photo by jenasa@flickr

The spell Cantrip was a 1st level spell that allowed you to do almost anything as long as it was small and didn’t cause any damage to anything and anything created only lasted something like an hour. On the face of it you might think it was useless for anything other than a full on roleplay session. You couldn’t be further from the truth however.

Before we realised just how useful this spell was our mages tooled up with blatant offensive or defensive spells and that was it. Occasionally they would get their books out when they had to research some magic items for the group but usually it was ‘how many fireballs and hastes are we going to need today?’

Then one day one of our clerics died and the player decided completely against character to bring in a mage. His daily allowance of 1st level spells were always completely taken up by cantrips. It took us around an hour to work out what he was up to.

In our first encounter upon entering a hamlet was a crowd of young kids. We had asked for directions from everyone passing by but as we were armed to the back teeth and strangers to boot noone would talk to us. Our new mage wandered over to the gang of street kids and got talking to them. He ended up casting cantrips to allow him to perform a brilliant card trick and then finished it off with some mini-fireworks from his wand. The kids loved it and after a few moments we were on our way armed with the information we needed.

Now you might think that is exactly what cantrip was for but it gets better.

We arrived at the tavern we were looking for in order to track down a certain rogue that could help us fence some stolen art work. He didn’t want to deal with us and decided to hit our remaining cleric out of the way and make a run for it. One cantrip later and just as the NPC goes to barge through the cleric the holy symbol around his neck shines like it had caught the sun at high noon. Blinded by this the NPC stumbled and was easily caught by the hands of the warriors.

From that moment on I loved that spell. From pretending to burn treasure maps to get other interested parties off of our tails to magically tying the shoelaces of the guards together to aid in our escape. Every single thing the spell done was minor but it had a huge impact on the game and on our party.

I really wish they had kept the spell like that rather than find ways to limit it. I understand why they did that but it’s nowhere near as much fun now.

This months Blog Carnival is hosted by 6d6 Fireball on the topic of D&D. He has picked out 4 specific topics to write about so head on over and see what he has to say.

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As a group we never owned AD&D 1e as we’d been playing Rolemaster beforehand so we hit 2e just as it was new to the shelves. The problem with that though is that as a young kid our pocket money only went so far and so we were forced to improvise. In a pre-edwardian shopping gallery called the Virginia Galleries off one of the major shopping streets in Glasgow there was a gaming store that did a vast amount of second hand books. With everyone changing over to 2e there were literally thousands of 1e books available for pennies. I think we picked up Dragonlance Adventures for something like £1.50. Now obviously we were using 2e so things had to be fudged and this was probably around the time we first started creating our own house rules to match the setting with the 2e game books. If you look in the margins of my copy you can just about make out the house rules in pencil from 18 years ago.

I was amazed that within it’s 128 pages there was everything you needed to get started on playing in the setting. My amazement was probably misplaced but I think it stemmed from all the new settings coming in boxed sets with multiple booklets, handouts and maps. The tone of the setting fitted exactly with the novels that had been released for obvious reasons and the novels themselves were written in such a way that it felt like every gaming session we ran. The characters all returning home and meeting up in the tavern to start a new adventure. In fact I seem to recall somewhere saying that the first few books were really just cleaned up transcripts from the initial games they ran.

So as I asked earlier. What source book do you keep going back to for inspiration or to actually play in this day and age of old and new school gaming?

OK so the meetup only consisted of myself and Seumas from Games of State and in all honesty it was actually a joint meetup to have a few drinks for a friend who had recently flew in from Las Vegas and a few drinks to see another friend off on a two and half month trip around the world. But it got me thinking.

I know there are other Scottish RPG bloggers out there. I’ve stumbled upon a few of their blogs in the past and there is a few conventions up these neck of the woods so I’m sure there is a readership base there somewhere. So how best to get those blogs under the RPGBN’s wing and does it make sense to get them under the Saltire and march forth to conquer the internet?

You would think that a world that’s population was almost all under the rule of mad tyrants whilst living in the middle of a huge desert would be the most depressing setting you could possibly ever play in. And you would be right in thinking that but at the same time when your characters done well by god you felt good. It was like upping the level a few notches in a computer game and rerunning through it and beating it. You got an extra kick out of it.

Of course it had it’s bad points. I can’t stand the game mechanics for psionics and with everyone having a chance of having a power thanks to natural selection and the effect magic has on the planet your bound to have at least one person in your game that can wiggle their eyebrows suggestively at you and do something weird. I think we ended up banning everyone from using them at one point as they were just unusable in our games.

I loved the setting though the gladiator character class along with the new weapons made me a very happy person. I’ve still got a Mul character kicking about called Ryol of Calabash who is unbeaten in Tyr’s pit with singing sticks.

Dark Sun is a classic example of how to ruin a setting with the novels however. The bleakness that was there in the original setting was shattered within the very first book and from there on in there was nothing they could do to stop it. By the time the rewrite came around the characters in the novels had already killed a sorcerer king and you’d heard far to much about the avangion. I loved the books, don’t get me wrong , but as a way to further the setting you couldn’t have have found a worse destination to arrive at. All your mysteries were Scooby Doo’d in the first two series released and there was almost nothing left to wonder about.

Just to prove I’m not just about high level characters, though you’d be forgiven for thinking this going on my previous posts, I’ll tell you about a character that sits in my top three and never made it past level six.

We’ve ran and played in many Forgotten Realms campaigns but for me one of them stands out purely for the character I played. I don’t know what the attraction is but I think I’ve played my fair share of dwarves over the years and for once I wanted to play something other than your normal axe wielding warrior but at the same time wanting to be that axe wielding warrior. What I finally landed on was Thorgrim Hardanvil.

Looking back at the character sheet I can remember thinking I wanted to eventually make him into your stereotypical dwarven weaponsmith that would also go out on adventures. I’d never actually tried that route with a dwarf before surprisingly enough but I had a spare non-weapon proficiency slot going and nothing that jumped out at me. In a moment of random insight I added brewing to my sheet and didn’t think anything else of it.

That was until the 3rd or 4th session we played. We’d picked up a mission in The Yawning Portal to help out some local merchants who were being pushed out of the market after refusing to pay protection money to a local gang. After a few hours of gaming we came across a building that used to be a brewery that just happened to be where the gang had set up shop. After a rather successful battle I came up with a bright idea to use the equipment to make up some homebrew. It certainly wasn’t easy to set up but within a few levels I had a rather successful business venture going on.

You may ask what was so exciting about playing a character that ran a brewery? Well after we managed to get a few contracts in Waterdeep itself, usually after doing a ‘favour’ for the tavern owners, we expanded our business north to the villages in Frozenfar. Being a little like bat country once you got into the wilds it meant having to have armed escorts to make sure the goods got through as well as trips to the outlying areas to sell the ale in the first place. The simplest skill taken in a moment of weakness turned out the be the major plot point for almost everything we did over the nexts three months of gaming.

What has been your favorite low level character and what made them so special?

So I guess I’ll be doing a future based undead/zombie attack scenario for the test run then.

(Ignore the pink cast… My light tent was giving off some strange colours today and I coudn’t seem to correct them in post)

Now if I’m going to do this I’m going to want to do it right so your experiences will be valuable. So with that in mind I have a few questions.

Does it really matter if figures are only half painted or even completely unpainted?

Does this work well with paper based maps with the scenery drawn on or do you need model scenery as well to get the feeling right?

Just how far do you go if you do use scenery?

I get the feeling I’m not really going to get into it unless I go OTT on the scenery which will limit my model based encounters to a select few predesigned and built battles. Seems to defeat the purpose of using miniatures in the first place though.

I’ve never understood it to be honest as I’ve always took the pastime to be about the storytelling rather than attack arcs traced out on hex paper or line of sight being blocked by an out of scale plastic barrel. Having only ever used miniatures in a gaming session once around 17 years ago I still struggle to this day to work out just what it brings to the game. When we did try it I was running a game on Griffon Island for my Runequest campaign and in all honesty it was more hassle than it was worth. Aside from having to draw out maps and room plans to scale for every encounter I had to contend with players being grumpy because their figure didn’t exactly match that of their character. The very next session we ditched the figures and went back to using a notepad to scribble down maps and help explain locations. When it came to the actual combat we found the encounter to be clearer in our heads without the use of props as I was describing the locations as well as the enemy in a completely different manner. With the figures I placed them on the map and it turned into a small scale wargaming skirmish and that was it. No roleplaying involved at all.

I can see that if done in a way that takes the best of both worlds it could work but for something as simple as a fight with a band of kobolds in a cave its an awful lot of work for something that in my eyes does not add very much to the game.

As you can probably tell I’m not really feeling the new edition just yet. Is it just me or are WotC trying to push every single angle they can to get you to part with every spare bit of cash you have?

“Oh look we sell miniatures now…I know lets make the combat rules work for figures and get everyone to buy them as well as the rulebooks. Oh and while we’re at it lets split up the character classes and thing slike that so we can release the players handbook over several volumes. They’ll have to buy everything just to play the game they way they want to.”

It’s getting all very White Wolfish. They’ve ran out of ideas so lets rewrite the rules again and get a new cash boost when folk buy the new books. They got rid of Thac0! *shakes head*

In my games there is no right or wrong way for a character to react to further the game. The story will go on without them even if it has to jump about a bit to get round a problem the character has caused but it will still get there. With very little in the way of set pieces storyboarded out I tend to leave it up to the player to do whatever they want which is where the problem can start.

• Players might not have a clue whats going on and so dither about all session trying to bump into some action.
• You might find the set pieces you have written happen in a completely different place from where the characters end up.
• It’s all to easy for players to pick up on something completely innocent that you’ve mentioned and decide that was what they had been looking for and run off in completely the wrong direction.

There are many other things that could happen to derail you in a game like this as you need to be prepared for anything. With a well prepared campaign/story/session where the players are effectively nudged along such as in 95% of the publications you can buy that provide such things everything i there for you and you only have to go off the page on the rare occasion.

An example of how my games sometimes don’t work out would be from my last campaign where the PC’s were trying to find and track down an outlawed group in the local woods. They spent weeks in the village generally messing about as I gave them no real leads or out at the local tanners waiting for one of them to come home for supplies. Thankfully they stumbled upon that house or we could have been there for ages as I struggle sometimes to work on the fly and create believable improvised story hooks to nudge them when I do actually want to nudge them.  There were plenty of other ways to track these bandits down but because of the way the characters acted around town, ie trying to get in good with the sheriff, no one wanted to talk to them.

One instance where it worked quite well was in a previous AD&D campaign loosely based on David Eddings Sparhawk novels. I’d virtually stolen the knights and their chapters wholesale from those books but I had added my own twist to make them fit into the rewritten Birthright setting that we were using. Anyway our two characters were trying to track down a mystic who could point them in the direction of whatever object it was they were hunting for. They’d spent a good day or two around town hunting this guy down and finally finding him in the market which was in front of their tavern. Rather than talk to him there and then and move on to the next part of the campaign they chose to follow him around which took them to the opposite side of the city to an illegal fighting den. This delay meant that they were going to get caught up in the attack that was due for that night which they were meant to completely miss. Returning to their tavern that night they noticed they were being shadowed on the rooftops by cloaked figures. It turned out that it wasn’t them they were shadowing but they were instead advancing on the market place. By the time the players made it back to the tavern the mystic was in the middle of the marketplace and seemed to be going through a ritual to summon a demon. Anyway the players found out a few things about the knights before that battle was over with a ‘care bear stare’ style anti-undead attack that they weren’t meant to see and huge battle in the tavern between the patrons and hordes of mindless zombies made from the towns folk. The freeform style of play meant the session that night actually turned out far better than it should have been for the players and they found out a lot of things that until then they had been dismissing and gave the characters a new meaning and drive to get through the campaign in one piece.

Gaming sessions like the latter are few and far between so they tend to stick in my mind where as I find the former to crop up in every campaign on a depressingly regular pattern. All this because too much info like you get in a premade campaign setting confuses me to much to actually run them successfully. I need to find a happy medium I think.

I blame the levels of caffiene I end up with in my system on game nights for this not working. Honest.

Then one day I thought I’d try and convert weaponmastery over to AD&D rules. It looked relatively easy as the damage tables were already written down so all I had to do was fudge the rules a little bit and everything would work OK. Well that was wrong to start with. I’d forgotten that in D&D weapons generally do less damage than in AD&D and the weapons charts don’t exactly match up. You might be able to get one weapon and have teh damage charts for it in AD&D but there was nothing comparable on the D&D charts. Eventually I managed to go through every weapon in the basic AD&D books and ‘update’ them for weaponmastery and I actually managed to playtest 95% of the weapons during the gaming sessions at university.

Back then you didn’t have blogs and in fact you could barely find a website about roleplaying anywhere on the internet. What you did have though was a thriving newsgroup scene and several active email lists. One of the mailing lists covered AD&D and I loved it. I very rarely posted to the group but when I did it was always something that added nothing to the conversation and was barely funny but I enjoyed it though. I spent a good few nights in a computer lab typing up the damage charts and eventually posted it to the mailing list and people loved it. Several people tested it again for me and after a few tweaks I posted an updated version to the list and even more people went off and played the rules variant that I’d written.

For years I had the original charts in a notebook I kept with all my old character I’ve had over the years. At some point though it’s went missing. I’ve no idea when it’s went missing but it must have been when I moved home. I really want to run a 2nd Edition game soon and I really want to use those rules. My only other hope is that I can find my old disks from my university days and hope a friends Mac can still read them.