The Lands of Ara Blog
Future plans for the blog include unveiling the Elementalists of Ara -- culling spells is extremely slow going for me, but the first type, the Earth Elementalists, are almost finished! -- and a new Arandish PC race: the ogre. I will also continue to document the ongoing exploits of my Labyrinth Lord group, with an eye toward including some reflective commentary at the end of each session report. I hope I can also encourage my co-contributor, The Spawn of Endra, to occasionally post thoughts about and analysis of the gaming sessions from a player's perspective.
In terms of new blog features, I have decided to make more of an effort to review and evaluate OSR products here at The Lands of Ara. I haven't done much of that so far, yet I notice that as a reader I greatly appreciate reviews of new (and old) products. I am not an exhaustive buyer of such stuff, but I pick up a goodly number of modules at least, so look for reviews of some key OSR modules (and possibly other publications) in the near future.
And speaking of modules. . .
Adventure Module Projects
I buy and read a fair number of Adventure modules. They are one of my favorite sources of inspiration, and I always love seeing how other writers and DMs put together an adventure location. I learn a lot from how other people do it, and I frequently hork maps, rooms, situations and general scenario ideas from other people's adventures, even if I do not always run each and every module I buy as writ.
I am currently writing an adventure module of my own, for eventual publication. I cannot reveal much about it at this point, but as soon as I can, I will give you the inside scoop. I also suspect that I will write at least one more module in the coming year, since the module I am currently finishing strongly implies the existence of a sequel, a follow-up module for which I already have maps.
Megadungeon Project 2011
As I mentioned in my last post, I have been incredibly inspired by Michael Curtis' Stonehell: Down Night-Haunted Halls. That megadungeon has changed how I play and think about the game of D&D. I find myself wishing there were more products out there like it. And while there are a few other megadungeons out there available in the blogosphere and on the net, when I say "products like Stonehell" I mean products available in published print versions. I am a bibliophile; I like physical books a great deal.
So I have been thinking lately: why not write my own megadungeon for eventual print publication? I have had an idea for one in my mind for a long while -- a conceit involving the place's physical layout and the key players who are currently inhabiting it. So why not write it up?
I won't say much about the specifics at this point, but I will reveal that the project involves one of the five possible Arandish megadungeons discussed here. Since I intend it for publication, it will NOT be too Ara-specific, though its history will be compatible with events that occurred in the Lands of Ara setting, and it will almost surely include stats for some new creatures, magic items, spells, etc. that have emerged from my Lands of Ara campaigns. It will use Labyrinth Lord as its default ruleset. It will not necessarily follow the Stonehell one-page dungeon format, though I have been thinking that, just to get started, maybe I will design a few one-page dungeons for eventual (modified) inclusion in the megadungeon, and preview them here on the blog. We'll see. I have been quite inspired by Michael Curtis' and Dyson Logos' use of one-page dungeons, and I recently downloaded Michael Shorten's OPD Template (found in the "Downloads" section of his blog) to give the format a spin, but I am concerned that the OPD layout may not work so well for couple of the weirder levels I have in mind. I also tend to be secretive in the design phases of a project, so I may decide to withhold information about the megadungeon's layout and contents until I am well into the writing phase, hence less motive to parse it out into OPD's for advance preview purposes.
Maybe I will simply write up a one-page dungeon or two for the blog, unrelated to Megadungeon Project 2011. . . .
In any case, thanks for the ongoing readership and support!
Showing posts with label Michael Curtis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michael Curtis. Show all posts
Saturday, January 1, 2011
Friday, December 31, 2010
From White Plume Mountain To Stonehell
I entered the RPG'ing hobby circa 1982, during the period James Maliszewski has dubbed the "Late Golden Age" or "Electrum Age," when TSR was beginning to transition D&D away from sandbox- and module-based play toward the more narratively driven campaign settings that characterize the "Silver Age" (1984-1989). In some ways, I came onboard too late to really be aware of the game's 1970s "gonzo," swords-and-planets, sandboxy origins, even though I read ERB's Barsoom books obsessively in junior high school. In terms of my taste in FRPG settings / adventures, I was more of a Tolkien-influenced high-fantasy guy, and felt, for example, that Gygax's Expedition to the Barrier Peaks was a strange anomaly in the D&D product line that came way out of left field. (I now happily understand the error of my ways on that score.)
I also never even heard of a megadungeon in those days, even though I was entranced by that awesome cross-section of Stone Mountain in the Holmes rulebook:
So my early training in how to play D&D was influenced most by TSR's early 1980's emphasis on releasing adventure modules that were published as one-offs and/or originally geared for tournament play, such as B2 The Keep on the Borderlands, C1 The Hidden Shrine of Tomoachan, S1 Tomb of Horrors, and my all-around favorite in those days, S2 White Plume Mountain. Even when I started playing in and eventually running longer campaigns, those campaigns tended to be structured as chains of strung-together module-based adventures, with maybe a bit of town adventuring in between. But again, not a megadungeon in sight. (Though, to be fair, not much over-arching narrative either.)
This led (or at least contributed) to a style of play that (I now realize) was more acquisitive than exploratory. Strangely -- especially given my extreme resistance to min-maxing and excessive game-ism nowadays -- my friends and I in those early days were all about the treasure, and the main (and possibly only) way we were interested in acquiring that treasure was by killing monsters. That was it. We wanted lots of monster encounters with lots of combat, then we wanted to find and loot big treasure hoards kept by the monsters we'd just slaughtered. End of story.
Of course, slaughtering monsters and looting treasure hoards are excellent goals for D&D PCs to have, and I am not saying we shouldn't have been excited by those activities. But I think some of the finer nuances of dungeon exploration were lost on us in the early years. No, we entered White Plume Mountain, knew there were some badassed artifact weapons in there, and we made as much of a beeline as possible toward the locations with the boss monsters so we could get our greedy hands on Wave! Relatively empty chamber with a bunch of mysterious floating globes? Intricate murals on the wall depicting ancient battles? Screw that, we want something to fight!
To be clear, this tendency of my junior high and high school years is absolutely NOT the fault of those excellent modules. Even the relatively straightforward White Plume Mountain has a great number of interesting tricks up its sleeve (discs over lava pools, anyone?), to say nothing of even more open-ended modules such as D3 Vault of the Drow or Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits. I have no idea what my group would have done with D3 in those early days -- probably started a minor civil war with the wrong Drow faction and gotten wiped out by Drow clerics long before finding the Fane of Lolth.
But thank goodness I have begun to learn the Old Ways! I look at those early modules with such different eyes now, and -- thanks in large part to James M.'s Dwimmermount campaign reports, the wisdom of so many other OSR bloggers, and (most impactfully) Michael Curtis' AWESOME megadungeon, Stonehell -- I am (in my very late 30's) finally grokking what is so fulfilling about sandbox / megadungeon play. The main thing is that it emphasizes exploration over (or at least in conjunction with) encounters. Taking on a megadungeon the size of Stonehell does not allow a party to be as cavalier as my buddies and I were about traipsing into White Plume in the 1980s. No, its sheer magnitude and its ever-evolving nature require much finer attention to detail, and encourage a certain degree of planning and preparation that one-off module-based play does not so strongly motivate.
For example, in recent sessions of my Arandish campaign, the PCs left Stonehell to rest and re-equip in a nearby town, only to find that when they returned to the megadungeon site a couple sessions later, the hobgoblin Occupational Army encamped atop the south ridge of the box canyon had increased its numbers and its patrol range. Thus the PCs simply could not reenter the megadungeon the way they had gone before unless they wanted to fight their way past a legion of well-armed hobgoblins!
My players seem to understand that mapping is essential in megadungeon exploration. My junior-high friends and I usually mapped in our early AD&D module-playing days, but I don't think we had quite the same sense of urgency about it as my PCs do now. Given the size of Stonehell and the shifting territorial boundaries of the various monster factions within, mapping in Stonehell is a crucial survival technique. I like that.
What I like most about megadungeon play -- and again, KUDOS to Michael Curtis for teaching me this through the excellent example of Stonehell -- is that it encourages, even requires, the party to slow down, check out each nook and cranny, and really soak in the atmosphere of the place. As a DM, I love that part of the process: immersing the players and myself alike in the feel of the game-world. (And here I must also mention the influence of James Raggi, who is arguably the Grand Master of setting a unique atmosphere in a dungeon.) For me nowadays, that is where the real fun and feeling of escape in RPG'ing comes from. Which is not mutually exclusive of kicking a bunch of monsters' asses and looting treasure with great abandon, but it is an added dimension of RPG'ing that I never knew I was missing in those early days in the Electrum and Silver Ages of the hobby.
I also never even heard of a megadungeon in those days, even though I was entranced by that awesome cross-section of Stone Mountain in the Holmes rulebook:
So my early training in how to play D&D was influenced most by TSR's early 1980's emphasis on releasing adventure modules that were published as one-offs and/or originally geared for tournament play, such as B2 The Keep on the Borderlands, C1 The Hidden Shrine of Tomoachan, S1 Tomb of Horrors, and my all-around favorite in those days, S2 White Plume Mountain. Even when I started playing in and eventually running longer campaigns, those campaigns tended to be structured as chains of strung-together module-based adventures, with maybe a bit of town adventuring in between. But again, not a megadungeon in sight. (Though, to be fair, not much over-arching narrative either.)
This led (or at least contributed) to a style of play that (I now realize) was more acquisitive than exploratory. Strangely -- especially given my extreme resistance to min-maxing and excessive game-ism nowadays -- my friends and I in those early days were all about the treasure, and the main (and possibly only) way we were interested in acquiring that treasure was by killing monsters. That was it. We wanted lots of monster encounters with lots of combat, then we wanted to find and loot big treasure hoards kept by the monsters we'd just slaughtered. End of story.
Of course, slaughtering monsters and looting treasure hoards are excellent goals for D&D PCs to have, and I am not saying we shouldn't have been excited by those activities. But I think some of the finer nuances of dungeon exploration were lost on us in the early years. No, we entered White Plume Mountain, knew there were some badassed artifact weapons in there, and we made as much of a beeline as possible toward the locations with the boss monsters so we could get our greedy hands on Wave! Relatively empty chamber with a bunch of mysterious floating globes? Intricate murals on the wall depicting ancient battles? Screw that, we want something to fight!
To be clear, this tendency of my junior high and high school years is absolutely NOT the fault of those excellent modules. Even the relatively straightforward White Plume Mountain has a great number of interesting tricks up its sleeve (discs over lava pools, anyone?), to say nothing of even more open-ended modules such as D3 Vault of the Drow or Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits. I have no idea what my group would have done with D3 in those early days -- probably started a minor civil war with the wrong Drow faction and gotten wiped out by Drow clerics long before finding the Fane of Lolth.
But thank goodness I have begun to learn the Old Ways! I look at those early modules with such different eyes now, and -- thanks in large part to James M.'s Dwimmermount campaign reports, the wisdom of so many other OSR bloggers, and (most impactfully) Michael Curtis' AWESOME megadungeon, Stonehell -- I am (in my very late 30's) finally grokking what is so fulfilling about sandbox / megadungeon play. The main thing is that it emphasizes exploration over (or at least in conjunction with) encounters. Taking on a megadungeon the size of Stonehell does not allow a party to be as cavalier as my buddies and I were about traipsing into White Plume in the 1980s. No, its sheer magnitude and its ever-evolving nature require much finer attention to detail, and encourage a certain degree of planning and preparation that one-off module-based play does not so strongly motivate.
For example, in recent sessions of my Arandish campaign, the PCs left Stonehell to rest and re-equip in a nearby town, only to find that when they returned to the megadungeon site a couple sessions later, the hobgoblin Occupational Army encamped atop the south ridge of the box canyon had increased its numbers and its patrol range. Thus the PCs simply could not reenter the megadungeon the way they had gone before unless they wanted to fight their way past a legion of well-armed hobgoblins!
My players seem to understand that mapping is essential in megadungeon exploration. My junior-high friends and I usually mapped in our early AD&D module-playing days, but I don't think we had quite the same sense of urgency about it as my PCs do now. Given the size of Stonehell and the shifting territorial boundaries of the various monster factions within, mapping in Stonehell is a crucial survival technique. I like that.
What I like most about megadungeon play -- and again, KUDOS to Michael Curtis for teaching me this through the excellent example of Stonehell -- is that it encourages, even requires, the party to slow down, check out each nook and cranny, and really soak in the atmosphere of the place. As a DM, I love that part of the process: immersing the players and myself alike in the feel of the game-world. (And here I must also mention the influence of James Raggi, who is arguably the Grand Master of setting a unique atmosphere in a dungeon.) For me nowadays, that is where the real fun and feeling of escape in RPG'ing comes from. Which is not mutually exclusive of kicking a bunch of monsters' asses and looting treasure with great abandon, but it is an added dimension of RPG'ing that I never knew I was missing in those early days in the Electrum and Silver Ages of the hobby.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Sleeping at Sessions
I consider a player falling asleep during a rpg'ing session to be one of the classic events / tropes of our hobby, a sign that your campaign is running well. As has been discussed by far wiser souls than me, old-school rpg'ing in particular involves a great deal of "slogging" through dungeon levels, searching through rooms that turn out to be empty, spending time looking for secret doors and traps, sneaking around, resting, praying for spells, and (at the metagame level) brainstorming tactical plans and hatching strategic schemes. So it is NOT all action-oriented, hack-and-slash, nor necessarily fast-paced. But this, of course, is part of the fun, since it is often during the exploration phases of an adventure that the more subtle nuances of the campaign setting and the characters' responses to it really come to the fore (see, for example, the stuff about the "Followers of Korath" from my previous session report). In short, I think story points and character development happen more so in the "downtime" between epic battles, rather than during them.
Yet I understand the thirst for ACTION and the lust for battle in the game. Hell, every time I play D&D (as a player), I always portray violent, sociopathic, bloodthirsty fighters. I LOVE combat. But one of my goals in picking up Labyrinth Lord last year and starting this campaign has been to (pardon the pun) delve back into a more old-school style of play -- perhaps even more old-school than the way I played Holmes / AD&D in the early 1980s. My most common play experience back then was usually single-module based, including an occasional linked set of "campaign modules" such as G1-2-3, D1-2-3, and Q1. Players would keep our same characters across many modules, thereby qualifying this as a "campaign" of sorts, but I rarely if ever played in a coherent campaign world with returning NPCs and villains, nor did I ever set foot in a megadungeon.
So with this current Labyrinth Lord campaign, I wanted megadungeon-crawl style play, with lots of mundane slogging and shifting of loads of treasure and worrying about mules and tracking elapsed turns and rolling for wandering monsters etc. With the help of Michael Curtis' brilliant Stonehell megadungeon, I am accomplishing just that. What this means, however, is that there are plenty of stretches of time during sessions when, from a neophyte player's point of view, or a bloodthirsty fighter's player's point of view, not much is happening. And thus things can get boring for that player.
The reason I bring this up is that we had a player fall asleep for about an hour of last Tuesday night's session. Part of the explanation for this is that this particular player is (in "real" life) moving this coming weekend, so she was up incredibly late the night before (and very early the morning of) our session packing her stuff, moving boxes around, negotiating with a moving truck company, etc. In short, she was exhausted when she arrived for our 8pm Tuesday session. Beyond this, however, she is playing Hazel, the group's fighter, and as Innominus' player's comments of 4/12 and 4/14 reveal, Hazel really likes killing and fighting and can get a bit antsy when no combat is taking place. So during the long middle stretch of last session, when the party was mostly rooting around and searching for loot in an abandoned chapel, Hazel's player was (not only tired but) bored. So she checked out and slept for awhile, then roused in time for the lizardfolk battles at the end of the session.
And this is how it should be. For as long as I can remember, having some player or another fall asleep during a late-night RPG'ing session is just part of the territory, something that inevitably happens every few sessions or so. Life happens, some people miss some sleep or drink too much beer or simply have very little to do during certain portions of the campaign and check out for awhile to get the rest they need. For some reason, this phenomenon has never bothered me -- I just let 'em sleep unless some crucial event involving their character occurs. It worked well for us the other night and it gave me a warmly nostalgic feeling for all those gaming sessions of yore when the odd player or two caught some winks as game play in general slogged forward.
Yet I understand the thirst for ACTION and the lust for battle in the game. Hell, every time I play D&D (as a player), I always portray violent, sociopathic, bloodthirsty fighters. I LOVE combat. But one of my goals in picking up Labyrinth Lord last year and starting this campaign has been to (pardon the pun) delve back into a more old-school style of play -- perhaps even more old-school than the way I played Holmes / AD&D in the early 1980s. My most common play experience back then was usually single-module based, including an occasional linked set of "campaign modules" such as G1-2-3, D1-2-3, and Q1. Players would keep our same characters across many modules, thereby qualifying this as a "campaign" of sorts, but I rarely if ever played in a coherent campaign world with returning NPCs and villains, nor did I ever set foot in a megadungeon.
So with this current Labyrinth Lord campaign, I wanted megadungeon-crawl style play, with lots of mundane slogging and shifting of loads of treasure and worrying about mules and tracking elapsed turns and rolling for wandering monsters etc. With the help of Michael Curtis' brilliant Stonehell megadungeon, I am accomplishing just that. What this means, however, is that there are plenty of stretches of time during sessions when, from a neophyte player's point of view, or a bloodthirsty fighter's player's point of view, not much is happening. And thus things can get boring for that player.
The reason I bring this up is that we had a player fall asleep for about an hour of last Tuesday night's session. Part of the explanation for this is that this particular player is (in "real" life) moving this coming weekend, so she was up incredibly late the night before (and very early the morning of) our session packing her stuff, moving boxes around, negotiating with a moving truck company, etc. In short, she was exhausted when she arrived for our 8pm Tuesday session. Beyond this, however, she is playing Hazel, the group's fighter, and as Innominus' player's comments of 4/12 and 4/14 reveal, Hazel really likes killing and fighting and can get a bit antsy when no combat is taking place. So during the long middle stretch of last session, when the party was mostly rooting around and searching for loot in an abandoned chapel, Hazel's player was (not only tired but) bored. So she checked out and slept for awhile, then roused in time for the lizardfolk battles at the end of the session.
And this is how it should be. For as long as I can remember, having some player or another fall asleep during a late-night RPG'ing session is just part of the territory, something that inevitably happens every few sessions or so. Life happens, some people miss some sleep or drink too much beer or simply have very little to do during certain portions of the campaign and check out for awhile to get the rest they need. For some reason, this phenomenon has never bothered me -- I just let 'em sleep unless some crucial event involving their character occurs. It worked well for us the other night and it gave me a warmly nostalgic feeling for all those gaming sessions of yore when the odd player or two caught some winks as game play in general slogged forward.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Payday Ordering Spree
1. Ordering two classic TSR modules from Amazon.com Marketplace vendors. There are two AD&D modules from the olden days that I have been wanting to obtain print copies of, both for the sheer fun of it (I fetishize books) and also because I intend to get working on Labyrinth Lord conversions of them as soon as they arrive. Like JB at B/X Blackrazor has done with his excellent B/X conversion of White Plume Mountain, I intend to make my Labyrinth Lord module conversions available as free pdfs to all you folks in the blogosphere once I complete them. I don't wish to reveal exactly which modules I ordered just yet, because my players could be reading this and there is a good chance (I hope!) that at least one of these adventures may find its way into my current campaign. (Remember, I am extremely lazy so usually don't convert or adapt stuff unless I plan to use it.) Suffice to say that I found the two modules I wanted for less than $10 each, cover price. The shipping bumped them up to about $13 and $15 respectively, but that still feels like an excellent deal for two much-beloved classic modules in "very good" to "like new" condition that I know I will use again and again. Score!
2. Ordering a hardcover Labyrinth Lord Revised Edition rulebook and a print copy of Stonehell megadungeon from Lulu.com -- at a discount! There is -- for two more days, until the end of the weekend -- a 10% discount to be had when ordering certain stuff from Lulu.com, so I took advantage of that deal to order two essential OSR products. The first is simply a hardcover version of a book I already have and use, the Labyrinth Lord rulebook. My players have been using my paperback copy at the gaming table a lot, and despite the fact that my friend Carl brings his paperback copy too, those greedy players seem to like to refer to them a fair amount as we play. So my desire to have an exclusive DM's copy of the rulebook, combined with my tendency to fetishize books in general, led me to the conclusion that I should purchase a nice, hardbound copy of the rules set I will doubtless be using for years to come. This hardbound Labyrinth Lord book was my most expensive and extravagant purchase of the day, but well-justified I think, now that I have a weekly LL campaign underway. My second Lulu purchase was the much-anticipated (by me) and much-lauded (by James Maliszewski and others) Stonehell megadungeon. I have seen the pdf preview version of Stonehell, which I liked, though I kind of need a print copy of a thing in my hands before I can really get familiar with it. So the pdf and the positive reviews of Stonehell whetted my appetite, and that combined with my general appreciation for the work of Michael Curtis -- do yourself a favor and check out his superb Dungeon Alphabet, reviewed here -- made my purchase of Stonehell in print inevitable. The fact that the multi-talented Carl also has published artwork in Stonehell only sweetens the deal (support your local artists!). I don't know exactly how I will use Stonehell in my Arandish campaign yet, but I know I will find plenty of inspiration and good material to hork (or possibly use whole-cloth) within its covers. Score!
3. Going to my favorite local game store and buying $10 worth of dice. I have been feeling a bit short of d12's and d8's lately -- I only own one of the former and two of the latter! -- though this hasn't mattered to me all that much in recent years since I have mainly been a player in the game sessions with my former 3.5 group and my current Mutant Future group. But now that I am the referee of a full-blown Labyrinth Lord campaign, I feel the need to have more dice on hand to share with dice-less players etc. Plus, it is far more fun when rolling for things like starting gold or flaming oil damage to actually have three (or more) eight-sided dice to roll at once. So today I went to Evolution Games in south Eugene and picked a grand total of twenty dice out of their 50-cent basket. There were a lot of pretty ones -- I somewhat fetishize dice -- so I walked out with a bunch of d20's and d6's I probably didn't need, but also with 4 or 5 more each of those much-needed d8's and d12's. Score!
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