more Dungeons and Dragons

What up to all you Thieves And Swordsmen!

So, here's what's been going on with me in recent months...

As you may or may not know, I currently reside in beautiful, scenic Las Vegas, Nevada where it doesn't rain enough.  I do have some family here, among them is my young nephew, who just finished high school.  A friend of his from the east coast moved out here a few month ago, and they wanted to play some D&D.  So we have been.

Apparently his friend has never played before, so I cobbled together a quick adventure that I thought would give him a good taste of the game.  Of course, whenever I have a new player, I feel a certain responsibility to play up the different aspects of the game, and all during play I tried to stress that different groups play in different ways.  Some favor role-playing, while others favor simple game mechanics.  Some focus on just fighting monsters and bad-guys, while others take copious notes to solve the long-term mysteries in the game and storyline.

I try to keep a healthy balance of all these things.  There's enough story to keep them following it, but no so much that it's overwhelming.  Some more notes would probably help them out, but we usually just sit and talk over things for a moment and they remember.  There is a good deal of fighting, but that first adventure threw me off because they decided to try and talk to the goblins in the cave instead of simply fighting them...which led to an unexpected but epic conclusion.

We're using the Labyrinth Lord rules, because they're quick and easy without a lot of the extra (optional) rules.  I thought that would be easier to explain to the new player.  We can import other rules if and when we feel they are needed.

My nephew decided to play a fighter, which is what he usually is.  His friend is playing a thief.  Thanks to one of those shows on YouTube, he wanted to have a gun, so I imported the wheellock pistols and rifles from the Red Steel campaign world.  It takes three rounds to load the gun, then you only get one shot, but if you're lucky, that shot can do a lot of damage!

I was hitting all the classic cliche's because it was quick and easy!  They started off in the little village where they had lived all their lives.  They worked for a pig-farmer until they were 20, finally had enough of that and decided to become adventurers!  So one day, in the tavern of course, they are approached by an out-of-towner who wants to hire a group to play bodyguard for him and take him to a nearby set of caves with a dangerous reputation.

Why does he want to go?  He's been researching a great kingdom that fell apart about a thousand years ago, and he believes there is some sort of marker, or sign that will give him a clue about to find some prominent and important ruins from that kingdom.  He has a purely archaeological purpose, of course!  

They hired a couple of npc's who were right there in the bar at the time and set out for adventure, excitement, and really wild things!

Then there was an ancient stone religious site, pesky sprites, a rickety bridge over a long chasm, betrayal, murder!  And that was just the first half of the adventure!  There was a mysterious invisible thing trapped in a chest, which burned runes onto the characters foreheads when it was freed.  A group of goblins that would have let them move on if only they had shut up, but instead they kept talking until the goblins became suspicious.

The goblins had a magical device and used it, but the players' stalwart hired-help destroyed the magic item and all hell broke loose, allowing the players and their companions to escape in the chaos.  They found some surface-people imprisoned by the goblins and freed them, killed an ogre way too-easily, took his treasure, found a way out of the caves and called it a day and headed back to the village.

There were minor problems and unanswered questions when then returned to the village.  Most of their treasure was in the form of gems and pieces of jewelry which they had to sell before they could pay off their hired help.  But no one in their little farming village could afford to pay what they were worth.  They would have to move on to the large dwarf-city to the north, or on to a larger human town to the south.

It turns out that one of the goblins' prisoners was looking for the same sign as their benefactor.  Both of these characters said they learned of marker in the caves from a certain Temple, which is located in a human city to the south-west and they were fervently convinced that it was a dark and evil place that needed prompt investigation.

But more importantly, what were these mysterious runes on their foreheads?  There was no wizard in their little farming village to consult.  The nearest wizard lived in the human town to the south.  (In all honesty, I didn't know what they were for when I put them in the adventure.  It was simply a device to worry the players, and be a good reason to continue adventuring.)

But apparently the mysteries were enticing, and there was a sense of a "Bigger World" out there, and they decided they wanted to explore more of it.  So, I've been developing the world, named it Leauvalar, and drew up a map depicting part of the Kingdom of Griffonwyr, wherein lies their hometown. 

They have had four or five more adventures since then.  During their travels they have lost a lot of NPC companions (but not all of them), they've been aged by ghosts, temporarily polymorphed, poisoned, paralyzed, received weird adjustments to various ability scores, carried cursed weapons, followed two treasure maps to buried treasure, had experience levels drained and restored, encountered rival (NPC) adventuring groups, and found their hometown leveled in retaliation by the remainder of that goblin tribe from their first adventure.

All this, and they're only fifth level!  I guess it's been about two, maybe three months in game time.  We've been playing for about five months, I guess.  

It has been years since I ran an ongoing game like this, and I have admit it feels pretty good to do it again.  On the other hand, I'm beginning to define many of the vague mysteries I've been hinting at, plus I'm re-learning how much work goes into running the game.  I'm starting to get kinda bored with it.  

On top of that, my nephew's friend is going to have to move back to the east coast.  Some sort of family matter, I think.  Of course, with all the restrictions from the Covid lockdowns, I must admit that Las Vegas isn't as much fun, or offer quite as much opportunity as it did...say, a year ago.  

Both my nephew and his friend have suggested that we continue the game by playing online via Skype, or one of those online table top sites.  Apparently I'm getting old, because that sounds pretty weird to me, as I've never tried to play D&D online like that before.  So I don't quite know what we're going to do about that yet.

If we do continue, we probably won't play as often.  I seem to be designing adventures instead of getting stories written.  It's not their fault, I'm just terrible at managing my time.  On the other hand, I am thinking of using these adventures as the template for a story, or at least writing up the adventures as modules to sell on DriveThru.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see how the adventure unfolds.  Well, I have at least three different things I need to work on, so I guess I'll bring this to a close.  

Don't forget to tune in on Saturday for the conclusion of the Phantom Sleuth adventure, "The Case of the Accursed Amulet"!  And I'll be back in two weeks with another exciting post!

Until then, I wish you all...

Good Adventuring!
Timothy A. Sayell

Dungeons and Dragons

Hail and well met, Templars And Sorcerers!

As I'm sure you all know by now, I am a fan of role playing games in general, and specifically Dungeons and Dragons.  Don't worry, I'm not going to post yet another online recount of the history of Dungeons and Dragons, and aren't you glad of it?  I know I am!

The main point I want to make is that D&D has evolved throughout the years and grown through many different editions of the game.  Some insightful person once remarked that D&D is like Doctor Who, whichever edition you first encountered is the one you think is "best".  

My first exposure to D&D was the B/X version, which was soon replaced by the BECMI version.  This version consisted of a collection of boxed sets, each containing rules for the increasing levels of game play.  The firs one was the Basic set, then Expert se rules, Companion set, Master set rules, and finally the Immortal rules.  The initials of these levels give this version its name:  BECMI.

I played some BECMI, which was eventually combined and compressed into the Rules Cyclopedia.  When this version of the game was no longer supported, I graduated to Second Edition AD&D.  

Sometimes I actually got to be a player, but usually if I wanted to play at all, I had to be the Dungeon Master and run the game.  Between playing and DMing, I got to poke around (at least a little bit) in a LOT of generic, unnamed fantasy worlds.  

I found out that I enjoyed creating these little worlds, although in retrospect, I think they often were composed of more-or-less the same elements.  Like I said, they were pretty generic, trying to accommodate all the standard races from the rulebooks.   Of course there were variations on the theme.

I found D&D helpful in practicing my world building, and certain aspects of plot structure.  And I must admit, during my teenage years, I started countless little fantasy stories that were straight up inspired by the information in those rulebooks.  I began to see the elements in the stories of Conan, or Fafhrd and Mouser that helped inspire the game.  Slowly, I got a better understanding of these concepts, and how to employ them.  But-ho boy!  Those early attempts were pretty bad!  But hey!  Ya gotta start somewhere!

I've always had a healthy imagination, but I do think D&D helped me to hone and harness that into whatever rudimentary writing skill I have today.  I've written many a D&D adventure, and a fair few stories.  There's a big difference in the composition of those two things.

First of all, writing an adventure for an RPG has aspects that are easier than writing a story, and other aspects that are harder.  For an adventure, you basically just have to come up with a situation, a problem, or a puzzle.  It's up to the players to figure out how to solve those situations.  Of course, sometimes you have an answer in mind, and it can be mind-blowing when your players decide to do something that you've never even considered a possibility.

On the other hand, if you're writing a story where this motley group of misfits explores the Haunted Castle, you don't have to create the ENTIRE castle like you would for a game.  You have to come up with the parts that turn out to be important to the plot.  In fact, if you have your characters explore every room in that castle, you would probably have a long, repetitive, and cumbersome story.  

On the other hand, you could make sure that the characters do...whatever you expected them to do when they come upon this problem or that puzzle.  Of course, you could miss out on the players doing something exceptionally cool and unexpected.  But you would avoid the Incredibly Stupid Thing that players always seem to decide to do.

Six in one, a half-dozen in the other, I guess.

Personally, I think my D&D game has improved because I'm trying to be a writer.  But I think me trying to be a writer has improved from playing D&D.  It's a weird, symbiotic, chicken-or-the-egg situation.  

I have tried, in the past, to write up D&D game sessions as stories, and some of them turned out pretty badly.  Others were a little better.  However, I've tried to use D&D to compose elements and ideas for stories, and I think that has turned out rather well.  Perhaps these elements are identifiable in my stories, perhaps not as badly as I think--they may be shrugged off as being influenced by the old pulp stories that I am a fan of.  

I still use RPG game supplements for inspiration and ideas for characters and potential plot points.  But of course, inspiration can sneak up on you from just about anywhere--books, TV shows, songs, the way one guys says his line in that commercial...  Like I said, inspiration can just ambush you like a ninja.

I still collect PDFs of some of the older D&D stuff that I missed out on.  And also new stuff published for the Old School Renaissance movement.  I'm especially fond of Labyrinth Lord, as it is basically a re-invention of the B/X version I started out with.  It's not bogged down with too-many rules, and it's a nice streamlined game.  It's quick and easy--that probably doesn't say much about me, ha!

What version of D&D, or what retro-clone do you play?  I'd love to hear about it, so leave a comment below!  

Until then, I wish you all...

Good Adventuring!
Timothy A. Sayell