, the biggest pumpkin, the best goat? Games of speed, strength, maybe skill. They also come to see the latest in craftsman’s products, the things they can’t handle on their own - fine fabrics, major tools, maybe some particularly fine tools. Maybe they’re buying seed, either seed they didn’t have or seed in hopes of crossing with some of their own. They are buying, eating, visiting, and having fun; exploring everything the big town/city has to offer.
I love faires - county fairs, state fairs, ren faires. I’ve always wanted to write one into the game world, but they either get too big or too small. I remain convinced that big fair festivals are a great add to any game world. Concentrating all the NPCs together in a smaller area brings all their drama and storylines together. A great place to start adventures - a good place to buy some new stuff - a great place to meet new NPCs or touch base with old contacts. As soon as I get it together, you’ll see it. Anyone want to offer free ideas?

Fixing Literature

2011-06-18T08:09:00.002-05:00

Have you ever read something - a comic book, a novel, or even watched a movie - and said to yourself, “That’s stupid!” You’re an hour into something and all you can think is, “This character should have had _________ instead.” Maybe you hate that Tarzan is so damn good. Maybe you hate that the Invisible Woman has force fields. Maybe you just hate Hal Jordan! (Come one -We all like just about every other Green Lantern more than Hal. If you actually like Hal, seek help.)
You know what you get to do as a game master? You get to fix those things! You can fix anything! Say you think that Waterloo was a blunder based on the French aristocracy (and their refusal to take orders from a commoner). Put that into your game world - Fix it any way you want. Maybe the nobles were forced out or the army. Maybe the first noble who acted superior was shot/executed and the next one was smarter. Maybe they just weren’t so damned French and actually listened to the messenger.
There’s a famous series of web sites about “what I would do if I were an evil emperor” or something like that. You know - train your storm troopers to shoot straight, stop delivering monologues, actually shooting the good guy so he doesn’t have a chance to escape. The lists go on and on. Go ahead and use those. But when you do take an existing story and make it your own by twisting that part that irritated the nonsense out of you, think it through. If the bad guy shoots the hero instead of letting him escape, does the hero become a martyr? Do thousands rise up in his wake to oppose the evil lord? Does the hero kill a subordinate at some point, but now that subordinate is going to have time to try and off his lordship? Sometimes things will swing exactly the way you want, but sometimes, your twist can lead to something even more interesting. Yes - I read What If by Marvel Comics and I loved them. Remember - changing genres is the easiest way to make a story your own without giving too much info to the players.
Most of the opinions in this segment are exaggerated -except for the one about Hal Jordan - he stinks!

Cool Stuff from Actual History

2011-06-12T15:01:00.000-05:00

OK - So I’ve been reading Anabasis by Xenophon. The only reason I started is because I discovered that it was in some ways the inspiration for the movie The Warriors - a truly excellent picture!
Anyway, I’m not liking it all that much, but it has had me looking up some other junk on the history of warfare. I think this should be part of pretty much every GMs list of things to do. Here’s a couple of examples as to why:
Did you know that the elephants Hannibal used were not the African elephants we know today but instead some much smaller species that was “only” 8’ tall. They aren’t that much smaller than “forest” elephants, but these are not those huge African elephants you think of. Still - 8’ at the shoulder isn’t 13’ at the shoulder, and you can see a person riding it more like a horse. Still a formidable steed. Now I just have to figure out the stats.
This does play into one of my favorite things: Making an idea my own. Now I get to create a “new” animal. Maybe I’ll add plains elephants who are 7-8” at the shoulder and live on grass, not trees. I already made up my own kudos as the main prey animals for the Central Plains, maybe these elephants will be for the Southern Plains mingled in with the antelopes. Eons ago, I created a pigmy elephant (I think they are the Island Elephants). These little guys are never more than 4’ tall (at the head), but because of the gold deposits they are eating, their tusks get marbled with gold. Hey - It’s a fantasy game!
One of the things I’ve pulled directly from Anabasis is the continuous discussion of providing for the logistics of the army. You can’t carry enough food with you, so you have to pick it up as you go. Sometimes you pillage them. Sometimes you buy them. Sometimes you might even be able to harvest them, but wow that would slow you down. Reading how ancient soldiers failed miserably at hunting ostriches was pretty funny!

Fans and Fan expansions

2011-06-04T09:32:00.001-05:00

I’m being a little presumptuous here, but that’s me –
There are people out there using the world of Fletnern as their campaign world. Sometimes I interact with them, but not that often. As you would expect, they are developing things within my world, making changes, advancing story lines that I haven’t touched, etc. but the truth is, I’ve been living part time in Fletnern for about 30 years now, and I have good portions of the next 150 years (in game) figured out.
Why am I bothering to say this? Fortunately I have not yet run into this, but the day may come when some GM using Fletnern or some other thing that I have written will come back and insist that I stole his or her idea(s). It won’t be true, but they may not see that from their perspective.
What I’m saying is this – I hope everyone out there uses Rhum, Fletnern, Legend Quest, etc etc etc, but if you fear someone (even me) stealing your ideas, don’t tell people about them.
I was young and dumb once. I play tested some major games for a major company, and I shared all sorts of ideas with my contacts at the company. One of those “game designers” stole my ideas and published them, and because I was young and dumb, there was nothing I could do about it, well, nothing but start my own game company and outlast him. Because of my own issues, I flat out wouldn’t swipe material from one of my customers – maybe from a friend, but only after telling him about it.
So – You can trust me, but still, don’t tell me everything if you think there’s any chance I would “borrow” it. Don’t trust other folks either, not with the jewels of your creation. It’s tempting though. Gamers love to talk about games. You can tell everyone everything, but don’t get annoyed if one of those writer-blocked “game designers” decides that you’ve got better stuff than he’s got that month. Them’s the breaks!
P.S. - I’m no longer bitter about a 20+ year old theft. I really haven’t been for years - since the company he worked for went belly up. I Googled him though. Turns out that those who can’t, teach - Yep, he works at a college “teaching”.

Merchant War vs. Military War

2011-05-31T13:18:00.001-05:00

You’ve seen the posts where we discuss the current merchant war brewing on Fletnern. I’ve done “real” wars before – You know, thousands of soldiers charging across a plain against thousands of soldiers. Truth is - I don’t think that role-playing characters belong in the middle of several thousand soldiers. Few if any games handle that well. The glass cannons become the only effective pieces and the warriors are reduced to shields for the mages.
So why a “merchant war”? Well, when the really big firms/cartels/merchant houses go at it, they are:
1 – very likely to hire adventuring type people – including assassins and small unit fighters
2 – very likely to be sneaky and mean if not outright evil
3 – very likely to have a lot of money
4 – very likely to be fighting against similarly odd groups of enemies as opposed to a huge number of reasonably identical soldiers
OK – 2 and 3 are likely in either type of warfare
We’ve talked about militaries retreating before - it’s not easy. Merchant wars lend themselves to smaller battles, often fought in city alleys or warehouses. If anything, they favor the subtle mages; fireballs will bring in guards from every neighborhood, but a disintegrate spell will do the job quickly and quietly. Adventurers fighting a merchant war can make a major difference, something they really shouldn’t be able to do in the major military actions.
Watch how our current mini-campaign work itself out. You’ll see what I’m talking about!

Role-players vs. gold farmers

2011-05-31T13:16:00.001-05:00

You’ll see a lot of my posts have to do with adding a bit of role-playing into role-playing games. Who’d a thunk, huh? The truth is, I get it. There are a lot of players out there who couldn’t care less about the role-playing aspect. They get annoyed when the GM tells them they need a character history, and they only care about the gold coin value of that really cool ruby necklace. I’ve been trying to come up with a way to classify the two styles, and the best one I can come up with is borrowed from the on-line MMO games: role-players vs. gold farmers.
If you play a MMO, you’ve likely seen them. (OK, if you play a popular MMO, then you’ve seen them.) These gold farmers are the jerks who wait for you to engage an enemy so they can grab the treasure behind the guy. They likely have bots running their characters, and they only care about the accumulation of stuff. Are they all in China? Probably not. A lot of them are similar to the rest of us, but they’re people that never even notice the art of the scenery in the game.
Don’t get me wrong – I may role-play by trying to figure out what a particular character would do in a particular situation, rather than try and figure out what the best strategy is from a die rolling point of view, but I’m still a little freaked out by the guys who have a different voice for each one of their characters. We all have our levels of involvement! Some folks might want cool sounding treasure and think it is wonderful for the mood and scene, but they still only care what it’s worth. I’m sure that there are a lot of folks out there who think the fact that I have documented what is on the heads and tails side of each major coin in my world is an enormous waste of time, but there are a lot of folks who think it’s pretty cool too. (If you do, check out Coins of Fletnern - it’s FREE!!)
So – From now on, when I refer to people who think more like me, I’m going to talk about “role-players”, knowing that there are extremes and moderates among us. When I talk about “gold-farmers” I’m going to be talking about those guys who know exactly what they need to hit an 18’ dragon while it is flying at 112” off the ground at 23mph in a light breeze, but have no idea what the name of their home town is.
I’m not set in stone on this! If someone has a better name than “gold farmers” I’m willing to be open minded.

How do they gamble?

2011-05-24T08:49:00.000-05:00

I often think about things in the real world and try to figure out how that would happen/work in my fantasy world. Silly little ideas about clothes later grow into the culture impacts of fashion. Too often we (myself included) forget that the fantasy world would have to be enormously different than the modern world. Here’s one that occurred to me:
Gambling: Cards would have to be the gambling style of the nobility. Why? Well because there was no mass production. A deck of cards should be an extremely expensive item. Each card would be a hand painted or inked work of art. Plus, what are they printed on? At best (cheapest) they are probably painted on slivers of wood – slivers that are exactly the same size and thickness. Cutting things that thin is not an easy (inexpensive) task. All this bubbles up to a deck of cards being very expensive!
So if only the nobles are playing cards, what are the commoners playing? Well, probably dice games. Two dice (d6 for all us gamers) are easy to carry around, and they work in most settings, probably even dirt. All sorts of dice games can be played with 2d6, often the kind that can be started or stopped very quickly, such as when a legion takes a 30 minute water break while marching.
What else? Well, in the bars there would be darts. Chess would likely be a nobility game because of the cost of a hand carved set, but checkers could be more reasonable for the commoners. Dominoes or other tile games might be more of a middle of the road (middle class) type of game, because they would be cheaper to produce than a chess set but more than checkers. (Think dominoes; mahjong seems too expensive.) Some tile games are based on card games, and might be a substitute.
What’s it matter in your campaign world? Well, it doesn’t if your game draws no distinctions between the haves and the have nots. In most cultures, the wealthy/nobles will always want to demonstrate their “superiority” over the lesser folk, even those lesser folk who have risen to high position (perhaps by killing dragons and taking their vast treasures). How? Well, the common warrior may be a great craps player, but have little idea how to play poker or chess. The snobby nobles will attempt to exclude or embarrass him because of this. Yeah – it’s a role-playing thing. If your players and your world have no role-playing, well, then I guess it doesn’t matter to you, but are you really playing a role-playing game then?

Why doesn’t anyone run away?

2011-05-02T10:00:00.001-05:00

Building on the last post - Why doesn’t anyone ever run away? I’ve touched on this before, but how many times have good guys or bad guys run away when in a FRPG battle? The problem is that without games geared to players acting defensively, it is usually suicide to back off. I know a lot of game systems that hand the aggressor a free shot (often undefended) if the enemy retreats. Think about the comic book villains. If they couldn’t retreat without hero whacking them for free, well, a lot of story lines would be different.
I think this is most glaring when you think of larger scale wars. If wars were fought like FRPGs then they would last about an hour. Once everyone was there, they would whack each other until one side was dead, or more likely both sides were dead. There’s none of this - retreat because of bad positioning. There’s no battle and withdraw and battle and withdraw. By FRPG standards Lee was an idiot during the Civil War, though Grant does seem to have been playing.
I really think that one of the major reasons this stuff doesn’t happen is that GMs don’t have time to properly prepare maps and scenes. If the GM fully knew what the terrain looked like, then either side might decide after a couple of bow shots that they were going to get shanked and high tail it out of there. Who has the high ground? Who has cover? Are there any places to hide? Dips? Ditches? Boulders?
Look, I get it. Especially having grown up in the flat lands, I don’t put culverts and hills into my maps, because they are tough to manage. We don’t sell mapped out locations, but maybe we should. Maybe it’s worth buying a fully detailed map of a place, so you can better run the area. Maybe just zooming in on Google Earth will get you there too.

Merchant War 3

2011-04-23T08:08:00.001-05:00

OK - So the Brinston Merchant Houses have been spreading all manner of propaganda against the Forsbury Cartels. A lot of this stuff is about how they’re all over extended and cannot pay their bills, but some of it is to try and minimize the abilities of the entire region. People like to think their rivals are stupid and weak, and the propaganda war is playing on those feelings. But it appears that they went too far.
One of the rumors is that last summer’s war was a loss for the Council of Baronies. (Forsbury is one of the baronies.) The war was against a group of spiritualists who used some massively powerful magics and tried to take one of the baronies as their own. (Centuries ago it was their ancestral homeland, so they felt they had a right.) The Barons beat them, but not according to the story tellers in Brinston. In rumors short on details, it sounds like the Council lost the war and a sizeable piece of its territory to a weak adversary.
Now we’ve talked about motivations here a lot, and this is exactly the kind of motivation that works - They’ve pissed off the Barons. While Baron Forsbury was already “all in” with his cartels, the other Barons are now branding themselves as merchants and therefore assuming that any attacks against Council merchants are against them as well. This isn’t farfetched at all, since each of the Barons is a merchant. Honsdeck is a Cattle Baron, Cifisdoan runs coal mines, and others control corn, cotton and other plantations. If Brinston really is coming against the merchants of the Central Plains, the Barons will be affected, and one by one, they’re all agreeing to help the cartels in whatever way they will need to.
In other related news, a night club owner in Brinston who was rumored to be a blabber mouth was killed “by robbers”. They didn’t hit his strong box, slit his throat from ear to ear (no other marks on him), and a new owner was in place the next morning. Yeah - Sounds like robbers to me. Good investigative work there Brinston! Then again, that’s one information source that Forsbury won’t be able to use.

Offensive vs. Defense

2011-04-23T07:58:00.001-05:00

It seems to me that most FRPGs are all about offense and not enough about defense. What do I mean? When’s the last time one of your players used cover as he advanced on a foe? Do your players want super powered weapons or super powered shields? (OK, they want both, but which one more?) Which has better bragging rights: I did 400 points of damage or He swung at me six times and never touched me? If your players are balancing a good offense with a good defense, then I think you’re in the minority. Even adult players would rather be bare chested barbarians than shield and armor types. What about the whole “glass canon” mage types? It’s not that they never consider defense, it’s just that the standard defensive strategy is to bring a healer.
My biggest problem with this is the shield rules in most games. Shields in most games are a flat modifier to defense. In Legend Quest, you use your shield levels, so you can be a skilled defensive fighter. Not surprising seeing my biases. In college, my character was known as the “damage sponge”. I was a paladin with way too much armor, who would keep the bad guys busy while my damage dealing friends knocked off the other bad guys. Now a days, the computer games have taught us the value of a “tank”, and yes, I often play one.
I think it comes down to an experience I had in my late teens. I have to say I was more of a leader than a follower in my youth (hopefully now too). We were somewhere we should NOT have been, and the other guys looked at me and said, “You go first.” Man, that sucked! While this was going on, we accidentally walked into an even more dangerous situation, and I was the dude in front. (The statute of limitations has likely passed, but I do not want to give details for fear of encouraging bad behavior in others.) After that it has always occurred to me, that no matter what the standard party formation is, it takes some balls to stand in front, especially if you expect that a lot of nasty guys are going to try and kill you.
My point is simply this. In real life, people avoid getting hurt. They do this by hiding behind barriers, advancing in covering teams, using shields and other protections, and countless other means, not all of them all that beneficial. It just seems that characters should do the same. No, it’s not as heroic, but it might add a level of strategy to your game that could be very interesting!

Dominoes

2011-04-16T07:33:00.000-05:00

The whole sugar/wine shortage thing is really more about cause and effect than about imports. Brutal slavery led to a revolt - makes sense. A revolt led to a loss of an important product - makes sense. Loss of something vital led to an uprising - makes sense.
What about your adventuring activity? What if your PCs go out and destroy a horrible slave trading business that has been stealing farm girls and turning them into cotton picking slaves? Well then there will no longer be those cotton picking slaves, which means there will no longer be cotton, which means that cloth and clothing will become either scarcer or really more expensive. This may not end a king’s reign, but your player characters will have just affected the economy of their homeland.
Game example that happened in Fletnern - What if your PCs come up with a way to hunt and kill a large number of mastodons? All of a sudden, ivory is flooding the market. Well, pretty quickly, the price of ivory nose dives, and their hauls, while still valuable, are no longer as valuable. This probably wasn’t that important of an issue, but I do have to keep track of the fact that ivory will never again be as valuable as it indicates in my own rule book.
Think smaller - campaign starting mission is to wipe out the wolves that are harassing the shepherds in the region. OK, they succeed and kill dozens of wolves for the bounties. Well, next year, either the deer and other prey animals are going to have a population explosion or some more dangerous critter is going to move into the wolves’ territory. Same if they wipe out a neighboring group of bandits, outlaws or raiders. Soon enough someone is going to move in there.
This can actually be easy for you as the GM. Draw up a ruined castle. Stock it with low level bandits. Send in the PCs. A year later (game time), restock it with mid-level orc raiders. A year later all this bloodshed has caused some undead to drift out of the castle’s catacombs and they are now terrorizing the countryside, possibly with their cult of freaky followers. One map, three adventures, the dominoes all fall in line.
The moral of this story: Don’t let your players’ actions happen in a vacuum.

What happens in the colonies matters!

2011-04-16T07:29:00.000-05:00

I was reading up on the slave trade as part of the merchant war that is building in intensity. I’m not going to argue the historical fact of this, but according to a fairly academic source, the brutal nature of the French Caribbean sugar plantations (huge slave colonies) caused the slaves to revolt. The slave revolt turned Saint-Domingue into the free state of Haiti. The loss of Haiti caused a shortage of sugar in Paris which in turn led to riots. It was these riots that turned the French Revolution from a high minded endeavor into an authoritarian regime (the government needed to crack down on the riots, and then never let up).
Doesn’t matter if it’s right (though it likely is) -It’s still a heck of a story. It made me think - What imports are going on in various areas that if someone were to “turn off the tap” would cause rioting? I mean - we’re not talking about blocking flour, we’re talking about sugar. Sure it’s a need, but it’s a lot more of a want. Booze came to mind. If you have a region that is a major wine drinking culture (or beer) and all of a sudden they can’t get their alcohol, you’re likely going to see some discontent. Now discontent doesn’t turn into riots without overcrowding, but still.
Why do you need riots? Why do you need stuff like this? You having any trouble motivating your characters to get involved in the politics of their homeland? This is a mini-campaign in the making: Wine has become scarce in the home city. The last few merchant ships that would normally have had it have been carrying grain instead. The news is that there was a bad grape season in the wine country. After several months, the stores have been depleted, and the alternatives are also running low. The country’s national dish requires wine, and there just isn’t any to be had. The king is getting nervous, because a mob just burned down a wine distributor’s warehouse when they found it empty. The city is fraying at the ends. The party needs to go get some wine and deliver it safely. Along the way they learn that this was in fact just a ruse by the wine producers to cause unrest. They are stockpiling wine barrels which they will deliver as soon as the king’s evil cousin is put on the throne. Could a revolution succeed simply because the people wanted wine and one king could give it to them while the other couldn’t? Depends on how much they love their wine! Governments have fallen over lesser issues.

How Big 2

2011-04-11T06:10:00.001-05:00

One of our faithful readers who usually comments in emails and not in the blog asked if there had ever been a major fire or disaster in Rhum. Certainly there have been disaster: fires, plagues, etc, but nothing major enough to wipe out more than a couple of neighborhoods. That was until the war 26 years ago. When Garnock advanced north, taking first Parnania, then Nanerette, then setting their sights on that little nothing town called Rhum, things went poorly. The majority of the city was outside the “walls”. The only reason the wall lasted was that the maze of streets and buildings surrounding it prevented an organized army from moving against it. Besides the siege itself, the battles were mainly skirmishes. By the time help arrived and the combined armies battled, Rhum was in ruins.
Rather than rebuild their not so fair city where it was (mixed in with some hills), they decided to move the entire city about two miles to an open plain with a strong running stream. While some of the buildings were literally dragged the two miles, most of the buildings in Rhum are less than a generation old. That was part of the dilemma; Rhum was supposed to have been built “too big” so it could grow the population, but how big was “too big”.
Right now I’m still feeling good about the size and density. Most likely before we release The City of Rhum, I’ll have sketched out one of the residential neighborhoods and I’ll feel better about whether or not the density works. The Narrows is a neighborhood that has always been described as similar to London, where the people built the upper floors bigger than the street level floors, so there is very little air between the houses, even those across the street from each other. Depending on how that works out, I’ll know a lot more!

So what are the enchanters doing anyway?

2011-04-04T06:13:00.000-05:00

As I’ve mentioned before, I once had a magazine article turned down because the editor thought I was kidding. The article was how magic (and this was magic from that really big FRPG that everyone played at least once) could be used to beauty and health care - two HUGE industries. Obviously this still bothers me. So many GMs believe that enchanters are going to hide themselves away in their little labs crafting huge swords for their buddies to use. That’s ... what’s the word ... stupid? ... dumb? ... ill-conceived? Whatever!
What would a mage (or alchemist or enchanter, etc.) lock himself away in a tiny tower for? Money? OK, yeah, that would lead to big hulking swords. But I think they’d be a lot more likely to do it for personal power, fame or knowledge; and to a mage, all three of those tie together. The more knowledge the more power and the more power the more fame. Look, these guys aren’t studying so hard just to become flunkies to some sword swinging dolt. They want to be “the man”. So what do they need to do that? Well, some of them would be developing new battle magics. But I think that a lot of them would be like modern research scientists. They would be trying to find that next thing, that next development in magic that would be the start of a new generation of magic or a revolution in the way magic is practiced.
So what is the enchanter doing? I think he’s trying to use his magic to learn more magic. He’s experimenting; he’s researching. I just finished watching the entire series of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. The whole series comes down to the fact that some alchemists were trying to gain immortality, so they created a life - a homunculus. The homunculus helped them figure out how to gain immortality, only he tricked them and gave the immortality to himself. What’s my point? Well, that magic types develop their magical powers for themselves. The alchemists basically summoned up a demon in hopes of learning from it. Learning what? Learning more magic.
In my world I have created a few magic items and enchantment spells that actually help alchemists and enchanters make stuff, either easier (faster) or more powerfully. While I have to admit that I haven’t exactly created hundreds of items (only a few), I think the reality of a fantasy era would be that there were a few spells that helped the military, and a ton of spells that helped the researcher.
My last point on this - Think about the wizards in movies. You walk into their lab and books are floating in front of him because the desk is so cluttered. Little creatures wander around stirring pots and watching over his experiments. Remember Merlin in the Sword and the Stone? His “best” magic was to shrink his entire home/library so it would fit in his satchel. He didn’t create magical swords, just knew where to find them. If you think about it from the wizard/enchanter’s point of view, you’ll make them more selfish, more self-centered, and develop more magic for magic’s sake, not for a warrior’s sake!

Relating Grain Into Gold to Reality

2011-03-27T21:34:00.001-05:00

If you multiply it out, the rules in Grain Into Gold seem to indicate that the fantasy farmer and his family (of mother, and two children) can produce enough food to feed themselves and seven other people. This means that just over one-third of the people were engaged in farming, but all the history books tell us that nine out of ten people were farmers. In some GIG circumstances, this number can go as low as 20% of the people were farmers. So what’s the deal? Well, it’s simple, though the math isn’t. The 1 in 5 or 1 in 3 numbers are dependent on a couple of issues. First, they assume that farmers only grow food. This obviously isn’t true as farmers also grow cotton, linen, sheep and goats for wool, hemp and various other textiles. They also grow spices, and though spices may not contribute to the “food” of the region, they were important crops that took labor and land. The farmers also grow all manner of specialty items such as tobacco, coffee, tea, indigo, etc ad nauseam. We didn’t even start on wine, beer and hooch.
Second, the Grain Into Gold production rates specifically do not take into account things like plagues of locust and droughts. Think of how much more food a farmer has to produce and store if every seven years a plague of locust wipes out pretty much all of his crops. This isn’t a silly notion, but part of the cycle of life. OK - so Americans may only have to worry about insect plagues every 17 years, but these farmers did not have insecticides to fight off these plagues. What about droughts? Depending on your definition of drought, they can occur as far apart as every 20 years or as close as every seven.
OK, so you need to plan out your world. You’re thinking - My world’s locust/cicadas are different from Earth’s, so I’m going to make them appear in huge numbers every ten years, because ten is an easy number to work with. And in this region of the world, where it’s usually pretty hot, I’m going to have a minor drought every ten years (easy math) and a major one every 20. So 1 in 10 years brings a reduction of 75% of food production (locusts), 1 in 20 bring s a 50% reduction (minor drought) and 1 in 10 brings a 80% reduction (we’re not planning to hit them for a minor drought and a major drought in the same year, so they’re really every 20 each). These events cut an average of 14% off the farmer’s production every year.
Lastly, and we’re not going to do the math on this, what about all those bandits out there? A nice calm country may not need to worry too much but an area that needs adventurers is likely going to see frequent bandit or orc attacks. Those damn bandits never just steal your stuff, they typically have to burn the crops and buildings. Not only are the crop lost, but if the farmer needs to spend time rebuilding, that’s time he likely isn’t growing stuff. What about taxes? Funny how I put bandits and tax collectors in the same paragraph, huh? Yes, the farmer is producing food, but the local lord is going to take some of it. This doesn’t change the fact that the local farmer is producing enough food for lots more people than live on his farm, but it shows how the redistribution happens. If the farmer is taxed at about 30% (20% civil and 10% religious), then his family of four is directly “sponsoring” one and a third governmental/religious person. Let’s look at our 3 out of 10 people are farmers. Well, 1 out of 10 is likely religious or supported by the religions. (Do they foster the poor?) 2 of 10 is government, likely one is a bureaucrat and one is a soldier. We just identified 60% of the population without including those who produce textiles or luxury goods, none of the miners, none of the craftsmen, and probably none of a lot of folks I’m not thinking of right now.
One final note - I never pretended that my fantasy worlds are like Earth at any age. Fantasy worlds need to be more than “The Middle Ages”. Whether it is magic or superior technology or the existence of elves, don’t let your players dictate something they learned in their history books. Earth history does not control your fantasy realms!

How Big?

2011-03-27T21:31:00.000-05:00

If you’re reading the Rhum Supplements, you’ll read that each sector is 1,000’x1,000’. That makes the city more than five square miles inside the wall. With 40,000 people, that puts the population density somewhere around that of a modern suburb - a nice suburb. That was never the point. The density I’m finding for ancient London and historic Paris are both pretty close to 87,000 per square mile. Let’s remember that London burned because of its narrow streets, and how many plagues did Paris have due to its overcrowding?
So the answer should be somewhere in the middle! We’re ret-conning all the Rhum supplements. Each sector will now be 500’x500’. That brings the size of the city down to one and a third square miles and the population density up to about 30K per sq. mile. That’s about the density of NY or double the density of some of the parts of Chicago I lived in. That makes sense - All I have to do is half the size of the houses that a family of 4.3 lives in, and shrink the streets a bit. Hey some of them can still have gardens, just not big ones. I’m a lot happier with this!
Look for the City of Rhum, the base upon which you can hang the modules, some time when the weather gets warmer.

How old?

2011-03-21T20:19:00.000-05:00

So I have been going through some boxes that are cluttering up the office. The idea was to image all of my hand written notes so I can throw out the paper, but still have the stuff on them. I’m up to scanning over 600 pages, so it is a fair amount of “stuff”. So I’m trying to figure out if any of this stuff is already in a file somewhere, and I’ve been opening up files on my computer that haven’t been touched in a while. How long? 20+ years. Yeah, creepy! Forsbury was created over 20 years ago, and the campaign we started there at that time is still running. Fletnern has been around for about 30 years, and Rhum and Brinston were the first cities. That doesn’t bother me as much; I guess because it hasn’t been one set of characters running the entire time.
Have I learned anything? Sure - type everything into the computer when you start, so you don’t have to scan or re-type it later! Thank goodness that Adobe makes cutting and pasting images simple!
Last week I posted about permanent enemies. One guy who we normally classify as a permanent enemy (even though he is now more of an ally) is still active in the campaign. When did he show up? the third mission! Not too many of my NPCs have survived and stayed interesting for two decades. (OK, there is a handful, but probably not too many more.)
Why am I doing this, the whole scanning thing? Because there are a couple of things I want from these old adventures. Some include towns and places that I put a little time into, but then didn’t use again. I’d like to get those on the maps and have them available for future use. Same with a couple of new monsters and spells. Every game/campaign can always use more of those. Some of the stuff isn’t old adventures, but instead notes and ideas I was generating. Some of them are even good.
I’m a better writer and game master than I was 20 years ago, but that doesn’t mean I should take that old source material and allow it to come back to life. Maybe a little polishing is needed, there are still a lot of diamonds in that rough! That reminds me of the review Legend Quest got in Dragon Magazine all those years ago: A real gem of a game. One of the best systems I’ve ever seen.

100 Bar Drinks

2011-03-21T20:15:00.001-05:00

Hey we’ve just released our latest product - 100 Bar Drinks - on RPG Now and e23. Are your bars dull? Want to get your players interested in their characters and what happens outside of combat? Introduce your players to these beverages, and you’ll see a huge change in the role-playing! Hey, everyone likes to argue over what’s “best”. Best team, best song, best movie, and best beverage. This is exactly the kind of thing that will help spark in-character conversations. It’s only $1.99, like the rest of our cheap books.
Don’t get confused. This isn’t some cheesy one-page thing with some names on it. This is 20 pages of drink descriptions. There are tons of beers, wines and the hard stuff, including some things that you might not have considered. There are even a few magical drinks.
100 Bar Drinks is probably the best representation of Board Enterprises and our products. Our products are focused around the folks who are interested in something more than melee rules, and our stuff isn’t intended for 11 year old kids. Check it out and get a flavor for what we do! (pun intended, though not a very good pun obviously)

Bad Guy “Levels”

2011-03-14T09:29:00.001-05:00

There comes a point in any campaign world where it isn’t OK to just keep making the bad guys bigger and tougher. A couple posts ago we talked about experience. Fortunately, in Legend Quest, you can customize your character, so there are circumstances where a 600 point deadly knight can easily overwhelm a 1000 point adventurer. This mainly comes when the adventurer is more of a jack of all trades, while the bad guy can be straight melee. But what about a 1,000 point character? Where did 1,000 point characters get to be so tough? They’re either 100 years old or they’ve been in a LOT of nasty scraps. How do guys like that “fly under the radar”? The point is, whether you’re using character points or levels, how did the guy with the huge experience get to be the guy with the huge experience. And assuming he did, wouldn’t the player characters know about him?
Not that I haven’t done it myself, but I always feel wrong about a mission where you go into the desert and fight a huge number of really experienced desert nomads. How did they get to be so good out in the desert where no one really knows of their existence. Now, if your game rewards you for challenges and not necessarily for actually killing people, then you can say they have overcome great challenges out in the desert, but what challenges? Staying alive is a big challenge and can teach a lot, but not how to wield a sword. Are there horrible sand eating desert monsters out there that need to be killed? If not, it’s not like they were fighting off all the other people in the desert - Tons of people don’t live in the desert (we’re not talking about LA here).
I’m not just arguing about experience methods here. I’m encouraging GMs across the industry to try and have some reasonable explanation for where all the really high level bad guys come from. Other worlds or hells are always good, but no tactic can be used over and over. Any really powerful creature that can be created through magic is good. Veterans of major wars are fine, but they should likely be known - maybe not individually, but “The Greenwood Company” from the six year satyr war. If powerful bad guys are coming into the area from distant lands, why?
This argument also encourages my on-going theme of “permanent enemies”, you know, those enemies who keep escaping and coming back again. Where did the bad guy get all that experience? From fighting the player characters over and over again.
One last point - as they have said on “White Collar”: No reputation is the best reputation. Certain bad guys only survive to be powerful because they are secretive. OK, that’s fine for the rogues and assassins, and maybe even the necromancers, but not for the rest of them. I hate arguing both sides of an argument!

Merchant War 2

2011-03-05T09:08:00.000-06:00

We haven’t brought the story up to date, so we’ll do that briefly now: Clearly Zeke Competine was the major instigator of the issues between the various merchant cartels. He even telegraphed that he was expecting problems when he hired a minotaur and a troll as bodyguards. The various cartels were starting to make their secret plans when all of a sudden, Zeke vanished from view. Conflicting rumors said he was dead or simply sick. Spies noticed all sorts of odd movements around the various mansions of Forsbury, including something that was interpreted as invisible people coming and going. The prevailing rumor (from the Forsbury cartels) is that Zeke was killed. There were no signs or sounds of conflict, and it appears some major league magic was used. The question at hand is who did it, and was Zeke the actual target? The story from the Competine Cartel is that Zeke became ill and returned home to Brinston to seek magical healing, because he didn’t trust the abilities of the healers in Forsbury. But now his assistant Violet is in charge of the cartel’s Forsbury operation and she is ruling with an iron fist. Rumors are starting to swirl that Violet may be behind Zeke’s problems in order to get her chance to take over.
Is it over before it started? Is Zeke dead? Was Zeke dead, and now returned to life? Who is to blame? If everything is done, why are there still tensions in Forsbury, Brinston and Nanerette (the city between the two)? The biggest question right now is who is that guy following Yemour Masterhill around and what are his intentions?
Is this a soap opera? Is it a detective story? Does it sound like an “adventure” that you would run? Have to admit, this is exactly the kind of “urban adventure” that we love!

Adventures vs. Encounters

2011-02-26T08:43:00.001-06:00

In Legend Quest, “experience” comes in the form of character points- points you use to build your character, increasing attributes like Strength or skill levels like Magical Power - Sorcery. There are no character classes. (Don’t get me started on classes - that will be another blog and not a nice one.) Well, the two main ways to get character point are adventures and encounters. Now adventures consist of extended things that make you encounter dangerous things several times over (and make you late for supper), while encounters are more typically single events. Case in point: Exploring the hidden forest while fighting off wolves and bears, eventually finding the hidden castle, and getting past all the evil wizard’s guards to rescue the princess and then escape through the hidden forest - That is an adventure. Going to the bandit camp and fighting all the bandits there to recover the stolen goods is an encounter. Now if you had to track the bandits across hundreds of miles, dodge hostile tribes along the way, and battle first the bandits and then their conjurer leader and his minions, well, that would probably be an adventure too.
But what about normal life, or at least non-hostile things? It is suggested that during the normal course of life in general, a character would earn about 10 points per year. Using this logic, I tell players that their starting characters are either going to be 25 years old or be able to tell me why they have earned more than the base average points per year. For most this is no big deal. Veteran of a war, gladiatorial experience, travels to distant lands (even without conflicts), these all can legitimately explain earning points outside the 10 per year. But what else?
The possibilities are endless, but I want to put some thoughts in the heads of you GMs out there. Think back to your childhood. (Probably not that far back for some of you.) Remember playing baseball or soccer in the summer? Most years you played on a team, got to know some guys, maybe even got a little stronger - the normal stuff that should be included in your 10 points per year. But was there one year that was different? One year where you were legitimately in the running for the championship maybe? You trained harder, you paid more attention to the coaches, you bonded more strongly with your team mates. Not only that, but while the other years on a team kind of blend together, that one summer stands out in your memory. Know why? Because it was an adventure.
Maybe it wasn’t sports for you. Maybe it was one year at summer camp. Maybe it was a really long vacation you took with your family. There was just something different about it that made it more of a learning experience, more of a life directing (not necessarily altering, but certainly focusing) experience. Probably some things went wrong, but those experiences taught you something that stayed with you the rest of your life. That’s it! That’s the point of experience. Something happened to you, and now that you have survived it, you know better how to handle that situation in the future. Maybe you were just scared, not actually in danger. Maybe you and your friends tried to start your own newspaper. It could be anything. But it stuck with you. That is what experience is supposed to be like. The number of monsters you kill is a poor substitute for figuring out what you may have learned along the way. As a GM, you need to try and figure out if this adventure they just went on was enough to alter the character’s perceptions of life.

Modern Prices

2011-02-20T07:32:00.002-06:00

It is often very easy to look at a modern thing and assume that they reflect what stuff should cost in a fantasy game, but that’s not even close to the truth. I want to be able to say - A banana costs 50¢, and an apple costs 25¢, so if an apple costs 1cc then a banana costs 2cc in game. Yeah - doesn’t work. Here’s why.
Start with the cost of marketing in the modern age. How much does marketing cost? Compare the cost of a store brand cola to Coke (not on sale). Yeah - not only is the difference caused by the advertising, but Coke should be able to have economies of scale that allow it to be produced more cheaply.
Then factor in the automation. We go to the store and buy T-shirts for next to nothing. Fantasy era characters have to pay for the weavers and the tailors. These weren’t garment district illegals here, but skilled craftsmen. Don’t think about what it would cost for a shirt from Wal-Mart, think about a hand knitted sweater imported from Ireland.
Don’t forget that we get our fruit from South America, and it’s still cheap. The characters will only be able to buy those things that are grown locally IF they are in season. Fruit probably cannot be imported, because it would rot on the ox drawn wagon. There would be pickled versions or other preservation strategies, but fresh fruit from somewhere else? Forget it.
Grain Into Gold tries to show these issues and more in the pricing schemes. One of the major pluses that we didn’t mention here (but is in the book) is that there are fewer middle men. Think about how many shippers and forwarders touch the stuff you buy as it makes its way from China to the US. There should be far fewer of these guys in the way, making things that much cheaper. Just like real life, corn is a lot cheaper from the farmer’s road side stand than from a grocery store.

Nameless, Faceless Monsters

2011-02-12T07:03:00.002-06:00

I’m tired of nameless, faceless monsters. Ogre Warrior followed by stats - DULL!! Human Barbarian Warlord - YAWN!! More games need more zip in their bad guys.
My 30 years of game mastering has taught me a couple of things. (Yeah - spooky huh? it really is 30 years) One thing I never know is when my players are going to stop to talk to somebody. Now I can’t figure out every single character they might meet (see a couple entries ago for the conversations about BSing during the game), but I think a GM needs to have some understanding of his bad guys. Case in point - My players were doing a good job of harassing a start-up orcish nation, so the leaders put together a goon squad and sent it after them. 30 mounted orcs came over the crest of a distant hill, and the player party (of ~8) took off running. [Side note - In Legend Quest, especially my campaigns, you don’t think “Orc = 1HD. Easy kill.” You think, “Their probably 500 point orcs and any one of them could kill me.” It’s lots more fun that way!]
Anyway - after a couple of skirmishes, the party was hold up in a hotel, and the goon squad found them. Huge fight out by the stables as the party tried to escape. With two party members unconscious and maybe a third of the orcs dead, they started a conversation. Now, here I am, in the middle of a fight, trying to figure out who these orcs were and what they might be thinking. Fortunately, it was late, and I called a stop to the game, to resume the next week with the conversation. It’s not like I put a ton of thought into this. I just assigned pro-wrestler names to each of the surviving orcs. Now, I had personalities to go with my characters. Some were crazy violent, some were reasonable, and some were simply stupid. Seeing as the hit and run fighting kept up for two more gaming sessions, knowing who the bad guys were really helped!
So what do I think GMs should do? I think you need to at least describe the general culture of any group of enemies your party will be fighting. Want it easy? Get a copy of A Baker’s Dozen Tribes; there we have thirteen examples of what we mean. But you can easily do this on your own:
1) This tribe of orcs uses wolves as steeds and spends most of their time as raiders and bandits. They live in the hills and are at home in the forests. Done. Now you know their motivation (looting) and which environments they will be best in.
2) This tribe of goblins is mainly shepherds, but their flocks have been diminished and now they have to raid their neighbors in order to survive. Done. They are more likely armed with slings and staves, than swords. They have experience fighting wild predators, but not with armored people. They are more likely to loot livestock than liquor.
3) This dragon has been the only predator in this area of the swamp most of her life. She hunts the huge rodents that live there. Done. She will not be use to things that fight back. She will be aggressive if she learns of any other “predators” in her territory. She will likely be curious until she gets hurt.
You don’t need to write out every soldier’s family tree back four generations, but if you know he’s from a country that is similar to ancient Rome, you’ll think about a disciplined soldier with experience and a name more like Marcus, Pompii, or Flavius (NOT Bob!).
So what if you spend the time to do this, but then don’t use it? What if your players kill the guys from a distance and never learn their names? You save it for the next time!

Looting a House

2011-02-05T08:14:00.001-06:00

As you can see from our products like An Army’s Arms or Grain Into Gold, I love detailing out treasure. We’re hoping to release A Baker’s Dozen Treasure Hoards and What Has It Got in Its Pockets, a d1000 random encounter chart for pick pockets. So I’m really into this!
I just had a tour of the Governor’s Mansion. Yeah ... I’ve known this for a while, but this tour really brought it home (no pun intended). No matter how detailed I want to be, I can’t actually detail the loot to be found in the simplest of homes, and REALLY can’t detail a mansion’s wealth.
Look around your house. There are probably 1,000 items in view right now! (This assumes you are not living in a bachelor pad with milk carton shelving, but even then???) Even a poor home would have 100s of kitchen tools and utensils. OK, not all of them are valuable, but anything made of steel likely would have some plunder value. For expensive homes, everything has value. Think about plundering a palace. Some of the items might be valueless on their own, but the fact that they came from the palace would grant them “artifact” or historic value. Even assuming that the looters would not take the heavy furniture (which would be hugely valuable), what about the rest of it?
Honestly, I write up those things that are of obvious value, and sometimes a few that aren’t so obvious. Then, if a character says something like, “This is an office, can I steal some paper or some blank scrolls or something?” I just give it to them. Of course, I make them roll for Scrounging, but come on, that’s a huge + modifier.
What I think is really required, and I will likely do going forward is this: assign some values and some weights. Let’s take a poor home: For 10 pounds, you can loot 25sc worth of miscellaneous. For 20 pounds, you can loot 35sc. For 30 pounds, you can loot 40sc. Maybe a wealthy house is more like: For 15 pounds, you can loot 100sc. For 50 pounds, you can loot 300sc. For 150 pounds, you can loot 600sc. With the poor house, you’re taking bigger and bigger kitchen steel. For the wealthy house, you’re starting to take paintings off the wall and rolling up carpeting. (These numbers are meant as examples and should NOT be used.) I have also done it where the longer you spend searching, the more you find of value, the idea being that you wouldn’t notice the kitchen knives if you just look at the counters, but if you go through all the drawers, then the semi-valuable knives would be found. This also can be used to factor in things like ripping the hinges off the doors and prying the marble out of the fireplace. One important note - don’t let them know the value unless they make an Appraisal roll. Make them decide whether or not to haul all that junk away first, then let them know what it was all worth.

More (urban) ideas

2011-01-29T06:41:00.001-06:00

From the last post, you’ll see that my campaign uses urban settings a lot. Many of the NPCs are developed and the PCs all have a decent idea of what is going on in the city, if not the world. At first, this was mainly to help me come up with semi-believable characters that would later be used in published content. After all, if we were playing in the city a lot, I would develop more characters and businesses and more importantly, inter-action between them. Think about your city/setting. I’ll bet you have more developed then you think.
Why does this matter? Because coming up with ideas can be tough. We’ve published Forge of Imagination and Character Foundry to help you come up with plot ideas and character ideas, and people buy them because often all you really need is the spark of an idea. Here’s how it all ties: Need a plot device, but you’re blocked? Think of a character in your setting/world that you haven’t used for a while, then advance their story. Did the party help a baron recover his kidnapped daughter? Maybe the baron needs more help, or the daughter is about to be married, or the daughter has her own daughter now and that princess was kidnapped. Does the party always hang out at a particular bar where they know the owner and bartenders? Maybe the brewery that supplies them needs help. Maybe the owner has come into a treasure map. OK - This probably sounds really difficult, like these ideas are no easier to come up with than any others, but they are, because you have some idea of who these NPCs are and what they care about.
Recent update in my campaign world - One of the top weapons trainers (a gladiatorial coach) hasn’t been used in a while, but had been an every week part of the campaign. OK, here’s a former slave who won his freedom and now trains freemen to fight, either in the arenas or on adventures. How to advance him? Well, he’s single, so let’s get him a wife. Where is he going to meet chicks? Well, he buys one. That part was pretty easy. I had a character; what was the next stage of his life cycle? OK, so now what? Well, I just added a slave woman to the city, and she needs a back story. Slave back stories aren’t that tough to develop. So, eventually he learns her language and learns that she was taken from her homeland and was separated from her child. He actually cares for his slave wife and wants to help her find her child, so he wants the party to help him. Would I have thought - let’s go after slavers in order to save a child? Probably not, but simply by advancing one seemingly forgotten NPC, I got a spark.
So, what’s new in the lives of the kings, merchants, innkeepers, captains, miners, bandits, priests, and healers in your world? Anything new there that could make for a cool adventure? It doesn’t have to be an ally’s life you’re advancing. What about the villains? Did any get away? Want to give any of them younger brothers who are out for revenge? You already spent the time creating these characters, why not make use of that effort and use them again. Besides, reusing NCs makes the campaign stronger, or at least more coherent.

Military Recruiting

2011-01-21T08:28:00.001-06:00

I have been thinking about how the soldiers get into the armies. For the smaller armies, it makes sense that the officers do their own recruiting, but for the big armies, there would have to be recruiters out there. Sure patriotism and desire for a better job than hog farming are strong motivators, but there has to be someone out there either strong arming these guys or convincing them. For towns with strong war gods, I would think that the recruiters were either associated with the temple or actual priests themselves. In Rhum, the Temple of Manoto sponsors a club for young boys where they learn wrestling and other teenage martial skills while being taught patriotism - practically a junior ROTC program.
I’m thinking mainly about the bigger militaries. Do any of your cities have standing armies that number in the thousands? There has to be recruiters out there supplying men, even if the officers actually have the responsibility, they must be willing to pay the recruiters to bring them “fine, young men”. I can see a recruiter going to a small town. First he convinces one of the more popular kids to join the army. Probably tells him all the stories about how the chicks will dig it, and he’ll be an officer in four months. Then he dresses this kid up in the full uniform with his weapons and uses him as a shining example of what the other boys in town will want to be like. I recall some stories, I think from the Civil War, where guys were joining up because the uniform came with a pair of boots, and they had never owned a pair of boots before. Certainly something similar would be true in a fantasy game.
What about conscription? Does every man have to serve two years? If so, how would you explain straight mage classed characters? What about “shanghaiing” recruits? Some poor slob gets drunk and wakes up on a naval vessel heading into a war zone. Maybe the lord of the manor has the right to simply assigning his peasants to his military force, like conscription, but more specialized.
There’s a lot more about this I feel I need to flesh out, because each of the cultures in each of my cities is different, but the more I think about it, the more I think how someone gets into the military is just as important as how many are there.

Maps and the necessity (or lack thereof) for them

2011-01-15T07:34:00.001-06:00

So have you mapped your world? Have you mapped your major cities? Parts of me want to scream, “YOU HAVE TO MAP!” But other parts of me keep thinking - but if I fill in all the spaces, then I can’t continue to be inventive. After all, once the space is all filled in, then I have to send the PCs somewhere else.
I love maps in fantasy fiction. My best set of Lord of the Rings has fold out maps attached to the back covers, so you can read the book and follow along on the maps. (Oh come on, I can’t be the only one with multiple sets. You don’t loan your hardcover boxed set to friends do you?) As a GM I have felt that I needed to lay out the skeletal structure of the world: continents, mountain ranges, major rivers, major cities. As long as these were fairly sparse, there was always a ton of space between them that I could fill with details later on. In fact, there were times when I’d look at what I had done and thought - what the heck was that all about? and then I’d have to come up with a reasonable answer that didn’t tear the political structure of that part of the world apart. Usually - that worked pretty good.
My real problem is with the cities. Rhum was mapped out down to the 10’ squares. Then I needed it to be bigger, so I changed the dimensions and mapped it out to 20’ squares. Then I needed it bigger again. Now, all the tax districts are mapped; most of the main neighborhoods are fleshed out in some way, but huge parts of the city are completely undrawn. The result? I haven’t run an urban adventure in Rhum since.
Forsbury is even worse. The map looks like a badly drawn circle with numbers indicating where the major landmarks are. Yep, only the major landmarks. Now I can BS whatever I need, but I know my consistency is 0. Six months ago, there was a tavern across the street from someone’s house, and this month there could be a laundry. As long as the players are as forgetful as I am, this works, but their multiple brains always seem to remember what I forgot, and then the whole illusion is shot. I hate that!
The obvious advice is to write down the nonsense that comes out of my mouth so I can remember it for the next time, but that never works. I can’t stop in mid-BS to jot down notes, and the unimportant parts have fled my brain by the time the session is over (typically because I’m pretty much going to sleep right after the game).
So I remain torn. On the one hand - stability, continuity, the illusion of a real world. On the other - infinite possibilities, though most of them are ill conceived because you had to make them up on the spot. I know there’s a happy medium, I just don’t know if I’ve figured it out yet.

Winter Foods

2011-01-09T05:30:00.001-06:00

I have to admit, I’m fascinated with how people lived without modern technology. I camp a lot, but that’s different. I can still bring a can of sweet corn and frozen beef with me to make my dinner. But our fantasy era characters didn’t have metal cans or freezers, so what did they do?
No, this isn’t an article about what they did. If you want more of that, check out Grain Into Gold and the upcoming Coins of the Road. I really just want to plant the idea in your head, that there were some really cool and inventive ways of providing food all winter long. Let’s face it, they needed to provide food all spring long too, because it’s not like fresh food just appeared the first month of spring. Things we consider weird, like pickled fish, were not only perfectly normal, but they were necessary, perhaps even special treats.
Does every GM need to know the amount of salt it takes to make a corned beef and what the shelf expectancy of the final product would be? No! But you do need to have some understanding of it. Otherwise you can’t create your cities and the homes in those cities. Do your farm cottages have root cellars for the potatoes, carrots and beets? Are they pickling their products, maybe a barrel of sauerkraut? What are they doing to keep the rats and other vermin out of the flour or meal? On a different track - How do they store up fuel for the winter?
You think it was rough on the East Coast this year? Think about a farm cottage that runs out of fuel when 20” of snow hits them.

2010

2011-01-09T05:29:00.000-06:00

We want to thank all of our fans and other customers for a great 2010! If we keep having years like the last three, we will be in the business for a very long time to come! We’ll try to keep providing quality products and listening to our customers. In summary: Thank you all!

Persuasion

2011-01-01T08:35:00.001-06:00

This is an article I wrote for a small press gaming magazine 15 years ago. The magazine went under before it was published, but I thought it would make a good blog post.
In a tournament I once ran, one character was an inquisitor (a torturer). He had worked for the Duke of the region for many years and become one of the most feared men in the region. Upon the Duke's death, a wild romp had begun over who the successor would be (the main point of the tourney). This inquisitor backed a nephew of the old Duke and the two of them were able to bluff their way into the palace and passed all of the guards protecting their rivals (well, all but the golem that killed them both, but that's another story).
These characters did not fight and kill everyone that opposed them, they intimidated. "Do you want to be the next one on my rack?" is quite a fitting argument to avoid conflict. Granted the torturer was skilled in intimidation and had an extreme presence about him, but this type of "attack" can be quite powerful.
In many games people are afraid of dragons. Anyone not afraid of dragons either has a game master that has been too nice to them or a lack of good sense. Why are people afraid of dragons? Because they breathe bone-frying flames and can bite a steer in half. Pretty good reasons to fear dragons.
What about normal adventurers? Farmers and merchants should have a healthy fear of these battle hardened veterans, even if only because the rumors of short tempers and fast blades. Not to suggest that adventurers should be able to bully their way through any town, but they should certainly be respected and treated with care.
A solitary orc guard facing a troop of six armored and mounted men backed by a dangerous looking wizard should flee in terror or quickly lose his life. There is no reason for the orc to stand his post only to be cut down by the first initiative rolled by the adventurers, yet this happens time and time again. Common sense, even in a simple and stupid creature, would have the orc flee no matter how afraid of his boss he might have been. Only a religious fanatic or other berserker warrior would face down six opponents when any one of them could easily defeat him.
Remember the gun-fighters in the old westerns? The second they walked into town, parents started bringing their children in off the streets. Store keepers closed early. The local sheriff walked out to discuss the fact that he "didn't want no trouble". How did the people in these little town know that these were gun-fighters? Could it be the fact that they walked into town wearing weapons in plain sight? Could it be the fact that their clothing often looked like it had been through a battle? Could it be the killer look in their eyes? Could it be the fact that nobody looking like them lives anywhere around here? Do these things sound exactly like how most adventuring parties enter a town, no matter what the genre?
The people in the town they have just entered not only know they are there, but they will know where they are staying, what they look like, and have made up several rumors about what their real purpose is. These adventurers should have an awe power over the generic farmers in a town. They should be able to intimidate just about anyone. The civilians will either worship them as heroes or fear them as the vilest villains.
As for the adventurers themselves, why are they not afraid? Should the thought of annoying the local baron and bringing down the full weight of law enforcement intimidate the party? One would think it would, but typically the local baron had better have several warriors more powerful than the party if he wishes to keep himself safe. Unfortunately with the average adventuring party, powerful guards becomes a test of machismo vs. machismo. No self-respecting adventurer can allow the baron’s bodyguards to scare him away. Killing the baron becomes a matter of honor, whether there is a reason for it or not.
Even in situations where the game master outright tells the characters that acting against this certain person will mean your death, they typically insist upon testing the theory. OK, so only berserker warriors, religious fanatics and adventurers will fight battles that they have no reason to believe they will win.

Merry Christmas

2010-12-25T20:22:00.003-06:00

Merry Christmas to all of our readers! The holiday will delay our posting, but we'll have it out in no time. In the mean time, read an article we wrote years ago. When written, very few of these ideas were included in Fletnern. Now most are represented!
http://www.gmsmagazine.com/articles/a-world-of-difference

Reputations

2010-12-19T08:09:00.002-06:00

I was expanding on some of the recent history for Fletnern, and I had a semi-emotional feeling. I was writing about the Vile Ones, the tribe of orcs who were the tops dogs. (If you read 13 Tribes, you will see that the Crooked Swords are now the top tribe.) Anyway, to me, the Vile Ones should instill fear in the hearts of the commoners around the city of Parnania. Now how to get that feeling into the players?
Reputations are a funny thing in role-playing games. The characters know far more than the players ever could. This means that when you’re introducing missions, you need to say things like, “You’ve known about and feared the Vile Ones tribe your whole life. These orcs are known as the best warriors and the most ruthless mercenaries in the Central Plains.” Of course, if you say that, most players immediately start arguing that their characters aren’t afraid of anything, least of all some orcs, but the truth is, this tribe of orcs dominated the region for a generation. Even the most skilled warrior would have a little twinge in the pit of his gut when the Vile Ones are mentioned. He probably lost family members to their assaults.
Then I thought - well, is it fair that I assume that everyone knows who these guys are. After all, the orcish army was huge; would every peasant know the Vile Ones. Yeah - I think so. The story tellers and news bringers of that time would want to tell the most exciting stories, so they would enhance the reputations of the major players. In modern times, everyone knows who the KGB were (are?). Think about the Iraqi Republican Guard. Before Desert Storm, the news media portrayed these soldiers as the most dangerous military on the face of the earth. Afterwards they are best remembered by the joke - Iraqi guns for sale, only dropped once. Are either of these valid - of course not! They are both exaggerations, but with enough storytelling, they are believed.
In my games, the players normally don’t care what the reputation of a group is, if they have a reputation. I write all this cool background stuff, and people seldom care. (Look back at my last entry about how huge Fletnern is, and it might explain why they don’t care. They simply cannot know it all.) What they notice is when a group doesn’t have a reputation. If they never heard of them before, then they know they’re insignificant.

Where’s Fletnern?

2010-12-11T07:15:00.001-06:00

Anyone who has bought our products likely knows of the world of Fletnern. Fletnern is the flagship setting for most Board Enterprises products, even when the products are generic. (They truly are generic, but the examples typically come from Fletnern.) So what’s the deal? Well, you can see cheat sheets and starter guides for free at http://www.boardenterprises.com/fletnern.html, but even that isn’t the “world”.
I’m a big fan of Ed Greenwood. I love the way he developed his histories. Eons ago, I had the great pleasure to have lunch with Jeff Grubb at GENCON. I was probably not even old enough to drink, but he was short on time (between signings and booth work) and was willing to have lunch with me if I was wiling to fetch it. Between that 45 minutes and several articles he had written for Dragon Magazine, I came to understand what he had done with the Forgotten Realms (as well as MSH, Gamma World and some others). He had taken a huge filing cabinet full of Ed’s disjointed notes and turned them into a coherent book describing a world/campaign setting. Oh, I’m sure Ed helped too, but Ed had been the idea man and Jeff the producer.
What does this have to do with Fletnern? Well, I’m an idea man without a producer. Fletnern is about 1,200 pages of disjointed ideas kept on dozens of computer files and one or two file boxes. There is actually a page in there entitled “lost cities”. No, this isn’t like El Dorado, this is cities that are mentioned in some place in the files, but I have no idea what I was talking about or where that city is supposed to have been. OK, at least half of them are places I renamed, but which new city are they?
See how disjointed this is? That’s how those 1,200+ pages are. And that count doesn’t include the campaigns that likely have setting information in them. I realized a decade ago that Fletnern was too big to publish, so I started to write it up not as a setting book, but instead as The Encyclopedia Fletnernia. Cute, huh? You think I’m off on another tangent, but I’m not. The world of Fletnern is so well developed, that it has ceased to be a marketable product. In order to make it marketable, I would have to cut it down to the point where it was no longer a strong, unique world. I am considering, just writing the Encyclopedia and selling it for $10 despite the fact that its 400 pages long, but I still don’t know if that would be marketable.
So the answer to the question, “Where’s Fletnern?” is simply - it’s stuck in pre-publication because I’m incapable of reducing it to a readable book. I hope you continue to enjoy the free stuff we give out on it, and if the demand increases, you just might see that massive encyclopedia hit the distributors.

A Baker’s Dozen Tribes

2010-12-05T06:45:00.002-06:00

Earlier this year we announced that we would produce 100 Towns, Book of Wishes, A Baker’s Dozen Tribes, and 100 Daggers. Well, we’re 75% of the way there. A Baker’s Dozen Tribes is available on RPGNow and e23. This book is a pretty detailed look at thirteen different humanoid tribes. Humanoid can mean anything you want from kobolds to orcs to giants to ogres to cavemen, whatever! What matters is the culture, tactics and equipment - all laid out and easy for you to drop right into one of your missions. So why buy this? Well, start with, it’s $1.99. OK, not the best reason, but a good one. Better yet - Ever want to plunk down several dozen orcs, but you hate how generic they are? Use one of these and they won’t be generic any more. Ever have some humanoid tribe come up as a random or wandering monster? What do you do with that? Well, give them a little depth by using these tribes. Stuck for what to do with a corner of your world? You get the picture.
As for 100 Daggers - It’s postponed. We’re still trying to finish 100 Bar Drinks, but the @#$%ing memory stick ate it, and its currently being rebuilt. Yes, I had backups - but they were a week old and had less than half the book. Just venting!

The Cost of Magic

2010-11-27T06:18:00.000-06:00

Check out The Cost of Magic, an article from BE writer John Josten on the GMS Magazine site. John is likely to do several articles for these guys because we think they’re cool!

Campaign Calendar

2010-11-27T05:58:00.000-06:00

I am always stressing, here and in my books, that the world does not revolve around the adventurers. As a way of forcing that issue, I like to make out a calendar for the year (in the game world). That way, I have certain major news items happen, no matter what is going on in their lives. These typically aren’t the major wars and battles, but more of the softer side of life. For example - One of the main characters in our longest on-going campaign is a major noble. As such certain things are expected, such as attending weddings and other social gatherings. Right now it is the first month of the game year, and I’m planning the noble weddings for the year. As the year goes on, adventures and other missions might put this character on the other side of the world when a socially important wedding is occurring. That causes drama in the character’s life.
I think about this like Stan Lee did for the early Spiderman stories. You know how real life kept interfering with his adventures? He also had to figure out how to pay the rent. He got fired from his job(s) if he kept vanishing into a broom closet to change into his superhero suit. The question is - Do you want your adventurers to have lives like Batman, where every social gathering that occurs is really only an excuse to have the PCs start a mission, or do you want them to have to role-play realistic characters that have back stories and players who are strongly attached to them? (All anti-DC statements are directed against the DC comics from decades ago and not necessarily recent movies that make up all of what some of you youngins know about comic books.)

Patrons of Adventure

2010-11-21T08:06:00.001-06:00

I believe very strongly that adventuring parties need patrons or sponsors. Here’s my thinking: The local Duke’s daughter has been kidnapped and he needs someone to go rescue her. So he turns to this group of cutthroats who answered an ad in a bar somewhere and entrusts them to return his daughter to him safe, sound and still virginal. WHAT!?!? But that’s how adventures often times work, right? Someone needs something very important done and they hire a group of mercenaries that they have never met, but that they believe can and will kill for them in cold blood. Is that really who they want to trust? How many adventures start with, “I need you to do something for me, but you have to keep it a secret.” Right - Someone important has a secret to keep, so they trust a stranger, let alone a group of strangers?
I think adventuring parties need a sponsor or patron - a person or organization that frequently employs them. This lets the employer come to trust the group, and perhaps on occasion vouch for them to other organizations in need of help. But who am I talking about?
Merchants are probably the best for this. They have money and frequently need mercenaries for a variety of reasons. They are also masters at organization. They have allies among other merchants and often into the political arenas, so they can “lend” their teams to others.
Churches are good too. They may have various needs and are unlikely to have the right style of people who can take on the more dangerous or violent tasks. They also have allies among the other churches who might have needs as well.
Obviously, political powers can be patrons too, but they usually have standing armies of their own. This means that the jobs they need done would have to be something the army cannot handle on their own, which may put a heavy influence on what will and won’t work intelligently.
Let me give an example: The players find a treasure map on a mission and decide they are going to sail to the deserted island and dig up the treasure. They now need to go to the docks, find a ship and/or a captain, likely hire a crew, arrange for supplies and logistics, possibly worry about the import tariffs that will exist when they return and a whole slew of other really boring things that the PCs are probably not cut out to take care of in the first place. However, if their patron says, “I want you to go retrieve a buried treasure”, the patron will have already taken care of the ship, crew and supplies. If you let the PCs do it, what’s to say they won’t hire Long John Silver and his crew of pirates? While the patron is arranging for the ship and crew, he probably has arranged for the players to stay at a particular hotel and handled many of their living expenses.
Patrons shouldn’t make the campaign boring, but they help to pull it all together. When a new patron approaches, he will likely want to try them out on something less important and as he grows to trust them, then he uses them for the really important and profitable stuff. If they show loyalty back, they will find themselves tied to the patron and embroiled in whatever intrigues affect the patron (allowing for more adventures). A campaign shouldn’t have just one patron. Maybe after proving themselves useful to the Mayor, he tells the Baron about them, and later, the Baron tells the King, and as they grow in experience, they get passed up the chain of command.

What’s a Noble to Do?

2010-11-13T07:53:00.000-06:00

Thinking back on historic nobles - In a lot of ways we think of them as soldiers and tax collectors. But if you read some of the histories closely, you find out about the kings granting this deed of land and that deed of land to the nobles. Sure, sometimes these were just tracts of land filled with sharecropping peasants, but sometimes it was more. Sometimes it was towns or villages. Sometimes it was mills.
I’ve made no secret that the nobles in my world are also merchants. I think this makes really good sense. I think the lesser nobles would have controlled the mills, so that not only did they collect the tax on the crops, but then they also get a share of the profits from milling the grain. This works even better when the noble lord is the soldier and his younger brother is the miller. But extend it - The nobles control all the land so they make perfect ranchers. Think back to the Old West where the ranchers controlled the law in the towns and no one could stop their cattle herds from wandering into corn fields.
In Fletnern, the major noble activity is the crafting of wines. They own the vineyards, they control the serfs, and they are the ones making the wine. Of course, if they produce enough wine to export, they are going to be the ones transporting it, and likely taking others along with them for the ride. After all, they have private armies, why not split the army during times of peace and send half to protect the caravan from bandits?
Don’t stop here. Think of all the commerce driven mainly by land ownership. Quarries, mines, any water powered mill, lumber camps, shipyards. The logic is this: If nobles control most of the land and some guy discovers a diamond mine, wouldn’t the noble who controls that land simply take over, no matter what agreement he originally had with the prospector? And if he didn’t control the land, he’d contact his buddy the king and have the land granted to him and then kick the prospector out. If it’s a valuable enough diamond mine, the king might even send an army to help the noble take that piece of land away from the neighboring king.
I’m not saying that only nobles can be merchants, but when you’re the one who gets to make the laws, why would you be content to simply collect taxes, while others got rich, especially if they might be getting richer than you?

Great Material

2010-11-08T05:47:00.000-06:00

In our book Character Foundry, we set out the concept of “Great Material”. Surround yourself with great ideas and they will spark ideas within you. Further, you can take bits and pieces from other things and incorporate them, making your job as GM easier and often times better. An example was using the annoying friend from an old sitcom and marrying him to the real estate broker from a current movie to make an NPC couple you need in a city. Poof - You know what they look like, sound like, and probably how they will act in many situations. But when do you do this? You do it for the really big games.
Take our merchant war. There are so many characters buzzing around this thing, many of which have never entered into play before. How does a GM intelligently guide the NPC actions and reactions? By knowing the characters. But you can’t do that (at least not easily) for three dozen made from scratch NPCs. Giving some of these new NPCs personalities from movie characters, I can far more easily think, “What would Draco Malfoy do?” This does a couple of things - Mainly, it gets me there quicker. Also vital - It stops everything from being logical. What a boring and easily defeated world you would have if all of your NPCs were logical. Sure, the smart move might be to forgive and forget, but if the NPC is brutal and vindictive, that ain’t gonna happen! Maybe some NPCs are cowards and even though they have the might to force their will, they might be afraid to risk it. Or the reverse might be true, and the character might be the world’s greatest bluffer and his assumed might is really all illusion (maybe literally).
Personalities aren’t that important for NPCs you expect to be killed before they utter a sound, but for the big games, especially the ones that don’t involve a “dungeon”, you need to know more about the bad guys!

So What’s Legend Quest

2010-10-30T07:03:00.000-05:00

New readers of this blog may be wondering what this Legend Quest thing is we keep talking about. Legend Quest is a high fantasy, pen and paper RPG published in the early 90s. We have been maintaining and updating the system the entire time, not that it needed much tweaking. LQ uses a simple rule: Attribute x 10% + Skill Level x5% = % Chance of Success. While this might sound overly simplistic, it is the consistency of this rule that makes the game hugely dynamic. By applying the base CoS (“chance of success”) rule, the GM can determine what the chances of nearly anything are. In most games, when a player wants to swing from the chandelier, grab the crown off the king’s head, and land on the narrow window ledge, the GM is at a loss for what chance such a thing has. Not in LQ, that’s simply three CoS tasks.
A couple of other points - There is bleeding damage, so if you get knocked around, you want some healing magic or first aid, before you keel over. Armor wearing requires skill, and it blocks damage. More strength does more damage with a weapon, but every weapon has a top end. Magic makes you more tired, so there’s none of this loss of memory stuff. The game is intended to keep the thresholds to a minimum. There isn’t a point at which suddenly some character automatically gets a new power. But there are no classes either. It’s a point based character creation, and you can make any type of character you want! Forget those rules about who can and cannot use healing magic -anyone willing to train in it (by spending experience) can use it.
The bad guys are different too. Each monster is created similarly to the player characters. Our best example has always been three tigers used in a jungle adventure. One was a stealthy stalker who attacked from surprise. Another was an almost berserk attacker who pounced first and attacked violently with its bite. The third (and last) was more of a bluffer. He had an incredibly intimidating roar, but not a whole lot to back it up. Needless to say, after the first two, they avoided the third, risking natural dangers like quicksand and snakes rather than encounter another tiger.
Bottom line: If you want a complicated melee system, with no role-playing, find a different system. Legend Quest is set up to make melee, range, magic, stealth, and social skills all fairly equally important, though clearly not at the same time. It is a true role-playing game, and not just a way to handle magical battles. We hope you’ll check it out!
Legend Quest on e23. Legend Quest on RPG Now.

A Merchant War in Forsbury

2010-10-23T09:08:00.000-05:00

There is a merchant war brewing in Forsbury. Since most people do not know much about Forsbury or how their merchant wars go, let’s lay out some of the chief players:
The Fist of Forsbury - The top five cartels in the city, allied against all external forces (loosely allied)
The Masterhill Cartel - Second generation cartel dealing mainly in standard goods desired by the largest number of people. Run by Yemour (the bad cop - the manager and tyrant) and his brother Herlol (the good cop - salesman and smoother). One of the largest land based cartels in the world when judged by volume of goods.
The Davvissen Cartel - Founded by the current owner, Caitlin Davvissen. Caitlin has an advantage as she has recently become the Baroness of Forsbury. Caitlin is a former adventurer (termed by some an “assassin”) who set up a major ivory harvesting operation and used it to fund her start-up cartel. She specializes in high end goods for the wealthy.
The Frumpt Cartel - Freddy Frumpt is a slave trader descended from slave traders in Garnock. He relies on his aristocratic manner and his large army to maintain his safety and alliances.
The Polnoska Cartel - The oldest cartel in Forsbury. They focus their efforts on the shipping of foodstuffs, including their own manufactured sausages and other preserved meats.
Travelers’ Cartel - not as much a wholesaler like the others, Travelers focuses on moving people across the continent with carriages and coaches. Run by Seddy Buxxing, Travelers also focuses on entertainment venues in various cities. Travelers is in many ways the outsider among the Fist of Forsbury due both to his different business and his frequently underhanded business dealings.

The Competine Merchant House - This cartel is run mainly from Brinston but has offices in Nanerette and Forsbury. The accusation is that the Competines hired bandits to attack a Masterhill caravan. Zeleid Competine runs the cartel from Brinston, but has placed his only son Zeke (actually Ezekiel) in Forsbury to run things there. Zeke is the one accused of hiring the bandits. Both are known as ruthless business men.

The situation - The Masterhills bid higher than the Competines to buy some porcelain goods from a factory near Parnania. This is a standard Forsbury tactic - overbid to win the business then later on, lower the price paid once the producer feels they have no other alternatives. While carrying its first shipment, the small caravan (only four wagons and about 13 men) was attacked by seven bandits. While seven against thirteen may seem like bad odds, the bandits were overly confident in their leader, a fireball wielding mage. After the first fireball exploded, the Masterhill snipers knew exactly who they needed to kill and fast! Meanwhile the Masterhill wizard (hey! no fair you having a mage too!) opened up with thunderclaps. The Masterhills made short work of the bandits, capturing five (though the crossbow bolt peppered mage was beyond hope). Fortunately, the Masterhill wizard was also able to cast some healing and no Masterhill guards were lost. The surviving bandits swear they were hired by Zeke, at least that’s what the dead mage said. Was Zeke really such a sore loser that he would attempt to arrange this attack? Is he such a bad tactician that he fumbled it so thoroughly? Is he acting alone or is this the opening salvo in a major Brinston vs. Forsbury merchant war?

The Emotion of Wishes

2010-10-16T11:57:00.000-05:00

We’re usually not emotional while blogging, at least we don’t start that way. This is different. Board Enterprises has been in business for closing on 20 years now, and with the e-publishing of Book of Wishes, it feels like we’re finally “back in business”. Hey, we’ve made really good money with Grain Into Gold and some of the other generic supplements, but having both Legend Quest and Book of Wishes available on line means our system is out there and available again. It’s not just that the core rule book and most popular rules supplement are available - This blog has shown that Legend Quest isn’t a stagnant system, but is living and breathing with rules explanations and options. We’re not resting either. More like basking with pride. OK, that’s done, time to get back to work. more “100s” coming out soon!

Ruins

2010-10-11T09:58:00.000-05:00

I love ruins. I know; they can be cliché, but I love ‘em. It comes from actually having read Jungle Book and Tarzan and the City of Opar. Whether it’s a ruined temple with a vault of incredible wealth in the basement or a vast deserted city filled with minor clues as to what really happened to the mighty inhabitants. I guess it’s because I think it’s a lot more plausible that people would wander around in a massive ruined city than they would find an underground dungeon stocked with monsters. (Sorry if I’m being a buzz kill.)
How much do I like them? An entire continent on Fletnern is now a ruin filled archipelago. I wasn’t satisfied with a ruined city, I needed a ruined continent. The biggest adventure setting I ever made? The ruined city of Ballogfar - Capital of the Goblin Empire. Ballogfar was actually a fairly well constructed idea. I wanted a big ruined city - but what to fill it with? Avoiding the whole Shangri-La idea of a lost city filled with people, I wanted a true ruin. So the only thing that survives for 1,000 years is undead. Of course, I could have gone for the whole animals moved into it, but that wasn’t the spooky ruin vibe I wanted. So what happened? Well, the ogres, orcs and goblins lived together in a caste system, but then the orcs and goblins rebelled against the ogres. That seems logical. So the ogres pressed on with some goblin slaves and a force of crafted undead slaves. That too seemed reasonable. But having an army of zombies walking around eventually bred a plague within the city, wiping out most of the ogre population and most anyone who wandered into the city. This justifies the massive size of the city (it once housed tens of thousands of goblins, orcs and ogres) as well as the reasons it hadn’t been found (those who found it were dead of the plague before they could return to civilization).
Of course, you don’t need that massive size - a ruined temple works great! Religious folks built a temple and a small village around it. The temple is probably stone or brick, while the homes were wood. When the neighboring cult wipes out this cult, their temple is seen as taboo. One hundred years later, the jungle has swallowed the village and nothing remains, except the temple, now filled with snakes and that one fabulous treasure that served as a embodiment of their god. (Don’t tell the adventurers that the jewel is cursed - they’ll figure that out later!)

Evil?

2010-10-01T20:52:00.000-05:00

I’m working on a book concerning the nobility of one of the core regions of Fletnern. The idea is to present a very large number of nobles and their employees - but present them as personalities, not as game statistics. More - The hope is to present this same group of people as two completely different styles of government, showing that you can take personality driven characters and add them to any game world or game system. A lot of these characters I “know”, because I use them a lot. While writing, it is becoming clear to me that they will be seen as “evil”.
Let’s take the top dog, Edward Highell-Forsbury. He is coming off as a laissez faire, philanderer with little concern for his citizens who see him as a “hanging judge”. So I need to rewrite him. He is in fact a very complex character. He is himself a business man, one of the largest cattle ranchers in the world. He is also one of the most powerful political figures for hundreds of miles in any direction. It is true that his morals would be considered incredibly low by most Americans, but are pretty much on par with Hollywood, except for the fact that he actually likes his wife. He also has a sense of duty, not to any individual subject, but to his subjects as a whole. He has twice risked his own life in wars to defend his allies (truly defending the region as his lands would have eventually been at peril as well). He did this out of his sense of duty, an honor code that he follows begrudgingly. He uses his political connections to advance his business dealings, but typically as a means of defeating rivals and not as a means of bilking his customers. He’s not a nice guy, but is he evil?
Let’s take a different example. Take a business man who has amassed a fortune through intelligent business deals, peppered with insider knowledge and political contacts. So far it seems the same, right? But this guy isn’t a nobleman. He’s not using his contacts, but instead bribing high and low level political figures to change the laws to benefit him. Once he’s really wealthy, he starts to change the game. When his fortunes turn, he uses his amassed fortune to bribe and extort those political figures into raising taxes in order to enable him to recover his losses - losses that had nothing to do with the tax paying subjects. He then goes on to begin what can only be termed a marketing campaign to convince the poor farmers who are paying the higher taxes that their crops are being taken in order to save the kingdom, when in fact they’re only being used to prop up his bad business deals. I think this is evil.
Our first nobleman played by different rules than his subjects. He had every advantage and made use of them. But he was still willing to do what needed to be done to preserve the lives and livelihoods of his subjects. The second guy (who I hope you see represents a few current people, who’s names I will give you if you really want) is really the selfish one. While he too plays by different rules, he has no concern whatsoever for the commoner, and honestly believes that preserving his wealth is the “greater good”. The problem is I don’t know if I’m dealing with an actual difference or just a difference of degree.

Familiars

2010-09-25T20:08:00.001-05:00

With Book of Wishes about to be released, we wanted to go over a couple of things in the book. Let’s start with familiars. Most fantasy enthusiasts are familiar with familiars. These are the little spell casting assistants that some spell casters make use of, but should one die, the magical and emotional toll is severe. It’s so severe, that we don’t think you should take your familiar into combat. That’s not really what they’re for. You’ll notice that there aren’t any sorcerer familiars - That’s because those guys throw fire balls at each other. Fireballs kill familiars, and that would wipe out the sorcerer pretty effectively!
Druids, conjurers and necromancers can have familiars. With the conjurers, it makes the most sense - summon your familiar and have it aid you in the bonding of some more powerful creature. With druids, it is a little more of the forces of nature concentrated in one of nature’s creatures. The druid familiars can be a little tougher than the others, especially if you choose a wolf or something like that, but to have your familiar attack in melee would be the height of stupidity. Necromancers are more like the conjurers - especially the undead masters. Here the familiar would assist in making the skeletons and zombies more powerful.
So how do you sneak in a familiar when you want one in combat? Well, protect it. Familiars need to be in physical contact with their spell casters. This rules out non-corporeal forms, but if you wanted to bend this rule, that would be a great defense. How about an arcane tower? Very good defense, but the familiar does count as an area of effect and is not considered part of the spell caster. How about ingenuity? I once had a familiar that posed as the necromancer’s shadow. Sure, he had two shadows, but when guys bust down the door and start flinging arrows, that isn’t the kind of thing they notice. In fact they never did. So I changed it up. The next time, I gave the necromancers a second shadow, and told them about it. This time it was a decoy. The familiar was actually the little gargoyle looking thing on the necro’s cane, and therefore in his hand the whole time.
This article also made me think - How about giving an illusionist an illusionary familiar? Any mage worth his salt would immediately attack what he thought was a small, easily killed familiar, wasting precious attacks on the illusion and not on the illusionist. Ooh, I have to use that!!
Are these it? By no means! In the description of the necromantic familiar it says, “A normal familiar will take...” Guess what? Yep, we’re implying that there are “non-normal” familiars out there.
Take our advice - You don’t want to take 4-40 points of damage, just because you took your cute owl familiar into battle with you and someone who thinks better than you do shot it with a lightning bolt!

Fletnern Question

2010-09-23T22:13:00.000-05:00

How interested are you, our loyal readers, in following the progression of the war in Fletnern? (We know there are loyal readers out there because we get the site stats every month, so don’t try to hide!) It will take a very long time to play out, so updates would likely be monthly.

Heroes - Really?

2010-09-20T08:54:00.000-05:00

The victors write the history books. I think the vast majority of us will agree with that. So what makes a hero? The motivation post got me thinking - Is hero worship a motivational force. Well, who do they “worship”? Let’s look at American heroes - but from a vantage point of if they had LOST.
George Washington - A favorite of mine when I want to infuriate someone - First - Washington was a “commoner” that many people of his time wanted to establish as King (of America). Therefore if the British had won the American Revolutionary War or the Minor Rebellion of 1776, Washington would be that commoner who tried to make himself king. He would also be the war criminal who broke every law of decency when he acted like a heathen and attacked a good Christian company of soldiers while they were observing the solemn holiday of Christmas. After his horrifying breech of the established armistice, he was promptly spanked and sent running back across the river. Let’s not forget the slave owning and the “funny” hemp growing.
Benjamin Franklin - an eccentric madman who invented a couple of clever contraptions, but nearly killed himself in his research on multiple occasions. Spent years as the French Court Jester in his silly fur garb. (always depicted like a white savage)
Nathan Bedford Forrest - Already a hero to some and villain to others. Was he the first Grand Wizard of the KKK or was he a military genius who might have won the Civil War for the Confederacy had he been given a chance.
Rosa Parks- - Some loony crab ass was arrested for causing a disruption on the bus. And then she would promptly be forgotten.
JFK - war hero and new hope for our nation (at that time) or philandering son of a rum runner who never accomplished anything in political office. A beautiful example of it all matters who is writing the history books and how they wish to portray someone.
Are these my opinions? No! at least not all of them. The point I am trying to make is NOT that these people had flaws, but instead it is only the way that we remember history that makes someone a hero or one of the forgotten masses. I think that has a huge impact on the ways heroes should be treated in fantasy worlds. It is less the feats accomplished then it is whether or not the song(s) about him are good tunes.
We could go on for days, but think about some of these guys who are typically remembered as villains, but were someone’s hero in their day: Hannibal, Napoleon, Rommel, Pete Rose, Jim Kelly (see you don’t remember - four consecutive Super Bowls, but no wins). Our apologies to Jim Kelly who has never been a villain to anyone, but is simply used to demonstrate what happens when you don’t get to write the history books.

How to restrict magic items

2010-09-10T06:40:00.001-05:00

For those games where the only magic items (or the only cool magic items) are given as treasure by the GM, restricting magic can still be challenging. How do you give them stuff without giving away incredible power? Here are a couple of ideas I had:
Give them winged bracers. This gives them the gift of flight, but they cannot use their arms while flying. Sure they can scout, but they cannot swoop in and hack with a sword. The concept is that trying to fly and fight would be like trying to fight while kicking with both legs - You are going to wind up on your butt!
A magical item that allows you to grow to giant size. Instead of giving the puny human giant strength, make him grow in order to get it. That can be a restriction in and of itself. Furthermore, the body cannot take the strain of becoming huge all the time, so there is a “cool down” between uses of the giant sized abilities. You could have the cool down based on Endurance, where a higher Endurance had a shorter cool down, but I think it would be more fun to based it on Willpower (or Wisdom or whatever) How many warriors do you know with a ton of Willpower?
The magic item has trapped the spirit of waterfall off Mount Kickapu. In order to access the item’s massive water based powers, you must first attune yourself to the spirit, by going to his home atop Mount Kickapu. I like the quest driven magic items. Another is to give them a minor powered sword, but if they plunge it into the eternal flame on the altar of Rsnefaria, it will gain far more power.
The challenge is always to give the bad guys stuff that the heroes have to fight against without necessarily giving those items to the players after the game. Maybe they’re not willing to travel to Mount Kickapu. How many encounters does an enemy giant man have to last? One. How many does the PC need to survive? Lots! Therefore limiting the item’s activation grants more power to the enemy than it does to the player.
Any more ideas?

Adventurers vs. Soldiers

2010-09-04T07:50:00.000-05:00

As you can tell from the last post - I’m working on an upcoming war in my game world (Fletnern). There is a good chance that if a major battle breaks out, it could be “adventurers” vs. soldiers. So what? It matters. The adventurers will likely have seen more action than the soldiers, and will therefore be assumed to be more “veteran” and have better skills. But they also need to be skilled at a whole number of things, where soldiers can be a little more focused on their martial skills and still do OK. Therefore skill-wise, they are likely equal.
Adventurers often have magical weapons. That should give them an advantage. But on Fletnern, some of the troops do supply some of their soldiers with magical stuff too. Still, slight advantage to the adventurers.
Most of the soldiers will be doing this because they have some patriotism, whereas the adventurers may have opinions, but will likely see it more as a job, a job they can get just as easily in another town. Fierce loyalty vs. mercenary greed. Advantage Soldiers.
Here’s the big one, and one that will howled at by the various players (and maybe you too): Soldiers drill in tight formations. Adventurers don’t. Adventurers often use long swords and battle axes, whereas soldiers will be tightly packed with spear and shield. In following commands, in moving as a unit, as staying within the boundaries of the camp (and not getting picked off), in not getting in front of the firing archers - the soldiers have a definite advantage. An advantage so great, that it should be able to wipe out the adventurers.
But wait - look at most FRPGs and you’ll see that “men-at-arms” are low level and lack any real power. It is the adventurers that should rule the day. Well, if that’s what you’re FRPG says, you need a new game! I’ve already admitted that the more experienced adventurers would have more skills than the soldiers, and might even be better weapon’s masters than the soldiers, but the efficient fighting force that acts as a unit will be vastly superior to a ramble of skilled swordsmen running all over the battlefield getting in each others’ way. Sure, I’m exaggerating a bit, but let’s think about a modern example. African/Arab pirates against a modern naval vessel. Yeah - fire a grenade and run! Is that what this fantasy era battle will look like? Could be!

Motivation

2010-08-28T08:33:00.001-05:00

So I’m thinking - What motivates people? Why was I thinking that? Well, to explain why people take certain actions. I may or may not be setting up Fletnern for another war or series of wars and I wanted to pretty firmly establish goals and desires, so I could better determine actions once the war started to blow out of control.
Greed! Greed motivates. Greed is good! OK, maybe not, but it is abundant. But believe it or not, there are other things that motivate people.
Ego. Tons of people will make stupid choices, just to preserve their ego or reputations. Bruise someone’s ego, and he’s more likely to be an enemy forever than if you’d simply stolen from him. Then again, stealing from him probably bruised his ego as well.
The need to be accepted. In intense situations, this is love, but people will still act simply to belong to a group. Think all the protesters at a rally believe the nonsense their chanting? Not all! Some are there just to be part of the group.
Well, if love, then hatred. Hatred isn’t a logical thing. It’s usually based on fear of some sort. It brushes up against ego too. Fear of being second best can often be enough to cause hatred, so it also goes along with jealousy, but so does greed. Darn! It’s all interconnected!
Religion. Let’s open this one wider and say “culture”. To some people, they will take certain actions simply because they are conditioned to, or because their moral system says they are the right thing to do. For better or worse, these people are the least likely to change their minds, because they are convinced they are “right”. Ain’t no stoppin’ that!
Looking back at these, any of the seven deadly sins would make a good motivational force. We already have avarice, pride, wrath. Hey even sloth can be a motivation - this guy just does not want to have to expend any energy. (“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”)
Mental defect. Let’s not leave out the idea that some people are simply not capable of making choices that are good for them. Whether this is some idiot who get’s in a bar fight because he’s drunk or a mass murderer who starts a war just to see the carnage, some times the motivation is simply that the guy ain’t playing with a full deck.
So who cares? So what? Here’s why it matters - A war is coming. The war is likely to be fought because the wealthy guys want their wealth secured against the up and comers. Meanwhile, there will be armies in the fields. Why are they there? To make the wealthy wealthier? No way. They are there because they are convinced that their cause is just and the other guy’s cause is unjust, and if they don’t fight today, their rights and their possessions will be stripped from them tomorrow. They’re probably right by the way. What will others do? Will the allies come? If so, will they have a different agenda, and will it affect the course of the war? This is the kind of war where allies will likely be working both sides. It is only by understanding the motivations of each group beforehand that I as the GM will stand a chance of producing a campaign that is both interesting and makes sense!

How Much is Too Much?

2010-08-21T07:57:00.001-05:00

I am plagued by this question, pretty much every time I write. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to learn that most people, even those who like and buy our stuff, thought I was over the line into “too much” quite frequently. Then again, when you’re not the one coming up with the stuff - too much is OK. It gives the reader a sense of what’s going on without really caring about the extra “wasted” work.
The big problem is trying to get the balance right in the “how much is more than I wanted to read” category. If I flub it there, then people don’t want to buy Board Enterprises stuff any more. Still, I think that line is way past the line most GMs would draw for themselves.
So how much is too much? We gave you the weights and dimensions on coins in a free supplement. That went pretty far. We described an orcish tribe’s gear down pretty far - but I always hate that that stuff isn’t in the games. (If a bandit is wielding a sword forged in a nearby city, you need to figure out if they gave it to him to cause trouble or if he stole it from a good guy. Without knowing where the sword came from, you don’t stand a chance of figuring this out.)
I guess like so many of these things, it comes down to play style. If you play an RPG with some role-playing, you might want to investigate your enemies and find something out. If you just hack and slash, then no one cares except for how much you can get for it. Our products have a way of picking their players.

Designing part 3

2010-08-14T08:03:00.002-05:00

Do the rest of you find the writing part easy? Once my brain gets hold of an idea, it just keeps developing it until the next idea crowds it out. This is good - in that I have some fairly decent ideas mixed in with a couple of losers. This is bad in that every new idea crowds out the earlier ones and if I didn’t write them down, they are typically gone forever. ADHD or whatever they want to call it this year - and yes that was a professional diagnosis, not just my mother.
I think one of the main reasons the writing is easy for me is that I have a fully developed and functioning world. I’ve been playing around with Fletnern for closing on 30 years now. OK - 30 years ago, it probably sucked. I know things were blatantly wrong. I recently found notes from 25+ years ago where on the same page it listed a historic war and the participants and the founding dates of some of the cities. Apparently two cities were involved in a war BEFORE they were founded. That takes skill.
But seriously, it works now. When I have good ideas, they fit into the world fairly easily. Yes, I do credit Legend Quest with a lot of that because it is the full RPG, and not just a magic system or a combat system. Add to that the whole Grain Into Gold economy structure, and its like a skeleton that I can hang meat on any time I want. Great framework makes for great substance. (I think I just called myself great. I’m OK with that!)

Designing continued

2010-08-14T07:56:00.001-05:00

I thought back to “what is probably the oldest book that has yet to see the light of day?” Monsters and Other Menaces! We advertised Monsters & Other Menaces back in 1991 when LQ first came out in its first edition style. Dark Hour was there on that flyer too, but I’ve always felt that The Forgotten Hunt was in many ways Dark Hour, just without the magic. M&OM is like All that Glitters. It was way too massive. It was to have starting characters, new monsters, new conjured creatures, new rules for important monsters (dragons at least). So will it ever be published? Let’s see how Book of Wishes does!

Game Design

2010-08-09T13:13:00.003-05:00

You’ve heard me bitch about formatting and other things that go into putting a book out for sale, but I’m not sure I’m making sense. Here’s my process: I come up with an idea for a book. I come up with probably 5-10 ideas every week. I write them down. I think about them a little bit. Some of them, I start writing outlines for. Time goes on. The list of books grows. I jot down more ideas. After a month or so, I usually wind up combining ideas because some of them are just too similar.
Once I decide that the idea didn’t suck, I start laying out the book. For me, the writing is easy. When I was doing magazine articles, I always use to say, “I write at least two pages a day. Give me some direction and I’ll write two pages a day for you.” {Side bar - I am looking at ways that I can put several of the magazine articles out as pdfs on the web-site - likely for free.}
Now, some ideas grow or shrink with time. All the Glitters is the best example. All that Glitters was intended to be the Legend Quest treasure supplement. It would include everything from a bigger better list of everyday items to a discussion of treasure (mainly gems), possible random charts and tons of new magical items. Yeah - That would have been about 600 pages. All that Glitters is now: Grain Into Gold (the economy), Coins of the Road (trade goods), Facets (gems, including magical uses), All that Glitters (treasure that is not necessarily “normal”), Coins of Fletnern (all the specs on the coins themselves), and a magical item supplement that I’ve never liked any of the names I have for yet.
OK -So I write the thing - the easy part is done. Now I have to edit it. Even if I am using outside editors, I still read the book at least three times. The first is to make sure it says what I want it to say. I have a tendency towards massive run on sentences, so here these get trimmed, sometimes. Then I read it for continuity and editing (punctuation, sentences that don’t sound garbled, etc). Then I really edit it, looking for spelling and grammar. Then I let the software edit it, showing me what it thinks are spelling and grammar errors. That’s not really reading, since I don’t see all the book.
Then I have to format it. Now, a lot of formatting was done during writing. I developed the chapters, I decided whether to use a list format (like 100 Towns - which is selling REALLY well, thank you!) or a text book format (most of our two column books) or possibly: ”story book” (one column - most of these have died off). I also have to figure out how to make the headers look, what to do about the page numbers, any art work, etc etc etc etc. By the time I’m at this stage, it’s mainly how do the pages look. Chapters typically start on the top of a page. There shouldn’t be any huge patches of white in the book. Then I upload it into Adobe, and have to start the formatting process all over again. Included in this is the need to re-read the book for the fourth time, because sometimes Adobe puts letters on top of each other and other oddities that look really stupid.
After all that, the book is read to publish, but only if I have a cover picture and a sales description set.
The moral of this story is this - I have a lot of books written, or mostly written. That is the easy part. Getting from written to published is the hard part. Then sitting back and watching a product I worked that hard at not sell well - well, it isn’t very fun. Fortunately, Legend Quest, Grain Into Gold and now 100 Towns sell really well!

Senses

2010-08-09T13:05:00.002-05:00

While GMing, I had to go through a description of what Senses skill is and how it applies. (PCs as caravan guards getting jumped.) Figured some of you might want to understand the way we see it. Hopefully no surprises:
Senses is typically used defensively, in other words - as a resistance. Therefore, if a sentry is actively aware, the person trying to sneak up on him should roll their attempt at being stealthy and resist it by the sentry’s (K +SEN) x 5%. Use of K x 10% + SEN x 5% really shouldn’t happen, though of course it does.
If you were to use your Senses as an active skill, you would take a combat round. Eventually, your eternal vigilance would result in you passing out, and thereafter not protecting your caravan. When would you use it? Well, if you heard a noise in the darkness and were trying to see what it came from, that would be an active Senses task. Of course, anyone using Senses constantly would on average fumble every 20 turns or about every three or four minutes
So, how do you know if the sentry is actively aware? What do you use to find out if the sentry wandered off or fell asleep? Well, asleep is different, but to determine if the sentry gets to use his or her SEN skill levels or not, I think you give him a Etiquette task but use Willpower as the base attribute. The assumption here is that disciplined sentries will have ETQ. If the sentry is undisciplined, there is a greater chance that he will not follow his orders and either be somewhere else or day dreaming. Now missing sentries cannot resist sneaking, but day dreaming ones can. Where an alert sentry resists at (K +SEN) x 5%, ones who miss their alertness roll will resist at (Kx5%) -10%. The “-10%” is for distraction. Now if for whatever reason, you want to have the two sentries arguing over which jousting champion is going to win at the tilting yard tomorrow, well, the distraction value should go way up.

Scheduling Blog

2010-08-09T13:04:00.000-05:00

OK - There are some things I’m good at, but updating this blog on Saturday mornings does not seem to be one of them. In an effort to be consistent and predictable, let’s change the scheduled update to “Weekly, on or before Monday”. If I’m going to be gone all weekend, I might update on Friday. If I remember on Sat. morning, I’ll do it then, but I should be reliable enough to get it done on or before Monday. As a peace offering, here’s two posts:

Selling Magic Items

2010-07-31T06:39:00.000-05:00

Question for you GMs out there - Have you ever let your PCs sell magical weapons? What about spell books? I don’t think this is too rare; I think it is common in most games. What happens to those items? If the party fights a demon summoner and finds his spell book, they would most likely sell it if they couldn’t use it (and maybe if they could). So some guy buys the book (and probably kills the middle man). He is now rampaging in the PCs homeland with demons. They put him down and get the book again. They’re stupid - they sell it again, of course, since the last guy is now dead, no one will pay well for it because they understand there is danger. So they sell it to a “passing merchant in a bar”. He either is or off loads it to a truly dangerous man who summons the demons as part of a major assault on the government of the city. #1 - the players seem to be endangering themselves needlessly. #2 - Shouldn’t someone (like someone afraid to buy the book) tell the government that the party is at fault for the demon invasion?
OK - go the other way - They dump a whole bunch of magic items on some merchant and he sells them to whoever he can - like the bandits who the players will be fighting next. Does the party just keep arming their opponents? At some level they will think how smart they are for selling the same items over and over again, but that would imply that you aren’t making the missions hard enough.
A while back in one of my campaigns a vorpal claymore came home from a mission. Most of the party was quick to try and sell it, but a couple of them said, “No way! I’m not going against someone with a vorpal claymore!” Funny how the melee types did not want to sell it, but the mage types weren’t worried. Hmm, there may be a moral in that somewhere.
Even fantasy characters have to learn - there are consequences to every action.

Violence part two

2010-07-25T12:08:00.002-05:00

It occurred to me that some of you might know Fletnern and be wondering what I plan to do to cause this world war. The two big ideas I have are:
Myork has an army sitting in Scaret ready to rampage. Neither Garnock nor the Wembic Empire could withstand it on their own, but together, they would likely defeat it. Do the orcs and the Lats form an alliance or do they fall prey to the Anglic knights bringing liberty to the rest of the continent?
The on-line campaign experienced the invasion of giant ants. It took a great part of the Wembic Army to defeat the first wave. (Oh, you didn’t realize that was only the first wave?) Now the Wembic Empire is going to need a lot more help to fight back the major assault. I’m not sure if the first wave is all that will hit the main line Fletnern or if I need to have the main assault hit too. What happens to the mighty Wembic Empire if they throw away their strength saving the rest of the continent? Who would dare side with them even if it meant life or death? The truth is I think I have to destroy the city of Kaudelt if the main invasion comes through. That’s the rub!
For you real old timers, you might recall “The Divine Mission” a romp through the future of Fletnern. By accomplishing the mission (actually missions), they undid something in the past that prevented the Cult of the Three Priests from taking over the world. Same principal.

Some Really Good Violence

2010-07-25T12:08:00.001-05:00

Ever want to put some really good violence into your campaign world, but fear that it will disrupt what you’ve worked so hard for? Try an alternate universe! What in the H E double hockey sticks is he talking about?!?
As many of you know, my world is Fletnern. It was started about 30 years ago (man that hurt - thinkin’ I’m that old). I have built and nurtured this world for 30 years, and the thought of having a massive world war that will likely kill a bunch of main characters (at least NPCs) and completely change most of what I have going currently is scary to me. Oh, I’d love to see it, but I don’t are risk it.
Then it struck me - parallel universe. Hey, if it works in the comic books, it should work here. A couple of minor changes to give it a slightly different feel, and advance a cold war into a war on the brink of exploding. Then, a friendly neighborhood time traveling titan (yes, I have more than one in the world) and the player character (or party of PCs) is replacing a recently assassinated version of himself on a different, but seemingly similar, world. Now, I can have my huge battle, and after the character takes part in the big war, he/she/it can go home - back to the normal world that still exists as I designed it, but with fond memories of ripping the world apart.
I have to tell you - I love this idea so much, I’m going to use it a lot more than once. Not only does it work fantastically well for one campaign, but it helps me keep one campaign’s huge action from completely disrupting another campaign’s normalized action.

Contacts

2010-07-18T18:31:00.000-05:00

Have you been watching Burn Notice? If not, you should. That is good TV! That’s not the point of this blog. The point is Barry, the money launderer. Barry is one of Michael’s contacts. Barry is not a nameless, faceless contact who simply supplies everything that Michael needs. He is an NPC that often needs to be convinced to help. In fact recently, they have pretty much had to bribe him every time, but he is willing to take a bribe (not always money) in order to commit crimes and put himself at risk. That is what a contact should do. Any other felon (non-contact) would not be willing to commit crimes for a bribe, at least not a reasonable one.
As I remember, Huggy Bear from Starsky and Hutch was the same. (S&H was BAD TV!) He never really wanted to help them, but with a couple off threats or a bribe of some kind, he coughed up the information they needed. Of course, if the bad guy was an enemy of his, then it came easier. (I haven’t seen S&H in decades, so forgive my memory.)
A lot of games have contacts as part of the game rules “Every character starts with two contacts”, but few of them ever really describe what these contacts are supposed to do. Are contacts willing to come with on missions? Are contacts willing to give the characters loans? I think Barry and Huggy are perfect examples. They are willing to put themselves in some danger for people they know and trust for some sort of reward. Example: I trust you well enough to tell you where the drug dealer lives if you give me $50. I would not tell someone I didn’t trust even for $50 because the drug dealer would find out and come shoot me.
But are they stagnant? They shouldn’t be. If your contact is an officer of the law, and the player character hands over an important criminal to the contact, maybe he gets a promotion. If the contact is a fence for stolen goods, and the player character kills the other fence in town, then the contact is going to have a really good year. The opposite is true too. If the fence tells the player where to find a thief, and the player kills the thief, the fence is likely going to have fewer people he can buy from.
These changes can be good and bad. A promotion gets a beat cop off the streets, and tougher to get street info from, but it will help him get other info, assuming he still deems it a good idea to deal with the player. These contact examples I’m using may seem like modern examples, but it works in fantasy too. City guards act remarkably like modern police. In many campaigns, enchanters are not willing to deal with characters who are not their contacts. Who would be dumb enough to sell a magical sword to a barbarian who is trained in using it to kill? Why would the barbarian not kill him and take the stuff from him? Some spells might be dangerous to cast or illegal. It would be nice to have a long range teleporter as a contact if the city guards are chasing you.
The reason I want you to care is that contacts greatly enhance the role-playing aspects of the game. They bring the city settings to life. Don’t let them be sycophants and don’t let them be meaningless. Let them become minor recurring characters that can really add life to the campaign. Once you do, they can often become mission givers as well!

100 Towns

2010-07-18T18:29:00.000-05:00

Well, we said we were going to be better about pushing out product this year and so far so good. 100 Towns just hit the electronic shelves at RPG Now and e23. Seriously, this is not just a simple little list. It’s 20+ pages of brief descriptions of 100 different kinds of towns. It’s what you need in a form you can read in a minute. Yes - this is for you Mr. GM off the cuff! Oh - and its $1.99, so it’s in your price range!

“Naturals”

2010-07-10T20:07:00.000-05:00

One of the optional rules that was designed years ago, but never published (boy there are a lot of those!) was the concept of the “natural”. It started with Convergence aka Alien Armageddon aka that modern LQ game with the aliens. One of the races was a snake centaur - torso, head and arms of a man (sort of) with the body of a snake. Some of these guys had natural defenses: poison fangs, tail spines, some sort of carapace; but the natural defense had to be taken at character creation. This was something they were born with, not something they could train in later. This started me down the road of other things you’re born with. One of the first was a 10 point skilled called “Noble Birth”. Yep - It’s what you think. In a role-playing setting, knowing whether the person is of noble birth can matter. No, not in combat, but Legend Quest is after all a role playing game and not simply a combat system. There was also the 10 point skill - Natural Beauty. These were the people so darn pretty that it affected their social skills. It could be good or bad, because it’s not like ugly folk like those who are vastly better looking. Natural Beauty led to Exceptional Natural Beauty (OK, that’s not the name, but I still haven’t figured out what I want to call it). The exceptional one is a 25 point skill and is twice as good as the other one. These are like the Helen of Troy folks where entire countries go to war to get them back. (Side bar - Don’t you hate when they put some skinny chick in as Helen and tell you how gorgeous she is, when you’re thinking, “Damn girl, eat! There are 14yo boys with more chest than you.” - Please excuse the inappropriateness of that last comment.)
Well this led to Royal Birth - a 25 point enhancement of noble. It also led to the concept of “naturals”. Everybody’s brain is wired a little differently. Some folks pick up certain things better than others. Why not have a character who had a natural affinity for a particular skill? Think magical power or swords. The idea is that the character would get the first skill level for free and every skill level afterwards would be cheaper to buy. Of course this would come at the cost of buying the “natural” talent. It can still only be purchased at the start of the character. To be honest, I haven’t figured out the point cost of this nor the benefit. I haven’t had enough new characters being played to play test the game balance of it. I have thought about just assigning (randomly) natural skills to every character and not telling them until it seemed appropriate. Everybody has to be good at something, don’t they?
Oh, there’s more. What about 0-point skills? Here’s what I mean: You would pick from one of the following faces: Attractive (mild - not like natural beauty), Plain (nothing special), Baby (good for carousing and acting innocent, but bad for leadership), Everyman (the kind of person who very easily melts into the crowd), etc. The idea was to start forcing the players to define their characters a little better, while not distorting the game. These “faces” would be very mild in effect, but there would be an effect. Yeah, there would be Ugly and Sinister too. Sinister - great for intimidation, bad for carousing.
So - Take this as a sneak peek at the optional rules, should they ever come out. First - Book of Wishes. It has been formatted and we’re checking the formatting and some edits now. Some of the artwork is showing shadows and our print guys cannot figure out why. (Not there in the original product, but magically appearing in the pdf version. VERY frustrating!) Anyway, at long last, we seem really close. BoW will hopefully show that while we’re doing a lot of generic stuff, we have not forgotten LQ, nor will we ever!

The Dark Side

2010-07-03T07:33:00.000-05:00

Assuming you’ve read our stuff (particularly Forge of Imagination), you’ve seen that we strongly support the concept of taking ideas from others, but making them your own. There’s a “dark side” to that:
I admit it - I’m a child of the Star Wars generation. I remember playing on the front porch of a guy who later became a play tester for us (wow - that one is a convoluted story) marveling at his new Boba Fett figure. I saw all three of the original movies in the theater with my parents because I wasn’t old enough to drive. So I guess it makes sense that when I think of spells, I envision laser beams. Cast a life drain spell, I see a laser beam reach out and strike the bad guy. Cast a fireball, I see a laser beam that explodes at the far end. But it really shouldn’t be that way. I’m working really hard to change my way of thinking. I’ve decided that spells should (as often as possible) look more like clouds. Magic is supposed to work outside of material physics, so a congealed, amorphous shape with power in it, seems to fit. It’s kind of H. P. Lovecraft too.
Or how about this - a rip in the fabric of space. I really wanted to use “rent in the fabric of reality” but that seems too flowery. I’m working on the stats because while writing this I thought of a cool spell: Ghoulish Hand - conjurer spell - This spell causes a rent in the fabric of reality through which a ghoulish hand emerges to claw and tear at an enemy. The hand will appear at one of the least advantageous points for the target (usually behind). The conjurer opens the portal for the hand, then the hand will attack as well as it can. The conjurer needs to sustain the spell but not direct it, unless he wants to move the portal, then he must take an action to close and reopen the portal. This is an action, but does not require a new casting fatigue or success roll. See, no laser beams.
The other thing I want to do is have precognitive sword fighters. The problem is that it keeps making me think of the Jedis, and I don’t want that. Imagine how cool it would be to be able to use mentalism to predict your opponent’s moves and then counter them. But I don’t want guys walking around saying, “These are not the halflings you are looking for.”
Don’t succumb to the Dark Side. Keep other people’s ideas out of your game (unless their from Board Enterprises of course! and of course unless you have made them "your own"), and the game will run a lot smoother! Come to think of it, maybe I should keep other people’s stuff out of the blog. Nah!

Running on those heels ...

2010-06-25T13:40:00.000-05:00

No this isn’t a Sex in the City review!
Running on the heels of what kind of gamer are you - are you a solo gamer? We had some mail last week asking about LQ for solo play. Truth is, we have thought about it. The problem is it is very difficult to find a happy medium. LQ is designed to be a dynamic system where anything can happen and the system can give you the CoS (chance of success). With solo play, you either write for what you think is every contingency, or you dumb it down to three choices. So you either waste boat loads of time writing or you ruin the original intent of the game. OK, so I’m being WAY overly dramatic.
Truth is - I think that in today’s gaming world, there may be a nitch for solo play, even though we would be competing strongly against the high graphics computer games. Any feed back? As always, we’ll react to what we think our customers want!

What kind of gamer are you?

2010-06-22T15:09:00.000-05:00

We run into a lot of different kinds of gamers. Some love the types of things we talk about: cultures, cuisine, trade goods. Others have no idea why anyone would care what happened outside of an actual battle. Let’s give you a little insight into the Board Enterprises way of looking at RPGs: We think they are role-playing games! We think that when you make a decision you shouldn’t rely on your overly mathematical sense of the rules, but in what makes sense for your character. Honestly, we’re not into doing voices and acting out everything that happens, though we know people who go for that kind of thing.
By the way - here’s how you know you’re role-playing and not acting like yourself: Imagine you’re walking into a biker bar where everyone is wearing red bandannas, and you put a blue bandanna around your head. Can you imagine doing that? If you can, you’re likely dead, so I guess you’re not reading this. OK - Different. You and your friends have entered an old abandoned house on a dare. They all say, “You go first”, and you do, without thinking, without trying to convince someone else to, you just go. Your characters do this kind of stuff all the time. No sane person does this. That’s how you know that the actions you choose for your characters are different than the actions you choose for yourself, thus, you are role-playing.
So - Why does this matter? Going back to the famous discussion I had with a magazine editor - I submitted an article in which I described the use of magical healing outside of combat - how would it affect the culture and the urban environment? There was also a thing in there about the use of age altering (youth) magic and other magic used simply for the purposes of beauty. The article even had stats on the modern health care and beauty industries. The editor was convinced that this was some sort of April Fools article. No one could possibly care what happened with magical healing outside of combat he insisted. Well, those of us who role-play - we care. The magazine didn’t last a year, but we’re still here. Maybe that proves something.

Hundreds of 100s

2010-06-06T06:40:00.001-05:00

At risk of appearing obsessed with numbers: (OK - I am, especially when they represent cash) Expect the Baker’s Dozen supplements to be interspersed among some 100s. Likely first up is 100 Towns. Now we’ve seen supplements that are quite literally 100 names of communities, and they take up one page. That’s not what these are. These are going to be 100 _____s with brief descriptions. Right now the 100 towns book is over twenty pages long, but admittedly, the chart format leaves a lot of white on the page.
Anyway - We asked you what you would want a Baker’s Dozen of, so - Anything you’d like to see 100 of? Towns is definitely first, but we’re eyeing daggers and swords to come soon, likely still this year. Our goal is to put out things you want to see, so we’re more than willing to listen.
As an update, here is legitimately what I think you will see available for sale this year. For us, this is a huge list:
100 Towns, Baker’s Dozen Tribes, Book of Wishes (Yep - first draft of formatting is completed), 100 Daggers (or Swords)
Possibles: The core of City of Rhum (kind of the base on which you can hang the other supplements), Coins of the Road - the follow up to Grain Into Gold that will supply trade goods (more later), d1000 - Mercenary’s Greed (a huge random chart for determining loot carried by the bad guys, including ways to alter it so even d1000 will never get stale), and Urban Developments - a method for creating communities that works exactly the way Grain Into Gold created economies.
On Coins of the Road - This thing has been started and restarted about seven times. The issue keeps being that it is too {expletive deleted} huge. We’ve had to pull out all the discussion on gemstones and make Facets. We’ve had to pull out all the discussions of brand name goods (that relate directly to Fletnern). We’ve had to pull out all the magical items. We’ve had to pull out 90% of the write-ups on the merchant houses and cartels (again mostly Fletnern related). We’ve pulled out the travel time information that was also specific to Fletnern. End result - It’s coming. It will specifically be about “standard” trade goods, with few references to Fletnern and very few rule comments.
We seldom talk only about our products, so tune in next week for something more in line with the flavor of this blog!

Tim the Trapper - A story of empty cabins

2010-05-29T06:11:00.000-05:00

I wrote this up for a book on the lifestyles of adventurers (as in how much do they cost and what repercussions are there). Well, it got really long and didn’t fit the book anymore, so rather than throw it out, I’m sharing it with you.
Let’s take Tim the Trapper for instance. Tim comes to the big city with his winter pelts in early spring. He makes a killing selling them to the furriers and he is richer than he has ever been before. Then he goes to the inn and discovers how much they want for a room. Several harsh words later, he decides that he is a tough guy and he would rather sleep under the stars than pay those prices. Evening comes, he settles down and has a nice night in the light woods about a mile from the city.
The next day, he explores the city, buying gear and replenishing supplies. He returns to his campsite, but this night it rains. The next morning, he continues his shopping, wet and not as happy. During the day, he meets Milo the Merchant. Milo is selling fire wood, and Tim cannot believe how much Milo is asking for pieces of wood. I mean, come on, they’re just lying around out in the forest. So Tim comes up with a plan. The little furry creatures are shedding and mating, so it’s not a great time to trap them. So he decides to stay here for a while. He’ll gather wood, bundle it and sell it in the city, just like Milo. So Tim brings a dozen bundles to the city, but only sells three. The next day, he lowers his price and only sells four. That’s when Milo spots him. “Hey Tim,” he says, “I notice that you’re trying to sell your fire wood. Tell you what I’m gonna do. Rather than both of us standing around here all day, you go out and get the firewood, and I’ll sell it and give you half.” Well, Tim isn’t a bookkeeper, but if Milo will sell 12 a day, and give half to Tim, then Tim will still be far better off than getting all of 3 sales. So the deal is made.
Throughout this time, Tim has been improving his campsite. First he set up an awning to keep off the rain. Then he built up the fire pit into something more resembling a fireplace. Then he put up some log walls. Before you know it, Tim has built himself a crude cabin in the woods. Tim sells his firewood to Milo for a couple of weeks, but Tim is getting hungry and he hates paying the huge prices in town for his food. So he goes off for a week on a hunting expedition and brings back enough meat that he can preserve some. He brings his firewood to Milo, but Milo has already found another sucker who will go out into the woods and bring back fire wood for him, and he only wants 40% of the profits, so Tim is out of luck.
Disgusted by the whole urban drama, Tim returns to the wilderness to continue his life of hunting and trapping, leaving his cute little cabin behind. If Tim had succeeded, he would have left his cute little cabin in the wilderness behind.
The point of this little theater was to explain that in the wooded areas around fantasy cities, it would be common to find campsites and even cabins. Some might be in use, while others would have been abandoned. Any woodsman with the slightest bit of survival training would easily know how to build some manner of shelter, even if easy to find caves were not scattered across the countryside. While these shelters would likely fall in on themselves after a couple of years, there should be enough of them around that they would make common random encounters in the wilderness. If you need to, think of them as homeless shanties. They may not be everywhere, but if you know where to look (likely close to the stream), you’re going to find them.

A little help here?

2010-05-25T18:39:00.001-05:00

OK - What’s the deal? It took a new guy from Latvia to notice that the BE website’s product links were busted. Oh I’m sure the guys at One Bookshelf told me they were changing the site around, but you know, didn’t seem relevant at the time, I’m sure. Anyway - if you notice something wrong, let us know. We’ll fix it. No, that is not a request for an exhaustive list of everything you disagree with or find grammatically incorrect on every book, but a little heads up about the big stuff would be appreciated. We can take a little criticism (but only just a little, OK?).

A Baker’s Dozen ... WHAT?!?

2010-05-21T06:02:00.000-05:00

So hopefully you read last week’s entry about our new supplement A Baker’s Dozen Villains. We are in the process of wrapping up several other Baker’s Dozen projects, but the question is, “What would like to see?” Some of the ideas are setting, people or characters, stuff, or even plot lines. But if you have good ideas, we’ll listen! The next planned one will hopefully be out shortly. (No, really, soon, not like the time between our last product postings.) It will deal with 13 different groups that all tie together. We think it will be a good way to get some of the ideas we have out there without breaking your wallet.
The Baker’s Dozen supplements are exactly what Board Enterprises is all about - We give you great content without wasting your time and money on the stuff you don’t need. Yeah -Art is the #1 thing that wastes space and makes a supplement cost more. This is the internet - If you’re looking for fancy art, check out any one of the artist sites where incredibly good (but typically unemployed) artists showcase their stuff. It’s free, and if you find something you really like, most of them offer purchase plans for posters and what not. Meanwhile, buy our supplements when you want content.