The Visions of Hazahall

    Back in the mists of time wizards decided to just take power for themselves and quickly formed an enormous and powerful kingdom run by magic. It predictably went absolutely mad and insane and turned to shit in no time, as magic and mutation and horrors consumed and engulfed its population.The few of those sorcerers who still lived and were willing to teach their magic to others would then begin a tradition of forcing any student to experience a very strong psycho-magical vision of the fall of Hazahall, the Glittering Kingdom, as a way of deterring their pupils from lusting after temporal power.

    This is an edited excerpt from a play-by-post game that I played with my partners a few years ago, that I am now posting here for posterity and because I was asked to. The scene involves Valeria - a young noble and later queen of her city-state that wants to learn how to practice magic and Jenx - a wizard and friend to Valeria, as well as mentor and counselor. The two are at the house of Violette, an old friend of Jenx’s, and Jenx is preparing the ritual of the Visions of Hazahall

    The broken up trance of the recitation was interrupted by Jenx suddenly inhaling sharply! He could see, and Valeria could sense it through him, that he was no longer in his friend's house. Instead he stood in the wide plaza of a city. The buildings were of pure white stone, towering above him, glittering like gems. The sky was pink or purple, and the people around him simply hummed with power. They walked around, ignoring him, talking among themselves.

During the trance Valeria had latched her aura into Jenx's with barbs of intention. She could feel his angular body pressed against her flesh. It was grounding and she used it as a conduit to dig deeper into his spirit. She did not want to hurt him but also wanted to be sure the ritual was done properly. When he inhaled she knew he was there. She could not see it but she understood it.

Jenx blinked and the scene changed. The city was still towering and glittering, but the people in it were now...different. Some looked like they were made of glass. Some had their skin become translucent and then shift into different colors. Some simply had an inscrutable look in their eyes. They still seemed joyous and happy as before, but there was a sense of unease. Like the joy was forced for the sake of appearances. There was a tension in the atmosphere, a dread. Like the pit in one's stomach as they are about to step off a cliff.

He took a deep breath. He knew what was about to come. He tensed up preparing for it.Valeria grew tenser with him. He blinked again.

The sky broke. It shattered like the shell of an egg, parts of it falling down, destroying the city, turning bodies into paste, shattering the glass creatures into shimmering mist. There was terror and panic that made his heart rate race like he was about to collapse. The sky broke still. Behind it there was nothing. A void and in it a black sun burned away flesh, thoughts, emotions, stone and wood. It burned away all.

Then there was nothing but a roiling mass of horror. Flesh, stone and glass mixed into one, pain worse than anything a mortal body was able to experience. And the burning of the black sun above. Jenx stood on, or hovered over, a low hill. Around him the roiling color and flesh reached out to him - with hands, claws, eyes, tendrils and other impossible appendages, reaching for help, begging for safety in a million voices. Every time they did not touch him though, pulling back away as if he was just out of reach.

Time became meaningless. There was simply an eternity of suffering in which Jenx was awash, like a man standing on the shore as the tides came in. It was years. Decades. Millennia. Time had become meaningless, just as self, pain, body, up, down, sky and sun had.

Valeria slumped against him. Every ounce of her will was in twined with his emotions. In her mind she clawed her way to him. His mind was locked in horror beyond reason but she clung to him, she loved him. It was like waves of pure terror and misery were trying to drag her down and away, but she clung to him, not just to support herself but also to brace Jenx against the onslaught. Tears flowed from her physical body and fell on his braided hair.

He had stopped breathing. He wasn't sure when exactly, but at some point he had stopped breathing because breathing had become a meaningless idea, just as his lungs were.

The sun had burned everything away - the million colors of the roiling flesh had simply turned to grey ash. Then the sun had burned itself out too. The screams stopped, but their echo continued. Nothing. Emptiness. But in that emptiness, the echo started to break apart. To take on a strange, stunted rhythm. The rhythm of his breath, the rhythm of the verse which Violette was reciting ever louder. And his breathing started again, again following the rhythm. He looked up one final time, into the empty void above where the sky had stood.


It was time to leave.

Adventure Design - Location, Scenario, Plot

When designing material for play at the table, it is helpful to think about what exactly you are trying to design as that will inform what sort of work you need to prepare before the game. Below I list three distinct (if often related) types of adventure structure.

Location Design

Whether it is a wilderness to explore a dungeon to delve, location-focused design is about setting up a fictional play space with enough things for players to interact with to provide entertainment and enjoyment during the game. This is your standard “sandbox” type of deal. A point-crawl, a hex crawl of some kind, and again, dungeons, all fall into this when they are being made with the primary concern being exploring the fictional space.

Secondary goals might exist such as looking for a specific item or NPC, attempting to do a specific task, or even just getting experience points. However an adventuring Location should work just as well without any objective beyond “this is a place to play in”.

Location-focused adventures can often benefit from having a scenario of some kind set up beforehand, as the two work quite well naturally. A plot of some kind could also be slotted in, of course, but in most cases that will simply overshadow the exploration of the location as a goal in and of itself.

How this differs from Scenarios is that the location does not need to have a specific situation or conflict currently happening as the players enter the picture. It is quite alright for a Location adventure to begin “static” and then react and shift as a result of the actions of the players.

How it differs from a Plot is that a location does not necessarily cares about specific narrative beats happening (either in order, or even at all). If the players do not interact with a specific element of the location, that does not result in bad or subpar gaming experience.

Obvious Example: Here is a dungeon composed of 20 odd keyed rooms. It has numerous enemies, hazards, treasure and obstacles. Some of the enemies form factions and have some kind of broad-strokes predetermined views of other enemies and/or factions, which gives an avenue for the players to engage in picking a side or playing all sides against each other.

Scenario Design

A different type of adventure is setting up a specific situation, outlining clearly the sides involved and their goals and parameters for “success” in the conflict, and going from there.

For me at least this type of design is primarily tied to wargaming (miniature, tabletop or otherwise). Wargaming is about conflict resolution of some kind, and so it benefits from having a scenario which outlines the parameter of the conflict.

An important part of scenario design is that it should depict the conflict already having started, and the players already begin the game by being part of one or multiple sides, and then striving to achieve their side’s goals as best as they can. Once the conflict of the scenario has been resolved, that adventure is now done and concluded - Further scenarios might be devised as logical reactions or responses to the way this first one played out, and stringing a bunch of those in a row is what a lot of wargaming campaigns end up looking like.

How this differs from a Location adventure is that while setting up the field for the conflict is part of establishing parameters, the location and its peculiarities only matter as far as they affect the conflict or scenario in question. It does not matter if over the mountains there exist some other kingdom that has other problems, because that does not directly affect the situation of the two orc tribes battling it out in this valley.

How this differs from Plot is that a scenario might have one outcome or another be more or less likely to occur as a result of the initial setup (in a “doomed last stand” kind of deal, the player or players doing the last stand are generally expected to lose eventually) however it usually does not care for specific outcomes happening or not happening. That contrasts it with a plot-focused adventure, which often needs specific narrative beats to occur so that the plot can progress without having to result to that most dreaded of term “railroading”, in which the referee simply forcibly drags the characters onto the next step of the plot, regardless of whether that makes any sense in the situation or not.

You can’t really railroad a Scenario, because if the conflict already has a 100% certain outcome, then that conflict is not barely gameable, and therefore simply unsuited for being used to prepare a gaming session.

Obvious Example: The party and their allies must defeat an imposing Big Evil Enemy. They know the broad parameters of where that Big Evil Enemy is, and the focus of the game is resolving that conflict one way or another. Once the Big Evil Enemy is defeated, or defeats the players, or any other potential resolution to the conflict has occurred, the scenario is complete and finished.

Plot Design

Plot design is the cornerstone of Trad play, and more often than not the one done very poorly. An inevitable result of it being the most broadly done way of running and playing TTRPGs I suspect.

A key difference is that a “plot” is not a “story”. Any of these types of adventures can result in a story, as the story is simply the actual events of what happened (both within the fiction and at the table). One can not write a story adventure, because that is already complete and there is nothing in there to actually play out. So instead, what you do is write a plot.

Plot adventures are most often formulated as a series of narrative elements or beats, some (or all) of which need to be met so that the players may progress onto the next set of beats. You can't go and question the doctor until you find his card at the scene of the crime (or you hear from a witness that they saw him with the victim. Or you find his name in the victim’s day planner, etc.). The reason you can’t is that the doctor might not even have existed as an element in the game, until you found the narrative beat that lets you know he even exists.

The enjoyment of playing through a plot-focused adventure is trying to find the beats and where they lead, with an ideal one often having twists and turns to the plot that the players do not anticipate, but could have foreseen if paying close attention to what has come before hand, leaving them with a broadly conventional narrative or story after completing the adventure.

How Plot adventures differ from Scenarios is that they tend to not have as clear win or lose states as a scenario would. In a scenario each side participating has very clear goals, and there is rarely much care given to results outside of those already established before play even began. In a Plot-based adventure the outcome from moment to moment is a lot less clearly outlined, and in a well designed plot adventure there should be numerous results or actions which still lead you onto the next plot beat.

As for Locations, Plot tends to not care about the fictional space in which the narrative is set in, beyond the obvious effects it will have on the actual plot. Abandoning the plot that supposedly everyone has agreed to follow through on as part of the gaming session to simply explore some other part of the location is often seen as disruptive behavior in a Plot-focused adventure, whereas it is the entire point of gaming in a Location adventure.

Obvious Example: A mysterious crime has taken place, and the players take on the roles of investigators trying to uncover what has occurred, and separate truth from lies. Numerous plot points involving questioning suspects, gathering clues and uncovering layers of mysteries eventually lead to a logical conclusion of the plot in which the investigating players confront the perpetrator.

There are, of course, other ways of thinking about how to structure gaming material for play at the table, but to me these three are the major categories that tend to cover most experiences happening in tabletop RPGs.

On Hobby Best Practices - Part 5

 

Series Index
<< Part 4 

Part 5 - Practice your actual hobby

I have saved the most blatantly obvious of these posts for last. Yet it feels sometimes like the obviousness of this is not as clear as I or others might think, so it bears stating it out loud.

First off, let me direct you to Weird Writer’s excellent post on the roleplaying hobbies. She breaks things down in an excellent manner, and frankly much better than I ever could. Going by their list, this post will be specifically about participating in the “core hobby”.

To do so first one must define what their core hobby is. In the case of TTRPGs, as that is the primary focus of this series, it can be rather tricky, however for the purposes of this post I will say that playing at a table (in person or virtual one) with other people is the core hobby of playing tabletop RPGs.

That might sound like a hot take, or even “controversial”, but the fact that it does is the same reason it needs saying. Playing tabletop RPGs, with other people, is the core of the TTRPG hobby. Buying books, reading books, writing and preparing adventures, scenarios, locations, sub-systems, magic spell lists, writing session reports, doing solo play, engaging in the community, watching actual plays - all of those are perfectly nice and enjoyable activities, but they are not engaging with your core hobby.

However one can’t become a more engaged and better hobbyist at their chosen hobby by simply nibbling around the edges. I put off writing this post for over a year, because due to various life reasons I was not able to do much of any gaming until the very tail end of 2024, and it felt disingenuous to declare the importance of play as I was not engaging in any myself.

TTRPGs are in a lot of ways a craft and crafts require purposeful, focused practice to become better at. And surely we, as hobbyists, should desire to become better at the thing we love and enjoy doing right?
This was the last planned post in this series. I might add further ones if I feel a specific thing benefits from being highlighted as a best practice. Or even better, I encourage you to contribute to this list yourself! If you do, please share it with me.

Thank you for reading, and go do more hobbying!

Wolves Upon the Coast - Session Reports and Observations, part 2

 

 I've started playing in NBateman's Wolves Upon the Coast campaign being run from the Rainbow/Purple OSR Discord.  I wrote another post already which you can find here. This one is going to cover the events of Sessions 4 and 5 (I did not participate in Session 3) as well as my thoughts on those.

  

Current state of our map.

Session 4 + 5

As stated I did not participate in Session 3, but from what other players told me the party made its way to Jork, met with the local king as well as other characters and Albinus, the Christian scholar/monk in our party ended up going north to fight a giant named Thomas (who apparently keeps kidnapping and murdering musicians), using some poison they acquired along the way.

Session 4 begins with my character Thorgo and a few others going north to see what became of Albinus and the Giant. They arrive to a beach littered with corpses - Albinus, Thomas the Giant and also, rather inexplicably, some 30 odd bandits. Everyone except Albinus has their corpses ripped apart, their guts and innards picked at and missing. The party gathers up what treasure they could from the giant's bag, retrieve Albinus's naked corpse and sail back to Jork, along the way running into some crashed ships and potential drowned ghosts, which are promptly ignored.

In Jork the party spread the word of Albinus's deeds and his sacrifice for the people of Jork. The local bishop starts working the crowd and declares that Albinus is a martyr and a saint and the locals begin construction of a shrine in his honor. Meanwhile the king of Jork is happy the problem has been dealt with and gives Stignadr a force of 100 men and 5 ships to return to Rhus and help fight off the Merfolk.

While the army prepares to leave the party splits up, running personal errands. Thorgo goes to the hermit seeking knowledge of magic. The hermit is polite, but says he isn't taking in any apprentices, but directs Thorgo to a witch that he knows, warning him to not seek the path to power. (At that Thorgo politely keeps quiet as he's a guest in this man's hovel). Thorgo was accompanied by 2 NPC crewmates from The Freedom (the name of the karvi that the party began the campaign in). One of them says he's not interested in this magic nonsense and heads back to the group. The other one says he wants to go with Thorgo to learn magic. The two buy a small raft and head up the river, searching for the witch.

Session 5 skips ahead as the fleet has finished mustering and is ready to return to Rhus. Among the Brythonic soldiers are Robert the Stonemason (Also known as Bob the Brython) and Val, both local Christians and replacement PCs for myself and Havoc (Albinus's player). Robert has deeply mid stats, good HP and is incredibly learned, being able to speak fluently Norse and also able to read and write in Brythonic. He is a relatively new convert to Christianity and so is a bit...loose let's say with his interpretations of the holy scriptures, as are the others in the area. He became inspired by Albinus's martyrdom and sacrifice and is going to become a member of the saint cult dedicated to him, for sure.

On the way back to Rhus the fleet encounters an odd sight - an island that was not there a couple of weeks ago as the crew sailed to Jork. The island is covered in hills and an imposing mountain, as well as a port and village which are of strange and alien architecture and completely abandoned.

The fleet stops to loot some gold ornaments off an old boat and those who disembarked have a vision the next morning - the rising sun appears to them as a blazing red eye with a triangle in the center. Bob and Val declare that this is a sign from God and that he clearly looks upon them with favor in the upcoming war with the merfolk. This mostly keeps the crew of the ship content and not panicking.

The fleet proceeds through a narrow channel now formed between the new island and Rhus, and arrive in the fortress of Trecht, where Stigandr, having now returned with an army as promised takes Princess Sophia's hand in marriage.

The next morning there's a war council and the PCs, plus Sophia and Grimmr (the captain of the Jork fleet) decide to go explore this new island in hopes of finding allies against the merfolk, as it was observed that the merfolk avoid going to it since it showed up a few days prior.

The group makes their way to the island, finding the mangled remains of the previous doomed Rhus expedition sent to investigate it by the increasingly mad and demented king. Going into the forest towards the imposing mountain, the party run into the mutilated hanging corpses of beastmen and the drumming of strange drums in the distance. Sophia has enough of this shit and flees, Stigandr running after her to make sure she's safe. The rest of the party, composed of Ingvar and Olaf the vikings, Grimmr the Jork captain, Robert the Brython and Val proceed to the mountain - a strange obelisk of sheer rock, spiky points and no vegetation.

Robert boasts that he will climb to the top of this thing, with the boisterous Grimmr immediately challenging him to a race. Everyone except Val (who is of low constitution and would almost certainly die trying to do this nonsense) decide to have a race, climbing up the mountain in 5 grueling days. Eventually, Ingvar makes a surprise advance and manages to overtake everyone, getting to the top first. All who climb the mountain experience a strange feeling if awe and cosmic insignificance, and find themselves marked with a triangular mark on their shoulder - the sign of the mountain and a potent magical protection.

The climb down, now without any food left, claims Olaf who is lost to the mountain, but the rest descend and meet up with Val. On the day of their descent they also go out hunting, as they are all very hungry, and in the process run into the beastmen, having now captured Stigandr (who had previously stood behind to hold them back as he told Sophia to run away) and experimenting on him, completely mangling his left arm at this point.

The beasts seem in awe of the people who have the mountain's blessing and do not stop them as the party retrieve the barely awake and concious Stig and return to their makeshift camp, giving him food and water, and Robert giving the poor naked man his shirt to keep him warm.

The party try and fail to leave off the island and go back to Rhus, but their attempts at crossing the channel with a raft are thwarted by a flash storm that just does not let up, so eventually Robert declares another boast - he will swim the channel in the storm, reach Trecht and get help. Grimmr, now going stir crazy from doing nothing for 2 days straight, oneups him and proposes another race.

Robert can't do much but agree, and the two men strip naked and dive into the murky stormy waters. Grimmr is lost to the storm, blown out into the open seas, but Robert, exhausted and hurting gets washed up on the shores of Rhus. He pushes through the storm and the night, out of sheer determination and reaches the ruined walls of Trecht. Apparently the battle had been fought and lost there in the time the party were busy racing up a mountain. He runs into a friendly local, tells him about the others stranded on the island then politely collapses from exhaustion.

The next couple of days the party manage to get saved and get back together and hear that the merfolk attacked en masse, destroyed the fortress, but the Jork and Rhus forces managed to drive them off in the center of the island, at heavy losses, but still victorious. The victory was hollow though as the Jork soldiers realizing there's little food simply raided the treasury and abused the local population.

Stigandr, exhausted from his ordeal, renounces his pagan ways and asks to be Christened, which Robert performs himself. The party gather up what they can in The Freedom and make ready to set sail back to Jork. Sophia asking them to send help and food, but the party are doubtful that any help would be of use - Rhus is clearly a cursed and doomed place, and so they just want to get away.

Observations

Fuck this is way longer of a recap than I intended, but so much keeps happening in these sessions that it's hard to cover it all even when condensing things significantly.

I wanted to have Thorgo learn magic from the moment I created him, so this was a great way to get him moving on that direction. Nathan, our Referee, says he's fine with running individual side-sessions for people, so Thorgo will be doing his own adventures. I made Robert as a throw away character to just play in the session, but he now has 3 hit dice, personally had a hand in installing a Christian king on the throne of Rhus (for what that's worth) and has a magical blessing from the weird mountain.  So my stable now has 2 very solid looking characters, which is almost not what I wanted, as now I have to actually put some effort into both of them hah.

Boasting continues to always feel slightly odd - the fact that you declare a boast, then get the bonus, then keep it if you succeed sounds like it should be intuitive, but that's...just not how actual boasting in real life works. You boast to others after the fact about the great deeds you've accomplished. So it just doesn't quite fit, but we seem to be getting the hang of making it work.

The race up the mountain was lots of fun, completely decided on the spot, and also helped underline just how little most of us, who aren't Stigandr, actually cared about Rhus and its fate hah. The race was a series of Constitution attribute tests, which definitely helped underline a broader issue with D&D like games, which that attribute tests are very awkward of a mechanic, in a system that does not focus on raising your attributes.

Val has a CON of 4, which is why his player decided to not even try and run him in the race - he was going to die, 100% guaranteed.  This brought on a good discussion during the game, and is something I've thought about on and off for a while now too.

Broadly speaking, I think that if you are going to have attribute checks be a regular element in your game, then your attributes should be able to be raised above what you rolled initially. Tunnels & Trolls makes that effectively the entire engine of the game, and it works fine and solves the problem.

Another observation is that these sessions have been just absolutely packed with action and events. I suspect that is due to the general density of stuff in the Wolves hexcrawl, more than anything else, but of course that's for our referee to know. But even just the immediate area around Jork appears to be full of giant monsters to hunt, a dungeon and numerous other things. And that is but a tiny speck on the entire hex map that composes the Wolves Upon the Coast campaign setting.

I am definitely interested in seeing how running two different characters will go. I usually use side-characters as mostly just throw aways, and in B/X or other older D&D games that makes sense - when you need XP to level up, playing multiple characters simply means you are diluting your XP per session and thus all of your characters just end up overall weaker.

Well in Wolves there is no exp, and Robert now has more hit dice than Thorgo! So I think that helps people just make new PCs and simply run with them. That and of course our referee being willing to handle multiple PCs and keeping track of the timeline that entails.

Wolves Upon the Coast - Session Reports and Observations, part 1

    I've started playing in NBateman's Wolves Upon the Coast campaign being run from the Rainbow/Purple OSR Discord.  While this post is, ostensibly, a session report in practice it's mostly going to be me talking about observations from the game so far.

Current explored parts of the giant WutC hex map. Hexes marked with a red dot are ones we have actually visited, not just seen.

 

Session 1 + 2

The campaign started, as per the WutC way, with our party of now former thralls having killed our masters and taken over the raiding ship we are on. My character, a man who only gives his name as Thorgo rolled high enough stats to get the meager bonuses offered by them, but only 2 HP. Questionable.

After sailing around a bit the party ran into the isle of Rhus and met with the local aristocracy - the demented king Maritz and his two daughters, Sophia and Louise. The island, it seems, has been under a sustained assault by merfolk from the depths of the ocean who have killed numerous people, sunk every single ship sent out for help, and have been a general nuisance. Stigandr boasted that he'll bring back an army to push away the merfolk and take the princess's name in marriage (nobody is still quite sure which princess that is, including Stigandr himself).

The whole army getting process gets delayed due to a rather prolonged rainstorm, during which the party explore the island, get into a fight with some merfolk, kill some more merfolk, make friends with the locals and explore a seaside cave that has a merfolk idol of some kind with its head missing (a likely reason they are so agitated and attacking the island).

As the weather finally clears the party make final preparations and sail west to Albonn, to seek help. As they were warned numerous times by the princesses, as soon as the ship cleared away from the coastline a gathering of merfolk ambush it. The preparations come in handy - nails sticking out of the gunwale of the ship along with everyone in the crew being armed with javelins or bows manages to whittle away the merfolks' numbers and only a few get on board, with Thorgo declaring a boast that he will defend the entire right side of the ship by himself, which he does, and Friggis (who has 1 HP) declared he will not be touched by a merfolk's weapon for the entire fight...which he did not. 

With their anime protagonist bullshit aside, the party manges to clear the boarding party and speed away from the second wave of attackers, having suffered only 1 PC casuality and a couple of followers. The ship soon makes its way to Albonn where they run into a rather dodgy looking village, apparently run by exiles, outlaws and thieves. Getting some directions and the lay of the land from the locals the party rest on their ship and prepare to sail north the next session.

A short summation of the two sessions so far.

Observations

 So overall I quite enjoyed these two sessions and look forward to the campaign ahead. Below is a non-exhaustive list of things that stood out to me throughout the games so far.

General Campaign Setup

The game is being run on Discord, through a text chat and a voice channel (no video). I find online games rather exhausting and mentally taxing, making it very hard to focus, but with several sessions now between this and the ASE campaign I mentioned in another post, I have found that perhaps the presence of video is what really makes me wiped out after gaming online. With audio only, and having to simply follow a text chat along with it, I am able to shift my focus a lot more easily to the various spreadsheets and map and other such things.

Speaking of, the campaign has a shared Google Sheets document with a roster of the characters, individual character sheets, a quartermaster sheet showing everyone's inventory and then a sheet for the ship and our fellow escaped slaves and newly joined Rhusian warriors. It is very well laid out and makes tracking what is going on a lot easier, especially in sessions with 6+ players. 

The combination of voice + text is also surprisingly useful. As people are chatting or discussing things, declaring actions and so on, what we often end up doing is then making action declarations or comments in text, which  reduces the level of overall noise while still allowing everyone to act simultaneously  (which in turn speeds up the game). A good example is in session 2 during the fight on the ship, as my character became more and more pumped up by adrenaline he would start shouting taunts at the merfolk, which I always just typed in chat rather than add more noise to the already busy voice chat of running a small skirmish-sized fight.

General Engagement 

A combination of having most of the players in the game also being referees of their own games, as well as the shared space used for characters and inventory creates a pretty high level of engagement from all players during the sessions. While a few of the players choose to step back a bit, most everyone else is always doing something, rather than waiting for the referee to give us a prompt. That includes maintaining the shared roster, handling mapping in tldraw (see above), or just taking notes.

Boasts and Gear

A standout with Wolves's built in system (a sort of stripped down OD&D affair) is the way character advancement happens. For those who don't know, in Wolves you don't gain experience, but instead your character can loudly and in public boast about attempting some kind of feat or other (slaying a monster, finding a specific treasure, doing a heroic deed of some kind) and that boast comes with an instant bonus of either +1 Hit Die or +1 (+2 in our house rules) attack bonus. Once the character succeeds at what they boasted they will do, that bonus is permanent. If they fail, the bonus is lost, but they can simply boast about something else. If they actively avoid or are seen to be dragging their feet about achieving what they said they will, they also lose the bonuses and, more importantly, can never boast again, as their reputation has taken a permanent hit.

There is also a mechanic where a rival or party member can challenge the boast, one-upping it which in turn gives another bonus, but if the original person then concedes that challenge, the challenger now must fulfill the challenge themselves. 


This whole setup, while very evocative of the kind of Beowulf-like setting of the campaign, does present some interesting challenges to the more typical OSR party-based advancement and cohesive action. It is a lot more individualistic, as each person has to stand out on their own, and in fact any subsequent boasts must, kind of by necessity, be more and more bombastic. Conversely, the bonuses you get from the boasts are both good and yet...kind of not good enough for the effort required. Case in point - Thorgo, my character, started with 1 HD and 2 HP. During the fight on the ship he declared his boast, getting another +1 HD and rerolling both to now get 11 hit points! Awesome, right? Well...sort of. He did get hit for 2 at one point, which would have killed him before his boast, but whether had 3 or 11 HP did not matter for that fight.

What mattered, however, was his gear. I started Thorgo using chain armor to help compensate for his low hit points, and while the party was mucking about on the island waiting for the rain to stop, he exchanged his starting spear for a greatsword. In Wolves Upon the Coast all weapons have some kind of special ability related to them, as well a a weight class which says if they do 1d6 hits (for medium wepaons) 2d6, drop lowest (for heavy weapons) and 2d6, drop highest (for light ones). And having that extra damage from the greatsword definitely helped out a lot more than the extra hit points from the +1HD.

I own &&&&Treasure, the Wolves treasure and gear book, and have used it in my own campaign before, so I know what kind of insane trinkets and weapons you can find in this campaign, which again makes me think that advancement in this campaign has to be, by necessity, more individual rather than cooperative.

I wonder perhaps if the natural way of doing this wouldn't be a semi-cooperative, but also semi-competitive game, rather than the generally accepted heavy cooperation of your typical OSR dungeoncrawl. It would fit with the literary references for this campaign, that's for sure. This is something to explore and keep an eye on as our campaign progresses. So far some people, me included, have felt that boasts are a bit awkward and rather forced, though that might also be due to our rather limited environment (you could only really boast about stabbing fishmen, since there was not much else happening on that isle).

Playing Fighters is Cool, Actually

If you have looked through my blog, you might have noticed that I quite like Fighters. I tend to talk about them way too much, if nothing else.

Well guess what, in Wolves Upon the Coast you all start as Fighters. There are no "mental' stats, no classes or backgrounds (aside from all of you being former slaves and whatever languages and character background you come up with yourself).  Magic exists, and is powerful, but requires ritual, specific ingredients (some quite rare to find) and is often one-off spells unless you want to go to some drastic measures.


And it fucking SLAPS! Even just two sessions in our characters feel so different from each other, despite mechanically being the same. People gravitate towards different weapons, armor, tactics and approaches and that naturally creates different ways of handling mechanically similar actions like combat. Fighters are great, and Wolves Upon the Coast is a fucking proof that you can make them work.

Anomalous Subsurface Environment: The Clown War, Play Report

    I've played in three sessions so far of a pickup game of Anomalous Subsurface Environment (ASE), a very gonzo and science fantasy megadungeon, run by Mr.Mann on the rainbow OSR discord server, and using vaguely OD&D or B/X and his houserules.

Below is a (hopefully) not too long play report of what happened in those three sessions as we murder just a frankly unhinged number of clowns.

Player Characters

• Herzgrau “Doberman” Mauler, level 3 Fighter 
  
• Razzledazzle, level 1 Magic-User
• Teela, level 1 Halfling
• Misha the Wide, level 2 War Bear
• One Man Army Corps (OMAC), level 1 Cleric
• Ascellus Tiramisu, Level 3 Fighter 
• Alon, level 2? Magic-User 
• Sparkles Witfully, Level 3 Cleric of Science

Sidekicks

1. Sir Esferico, Balloon Bodyguard
2. Oog

Preamble (Sessions 1 & 2)

Misha the Wide, a Hill Cantons War Bear, somehow finds himself in this strange land of Wizard Towers, sci-fi tech and, most terribly of all, dog-headed people (sorry Doberman)!

In the first delve the party is already going down to level 4 of the dungeon, and they find a circus being run by strange red painted naked men. After enjoying the various sideshows and carnival games most of the party piles into the circus proper to watch the show. Doberman and another character refuse to do so and end up being hassled by Barnabous, the carnival crier, and the ticket collector. Things escalate into a fight, multiple carnies get killed by a flamethrower and the party engage in a fighting retreat, killing Barnabous (maybe, since he comes back) in the process.

The next delve the group decides to scout out the territory of these dungeon clowns and get a read for their strength, numbers and other intel, in preparation for a full on assault on them. After a few brief encounters and questions the party has some vague idea of their territory, rescue and befriend a big man named Oog, and also a character that got turned to stone.

The Clown War (Session 3)

The party gathers up its numbers, recruiting several level 1 characters, equipping themselves well (Misha now owning a bespoke large set of plate armor which puts his Descending AC to 0!) and venture down to level 4 again, looking for trouble.

With good communication, coordinated action and psychotic mercilessness the party begins to systematically go room by room, slaughtering any naked clown people they find, only stopping occasionally to interrogate some before murdering them as well.

Through this process the party learns several useful bits of information. There are in total about 70 to 80 painted men, the enormous bronze gong near by is used for prisoner exchange with other denizens of the dungeon (which the clowns kill and eat as a way to keep the ecology of the dungeon in balance) and they do not appear to have a solid leadership in place.

Through more commitment of war crimes (murdering unsuspecting targets, murdering people who have surrendered) the party makes its way into a foul smelling kitchen where a particularly large painted man chef is busing himself with some cooking. Ascellus, in a bout of brashness, challenges the Chef to a duel, which the Chef quickly starts winning, at which point he is also murdered by the rest of the party.

Loot is found and, more importantly, a secret door leading to the back corridors of the clown territory. using those passages the party reach what appears to be living quarters and/or a clown brothel (the mind shudders), and proceed to slaughter even more them. Unfortunately the last assault leaves victims alive for long enough to start screaming which alerts the painted men patrolling army.

The party decides to take a pincer position in a four way intersection of hallways, and through the use of firebombs and flamethrower (see previous mention of war crimes) manage to cut off the first wave of the clown army. Unfortunately the second wave bring along with them a cannon, which they proceed to fire into the central branch of the party, which happens to house the vulnerable magic-users.

Alon gets a broken leg, but poor Razzledazzle gets hit square in the chest, blowing  hole out of him and allowing him one last spell (his finel razzledazzle if you will) before he expires. The party then proceeds to firebomb the ever living hell out of the shield-wielding clowns, which finally routs them and allows the party a chance  retreat themselves.

Thus ends the first phase of the Clown War. The casualties on both sides are, as follows:

The Party: Razzledazzle, the Magic-user (Dead), Alon the Magic-user (wounded, recovering).

The Dungeon Clowns: 40 Painted Men (dead), 1 Painted Man Chef (dead)

Thoughts and Observations

I quite enjoy Mr.Mann's house rules, and repurposed and tweaked my Hill Cantons OSE character (that I never got to actually play in B/X, only a variant of him using 5e) to fit better. He's almost at level 3, which is impressive, though HC characters do start at level 2 so there is that.

The session focusing on the Clown War was very high energy and fast paced. All of this clown murder took place within 2 hours of gaming (less even since we also had preamble and people sorting out inventories and such). Despite 8 people playing in a voice-only pick up game, things ran smoothly through the employment of classic player roles - a Caller (extra important in the big fights), a Mapper, a Turn Keeper and a Quartermaster (me in this case, mostly recording the kills).

The reason for the especially bloodthirsty session is that in Mr.Mann's rules 1 HD worth of enemies killed gives 100 experience, similar to my OD&D campaign I've written about on here. So that very much leads to trying to take out as many enemies as possible.

ASE itself is...just as bizarre and absurd as I've heard (I've only read the general setting and like 5 rooms on floor 1, so I was going in blind). While things did run well enough considering the number of players, since this was a pickup game we also had several people who had not played in the previous sessions and as such were perhaps a bit lost as to what on earth was going on and why we were killing clowns in this dungeon. Or, in fact, why the dog-headed man had a goddamn flamethrower (that one I don't know either!)

Roleplaying Games are Wargames

Preface

    The title is a simplification and shortening of the real statement. What I will explain below is how (Tabletop) Roleplaying Games are one subset of the broad and expansive design space of wargaming. This does not mean that RPGs are the same, or even similar to, say, board game wargames. Or miniatures wargames. Or matrix games (though they are to those ones!). Or any of other numerous game design practices that encompass wargaming.

Secondly, this is not about [scarequotes]TaXonOMy[scarequotes]. This is about history and game design.

"I roll to seduce the enemy commander!"

Key Elements of a Roleplaying Game

    While I am sure there are much more well read game designers than myself out there who can elaborate further on this stuff, to me the two of the defining features of RPGs that set them aside from, say, board games or video games are


1. Tactical Infinity. In this case “tactical infinity” means that participants in the game are expected to freely offer any course of action they want to take, without having to pick from a predetermined list of choices or actions. In a boardgame the rulebook explicitly lists out all of the things the game actions that you can take when playing. A Knight in a game of chess can’t simply just wander off the board, then perform a flank charge on the enemy’s Bishop. A knight only moves the way the rules say it moves and that is it.

In order for this tactical infinity to actually have some kind of constraints and sense to it (After all, if you are free to take any action you can simply declare “I win the game.”) roleplaying games employ a participant whose job is to adjudicate the actions of the other players. That person is the referee.

2. The Referee. Or GameMaster, Dungeon Master, Judge, Royal Highness or whatever other title you prefer. The referee’s role in a roleplaying game is, first and foremost, to adjudicate the actions proposed by the other players, and in turn tell them how their actions and choices impact the simulated world of the game, and how things in that simulated world react. This is what keeps the ability to attempt anything in check so you can actually have a reasonable game.

3(ish). Campaigns. While one-off games of TTPRGs are possible and doable and, in some cases, the main way people participate in the hobby, from the very start the goal at least of a Roleplaying Game is the campaign - a continuous and connected setting and characters simulated, explored and changed through multiple game sessions, often with recurring characters. This one I don’t consider as key as the above two, but I figured bears mentioning.

History and Design Lineage

Where do RPGs then get those two above game design elements from? Were they fully formed and birthed from the forehead of Saint Gygax as he used his Galaxy-brain genius to give us mortals Dungeons & Dragons?


No. No they weren’t. Duh.


    Gygax wrote D&D (from what I’ve read second-hand, it is debatable just how much actual writing Arneson contributed to the finished product) as a way to formalize, recreate and allow others to recreate, the experience of Dave Arneson running his Blackmoor game for him and Rob Kuntz. So while the actual writing and product might originate primarily from Gygax, who himself has plenty of game design experience, the broader “idea” of what “a D&D” is, I would argue, came to Gygax through Arneson and Blackmoor.

    Blackmoor, in turn, is a variant of Braunstein, with fantasy, sci-fi, horror and other things thrown into it for good measure. Arneson explicitly started and advertised his Blackmoor campaign to his gaming circle as a fantasy Braunstein. So that leads us to the next step back in history.

    Braunstein is the name that Dave Wesley gave to a type of game he created and ran (and to my knowledge still occasionally runs at conventions) over the years. It is a wargame in which each player controls only a singular individual, usually with predetermined goals and abilities, while a referee helps adjudicate the interactions between the players. Wesley’s very first Braunstein game, and the most famous one, was set during the Napoleonic Wars, a favorite period of his gaming circle at the time. A big inspiration for making and running this type of game was his research into the late 19th century american wargame Strategos, of which Wesley created a variant he called Strategos N (the N is for Napoleonic, in case anyone didn’t get that).

    Strategos is a military wargame (meaning a wargame not meant for hobby enjoyment, but used in actual military training) developed by Charles Totten for the US army and published in the tail end of the 19th century. Strategos has the same key elements as above - a referee who adjudicates and mediates between the players that are participating in the game, because Strategos was a variant of the Prussian Kriegsspiel, though inherited through the British variants of that game from a decade prior.

    And finally, we get to the origin of it all. The literal Wargame (or Kriegsspiel in German), developed as a training tool for the Prussian military by George Leopold von Reisswitz and based on prior attempts at developing wargames in Prussia. And while Kriegsspiel has numerous variants, modifications and changes to it over the decades it was used, “Free” Kriegsspiel variant which Strategos above is based on, relied less on strict and codified rules about what actions can or can’t be taken by players, but instead of an arbiter (usually a more veteran officer) who would use their own military experience and knowledge, combined with potential mechanics to introduce randomness and uncertainness in actions (such as, say, a fog of war) in order to help the players get used to making decisions that would, hopefully, prepare them for leading troops on actual battlefield.

    As you can see, the connection to D&D, and from it all Tabletop RPGs (as RPGs are all, in one way or another, direct or indirect responses to Dungeons and Dragons) leads directly back through a century or so of games back into the Wargame. Not just in simple reference, but in what all of those game designers I listed above have repeatedly taken and reiterated upon from that first Kriegsspiel.

And those very same principles - the ability to attempt any action that a player can think of, and the referee’s job to then moderate those actions, are still very much present in mos RPGs.

    Now, as I said in the preface, this does not mean RPGs are the same as other forms of wargaming like Matrix Games or Miniatures Games or Board game Wargames, or Map Games or the numerous other design iterations. Hell, a good amount of wargames nowadays don’t even use a referee and instead rely on somewhat restricted actions that players can take.

However those all are still wargames, or at least an aspect and interpretation of wargaming as a practice.

What Does It All Mean?

    Nothing. I do not tell people that RPGs are wargames as a hot take to make them somehow change the way they play. I say it because too many people, influenced by company marketing talking points around “originality” or “uniqueness” or “new and better game design” seem to think that RPGs are somehow this utterly self-encompassed thing, and that wargames design can’t offer anything to their games, as wargames are also only about fighting. A statement which itself also shows ignorance about the scope of topic, theme and practice in wargaming.

    Wargames are more about conflict and conflict resolution. That conflict need not be violence though. The conflict in how to allocate resources in a civilian infrastructure is still a viable thing to wargame (and has been done). Yes, a game which utterly lacks any conflict or the need to resolve it is probably truly outside the scope of Wargaming, and some people’s RPG games probably do attempt to be about that, but I would argue those are outliers which simply reinforce the majority rule.

In conclusion - wargames and their offspring tabletop roleplaying games are much more complex, nuanced and usable for a broad and more expansive activity than simple entertainment. And that’s a good thing.

Recommended Reading

The Wargame Developments Handbook - https://wargamedevelopments.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/WD-Handbook-Third-Edition-October-2022.pdf
Jon Peterson's Blog - http://playingattheworld.blogspot.com/
Playing at the World - https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262548779/playing-at-the-world-2e/
The Elusive Shift - https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262544900/the-elusive-shift/
The Connections UK Wargames Conference - https://www.professionalwargaming.co.uk/2024.html