Poisons

OK - seems an odd thing to discuss this time of year, but something got me thinking on poison. You know how most guys who protect their wealth by using poisonous traps die? By poison malfunctions. You know how most poison using knife fighters die? By cutting themselves with poisoned blades.
So why use it? Well, many of them use it because their game masters don’t make it dangerous enough to use. GMs should (and I don’t always, so I’m not really preaching here, unless I’m preaching to me) force a roll every time someone handles poison. Fumble and you get hurt. If you have poison laying around the house, either protecting your belongings or on all your weapons, then maybe one fumble chance per day. What’s that mean? Well it typically means that once a month the poisoner is going to get poisoned. Maybe your rules have some skill by which the person can handle the poison more efficiently (Chemistry or Alchemy in LQ). Maybe if your level is high enough, you might reduce your chances of fumbling.
OK - taking the rules aside for a minute - It should take a certain kind of person to use poison. Normal people don’t like having something that dangerous around them all the time. Personally, I’ve poisoned my fair share of mice, but I’m OCD about washing my hands and not touching anything while I’m laying the bait. Imagine having to be like that all the time. Also, at their core, most people don’t like killing others, not even people who do it professionally. Given an option, they’d probably prefer to drive off or capture an enemy, depending on the circumstances. But not a poisoner. Frequently a poisoned enemy ill stumble away from combat only to die later. That takes a certain kind of mean to inflict on someone.
Is there a point to this? No, but that’s what a blog is for - sharing ideas that don’t necessarily have any deep meaning.

Missing in Action?

Yes Board Enterprises was on vacation. We normally don’t like to pre-announce such things because we’re paranoid about people raiding the office while we’re gone. Anyway, we’re back and we’ll be posting again very soon. Sorry for the gap!

Aliens in Fantasy

I know some of the playtesters from years ago are reading this blog (Hi!), but let me fill the rest of you in. The Forgotten Hunt was intended to be the entry into a series of modern games that would form a world where pretty much anything could happen. There would be dinosaurs, mercenaries, super-powers (not incredible ones, but some manner of enhancement), and (pause for drama) a huge alien invasion. Oh - and magic (the game Dark Hour)! Well, Magic the Gathering dominated the industry for years, and now role-playing games seem to have gone the way of war games - they’re still there, but the youth market and the money has shifted to the cards.
So, what to do with all those cool aliens that I created to attack the Earth? I use them in the Legend Quest fantasy games. Aliens and monsters can and should be used along the same lines. Those British game designers have it right. Orcs make great bad guys whether they are in the past or in the future.
My favorite aliens were the Congrogas. They were sort of dinosaur men, or dragon men (not really lizard men, but if you need to see it that way). They even had an elite cadre that were basically triceratons. I’ve been able to use the Congrogas as enemies in a super-hero genre game, a modern alien invasion game, and now in a fantasy genre game. So how do you make aliens work in a fantasy era?
First - they need to get from one planet to another. I have introduced the concept of the “spiral stairs”. I once used the term “spiral rifts”, but I really never intended to copy that other game. Think of two spiral staircases that are rotating in opposite directions, sometimes I think about a DNA strand but not connected. As the two spirals move, different parts of them will touch each other. If the worlds are on those spirals, then from time to time, they will touch as well, and at those times, both worlds (or more likely small parts of those worlds) will be in the same place at the same time. Where they touch, spiral gates will open and creatures can step through. Where the Congrogas are explorers and conquerors in the future, they are a race desperate to find a new homeland in the fantasy era. (Theirs is being ripped apart by geological forces.) Are they invaders? Well sure, but they aren’t evil. They simply must find a place to settle their race or face extinction. Where the futuristic guys have laser rifles, the fantasy guys have obsidian swords and spears. Same stats, same “powers” and weaknesses (in this case natural armor and a weakness in humid weather), different weapons, but still great enemies.
Does it work for others? Yep! Let’s go backwards. The hoawmintz are a Legend Quest “monster” race - a race of “men” who are bipedal cats. The hoawmintz make perfect aliens, they just need some manner of high tech gadgetry, or if you prefer they could be a “barbarian” culture that gets mixed up in the space race. Anyone who watched the Flash Gordon cartoon where Thun was a Lion Man understands that this race would be equally cool in a fantasy game or a space opera. This genre jumping (which clearly I am a huge fan of as I discuss it in many of our books), was also shown in things like Warhammer and Warhammer 40K, TSR’s Spelljammer, Rifts, and a bunch of other books. (At least I admit when I’m not the first to think of something.)
So what do you do now? You think back to that really cool space story you read last month (or when you were a kid) and you pluck the bad guy race out of it and throw it into your fantasy game. You probably already have their history. Maybe you can either stop them before they become a space fairing race, or simply retro their history to a fantasy era. Maybe they found a magical portal from their planet to yours or they’re simply from another continent. I am not a supporter of laser rifles vs fireballs, but once you take the lasers away from them, a lot of those aliens become really cool monsters!

Trivia

So I’m watching this show Castle last night. My first time with it, so I don’t know the characters that well or anything. But the author keeps spouting off these useless trivia facts about things. I now identify with this character. I learned more trivial stuff writing my books, especially Grain Into Gold. You would not believe the silly stuff in my head. (Pemmican came up in the show, which I perfectly understood and nearly spouted off two recipes to the people watching with me.) So to all of you out there - IT’S NOT JUST ME!
These views are the views of the author alone and are not supported by Board Enterprises. Board Enterprises does not hold or support the views of the author, especially when they are silly!

Cool magic item combo

OK - so I was writing a prior post and it occurred to me that the Heart of Dragonkind only protects the dragon wearing it if the dragon is aware of the enemy. Well, if your champion is going to wear it, then he needs to have the all seeing eyes of Milonsovich. The all seeing eyes is a crown like thing, but gives the wearer a 360 degree field of vision and can see through most illusions even invisibility. The drawback is that the all seeing eyes exhaust the wearer. I mean come on - try and pay attention to everything in a crowded room for a long period of time - it’ll wear you out. So - the Heart can only be used by a dragon and the eyes will tire the wearer, making it a limited use item. These are great magic items to give a party, because they cannot make strong use of them. Game balance achieved!

Non-skilled modifier

We never really covered this in the rule book, but it has come up from time to time. What happens if a character with Melee 2 [Swords 3 (Long Sword 4)] picks up a sword-style weapon that he has never experienced before? Well, if he really has no knowledge of this weapon, he would suffer the non-skilled modifier, but since it is a sword, he still gets the MEL and SWD group skills. Huh? Yep - If a knight who has practiced with only straight edged weapons his whole life picks up a curved scimitar on the battlefield, he would have +10 (MEL) +15 (SWD) -15 (non-skilled) for a net +10. Now, give him a couple hours to practice with it and that modifier might go away.
So, is this just another chance for GMs to mess with their players? No. It is intended to stop standard soldiers from picking up exotic weapons and using them as though they were born with one in their crib. Furthermore, hopefully it never happens, but a medieval knight should not be able to pick up a light saber and use it with skill. He’d fumble around with it, maybe finding a way to use it as a sword, but definitely not look like a Jedi. With such an extremely different weapon, it might take a few days of training for him to lose his non-skilled modifier. Anyway - some things are beyond the scope of group skills until the character actually encounters them and recognizes them as something familiar. (If the knight can’t figure out how to turn the light saber on, it really doesn’t matter what he might be able to do with it.)

Other Quests (part 2)

OK - it’s hard enough to come up with your own missions, so what do you do for the guys you don’t even care about? Give them the boring stuff. If 5,000 zombies are wandering the countryside and need to be put down - send your players against the necromancers and other NPC adventurers against the zombies. If a volcano erupts and shows the entrance to the dimension of fire, your players will not be the only ones to notice. Others will be racing them to acquire whatever treasures are in the plane of fire. Tapped for ideas? Use idea supplements like Spark of Imagination. No, that’s not a shameless plug - use whatever aids your want to. Remember - the other adventurers do not need to be as challenged mentally as your actual players. They also don’t need as much game balance. If it works for them to fight orcs and come away with a magical hoard of weapons - go for it!
The point here is two fold - the world cannot stand still while your players advance in levels. The world really does not revolve around them, and they shouldn’t be the most important people in the world, even if they did save it from destruction. The other side is the other side (meaning the other side of the conflict). If your players are good guys, then the bad guys will want to be gaining ground too. If your players are bad guys, then the good guys will want to rally the troops against them.
Maybe the gods want to get involved too. After all, if your players are slaughtering dragons across the planet in order to make things “safe” for humanity, shouldn’t the dragon gods get a little peeved? Wouldn’t they send their dragon champion on a quest to find the Heart of Dragonkind, a mystical amulet that allows the dragon champion to never be harmed in battle?
How does this play out? Well it could play out in a number of ways. The party could be back from killing the necromancer in a hidden tomb somewhere and learn that the two parties who were out chopping zombies to bits are the ones hailed as heroes, because they were the ones that the peasants saw protecting them. Or the party could spend three years saving village after village on the border, while another raided the tomb of a lich and returned with really powerful magic items. Or they could all just get along - comrades in arms, knowing everyone was doing their parts. When the final battle comes, your party might feel it is vitally necessary to protect the other party’s mage because he is the one wielding the wand of sunlight which destroys all undead. They might also see the evil high priest who sacrificed that one noble girl before they could save her and really want to get their revenge. Maybe we’re just making the point for permanent allies as well as the permanent enemies we advise in our books. Yeah - I guess we are.