Concerning Dungeons, Part I

"Dad, I want to tell you some of the stuff my guy has in the dungeon he's building. He has a Wall of Bone, three Walls of Fire, a Wall of Plants. He also has Floors of Bone and Walls of Insects, and Floors of Fire and Floors of Ice, Floors of Souls, Floors of Water, Floors of Webs, Bone Doors, Ice Doors, Plant Doors, Void Doors ... wait, I take that back, no Void Doors. And Bridges! Ice bridges and web bridges."


"Wouldn't the Floor of Fire melt the Wall of Ice?"

"What do you mean? Not if they were far away enough!"

Some silence.

"He also set a lava trap, so that if you're walking across the lava, if you step on the first stone -- on the second -- on a small stone next to right in the middle of the lava, if you step on the extra stone, all the stones suddenly pop into the lava -- they disappear, pop pop pop into the lava."

"So is the dungeon underground?"

"Yes, most of it."

"Why did he build it?"

"Becuase he thought it would be enjoyable to have a dungeon of his own. And his old house was a wreck (as I've told you many times). Now he constructed it so that many people will get out the front door if they come in, but only person will get out the back door and make it through the dungeon."

"Only one person EVER?"

"Out of a party. Only one person out of a party would make it through. BUT, the most dangerous entrance is the cave entrance. My guy put in four beholders in the front cave entrance."

"Do they fight?"

"The beholders? Do they fight with each other? No, they're LAWFUL EVIL! They work together."

Ah, right.

"The first entrance to the dungeon has another beholder, but it's not as powerful as the one in the cave. The third entrance, that one's only defense is that it's very difficult to find. It's camouflaged, and covered in rocks, because I didn't have anything else to put in."

"I take that back. He has four entrances. One of them, as I said, is a large dome. It's very large, and rocky and round, and it has a beholder in it. The second entrance are the caves, and in one part of the caves is a hole that enters the dungeon but it's guarded by four beholders. The fourth one is very very difficult to find, and it just leads straight into the dungeon. And the fourth one, there's this very very large mound of rock, a dome of rock, and stair built into it, and there's a cave, and that place is guarded by ... well, that place is actually a decoy. He just put that place for a decoy. It just turns out to be a dead end. He also put a monster in there, within the rubble, within a cliff face. On the side of one tunnel, if somebody comes in, the rocks start to fall away because the creature inside detected them, and as the rocks fall away, the creature begins to come out. It has human hands and as the hands come out, it bends the fingers, and this crust comes off. It's basically a big blob and it can make anything from the blob. When it first emerges, when every single bit of it emerges, it's covered in this crust and when the crust falls off it turns into this bluish liquid. It's the color of a gelatinous cube. It's basically a huge blob. It can turn into a whole river, it can disguise itself as a river.

"He also set a trap with a purple worm, that if you step into a chamber, the purple worm wakes up, and it waits till you're in the center of the cave, then it burst up through the floor. And it eats the people, if they weren't killed by flying rocks. Well, it eats those too."

"Does he live in the dungeon?"

"Who, the purple worm or my guy?"

"Your guy."

"Yes, he does live in the dungeon. He has this area. There's this area in the dungeon that's like a house. It's like this house except it doesn't have a room like this, it just has a single room, 'cause it has a library. It just has a living room, a bedroom and a library. And it has a magic room."

"How about windows?"

"Um ... no, it doesn't have windows because he doesn't like light. He despises the light.

"He also has a very beautifully designed throne."

***

It's E's birthday, or it was yesterday. Nine years on Earth. Usually we don't celebrate his birthday on The Day -- more often it gets deferred or moved up to the nearest weekend, so the actual day has become blurry. This week we're at the in-laws for Thanksgiving break. The kids are off school (though there was a half-day Monday and young R was very concerned that she was missing it). And I, as usual, am on some bastardized semi-vacation in which I am neither Here nor There, but half-working, half-not. Don't try this at home OR at work.

Anyway, we had his birthday yesterday, on the Day itself, which felt like rediscovering and reburnishing something very old, which had fallen unaccountably into disuse and been resurrected only with pains and serendipity: like an heirloom parsnip (comically squat, incomparably tasty, baked in earthen ovens by the Wichita) or a period instrument (we rediscovered the varnish recipe, which has to be leavened with the ash of Hamburg oak, and tuned it in the Old Way so that a C sharp is really sharp, as Bach and his friends would have heard it). And this rediscovery came with a further air of mystery, as the day itself is more than a day, since he was born after a 38-hour labor.

But none of that rambling mattered because it was his birthday, and after dinner, cake, and a playing of "Happy Birthday" on the penny-whistle by his eight-year old cousin Miss F, there were of course presents.

This was a smaller affair, which I like, because the home birthdays (and we'll have of those too, never fear) generally feature about 8-10 kids, and a good number of dutifully-purchased and not-inexpensive presents that still somehow don't all get used. In this respect Miss R's last birthday was more of a success than Mr E's last. E's 8th birthday, last year, resulted in a lot of games coming into the house. These were generally games of a pretty high quality, but we have been very slow to play them. Battleship Command: Pirates of the Caribbean Edition, for example, has been played about three times, but he doesn't find it too interesting, and hates losing, and I'm not convinced it's a very strong game. The Legend of Landlock is actually a nice little strategy game, and he publisher Gamewright looks like they, well, have some game, but this one was only cracked out recently, to be played by my mother and Miss R. (As it was my mother who got the game for E, she felt she had to make sure it got played). And he also got a copy of Mancala, which I've heard of all he time and never played, and which exists in so many versions I have no hope of linking to the one he actually got.

By contrast, Miss R's sixth birthday, this summer, featured a lot of fairly meaty craft-y things. There was a beading set with perhaps thousands of very small beads and fine thread and a really sharp needle, which I thought must be beyond her except it turns out it's not, at all; a "math Scrabble" game called Smath, which we played a bit recently, and successfully, though she could only do the adding problems; and a stained glass kit where you fill in quite complex shapes with thick go that hardens into translucency. This last one, despite being really porly executed in some ways (the patterns are made of soft, adhesive-backed rubber that you lay down on a plastic sheet before filling in, and the rubber is so flimsy and the molds so thin that it almost impossible to peel from the backing without ripping the molds) was by far the most popular, and only recently got exhausted (we still have goo, just nothing to pour it in).

So, there's a long digression on what sometimes doesn't work well in kid birthdays. But this was small, and all family members, and honestly, his family on my wife's side is exceptionally good with gifts and with celebrations of all kind. So the point is, I should tell you about the loot.

• a pendant of a faceted amethyst, very apropos after last week's lapidary exhibition
• A fat volume containing books 1-4 of Deltora Quest (these honestly are not very good, but a book's a book, even if I'd rather they were reading the Pippi Longstocking my sister-in-law brought: I was all about Pippi at that age ...)
  
• Two new Bionicle figures (respectively the Jaller and the Nuparu)
  
• Praying Mantis hand puppet, courtesy of Folkmanis
  
• And the item that occasioned the lead-in to this post: a new D&D volume, Dungeonscape

He's wanted Dungeonscape for a long time. He first saw it in the game store in South Carolina, back in April, when we visited there with Uncle K. Later, when I offered him a D&D book in ill-advised bribery for a swim lesson, he scrounged through the racks at the Strategist, trying fruitlessly to find Dungeonscape before setting for Stormwrack. (This was all recounted in an earlier post). So I had it in the back of my head as a birthday or Christmas present, and happily, was able to deliver. (In passing, after griping about the expense of these things, I can only recommend buying them at Amazon, where they seem to run about a one-third discount, possibly a bit more if you buy used).

E. was ecstatic. He held the book heavenward like grail, did a dance, hugged me. Later plunged into the book. All good. I had the reviews on the book, of which many, like this sample, were not good. It sounded like the gripers had some justification, but I also knew it wouldn't matter. I wasn't (yet) a snobby rules lawyer when I laid down my first dungeons at twelve and thirteen: no reason he should be at nine.

***

"Before it is possible to conduct a campaign of adventures in the mazey dungeons, it is necessary for the referee to sit down with pencil in hand and draw these labyrinths on graph paper. Unquestionably this will require a great deal of time and effort and imagination. The dungeons should look something like the example given below, with numerous levels that sprawl in all directions ..."

Ring any bells? The quote is from Gygax and Arneson, Dungeons and Dragons: Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures, vol 3. (The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures), (Tactical Studies Rules: Lake Geneva 1974), p. 3, if you want the scholarly citation. Or, to those of us who grew up with it, "book three of the boxed set". It was accompanied by diagrams like the following:



Or this:



(If you're wondering how many hoops I had to jump through to find and digitize my old copies of the Boxed Set, the answer is "none". Per a suggestion from Elliot on an older post, and things I'd found in my own wanderings, I simply zipped over to RPGNow, which sells PDFs of a huge variety of new and old gaming materials. PDFs of the Boxed Set became mine for a mere $5.99, which seems cheap till you try to navigate RPGNow's exquisitely horrible web interface. Despite being signed in, I had to sign in again to see the list of download links for what I'd bought. And it was not one link, but about seven, each one for a separate part of the product, one for the cover, one for each volume, one for the Ready Reference Sheets -- and each link had exactly the same title, AND the last two produced mysterious messages that said I wasn't allowed to download them! You can't beat the prices, but be prepared for a slog. Put that way, I guess some hoop-jumping was involved after all).

Well, that's how it was in my day. When E wandered by and I showed him the old boxed set pages on screen, he glanced at it only briefly, then wandered away. "Is that boring?" I called after him. "Yesssss" he groaned. Ah well.

Out-blogged

Yeah, so ....

Hmm.

Been a while, as they say.

What with giving two talks at the FileMaker DevCon in August, and being like three months behind and an author down in finishing up the new training materials for FileMaker 9 (almost done!), and starting a new life/health/whatever regime that kicks me out of bed at 6 AM to walk sleepily, steadily uphill, and what with three trips in the last month and four more (yep, four!) in the next six weeks, and the kids starting school and E. getting into Cub Scouts ...

So, yeah.

So yeah, here's a really really short, true, story about gamekids. 'Cause that's all I have time for, it's past my middle-aged beddy time.

Two stories, I guess. E. has gotten out the AD&D books again, after a kind of hiatus. He's been studying the Monster Manual closely. This evening he had it outside and we were looking through it as he selected monsters he thought his half-orc barbarian might like to fight. We turned to the page with the ankheg on it. I opined that the ankheg had used to be one of my favorite monsters (thus implying that I actually knew something about it). So E says "Dad, how does the ankheg's acid work?"

Acid? Acid?? OK, that sounded familiar. Clearly it was obvious to E. I read the MM entry. Yep, not one but two kinds of acid attack. Ankheg may have been a favorite of mine, but clearly my son is now the facile one.

In the same vein, we were looking at some of my old painted figures this morning. Some of them are outlandish things I don't really recognize. OK, most of the those are explicitly Lovecraftian critters. But one bizarre creature, with a segmented body, big bug eyes, long snout and crablike claws, I just couldn't place, and said so.

"Dad!" said E. "That's a cave fisher! Here, I'll show you."

And he runs and he fetches my old Monster Manual II, lovingly sheathed in opaque contact paper and never used, and opens to C, and lo, the beast in all its glory ...

That seems to be a torch of some sort, going by there. And I don't appear to be holding it, just now.

Oh, and speaking of blogs that are actually funny or talented? See whether this doesn't just make the sn*t run out of your nose ...

Mash-ups part 1

We haven't played too much "standard" D&D of late. Rather, we been doing some genre-hopping, based mostly on the movies the kids have been consuming. We've been playing a lot of things CALLED D&D, which has come to mean "semi-interactive narrated story," and bleeds over into the various kinds of bedtime stories we tell.

Those bedtime stories are worth a mention, because it's where the mash-up concept kicks in. We don't have a TV, but our kids watch plenty of video anyway, it's just packaged up as movies. They have their favorites, and they go through phases. For R, the favorites are things like Dora and Scooby Doo. For E, at the moment, Spy Kids, or at other times, Godzilla or Lord of the Rings.

In any case, I get asked a lot for bedtime stories, and generally I'm asked to set them in the worlds of one or another of these movie universes. At least initially, E. tended to ask for stories that closely paralleled the plot of whatever he'd just watched, or indeed exactly paralleled it absent some small distinctions of character names or whatever. But as time has gone on, tastes have gotten more sophisticated, and variety has become at first tolerated, and now, I think, embraced.

Initially we only had variation within genres. For example R: "Dad, tell me a Scooby Doo story. First we have to figure out what the monster is!" (There is always a monster, and it always has to be a REAL monster, never one of these lame, plastic-mask "and we would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for ..."). At first the monsters were prosaic, such as the Giant Scorpion, but more recently I've tested the boundaries of common sense and sanity with the Giant Three-Headed Fire-Breathing Mummy Beetle, the Terror Rug, and of course the Giant Walnut-Eating Doughnut Manhole Cover. (Hint: if you see an innocent looking manhole cover covering an innocent-looking manhole, but there are some telltale walnut shells nearby, run).
This is all still genre-bound. But then I get E, after a binge on YouTube Godzilla clips: "Dad, do a story of Scooby Doo meets Godzilla!" OK, I warn him -- but it'll be a short one. Why? You'll see. Predictable developments ensue. :-)

"Dad, no! They work TOGETHER, and they have to fight Mothra, or some other Godzilla monster! Wait, can Gamera be in it?" OK, this is going to be some work.

Telling stories that just repeat movie plots can be a bit dull, or, when I don't actually KNOW the story, very slow, as someone feeds me the plot bit by bit in whispers as I tell the tale, like an inefficient prompter. But producing genre mash-ups on the fly can truly tax the storytelling engine.

Recently, the thing has been Spy Kids. These, by the way, are pretty decent kid movies, long on captivating details and short on things mean or sophomoric. Pretty entertaining. So we've watched a lot of Spy Kids.

But another thing, for E, has been discovering a book I had lying around (ah, the stuff that lies around), full of concept art and screenshots for Halo. Now I could wax eloquent about Halo, and its make Bungie Studios, for a fair bit of time, but "great first person shooter" sums it up quickly. We're trying to keep our kids off computer games for now. E. grasps that Halo is a game, but (happily) doesn't yet grasp (what do I know, maybe he does??) that a lot of the pictures are taken straight from the game, and occur during play. And boy was I tempted to show him, because it's a great game, but I forbore. Instead I just answered his questions about the various alien races and how they related to each other, and tried to explain why Halo 2 is not as good as Halo, and the problems with sequels in general.

All well.

So it gets to be bedtime of a recent evening. E hops up into bed. I expect I might get pressed for a story, and I do.

"Dad! Tell a Spy Kids Halo story!"

Whoa! Spy Kids / Halo, eh? My hear is in my throat. Carmen and Juni will last about five seconds against the Covenant elites.

But by gum, if I can manage Scooby Doo and Godzilla with a happily ever after, Spy Kids Halo's gotta be within reach. Stay tuned.

Store-Bought

So E. had run his first game, and I had had the day of my life. And there we were, still sitting in South Carolina, wanting to play some more and sitting on the module I'd picked up at the store.

Let me say a few words about this module. I've already mentioned the proliferation of materials, and their increased expense, and perhaps increased quality as well. This module, which went for about $21 and bore the name the Barrow of the Forgotten King, looked good in the store: cheaper than the big adventure packs that seemed to require a commitment akin to that of the Peace Corps, better quality than the rows of cheap modules that gleefully advertised themselves as "dungeon crawls." BFK looked solidly in the middle.

So a bit after E. completed his first stint as a GM, we all sat down to take a swing at BFK. I decided to try to work it into the narrative of E's half-orc character and his ever-helpful uncle K. Which means we need to hark back to their last adventure below ground, in the ruins of some nameless castle near Bladesbat Cave. This place proved such a treasury that, in due course, back they went -- their highest aspiration being a bit of treasure,, and their tribe's greatest hope, no doubt, that the larders would soon bulge again with grick staples of every decription: salted, dried, fried, boiled, broiled, stuffed, and thus onward.

The castle ruins proved to have further reaches. Fairly bold by now, they returned to where they had been, then pressed on, into the narrow crack from which had issued the carrion crawler that stunned Thorgun, leading to a dramatic rescue by the outgunned uncle K. This crack wound its way around and through the guts of the mountain. This fit in well, as we had explored two natural caverns in Virginia and North Carolina (a practice I heartily recommend, by the way) on our way southward, so I was able to call on our joint memories of dank walls and the dripping dark. (A staple of every cave tour is the moment, toward the end, where they turn out all the lights, inviting you to "experience total darkness" and imagine the tribulations of the boys who discovered the cave, then lost their light deep inside it. That one, Linwood Caverns I believe, was distinguished by having a stream running OUT of the inside of the hill in which the cave sits, a stream inhabited by fish that don't seem to care whether they're underground or not. Our intrepid first explorers, having dashed their light into some dark crevice, allegedly found their way out by following the water.)

THIS cavern, in any event, threaded its way deep off into the mountain, but our semi-orcish pair were untroubled by this, since their race gives them "darkvision." E. recently expressed some curiosity as to how darkvision actually works. The Player's Handbook described DV dispassionately as the ability to see up to 60 feet in black and white, even in the complete absence of light. On the other hand, The Order of the Stick, a rather adult D&D-based online comic strip that E. frequents, depicts darkvision as two flashlight beams emanating from a character's eyes. I had to inform it was more boring than this.

Boring or not, it was sufficient to allow them to pick their way slowly through the mountain, and to emerge into ever more lighted caves that eventually gave way to a hillside grotto thriving with their less-than-favorite beast -- more carrion crawlers, qyite the nest of them, and Thorgun, still smarting from being stunned the last time out, wanted nothing whatever to do with them.
so they made their way back through the caves, and into the dungeon "proper."

What else to explore? There was still the long hallway with its upset pavings and burrow-holes. The holes were tempting, at least to the orcish, (as I may have mentioned in an earlier posting), but filled, as expected, with prodigious reddish ants. After beating down a few of these creatures, they retreated, abandoning any idea of fully exploring the nest.

There remained only the dark corner, where the ruined hall turned a corner.

Standing at that corner, they could see that the hall rain away, straight as an arrow, beyond the reach of their sight. just at the corner there was an inscription in the wall. They started down the hallway, but after a few hundred yards of walking, lost their nerve. The ancient stonework ran on and on, with out a break or stutter, and they lost all hope it would come to an end. they returned to its beginning and somehow, though neither of them could write, copied the inscription as best they could, intending to bring it back to the Bladesbat shamaness.

The shamaness was named Vishara. She was elderly, and not in a good mood. She scrutinized the copied inscription, and asked whether they'd been near a park. It was pointed out to here that they lived in a bat-inhabited cave, in a dank forest beside a swamp beside a set of mountains known for their dragon races, and had just come back from exploring underground ruins, so no, there had been no park involved anywhere along the way. She pronounced herself baffled as to what the term "Park Highway" might mean, but then prevailed upon Thorgun to try to redraw part of the inscription.

"Dark," it turned out was the word. Dark Highway. And writing this I now remember that I have already written it, because it was at just this point that I recounted the history of the term. Hmm, the same story told twice, in forgetfulness. Well, perhaps that brings me back to where I was before.

The Dark Highway, as you might imagine, was a very ancient road. This one ran away in a straight line, so far as was known, for the human town of Kingsholm. This was my hook into the BFK module, which was set in Kingsholm. But the road, so far as was known, was older than orcs or men. (I can't help channeling here H.P. Lovecraft's overwrought but atmospheric old story The Festival, in which the protagonist returns to a New England town called Kingsport. "Then before me I saw frosty Kingsport outspread in the gloaming ... antiquity hovering on winter-whitened wings over gables and gambrel roofs ... fanlights and small-paned windows gleaming out to join cold Orion and the archaic stars." And then something about a secret "older than Memphis, and mankind" but I digress).

For nebulous reasons based mostly in plot necessity, the Bladesbat head ordered our heroes to go explore the Dark Highway, even reaching Kingsholm if necessary. E, I will admit, was not entirely persuaded of the logic, not even with the knowledge that was "where the adventure was going to happen." Thus burdened from the outset with contrivance, the adventure unfolded.

It did not unfold entirely smoothly. I had read the module a bit, but not enough. Modules, if I can digress, have evolved since the days of the early G1-G3 releases. It's not clear to me they've evolved all that well. The Dragonlance adventures, for example, were heavily script, with, if I recall, fairly elaborate plot flowcharts, sections of narrative the GM was to read verbatim to the players, and sections containing data and facts for GM use. BFK was not as heavily scripted as this, but it still followed an odd division: the first section detailed each encounter from a narrative perspective, but all of the hard facts about an encounter, such as monster stats, were put in a parallel, denser structure in the second half of the module, like a set of large endnotes, so that one had to constantly flip back and forth between the somewhat connected narrative and the supporting data. This only compounded some of the other problems we were to experience.

The first one was unfamiliarity with an existing product. In my line of work (software development, and the management thereof), we refer to this as "integration risk" or "existing system risk". It's one thing to go in and build a brand-new system for someone, from scratch, that needn't link to any other system or product. It may take longer, but it will ideally have a strong conceptual purity, and the designers (us) will have complete facility with the product and its design. On the other hand, if we need to build onto or otherwise use or reuse something someone else built, we first need to learn that system or product. This will take time, and runs the risk that we'll never fully grasp the concept or design, and constantly be encountering small surprises and "oh wait" moments.

No different the task of running and adventure someone else wrote, a task made harder the less one actually reads and prepares! So the Barrow of the Forgotten King was plagued with these little issues from the beginning.

Thorgun and his uncle navigated the length of the Dark Highway, sixty-some miles under the earth. They emerged, after some days walking the dark and subsisting on grick pemmican, in a thicket on the hills over Kingsholm. Pushing through the brush, they came suddenly upon an ancient statue, overgrown (more details from module?). From that vantage, they could see downhill toward a cemetery, and below it the town of Kingsholm. and as they stood wondering what to do, they became aware of a sound from nearby, like nothing so much as digging.

Unfortunately, I had already miscalculated. The module was fairly carefully designed to start in the village and work its way up through the cemetry, finally,perhaps, to the area of the statue. I had managed to start the module at a point well toward its end. Ah well.

And now I need to actually FIND the module to jog my memory further. And so far, no luck. Stay tuned.

Out of Order

One of the things I Do Not Like about Blogger is that it publishes posts in the order in which you began them, not the order in which you finally got enough done to press the Publish button.

As a result, those of you who have seen the Not Fair post might conclude that nothing new has happened. But there is indeed a new post, down below Not Fair, whose only sin is being started early.

Well, at some point I'll determine how to better sway the posting order, but till then I'll put this note out as a signpost to the fact that something has actually changed. The errant post is called The Day of Your Life.

Not fair

Some zealous readers press me with charges that it's been a month since I last posted. Not true! I mutter. It can't be, it truly deeply CAN'T.

And it isn't. Not technically, not quite a month, not here and now in the Gregorian West. Perhaps I have sinned on Roman terms, or Mayan, but one of our modern months pass by? Not so. A mere 26 days, no more, skinnier than even the skinniest of the twelve. Pish.

(There then followed a long apologetic focusing chiefly on the writer's many burdens, his foolish commitments to other causes, a jumbled and wholly unpersuasive farrago of nightmarish tales concerning book revisions, page proofs, conference papers, technical briefs and the like, all of which he would have us believe he signed on to execute in the space of a few short months. Cry me a river, as an ex-colleague used to say, though he tended to spice it up with a few expletives depending on audience).

This is a way of warning the reader that this post will be ... short, I believe is the current term. In the place of narrative, I offer something even more precious: media. One must stay current, after all.

Firstly, I just offer you a look at what might be considered a well-stocked bookshelf. Certainly nothing of the sort graced my shelves at eight or so:



I'll indulge the fiction, perhaps not absolute, that the image speaks for itself, and move onward. E. for a long time has been interested in how one might make a movie. Periodically he announces he will be a movie maker when he grows. (Just this morning he said to me "Dad, who gets paid when a movie gets made? When you say it cost a lot to make, who got the money?" We then have a discussion of movie economics, in which I can draw on many hours of bonus Lord of the Rings features in which the movie animators describe the one thousand days they worked continuously on Peter Jackson's miniatures). So we've been talking about movie technology, and then just recently we broke down and decided our young ones were no longer too young for Star Wars, which led to a discussion of "older" special effects technology, and how the Hoth walkers are jittery because they are using a form of stop-motion, and somewhere in all of this I decided to put my money where my mouth was and make good my claim that simple stop-motion animation was "not all that hard."

Indeed it isn't, but then, the results aren't all that good, but it gives me an excuse to experiment with YouTube, and another to divert your attention with colors and, in this case, some movement.



Hmm, what's more, I find YouTube seems to have cut off the last little bit! Nothing dramatic, just the jaws gaping ever wider.

Well, I regret the meagerness of this post, but a long bout of proofing and reading copy edits looms sharply in the foreground ...

The Day of Your Life

Bear in mind that we are entering, in this retelling, maybe day 3 of E's discovery of D&D. As it turns out, this was more than enough time for him to decide to try his hand at being a gamemaster -- bless all eight years of him. After we returned from the game store, he announced it was time for HIM to make a dungeon, and for me to make a character. Well, there's a lot to be said for fostering ambition. So I let him tell me what he wanted to do.

E began to narrate the "things" his dungeon needed to have: an incubator, a training room, a secret passage, an arena ... As he went, he drew inspiration from a dungeon cross-section featured prominently in the DMG. I have to admit, the picture has a powerful appeal -- makes me want to sit down and start hammering out a dungeon myself:



Well, guided by this architecturally correct, exploded-view dungeon, E continued to enumerate the key features of his dungeon. Once we had a list of a dozen or so, I began to draw a map that incorporated them. We went back and forth on each item, trying to decide where to incorporate it and how it should look. I'll share our results, though really, they're none too legible. I'll do my best to transcribe the legend.



The legend, as best I can read it, goes like this:

1. Orc guards; giant owl statue; thick wall
2. Dueling ground/arena
3. Training room
4. Secret passage with dragon eye lock (as on the cover of the Monster Manual, seen in this image):
5. Incubator
6. Orc barracks
7. Weapon room
8. Dining hall
9. Kitchen
10. Forge
11. Storeroom
12. Destrachan training
13. (In E's own hand) Caverns!

With the dungeon designed, of course I needed a character. I rolled a dwarf, a ranger I believe, named Eragol. Well it rapidly transpired that Eragol was not going to enter this dungeon alone. No, he was going as part of a large gang of fairly high level characters, all NPCs. And this was just as well, since the power behind this particular dungeon was a Dark Sorceror of level 20 or thereabouts. Vaguely skeletal, possibly undead, generally bad news.

The gang of us pushed our way into the dungeon. It turned out that the parts of the dungeon we had actually drawn and designed were the innocuous parts. The orc guards didn't bother us much: apparently too busy doing arena training and incubating monsters. The real dungeon was reached by going straight downstairs from the first room, through the secret door with the dragon eye lock. THERE, it turned out, was the real dungeon. We proceeded through the dark. Eragol didn't get to do very much: the place was haunted by a number of hideous Monster Manual creatures called destrachans, eyeless horrors which are capable of locating you by a form of sonar, then bursting through solid rock walls to assault you (the orcs above, as you might note from the legend, were given to training them). My crack squad of NPCs dealt with most of these, but we did encounter some lower-level cave dwellers, such as cloakers, which Eragol handily dispatched. Finally, a climactic encounter with the dark lord himself, in which the NPCs figured prominently, and hardy Eragol somewhat less so.

But all was to be redeemed. E was aware, of course, that at the end of an adventure one handed out experience. I think I got about 600 XP for my participation in the struggle with the dark sorceror.

"And then -- Daddy, this is gonna be the day of your life -- for those two cloakers you killed? TWO HUNDRED POINTS each."

Now why is this significant? Well, like many kids, E has struggled a bit with math from time to time. (Last night, he tried to tell me he was "not very good at math.") But it's interesting what can be accomplished with the right motivation. Here, in his head, he had started with 600 XP, and, realizing that one makes the leap from level 1 to level 2 at 1000 XP, had correctly reasoned that two cloakers at 200 apiece would bring me exactly to second level. More, he'd assumed I would follow his reasoning, and be suitably thrilled with the award (and so I was).

The day of my life, indeed.

A Tale of Two Game Stores

All of the foregoing, if you can believe it, took place in just the first two days or so of D&D Resurrection. Early April. Then dawned the third day, and uncle K opined that it might be a fine idea to visit a game store. The adventures so far had been a bit rough and ready, and I think he was hoping for a "bought" adventure with some meat, that we could milk for a few hours. Good thought, so we saddled up.

Now let's stop and talk for a second about game stores. Long ago, the only store round these parts that sold anything gaming-related was a chain called Allied Hobbies. They had a shop in Ardmore, and another out at King of Prussia Mall. (TA still cannot believe there's a town called King of Prussia. Well there was once, dating back a long way, as you might imagine, to those of Washington's soldiers who hailed from Prussia and presumably still had fond thoughts of its king. But the old town has been dismantled bit by bit, till now it is only a maze of highway interchanges and the great mall itself sprawling in the midst). Allied Hobbies was quite serviceable: the Ardmore shop sold a good variety of lead figures, including the defunct Dragontooth line, which added in imagination what its sculptors lacked in finesse. And the King of Prussia shop was where I laid hands on the very first packaged module ever sold, the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief (actually released in advance of the AD&D books themselves, so we somehow staggered through the first couple based on the old rules). So Allied Hobbies was a serviceable place, and indeed it's still around, though none of its stores are where they used to be.

Not long into my first fascination with D&D, a new game store opened, up the road from the King of Prussia Allied Hobbies, at the Valley Forge Shopping Center. I can't for the life of me remember the store's name. Regardless, it was a harbinger of a new species, the pure games store. Allied Hobbies was worthy, but it was a hobby store, with its figures and rules books tucked at the ends of aisles that bulged with massive plastic battleship kits at 1:20 scale, and wooden-ships kits of horrifying complexity. (As I think about it, the long-departed Wayne Toytown also sold some of the early gaming materials: it was there that I purchased my first copy of The Dragon, #10 to be exact).

In any case, the new place instantly supplanted Allied Hobbies as The Place to Go for gaming stuff. Role-playing and board/simulation games were in the midst of a huge growth spurt, and the place thrived. Unlike Allied, it's still around in recognizable form, but we'll get back to that.

So by the time uncle K made his suggestion, I had been to a game store or two. But I wasn't sure what to expect from a game store in South Carolina in 2007. So off we went.

The place we lit down at was a combination games/comics store, which seems a usual combination these days. It was large, bright, clean and spacious -- almost supermarket-like in its proportions, very unlike the Center City Philadelphia comics stores at which I used to spend my weekends (institutions such as Comics for Collectors, a slightly finicky operation that used to have a shop on Rittenhouse Square, and seems now to be confined to New York, and the eminently small and comfy Fat Jack's, which, remarkably on two counts, seems to still exist in their location on narrow Sansom Street, and yet not have a web site). Point being, this place wasn't like those.

If you haven't been to a game store in a while, the things you notice are:

1. There's more stuff.
2. The stuff costs more.

More stuff: AD&D material has, of course, been proliferating for thirty years. After the original AD&D, came, I believe, AD&D 2. With the third edition, it ceased to be Advanced, and plain old D&D it is again, in a glorious Edition 3.5. In its essence, it still consists of the same three rulebooks: Players' Handbook, Monster Manual, DM Guide. Okay, except the Monster Manual is now multi-volume (they seem to be up to MM V). For players, well, in addition to the PH itself, there are also many class-specific books, each delving further into a specific class. There must be five or so of these, along with things like a Dungeon Survival guide, and a couple hefty volumes on playing characters of draconic lineage. I'll stop linking the things or the whole page will go blue.

The DM, as well, can spend as much as she likes on books. No reason to stop at just the plain DMG, there are a couple volumes on how to make dungeons, as well as individual sourcebooks to help you set adventures in cold, hot, wet, dry and other geographies. (Not far off, I'm sure, is the Official D&D Sourcebook for Eastern Taiga and Sub-boreal Woodlands, in two fat volumes.)

This all leaves out, of course, one of the largest categories of Stuff: adventure settings. Back in the day, as earlier alluded, this consisted entirely of modules as they were known. The mind echoes with names like Vault of the Drow, White Plume Mountain, Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, and Tomb of Horrors. (Heh, not to mention Temple of the Frog, as well as Tegel Manor, Dark Tower, Caverns of Thracia and other Judges' Guild delights. Seriously not to mention The Nightmare Maze of Jigresh! But all of those solid efforts are as chaff before the mighty wind of modern adventures. These are entire product lines, like Eberron and Forgotten Realms, game settings that each boast a dozen hard-cover game books, not to mention a big stack of adventures and a slew of novels.

Of course, you may not want to buy into an entire new world. You may want to make your own, but feel the need to insert a substantial setting here and there. No problem! Simply plunk down $120, and you are the proud owner of 672 pages documenting the mighty City of Ptolus.

Not feeling so rich? So scale your expenditure back to $100 and be content with the world's largest dungeon.

And that's a useful segue to the topic of "costs more." Granted that $120 is only about $48 in 1980 dollars, forty-eight bucks for a game setting was pretty unheard of back then (I think the biggest books from Judges' Guild topped out around $18). Consider further that all of the hardback game books run about $35, and that you can easily get a dozen of the things and, well, it adds up.

Even a simple module, it turns out, will run you $20 or so. I settled on The Barrow of the Forgotten King. Uncle K, somewhat overwhelmed by the WALL of D&D material, briefly considered whether D&D for Dummies might not be an appropriate path back into the game, but decided against it. And with that, we left the brightly lit acreage and headed for home.

***

Now, if I may, before I get back to what happened when we cracked the module open, I'm going to skip ahead a month or so. It is Saturday, a swimming lesson day, and I have shamelessly bribed my son to go to his lesson. This will only work once, but I think it's important to get him back in the water, so I stoop. I've told him we'll visit a game store after the lesson, and he can choose a D&D book to buy. Yes, that would be one of the stock $35 hardcovers. There ya have it.

The place we visit is the successor of that self-same games store of long ago, from the Valley Forge Shopping Center. Though I do forget the original name, there was some point in the last 20 years when the store became a branch of The Compleat Strategist. The Strategist is probably one of the oldest games stores in the country. I visited the flagship, in downtown New York, in December or so of 1980, with some summer camp alumni, and was suitably impressed.

But the King of Prussia Strategist? Shifted from its old, spacious location on DeKalb Pike into a small shopping area that consists of a remodeled barn and outbuildings, it is ... not what it was. It is small, low and dark. When we visit, a gaming group is just sitting down at the back for the Saturday game. "Anybody got any of these items?" the GM demands. "Robe of Falconry? Deck of Azurite? Radiant Headpiece? Shimmering Mask of Zerthul?" Muttered negatives all around. "K, well lemme figure out yer bonus, then ..." Various dice rolls. The GM moves them along and begins reading, literally reading, loudly from a bought adventure. This forms the backdrop of our stay.

E. can't decide what book he wants. What he really wants is the Dungeonscape book we saw the SC store, but it's not here. We spend a long time looking fruitlessly. Meanwhile, a large gamer with a big white beard, floppy denim hat with good-cause buttons pinned all over it, suspenders and a blue t-shirt over a Santa Claus-like belly, has trapped the store owner with a long political harangue. Finally I am able to rescue the store owner by asking the whereabouts of Dungeonscape. Though relieved to be freed, he isn't much help, and waves vaguely at the shelf where we've just spent 15 minutes looking. Clearly the book isn't there -- too bad, as I have to admit it's the one I would have chosen myself.

More people crowd in. The game in the back drones on. Finally E. settles on an environmental sourcebook called Stormwrack. His love of the sea coming through. We prepare to buy it and skedaddle. There's only one customer ahead of us (one of several father-and-son pairs I see there), but things are not so simple. The shopkeep first asks whether Dad is paying with cash or credit. One doesn't hear that question much anymore. But here you do. Dad is using credit, and the shopkeeper pulls out one of those slider things that you use to take a card impression. He takes the card impression, then with great labor fills in all the details of the purchase on the charge slip. Then he puts on his glasses, picks up a calculator, and carefully figures the sales tax, writes that on the charge slip, then, again using the calculator, figures the total. Next he takes the card to an authorization machine, runs it, and enters the total. Once the card is run and approved, he hands the charge slip to Dad for signature. Dad signs, clearly somewhat impatient. But the sale is not complete. The shopkeeper now produces one of those old metal boxes with a double or triple roll of sales slips on it. He now proceeds once again to write out all the details of the purchase, long hand, and slowly at that. He then strips the sales slips from the box, hands Dad the white copy, opens a small metal drawer in the bottom of the box, and slips his own pink copy carefully into it. Finally he produces a bag, puts the sales slip, the charge slip, and the purchase into it, and hands it all to Dad, who is rather tight-lipped at this point. Finally father and son are free to go.

I watch in something near awe. In most establishments the purchase would have taken 45 seconds, tops. This process probably took three or four minutes. Clearly this could only work when you haven't many customers at once. It's now my turn to step forward. Knowing we have quite a bit of work ahead of us, I engage the shopkeeper in a bit of conversation. He acknowledges they're affiliated with the main Strategist, but, he notes, waving at the metal box, the charge slips, the calculator "they still got us using thirty-year old equipment." True enough.

We complete all the steps of our purchase with due diligence, and finally leave, dice still rattling in the background. The GM's monotone follows us into the April air: "The Temple of Ashara was once a wondrous site of worship, but is nearly ruined now, and has fallen on hard times ..."

It has indeed, dear lady. I finger my brow for signs of a Radiant Headpiece or Shimmering Mask of Zerthul: nothing.

How To Cook a Grick

For reasons I can't fathom, the Blogger feature that emails me when someone posts a comment seems to work with complete randomness. I got no emails for a month, despite folks posting comments (and me in due course finding them and belatedly answering), then this afternoon a flurry of several emails, but still one email fewer than there were comments posted. Hmm.

In any, Elliot asked about grick recipes. And I have been the source, and I have answers. Here's the word from Bladesbat on grick cookery:

1. The tentacles should be lightly cooked and eaten with salt.
2. The body should be slathered in garlic and spit-roasted
3. Don't cook the beak. It's not good to eat, but you can and should save it to gnaw on, as it keeps your teeth sharp.

Sounds pretty tasty to me!

How It Ought to Work

Any prospective blogger really should be aware of the basic requirements of their craft, at least if they care whether anyone reads their stuff. The most basic requirement, it seems to me, is regularity. I think most people still consume blogs in a fairly low-tech way (that's actually sort of a term of art in the tech sector, at least for me, and is not necessarily derogatory: low-tech is often the simplest and best solution, and the admonition to "stay low-tech on this design" warns us not to make things more complex, fussy or expensive than they need to be). By low-tech I mean the practice of periodically returning to the bookmarked blog and seeing if there's anything you haven't seen. A few hardy souls may consume your blog via more high-tech tool such as an RSS reader or other aggregator that scans a variety of data sources, pulls them together and lets you know when any specific data source (a blog, say) has new stuff.

But regardless, regularity is still a requirement. As indeed it is in any form of writing. Speaking of other forms of writing, perhaps I can use that as a bit of an excuse. In a by-now-typical fit of overconfidence, a couple of my colleagues and I have once again signed up for vastly too much technical writing in too short a period. We have just finished a six-week period of revising one of our technical books to keep up with new software, and are now engaged in a rewriting the training curriculum for said software from the ground up. I've also personally signed up to write two technical white papers (yes, on the same software release), as well as put together two talks for the annual developer conference. It's nice to be invited to do all of these things, but there's definitely some eyes >> stomach going on there.

So that, for what it may be worth, is my excuse, and it's taken me so long to write that I'm going to have to postpone the actual intended content of this post till some unspecified future time.

OK, kidding! Let's move on. I left Thorgun on the castle steps, peering down into the dark.

One thing we learned about half-orcs is that they have darkvision. Sixty feet of crisp black and white visibility even in complete darkness. Mostly this has been useful since it eliminates some cumbersome game mechanics; when E wants to do something in the dark I don't face the choice between letting little issues like lighting slide, or pedantically insisting he needs to remember to bring a lantern. No fussing with lanterns, no oil flasks, none of that. (Some of you may recall games in which oil flasks were a primary weapon, deemed to be as flammable as naphtha and as safe to carry as beef jerky).

Below the stair, and the shattered ruins of its door (recalling that marvelous chapter in Narnia 2, Prince Caspian, where the Pevensy kids are wandering in the ruins and find a broken door gaping on darkness, and slowly begin to realize they're in the ruins of the castle they ruled from, Cair Paravel, itself one of the greatest names in fantasy lit but I digress) was a small warren of rooms and passage (see the earlier map). Most notable were the scattered shells of large eggs. Thorgun recognized them right away as grick eggs, and proceeded cautiously. The first room to the left was filled with these shells. From there, three arches opened onto a huge space further west, which for now he decided to leave alone. Instead he crossed the main passage and found a second passage twisting east, then north. Here the obligatory slithering sounds commenced, and he had soon met and defeated the day's first grick. If I recall right, a second much larger one then appeared from deeper in, driving him back out into the daylight.

Once more, at Bladesbat Cave, Thorgun caused a bit of a stir. Not only had he brought back the usual grick, but also tales of hidden ruins. As we know from some of his earlier outings, not everyone in the cave bore him the best will, and it seems likely that plans were laid to raid the caves and tunnels for the treasure that presumably lay there. (It might even be that Thorgun himself sparked those ideas by talking a bit too freely about the loot he had discovered, which in the end was a handful of coins dropped by grick victims of old).

Strength in Numbers

All of this occurred, believe it or not, over the course of about two days in early April 2007, owing to E's discovery of his uncle K's gaming books. Uncle K was busy with work-related matters but expressed considerable eagerness to join E in the game, and at this juncture he did so. Good thing too, as opposing forces were beginning to scheme against our crew. Hearing the rumblings in the camp, they made hurried plans to return to the castle and delve deeper. Not long on their way, they heard shouts and the clatter of armor behind them, and picked up their pace.

They reached the castle at speed. A look back over the dank forest, and a sharp ear, told them a stout band of malcontents was not far behind them. Standing and fighting was a poor option, as was running away. Instead, they decided to plunge straight into the dungeon, hoping their enemies would lack the courage to do so, or in any case the resourcefulness to make a success of their descent.

From the main passage they headed west, through the eggshell-scattered room and through the three arches into the wide hall beyond. This hall had once been paved with huge stones, but many of these had been lifted and thrust aside, apparently from below. Underneath, the sandy soil was pocked with dark, inward-twisting holes. "Burrows" was the word that came to mind, but they had no time to think too hard on the matter, as the gang of Bladesbat thugs was now making their way cautiously down the outer stair.

It turned out that crouching in the dark (OK, granted that all parties involved have darkvision) was the best approach. Darkvision or not, the marauding band was most uneasy in the dungeon. They stood firm during what sounded like one grick encounter, but shortly afterward, Something Emerged to drive them moaning from the underground. There was a brief sound of retreating feet, then silence.

Thorgun and uncle decided it would best to get out of the plowed-up hall. The burrows looked threatening, and they had begun to notice that the air was pungent with a sharp, sweet reek (formic acid, as it happened). They got out of there and went back to the main hall, where they found a dead grick, presumably left by the fleeing thugs.

They made further explorations. The main hall twisted left and ended in a locked door. My memory of the room was imperfect, but E has reminded me that, once they broke the door down, they found a number of sealed boxes, with high-grade weapons carefully packaged in oilcloth or the like: good steel swords and shield. They availed themselves of some upgrades, though Thorgun decided that the swords were no improvement on his huge greataxe. Further east, they ventured into the passage that seemed to be as far as anyone had yet penetrated. From ahead came a faint sound of running water. That was what probably masked the sound of the approach of a truly immense grick, all barbed tentacled and menace, doubtless getting very tired of having to chase off one visitor after another.

These visitors, though, did not chase. They fought. Uncle K, though level 1 to Thorgun's 2 or 3, proved to hit nearly as hard as he did, and the beast went down in a flurry. Alone, one imagines Thorgun would have been hard pressed.

And so onward, down some stairs and into a large round chamber with six inches of water on the flow, flowing slowly eastward. They soon discovered that a natural stream flowed through, from some small caves to the west, over the floor, and away eastward, to tip over a ten-foot drop in the eastern passage and spill out a grate in the hillside. Clearly a sewer, built in such a way that anyone wrestling the grate out of the hill would have faced a wet, ten-foot climb to get into the castle's underbelly.

And finally, at the back of the room, a barely traversable crack into darkness. Actually, traversing it didn't come up much at first, because it promptly disgorged its inhabitant, an enraged carrion crawler.

Now, I have deep affection and nostalgia for carrion crawlers. They were somehow emblematic to me of the first Monster Manual. Nothing ever quite said ADVANCED D&D (as opposed to the rudimentary form we'd presumably been playing) as a carrion crawler. That said, I had forgotten how they actually worked ...

How they work is by secreting a paralyzing goo that knocks you out of commission for many tens of minutes -- in effect, for an entire combat. And that was just what happened to Thorgun. In all truth I had been fudging the dice not infrequently on e's behalf, and this time I was somehow disinclined to do so. So Thorgun was out of business, and uncle K fought on. E was as put out by this as by earlier near-death experiences, and threw himself in a corner, but soon recovered as his uncle handily defeated the critter (maybe not so handily, it was a bit touch and go, but uncle pulled through).

Once they'd composed themselves they explored the crack. It opened into a series of caves, finally reaching the hillside burrow of the rest of the carrion crawlers. They looked to be too much to handle, so it was back into the underground.

The only unexplored area was the torn-up hall with the ominous holes in the ground. These turned out to be the burrows of giant ants. They tried a bit of burrow exploration, but were quickly put off by the teeming numbers. They retreated and, with a bit of daring, went ahead to where the hall turned a corner.

From there the hall stretched out straight as an arrow for much farther than either of them could see. Beyond the turn was an ancient plaque on the wall, covered in what appeared to be writing. Though neither of them could read it, Thorgun alertly copied it, reasoning that Vishara, the Bladesbat shamaness, might be able to make sense of it. Then, with the ants chittering menacingly at burrow openings, they finally headed for daylight.

Old Vishara seemed perplexed by their intrusion when they found her,and spent a long time squinting at what they'd written. Finally she peered at them and said "Were ya near a park somewheres?" A park? In the swamp? Certainly not. Well, she said, the plaque alluded to a "park highway." She ordered Thorgun to draw a P, then a D (here I was glossing over the fact that barbarians start out illiterate and need to spend skill levels to learn writing). He did so.

"Ah," she said. "I had it wrong. It reads:

HERE BEGINS THE DARK HIGHWAY*

Dark, dark. That's more like it!"

More like what, exactly? Thorgun and uncle K retreated to lick their wounds, watching their backs for any more mischief from the Bladesbat gang.

***********

Still ahead:We visit a game store, and E decides to try his hand at game-mastering.

*A fellow I gamed with a bit in my college days, Mr. John Bedell, once said (or at least is said to have said) that "originality is the art of concealing your sources." As a veteran cobbler of things together, I agree with that sentiment, whoever said it. I'll strike a blow against my own originality, then, by admitting that the phrase Dark Highway has rattled around my head for 20 years, ever since another old gaming friend, Mr. Chuck D., included a Dark Highway in a game he ran. Now, CD may have had it from other sources, but I can trace the chain of non-originality no farther. Credit where credit is due. Or wait, this would be non-credit where credit isn't due ... well, see the trouble the whole idea of attribution entails?

Let's just say, "I've always like the sound of The Dark Highway."

Local Rivalries

Thorgun was moving up in the world. He'd become an accomplished hunter of the grick. Not only was he bringing home food to the larder, but he was starting to accumulate actual treasure.

Apparently his exploits were becoming well-known. What was more, we were getting bored with grick battles. This led me to introduce a new foe, and to cross an invisible line without quite knowing it (though JP would later point this fact out to me).

After Thorgun's next victory over a grick, he was confronted, as he was dragging his prize home, by two burly gnoll brothers. Here, for the first time, Thorgun faced sentient, semi-intelligent opponents. That this was an important was not clear to witless me till JP later noted the fact. Ah well.

Since I was still misreading the concept of Challenge Rating (see previous post), these gnolls were more than a match for Thorgun. He did kill one of them, but the other mastered him. Once again, the chance appearance of a Bladesbat war party was needed in order to save the situation. E was still very disgruntled at losing.

Back at home, the Bladesbat chief ordered a patrol, to go find the other gnoll and avenge the dishonor. Thorgun was to lead the patrol. Unfortunately, it was staffed with malcontent half-orcs, including one large troublemaker (whom I never blessed with a name) who was clearly No Good. Once sufficiently out into the woods, this rascal induced most of the party to abandon Thorgun. Happily, one fellow stayed behind, but there was no sign of the offending gnolls. Eventually they went home empty-handed, and were roundly mocked by No-Good and his gang.

That was two setbacks in a row. Time to try for something bigger. Grick could certainly be found in the odd crack in the stone, but what was really needed was some Serious Underground. Well it happened that not far away was the obligatory Ruined Castle, and of course, walled away beneath it, a basement area (yes, a.k.a A Dungeon)



A dungeon, a dungeon. Now THAT takes me back. It didn't take me long (as you can tell) to bang out the above. Fired by the thought of fresh grick, Thorgun hustled his way off to the castle, dug about till he found the dark weed-choked steps leading into the earth, and vanished into the darkness.

The Trail of the Grick

Let's get back to Thorgun, E's new half-orc.

After handily defeating the first giant centipede, and battling the next till he passed out, E went on another monster browse in the ol' Monster Manual. This time his eye lit on a creature called a grick, a loathsome crack-dwelling tentacled horror. (I could describe them further but, alarmingly enough, you can find out the same things in the Wikipedia entry). He decided it was Thorgun's mission in life to hunt them. So off went T into the dank forests around Bladesbat cave, in search of likely cracks.

Another systems digression

Monsters in the newer Monster Manuals are each assigned a Challenge Rating. Apparently, a monster's CR is intended to indicate that the creature is a fair fight for about 4 PCs of that level. A monster with CR 8 should give a good fight to 4 eighth-level PCs, supposedly.

E and I picked up on challenge rating, but I did not pick up on the number "four". As a result I had the tendency early on to send him up against creatures with a CR equal to about his level, oblivious to the fact that, at least per the game designers he was outmatched as much as four to one.

This further explains why I had to fudge some rolls to keep him alive in the early going. It also further explains why he seemed to be leveling up at an alarming rate! The DMG explains to us that monster challenge and awarded XP are intended to be balanced in such a way that a PC will require about 13 encounters of a CR equal to their level, in order to advance a level. Thorgun on the other hand was advancing every 3-4 encounters! Hmm.

On reflection, I have to admit, alarmingly, that my gaming senses have been deeply affected, and likely dulled, by the horribly addictive World of Warcraft. WoW has, in effect, two challenge modes. Certain types of monster can be handily mastered by a character of the same level as the monster. In fact, when fighting "regular" monsters, a skilled player can generally take on 2-3 monsters of the same level as himself, and survive. A second kind of monster, known as an elite, generally has triple the hit points and hands out a great deal more damage than a regular monster of that level. Most players will be hard pressed to defeat an elite of their level single-handed. So a level 35 player can take on several level 35 monsters, or a single monster of level 37 or 38, and prevail. The same player will likely barely make it through a fight with a 35 elite.

I have a feeling that this system was on my mind in looking at Challenge Rating. Hence, in evaluating monsters for Thorgun to tackle, when he was level 1, I figured a CR 1 monster would be a fair fight, and a CR 2 monster a reasonable stretch with some good rolls.

That turned out to be not quite the case.

There was one further wrinkle with the grick: it has four tentacles, each with significant damage potential. Soon I understood why a create with weak hit points had a challenge rating of 2 or 3. (Thorgun was level 2 by now, on the strength of 3 small and one medium giant centipede). Alas, I didn't understand how monster multiple attacks worked ... I gave the creatures four attacks at full bonus, whereas each additional attack after the primary is supposed to sugger a -5 penalty ...

It all added up, as you can imagine, to a tough challenge.

Well, I'll admit it's been so long I don't remember all the details of the grick encounters. I do know that I needed to teach E the wisdom of running away. Alas, once he picked up on this tactic, he began using it at the slightest hint of danger, after even one hit from a monster! So I then had to advise him on the wisdom of how to stand and fight.

In the end it turned out grick was a half-orc delicacy, and the larders at Bladesbat received several deliveries. More, these monsters had actual treasure! Now that was a thrill.

From Bladesbat cave, then, the sounds of contented gnawing and the clatter of picked Grick bones ...

Ambition

The day after the MFCA show there was much watching of the "Making Of" bits of the Lord of the Rings extended edition DVDs. Lots about making monsters, and sets, and "miniatures". Especially interesting to E was the "small" Minas Tirith. Ever since inspecting the "siege of Azure City" as part of a miniatures game, in the Order of the Stick comic strip, E has been fascinated with the idea of building a city for miniatures to romp about in.

So tonight he asks me "Dad, how big would a Minas Tirith have to be to be the right size for your action figures?" (as he calls my miniatures).

The answer was easy, because Weta's "small" Minas Tirith for LotR was exactly 1:72 scale, if I recall, which is very good match for 25mm figs.

Weta's "small" Minas Tirith was the better part of nine feet tall.

"Well," I told him, "it would fill this room."

"Wow," he said. Pause. "Well can we build it?"

I am having visions shades of Mrs. Winchester, and/or Richard Dreyfus. "Local recluse added to city for decades, shunned all contact."

But the vision is worthy ...

Västra Götaland, come on down!

I was looking for some nice means to track traffic to the blog, and I eventually settled on Google Analytics. Free, easy to integrate with Blogger, and it gaves you some great reports and views of your (in my case tiny) traffic data.

My favorite is the breakdown by geographic region. I can see this as a list of city names, or as dots of various sizes on a world map.

I don't know whether it's just that the blog's been up for a little while, and various spiders and hacker bots are starting to find it, or if Google, plus some Technorati tagging is starting to influence traffic at all, but I'm starting to see a tiny trickle of traffic from outside the immediate circle of people I know -- including hits from France, Singapore, and Sweden. Hmm, as of tonight, Costa Rica as well.

It's amusing to inspect where the traffic comes from. The site in Costa Rica is called Heredia province, which in addition to sounding like a nice place to visit, what with volcanoes and a national wildlife refuge, also reminds me of the author (José María de Heredia) of one of my favorite poems in high school, Les Conquérants (French, I couldn't find a translation), which in turn reminds me of Archibald MacLeish's mighty Pulitzer poem "Conquistadors", which I commend to anyone who's interested in seeing the other uses to which history can be put ...

My French hit (singular) is from Les Pideaux, a bit to the west of France. Scrupulous Googling is unable to reveal to me what a pideau might be.

Singapore we all know.

And finally, my Swedish traffic, from Västra Götaland. West Goth-land? I'm envisioning a fella in furs and a horned helmet, crouching on the outer walls of a huge bulwark, jiggling his laptop and cursing how weak the wireless is outside the main castle.

West Goths, indeed. Where's an Alaric or a Chindaswinth when you need 'em?

It's fun to stay at the MFCA

Years ago, in my youth (approximately 1978-1984), I was an avid painter of 25mm fantasy figures. Besides building up large collections of painted fantasy figures, my friend JP and I were regular visitors at the annual meeting and trade show of the Miniature Figure Collectors of America (MFCA). This show used to fill the field house every year over at Widener College, near West Chester, Pennsylvania. We'd go for the better part of a day, eat there, stagger home laden with loot.

Fast-forward almost 25 years. My figure painting hobby trailed off during college. I probably painted my last figures senior year. And I moved away from Pennsylvania, perennial home of the MFCA show, and stayed away till 2005.

Now that I'm back, I thought to scout around and see if the MFCA was still alive. JP mentioned that the shows had gone on, but much diminished. I made plans to see the 2006 show last year, but because of schedule confusion (the show runs Friday-Saturday, and I had assumed Saturday-Sunday), I didn't make it. JP did, and he informed it was disappointingly small. Despite that, and despite the $10 entrance fee, I made plans to go back this year.

I figured E would want to go. At the last minute R (two years younger), decided firmly that she wanted in. I anticipated boredom and an early meltdown, but agreed. Per JP's warnings, I was expecting a disappointing setup of four or five rickety tables with paunchy white guys crouched over them discussing the best way to paint the thick mustaches worn by the British office corps in India.

But no, not so much. The show may have looked a little smaller due to the large space it was in, but it was plenty large. If it was smaller than the Widener days, it was not by much at all. It took us the better part of an hour just to casually walk the aisles.

Size aside, my worry was still that the hobby would be moribund. It turns out that figure painting, like the other key hobby of my youth, model railroading, has taken on plenty of new blood, and is in no danger of immediate death.

The show, as it always has been, was divided into a vendors area and an exhibition area. The exhibits were grouped into skill ranks from Junior to Master, and would be judged at some point, though they hadn't been yet.

The skill of the painters was staggering. I lingered over a few, despite the fact that the bulk of the figures were 54mm figures and up (as opposed to the 25mm that used to be my forte), and a mix that was mostly military/historical, along with a small mixture of celebrities, superheroes and pin-ups (not age-appropriate, indeed).

Out in the vendors area, it became clear that the sale of painted figures has become big business. In the old days, if I recall well, the crowds were mostly painters and modelers. Most figures on sale were unpainted, though a number of painters did offer small numbers of their painted works for sale at high prices. You didn't have the feeling that too many people were making a living off of selling painted figures, though.

Lose a Rain Forest, gain a museum-quality Phillipe de Crécy?

Things are different now. The big deal at the moment is apparently coming from Russia, which is now turning out painted figures of extremely high quality, with correspondingly staggering prices. These figures are known generally as "St. Petersburg."

I stopped by one booth and commenced to marvelling over an extraordinarily painted 54mm war elephant. I mused aloud to JP as to the price, and extrovert that he is (relative to me) he insisted on actually asking. The person he asked was Nikki Johnson of Aero Art International, one of the main (if not the main) importers of these figures. She let me know the elephant cost $1500.00, and we then briefly talked past each other as I asked whether that were the painted or the unpainted price. She finally understood my question, and still seemed puzzled that anyone would think to try to buy a figure unpainted. "They're all painted!" she informed me. And indeed, given the quality of what we saw, the price tag began to seem more reasonable.

Here are a few samples of what we saw:
(all images are reproduced courtesy of Aero Art International. Click an image to view the full listing on the AeroArt site)




Apprently the story behind this figure line is elaborate and long-running: how the Russian sculptors and painters worked without a market under Communism; how they learned their craft using whatever materials they had; and how the "opening" of Russia eventually led to a market for their work. To hear the MFCA vendors relate the story, the Russians are well paid for their work, and indeed reap the majority of the rewards. To the extent this is true, it's an interesting preview of the future. We all know some of the things that happen as "other" part of the world "develop":

• "Climate change," perhaps catastrophic


• The razing of the last rain forests


• The disappearance of species

But there must be other things happening as well. Presumably the benefits of development are distributed unevenly. Some is lost to corruption, some to various mafia, some to the unevenness inherent in anything remotely like capitalism. But one outcome, perhaps, is that some number of people are better off than they were before. (Given the probably irreversible toll development exacts on the earth, one would hope so). As some of the formerly disadvantaged climb the hierarchy of needs, they begin to worry less about subsistence, and more about self-actualization. They begin to "contribute," not only in technology (like India) but in "softer" areas such as the figurative arts. The next wave of painted Crusaders may come from former Patagonian llama herders. The forefront of research in algebraic topology may move to Madagascar. The descendants of the Inuit, their ecologies ruined by warming, may become the great novelists of the 22nd century, or perhaps perfect the renewable hydrogen energy cell.

No doubt in 2045 the world's greatest figure painter will be from one of the old Altaic peoples of northeast Mongolia. From his spiffy studio in Ulan Bataar he will upload realtime video as he works on his latest piece, a beautiful 54mm fantasy of the war chariot of the Ice Princess, pulled by three snarling Amur (Siberian) tigers. Of course, the tigers will have been extinct in the wild for twenty years by then -- but our Mongolian friend will be free, free, free.

Still At It

Lest anyone have "worried," based on recent posts, that D&D was a passing fad for my kids (OK, I'm sure that doesn't rank on the scale of actual worries for you, and I would be Actually Worried if it did) ... no fear of that. E. is back at it -- his new character and his goblin ally Gibble have stowed away on a ship, conversed with a sorceror via his owl familiar, and been shipwrecked on a strange coast. I'll try to get that story up to date as fast as I can.

This morning I woke up and I heard various noises from E's room:

"Let's play D&D! I'll be the gamemaster."
"OK. Is this the story of how I get to your island?"
"No, I'm not in your game." (Meaning, E's character is in a different game from the game is intending to run for R. Some tricky multilevel cognition there)
"OK, well, you're walking along ..."

At that point I think I rolled over and went back to sleep.

In Bladesbat Cave

Warp Speed

If you have nothing better to do than watch this blog (and I hope indeed that you do), you'll notice that I'm posting at a bit of a frantic pace. That's because I am simply trying to, as they say, catch up. As I mentioned recently, E. tired of Tyron once he reached Owlsnest and rolled a new character, the better part of three weeks ago. I still have to relate:

• How Thorgun grew up fighting large insects


• How, in his search for the delicacy Grick, he discovered the Dark Highway


• How he set off for Owlsnest, pursued by old enemies


• How it was a long way


• How he fell in with a foe, and they reached the city together

So I better get on it.

Thorgun Arrives

Thorgun is a half-orc barbarian, who grew up in Bladesbat cave, far in the southwest of Thorion Island, near a swamp that swelters at the foot of the Black Mountains. (You might remember that this is the home of the black dragons that were driven away from Dragontown). Barbarian, for those of you who've been away from D&D for a while, is a new sort of warrior with maximum hit points, and a limited, combat-and-outdoors type of skill set. It appears to be what we call in the world of on-line RPGs such as World of Warcraft a good "solo class", meaning it's a viable class for solo adventuring (unlike, say, a starting wizard or sorceror who can cast 3-4 spells per day.

Once again, the game got underway more or less by E. deciding which monsters in the MM looked interesting. Being interested in animals he again lit on things like giant centipedes. So off he went to defend the swamp from giant centipedes. He defeated a medium sized one, then later went back to battle the Really Big One. And here, for the first time, a setback. He defeated the monster, but was left for dead. In fact he got reduced to 0 hit points, which D&D now treats as an unconscious but stable state. But I told him he was "sort of dead" or at least defeated, and he didn't take it well at all. In fact a wandering party from his cave found the aftermath of the battle, took him and the dead centipede back, and patched him up. This was the beginning of Thorgun's reputation as by far the craziest half-orc Bladesbat had ever seen.

In Praise of Droon

In one of my recent posts, I dismissed Tony Abbott's Droon series as "tooth-grinding." And so it can be, but I have to admit: it contains non-stop action, an endless series of encounters with fearsome and legendary creatures, and no one ever gets hurt! And it has some neat ideas. Somewhere in the old history of the world is a giant tortoise that carries an entire city on his back. The kids travel through various aspects of Droon's past in one book, and they are able to tell about when they are by observing the extent to which the city on the tortoise's back has grown.

I'd do better to emulate what makes his books work than just to wag my finger at them ...

A Long Time, That's How Long!

I think one of the things that contributed to E's (temporary) loss of interest in the game was not only the pedestrian nature the adventures had assumed (another spider on the Owlsnest road!) but the slow pace of my producing them.

A week or so ago he asked me "Dad, how long would it take to get ready if we were going to play for a WHOLE DAY?" He had already heard me say that in high school and college our games sometimes lasted for six to eight hours.

I thought a bit and pulled out the old classroom prep ratio of four to one (four hours of prep per classroom hour). "About four days" I told him. He was suitably impressed.

But here I am back from trip, with some free time, trying to whip up an adventure that will suit his avowed taste for something interesting and "legendary" (a word he used this morning when we were reading some of Tony Abbott's tooth-grinding Secrets of Droon series). I've been hacking away at this story for bits of the day, and so far I have two single-spaced pages of backstory, and perhaps 15 minutes worth of actual gameplay in the present! Hmm, a problem I know well from my efforts at novel-writing.

Well, back to it. Those of you who are seasoned blog consumers know these things apper in reverse order by default. I've posted three times today, so don't miss the others that are further below.

(Interesting how the semi-public forum instantly sharpens one's sense of self-promotion. "Don't miss..." indeed!)

Rumblings

I was away for 3 days on a business trip last week. On getting back, I realized there was an odd sort of silence. Something wasn't getting said. Then I realized: E was not asking to play D&D!

I approached him. "Hey kiddo, do you want to play some D&D sometime?"

"Yeah, I guess."

Hmm.

"OK, well. I'll try to think of our next adventure."

"OK."

Next day, more silence. "Hey E, do you think you're going to want to play D&D again?"

"Yea, I dunno. Maybe not."

AAGH!

"Not enjoying it so much anymore?"

"Maybe not. Well ... I might want to play if the adventures weren't so BORING!"

Hmm.

"Boring eh?"

"Yeah, I want to go on a REAL ADVENTURE! Like a really real one!"

OK, I acknowledge all the back and forth across the island has gotten a bit repetitive. I haven't even posted all the adventures of his second (current) character. But could it be that D&D is just a two-week fad? Well, perhaps.

Perhaps.

That's all for Tyron

Tyron pushed on from Holborne. At one point he cross a bridge and found another huge thick web across his path. As he tried to decide what to do, he became more and more worried about the dark cracks in the high rock walls that had closed in on either side of the path. Finally he decided to cut his way through the web, just as Something began to struggle out of one of those cracks. (He was convinced, perhaps rightly, that the spiders were being led by an aranea, a powerful, shape-shifting, spell-using spider).

From there he pressed on quickly to Owlsnest. He'd been deputed to find a sorceress who might be able to help figure out the reason behind the invasion. He found her at the end of our session, after a frustrating verbal dance with a tower-keeper.

And having reached Owlsnest at last, E lost interest in old Tyron, and decided a new character was in order ...

Holborne Besieged

All through the woods there were signs of spiders. With E's interest in animals, the household has learned a lot about spiders. Rather than the stock single-layer net-like webs we imagine from Tolkien, I envisioned huge funnel webs with their thickets of trip-lines trailing into darkness.

My memory is shaky, but I believe they must have encountered at least a few more spiders on the way to Holborne. They arrived to find the gates shut, and had to talk their way in. There they encountered a nervous mayor who told them they expected a spider attack that night, and offered them a princely reward (fifty gold pieces, if I recall correctly) to aid in the defense. (It appeared that the mayor and the whey-faced town guard were hoping this sum would suffice for Tyron and Fredegar to conduct the defense by themselves, but they were persuaded otherwise).

Night came, and torches were lit along the stockades.

The promised attack was not long in coming, and the defense was fierce. Many spiders lost their legs (Fredegar could be heard howling "C'mere, dinner!" from somewhere away along the wall).

At one point Tyron found himself directly behind the gate. He had learned that paladins had a few spell-like abilities, and decided to use Detect Evil (through the gate). He learned that, though spiders are generally not evil per se, being essentially bestial, there was indeed a considerable evil lurking just behind the gate.

Tyron immediately swung up on the wall and was going to jump down outside the gate to confront the evil when I suggested this might lead to troubles, what with the main body of the spider troop boiling about down there. He grudgingly conceded it might be better to stay on the wall.

After some more fierce fighting the spiders were beaten back. The townspeople repaired to inn and hearth to bind their wounds. In the morning, panic ensued when it was learned that Tyron and Fredegar intended to continue to Owlsnest. In short order the mayor opened the town bank, dispensed the reward, and promised Fredegar extra to stay behind. Tyron and Fredegar conferred, and determined that Tyron felt safe enough going the last leg to Owlsnest alone.

It did not seem to Tyron, as he pushed back the gate, that the evil that had lurked behind it the night before was entirely done with ...

Of Herbs and Fried Spider

Tyron was eager to get on the road. I didn't think it'd be too safe for him to travel alone. Along came a half-dwarven merchant named Fredegar, who as luck had it was also headed to Owlsnest. Fredegar spoke loudly, carried a big stick, and carried his goods on the back of a pack pony. Off they went into the piney forests north and west of Dragontown.

After making camp, Tyron went off to hunt,or perhaps off to pee, who knows. While about his business, he heard a sort of hissing sound, and saw a cluster of eight eyes regarding him from the wood.

A digression on systems

If you haven't played D&D in a while, things have changed. From my dim memories, I'd say it's gotten easier. Most "rollable" activities (combat, skill checks and saving throws as far as I can tell) are based on the roll of a d20. The scale you roll against, is open ended, and the roll can be heavily modified. A level 15 fighter might have a bonus of +12 or the like to his Fortitude save, but the poison of the queen of the spiders is so strong he needs to beat a 27 to survive. (Hence 15 or better on that 20-sider).

Generally your roll needs to be compared to something. For a skill check, the GM assigns a certain difficulty class (DC) to your attempt: using your Climb skill to scale a sheer icy cliff might have a DC 25 or so, so you'll need plenty of experience and bonuses.

Or, if a goblin is hidden and you're trying to detect it, you compare your Listen check to the goblin's Hide check.

One thing this makes much easier is combat. Armor class,for example, is simply a number, from 0 to whatever (as opposed to the old -10 to +10 I think I remember). To hit a foe, your adjusted combat roll needs to beat its AC. Simple. And as you go up in levels your combat bonus increases. Fighting classes increases their combat bonuses the quickest.

So this does away with those huge table that cross-reference your class and level with an opponent's AC.

As a result, it's been easy to have combats -- scribble a few numbers from the MM and you're ready to go. (Now, D&D 3 and 3.5 then throw in a host of additional combat complexities that put the old Steve Jackson Melee games to shame and make one think instead of Advanced Squad Leader. But you will not be surprised to hear that if you omit such considerations as flat-footed AC reduction, flanking moves, areas of threat and attacks of opportunity, the game still plays Just Fine).

Now, to those of you who've followed gaming, this news is probably 15 years old. To me, though, it is "new"! Delightful to be out of touch.

There followed a combat in which young Tyron handily defeated a large spider and reported the same to Fredegar.

"Spider? Where's the legs?"

"Legs?"

"Legs! That's dinner!"

Fredegar fried up the legs, and a fine meal was had. (I have to admit this is due to the influence of World of Warcraft, in which spiders are a prime food source and shed things like "white spider meat" and "crunchy spider leg." Hmm, sounds a bit like a punchily named Thai noodle dish, doesn't it? Crazy Spider Noodle.)

It soon developed that the woods were full of spiders. They set watches, and headed off early, hoping to reach the town of Holborne.

Getting Underway

Obviously, it was the Monster Manual that captivated E to start with. But he quickly got the idea of the game. First he needed to choose a KIND of character (race), then a calling/profession (class). The pictures in the Players' Handbook helped -- two page spread of all the races, in each gender. He browsed over those for a while and chose a half-elf.

Class was trickier. I explained all the options as best I could. He decided on a paladin. We knocked together some stats for him and I scribbled it on a sheet of paper, still being utterly new to D&D 3rd edition rules, and figuring anyway that "rules" were not so much the point.

"OK," I announced. "Now comes the fun part. We need to decide where he lives. Where does he live?"

(Thought) "He lives on an island."

I grab a blank sheet of paper and begin to draw coastline. Suddenly I am 14 again. Or 10, looking at the map of Verne's Mysterious Island. Here's a long peninsula called the Spike. Here three wide bays beside each other, each presumably with its dominant town. Here a wild coast that we know lies empty and unexplored.

"What's the island called?"

(More thought). "Thorion Island." I scrawl it in the corner like a dying seaman.

"OK, now we need to decide where he lives. Where on the island should Tyron live?"

"Ummm.... Dragontown."

"Interesting." I put a Dragontown dot near the center of the island, plunk it next to a lake, let a river trickle from the lake toward the eastern coast. "Why Dragontown?"

"Because ... a lot of dragons used to live there."

"Where'd they go?" (Socratic gaming)

"They got driven away by the people who came to live there. They went away to ... to the .. the Black Mountains! Because they were mostly black dragons."

(Dragons are a favorite monster and E was duly impressed by the MM's pages of dragons, and wanted to learn the different types etc. By this time he had learned many of them).

I duly draw in a mountain range and label it The Black Mountains.

One other thing E has lit on is a Giant Owl. The MM has these, and he's read that they can be trained. He wants his character to train a giant owl as a pet. (Animals have been a major preoccupation of his since he was quite young). We figure out that the giant owls live in the northern forests, and that owl trainers can be found in an around the city of Owlsnest.

And before long we had the following:



(We've added other items since then. Some roads are hard to see. And yes, my handwriting is medieval. OK, not really. For really medieval writing go here).

So his half-elven paladin Tyron came into the world high in the mountains, in Dragontown, with one goal in mind: to get to rocky Owlsnest, in its northern perch beside the sea.

Whence the name, this place, and our further adventures ...