Easter Eggs (the literary kind)

I’m a fan of Stephen King - Not a huge fan, but a fan. As such, I do not always get his little nods to his other works in each of his stories. That’s OK, it doesn’t ruin it for me. But for the huge fans, they love every little mention that crosses from one story to another. I think Easter eggs are fun. They’re little puns that some people will get and others won’t. But I think it is incredibly important that they are “little”. What’s “little”: Having a scribe in the back room of a lawyer’s office who’s name is Bartleby. If the players know the famous Melville story, it’s funny. If they don’t, no one cares. Having a newspaper reporter that is NOT key to the story line who’s name just happens to be Clark Kent is cute. If he actually is Superman, you probably just ruined the campaign. The issue here is that very few players are such great role-players that they can forget their own opinions and have their characters treat things on a fair basis. Example: I hate Green Lantern. I’ve always hated Green Lantern. I think the whole concept of that super-hero is silly and foolish. If one of my characters were in a campaign, superhero or not, and met up with a character named Hal Jordan, I would hate him. Doesn’t matter what this game character was supposed to do for or to my PC, I’d hate him. You run the same risk using known literary or film characters in your game. We went over this in Character Foundry - You can never be sure how a player is going to relate to a character if they see through your thinly veiled reference. There, we were talking about the use of real people as personalities in the game, but it works on both sides. A couple of more examples that work, because they are small: Mithrandir’s Staff in a museum (don’t give it any powers, other than possibly light emitting), a small hill outside of town known as Jacquesenjyll Hill, the blacksmith for the mine who’s name is John Henry, or a book about ghosts written by S. King. They’re kind of like puns, sometimes funny and sometimes not, depends on the eye of the beholder. If there is one moral we really want you to take away from this, it is: Don’t allow known people or characters from outside the game become important inside the game. That’s a rookie mistake, and it will cost you down the road.

Time to Change the World

Does your game world change? Is it completely stagnant? What about after adventures the players are a part of? Can they change the world? Very important point – I’m not talking about changing everything! Little changes can be good too. Example: For several adventures, you make your players go the long way around a river, because the fording spots are few and far between. Maybe you even slow their return from an adventure because rains have made the ford swollen and they have to wait to get across. Then, you let them know that someone is building a bridge. There’s a narrow spot where they can put up a bridge without affecting the river travel. To the players, no big deal, at least at first. Now they can travel more quickly. But so can everyone else. There will be new roads cut leading to the bridge. There will likely be new towns building up around the bridge. New towns come with all sorts of issues, plus the jealousy of the other towns that use to have all the travelers. Seems a small thing, but within a couple years of the bridge going up, you will change the populations of your towns along the river. If you ran adventures where the players rescued the architect behind the bridge or held off an attack from bandits/pirates/rivals, they will feel attached to the bridge. Seems like a small thing, right? It is. But it makes the world feel more real. What about the wars the party has fought in or around? Do the towns change hands? What are the impacts, both role-playing and adventure starting? Was there a drought? Did the players have to deal with rations being a lot more expensive because of the food shortages? Did the king get old and die? Is his son really old enough and wise enough to rule in his place? Was there any attempt to put a pretender on the throne? Maybe it’s just a duke or baron that has been switched. Is the new guy as supportive of the king as the old guy was? I’m not suggesting you need to immediately go and check the health of every one of your rulers, but if the campaign (or multiple campaigns) has been based in a certain city for 18 years – don’t you have to do something? OK – Let’s give some suggestions for starting small: Do your players and their characters prefer on tavern in town and dislike another? Have something happen to the other one. It caught fire. The owner died and his widow sold it. Whatever. Then you create a different tavern in that spot. Maybe your players will like this one better. Next – If your players have a good relationship with a contact, especially a highly placed political one, have him lose his job. Maybe he said something or maybe there is a full change in the local politics. Now, they are behind the eight ball for getting things fixed politically. Will they still do missions for him if he can’t pay them as much? Remember that the world will change, typically for the worse. Things happen that the adventurers have absolutely no control over (or maybe they did). Especially if the change is an unintended consequence of some mission they ran, then it just gets better to make them pay for it. One last note – Make sure you keep good records of what dates these things happen. If you ever run a campaign in the same general region, but it starts before the other one ended, you’ll need to duplicate the changes in the new campaign.

Perfect Families (rivalries within organizations)

If you look at the write up for Fletnern, you will see many organizations within the world. Religions, merchant cartels, military organizations, governments, etc. Each is written up with its powers and abilities as well as its goals and desires. But are they really that uniform? Are they really “perfect families” or is there some strife in there? The militaries - do they all believe the same things? More to the point, are the leather clad archers ever jealous of the steel armored heavy cavalry? Rivalries are a natural part of life. Some are good natured, but often they are not. Seldom are they based in fact, but they could be. Maybe the knights make up the cavalry and they come mainly from noble families. Well those guys are going to be eating far better food than the infantry or archers. In fact, the horses might be eating on par (or better) than the archers. They may all work together during the battles, but afterwards, their various officers might be willing to do some underhanded tricks to try and advance their units. Come on - This is politics after all! Especially when it comes to the bad guys, loyalty and fairness go right out the window. If some organization is generally underhanded, then they will be underhanded within their own organization too. So why does it matter? The different factions within an organization can lead to missions. A couple of examples: There is a weapons manufacturer associated with the “evil” army. They craft all the armor for the men and some magic for the officers. They also have an R&D department. The R&D guys should be the smartest smiths and enchanters. What if they start doing some evil testing on the townsfolk, but they are keeping it secret from the military? If you send in stupid player characters, they might get into a fight with the entire army, when the smart, detective-like PCs will figure out it is only a handful of bad guys within the bad organization. They might even get military commanders to help them stop the R&D guys. What if the captain of the archers is jealous of the captain of the infantry? What would he do? Would he kill his rival and create a detective mission? Would he hire assassins (creating that style of mission)? Would he discredit his rival causing the infantry officer to seek help from the PCs? And these examples are only within the military. Religious, political and economic organizations could be equally bad. The point is this - You have probably created a whole bunch of organizations within your game world. When you need more conflict and strife - try looking within those organizations. A handful of traitors can cause all sorts of trouble, requiring an “independent” group (of PCs) to be needed to sort the matter out. And the best thing, is that you probably wrote out half the stuff you needed already.

RPG Waiting

This may be obvious to some of you, but from conversations I’ve had with some game masters, not to everyone. What do you do when the party separates? There are always those times when player characters have to go in different directions in order to get the job done. Urban missions, especially in modern games, seem to be the most common “party splitters”. So what do you do as a GM? Whispering or throwing notes back and forth are both inefficient and boring to the other players. The best thing I have found is this: We always played in the basement. So when the party split up, the players who were not involved go upstairs (any different room) and watch a movie. What kind of movie - well, if you want them to come back when they are needed, it has to be a movie everyone likes, but they have already seen a couple times. That way when it’s their turn, they aren’t telling you as the GM to wait. This has all sorts of advantages: First, the movie helps drown out the sound of you talking to the players who are “active”, plus they aren’t right there. Second, the players who are not active are not bored, or at least not as bored as they would have been. Third, you can swap players in or out of the movie room as their characters enter the action, and all the time, you are right there with all your notes and paperwork. If you take a couple of players off to a corner, you probably don’t have all your papers. Not being part of the action can be boring, and your players don’t show up to be bored, but everybody recognizes when the party needs to split up for short periods of time. By distracting your players with a decent movie, they don’t notice the time flying by as much. One warning - it is best to make sure that you always have three people in the “movie room”, especially when its co-ed. No point in letting the down time turn into a romance!

Dwarves - at least in Fletnern

We’ve been working on Gods and Demons - which is behind- and have been referring to the dwarven gods and their issues. I thought, maybe we should talk about them more fully, but it doesn’t belong in the book. So here we go: Some time ago, there was a revolution in the dwarven Rocchairian Nation. The noble clans had ruled over the commoner clans for centuries, and the commoner clans were done with it. Over two or three generations, they had begun to form themselves into a communist or socialist society, or at least the beginnings of one. The inevitable revolution (armed - violent) occurred. Several of the noble clans had seen the writing on the walls and joined the rebellion in order to preserve their standing in the new government. The revolution was successful, and the nobles were overthrown. A council of clanmasters was established, and the nobles lost their lands. Well, it wasn’t as clean as that. Some of the nobles managed to hold on to certain pieces of land, and a peace was established. In any case, the new communist government was quick to put down any ideas or traditions that they felt would enable the nobles to build a power base. One of the ideas they wanted to put down was religion. The communists insisted that no dwarf was beholding to any god or noble. While this was originally established to prevent nobles or churches from taxing the commoner clans, it served to nearly outlaw religion. Fast forward to the current, and the dwarves within the Rocchairian Nation are non-worshipping atheists. While the dwarves outside the Nation (mainly the remaining, weakened noble clans) still worship, they are too few to maintain the power of the dwarven gods, and without the adoration of an organized religion, the gods are weakening, weakening to the point of heading towards oblivion. So, when you read Gods and Demons - now you’ll know!

Why Legend Quest - part 4

This will be our last of these, but if you have any questions, please just let us know in comments or at info@boardenterprises.com. Magic - hugely important for any FRPG. So how to use it? Well, I have always hated the “spell leaves your memory” model. Never understood that! I guess it’s from some forgotten fantasy novel series. Anyway - I wanted the mages to be able to customize just like the warriors (see the last post for details on shield fighters). So how? Well, in LQ, you need power levels in order to cast a spell. For attack spells, the more power, the more damage. So you can get your power way up and become a spell casting monster. OR you can get your control levels up and be more of a sniper. Instead of doing huge damage, you can get your accuracy (or range or area of effect) way up. That was always the intent, but wise spell casters learned to ride the middle - balance power levels and control levels to get fairly good on both sides. Here’s where the players have used the system to customize: number of spells. Some players get phenomenally good (control levels) with just a couple of spells. Others go for having dozens of spells at their command. These are the guys who love the Book of Wishes magic supplement. But this is a fun balancing act. Do you want to be a wizard with heals, fireballs, teleports, etc. or do you want to be a focused sorcerer with fireball, but a fireball that always hits and can be bigger and go farther than everyone else’s? It continues with which magic items you use, because those talismans are expensive. Which do you use to assist? Focus or broad ability? Further - What type of “magic” do you want? Mentalism, the “pure” magic of the mages and wizards, spell singing, alchemy or enchantment, etc. This affects whether or not you can use steel, how your spells are cast and a number of other influences, that may not seem important at first, but affect both the role-playing and the game. Mentalists don’t have to speak, while spells singers not only speak, but aren’t allowed to whisper. That matters! Both of them are unaffected by steel, while the wizards are, so if you want more of a fighter/mage, you are likely looking at a spell singer. Then again, a wizard with a glass sword (magically hardened of course) can be just as deadly in a duel. I wrote these posts to try and let some of the newer folks see “behind the curtain”. Everyone does things for a reason, and my reasons strongly influenced the rules of Legend Quest. Clearly, we think it is the best. Even when we started two decades ago, others agreed: “A real gem of a game. One of the best systems I’ve ever seen” - Dragon Magazine

Why Legend Quest - part 3

Legend Quest is a percentile system and only uses d10s. Several reasons for this, but the top two are: most female gamers have expressed that they hated the idea of different dice for different reasons. Since we had several ladies playtesting, d10 and d% seemed the best way to go. My personal opinion has always been that using 2d6 or 3d6 made the “pluses” silly. If you need to roll a “7” or better on 2d6 and you have a +1 modifier, it is a huge modifier. If you have the same +1 but need to roll an 11 or better, the odds are completely different. The +1 doesn’t mean as much. It’s the whole bell curve thing. On a % system, +5 means +5 whether you’re at the top or the middle or the % chance. This also then goes into damage. Damage dice are not 2d10 for a bell curve from 2-20, but instead 2D or a multiplier of “2”, so the damage is a smooth line from 2-20. In the first case, you will most likely do about 11 damage. In the LQ case, you have even odds of doing 2, 10 or 20. Yes - Average damage is the same, but the results are more dramatic. Plus, with multipliers, you can do a “half” die damage for 1-5. No need for a different die. Damage also comes with bleeding. If you are hurt, you will bleed, possibly to death. Why? Because someone with one point of life left should not be able to stand toe to toe with the bad guy and be perfectly the same as if he were fully healed. In LQ, bleeding first affects your Fatigue, slowing you down and making you less likely to succeed at things. Then it affects your Life’s Blood, meaning you could die. Don’t be stupid; go see the medic and get that thing bandaged! Armor blocks damage as it is coming in. The heavier the armor, the less of that damage gets through to you. Isn’t that what it is supposed to do? It doesn’t make you harder to hit, just harder to damage. It will slow you down as well, but you can get armor skill levels to offset some or all of the negatives. This means that a knight trained from birth to wear armor is going to be vastly better in it than some joker off the street. Little more realistic? We sure think so! Lastly (for this week) - Shields. I hate nothing more than in that historic first game where shields are +1. All shields were +1 to defense. No more, no less, didn’t matter if you were a moron or Captain America. Didn’t matter if it was a hand held buckler or a Roman legionnaire’s full bodied scutum. In LQ, different sized shields give different base benefits and the shield user’s skill levels (in Shields) dictate the added benefits possible. Why? Well, now it makes more sense, and now you can have a defensive fighter. You can set your guy up to have a huge shield and really know how to use it. Then he can “tank” or whatever you want to call it for the group. When I did it I was referred to as the “damage sponge”, soaking up damage for the rest of the party, but hardly ever killing anyone. next week - part 4 - magic