Bundle of Holding - Dungeon Age (Adventure Modules for 5e and B/X)

I hadn't heard of Joseph R. Lewis, the author of these adventure modules before seeing this bundle, but I have to say, at a buck and a half an adventure, I'm in.

Adventurer! This all-new Dungeon Age Adventures Quick Deal presents ten short tabletop fantasy roleplaying modules in the Dungeon Age series by writer and game designer Joseph R. Lewis. Set on Joseph's ancient world of Harth (inspired by classic fantasy authors like Jack Vance, Michael Moorcock, and Fritz Leiber), and presented in dual versions for Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition and for Old School Revival-style retroclones, these ready-to-run Dungeon Age scenarios fit easily into any ongoing fantasy campaign. Explore a toxic city (Acid Metal Howl) – ride a flying merchant ship across the Great Sand Sea (Desert Angel Fiasco) – try to escape a cursed village (Witches of Frostwyck) – and two of these modules are titled, accurately, Kraken Corpse Delve and Orbital Vampire Tower.

For just US$14.95 you get all ten modules in our Dungeon Age Collection (retail value $66) as DRM-free ebooks, each presented in versions for both D&D Fifth Edition and for old-school B/X-style retroclones such as Old-School Essentials.

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Do You Hand-Wave Adventuring Economic Effects?

Knowing I had to make a post today I spent the last couple of days brainstorming some big and/or cool thing to think about that would interest the patrons here at the Tavern.

Yeah.....I don't really know why I bother as that never seems to really work.

What it does do, however, is make me compare/contrast certain aspects of different games & game systems I have played and how I might be able to do a better job running my next game...or maybe come up with an idea for a game aid that would help other GMs.

Of course "better" is such a messed up adjective to be using because it's clearly a judgment call and what I think is better for my game may totally mess your game up, or just make it less fun than it was before. 

Don't fret, I didn't actually come up with some idea for you to potentially ruin your game. 

In my mental ramblings leading me up until typing out this post I was thinking a lot about in-game economies as it pertains to adventuring parties. Dungeon-delving can seriously mess up a local economy when PCs bring long-sequestered "loot" out of the ground. Of course everybody wants a piece of that action.....local governments/tax collectors, merchants, tavern owners, you name it.

Logistically how in the hell do you handle this? Requiring a license and/or local tax is relatively straight-forward, as is jacking up prices for the party, but there are also secondary logistical effects to think of as well. The party manages to snag 10,000 copper pieces from the dungeon, IIRC that's what?.......a thousand pounds of raw coinage to deal with? Sure the players may be considering the sheer weight of the haul and invested in a donkey cart, but who the heck wants to be on the receiving end of 10,000 copper coins? 

You ever go on a vacation and even think of paying your hotel bill in pennies? Of course you didn't!

Oh...BTW those thousand pounds of copper, yeah those were minted by like three monarch ago over in the next kingdom and are no longer considered valid currency if you were in that kingdom, which you aren't. So you're going to have to pay off someone, or maybe even a few someones, to take those coins off of your hands.

Now I've been in games, and I think this is the norm, that these adventuring issues with the economy get largely hand-waived. A coin is a coin is a coin and all of a sudden having a bunch of them doesn't get much traction with the locals, aside from now you can do more shopping......

I've played in....or run, games that were on the far side of the spectrum, where coins had different names and you needed to keep track of all the assorted coinage. As a GM I'd just skim off a simple percentage off of money exchanges as needed. I left the weight (encumbrance) and record keeping problems on the players.....but I had the power to do an audit and remove PC levels if numbers were out of whack.

Now as far as affecting the economy I'm sure that getting the PCs to buy magic items removes a lot of that cash and you can factor in all the overhead stuff into that particular bleeding-off of coinage. Even then though I've seen some games where the PCs are expected to spend a specific amounts of coinage as they level up in order to maintain their  adventuring social-status and as a price for schooling itself (basically another/additional version of buying magic items).

Once I had a campaign where I fully intended to go overly-complex with the coinage/economy aspects. Multiple coinage systems, taxes, required adventuring permits, you name it. To help facilitate everything and make my end a bit easier the party had a chartering organization that handled the fiddly aspects and acted as a bank, and more importantly, and anchor to the local community. That campaign only lasted a few games so I never got to see how my "experiment" would work.

I'm thinking the simplistic idea of basically taking a good percentage of loot "off the top" in form of a simple tax and explain that this is a roll-up of permits, taxes, and money handling issues. I'm thinking maybe as much as 50% is appropriate...to start. I can easily see 10% for permit fees, 25% for taxes, and 15% for money changing not being too much. If the players balk I can just cut back, like the 15% for money changing and start emphasizing that they keep looting old coins and make spending said coins a bit more a PITA.

Unfortunately I haven't had too many long-running campaigns as a player so my experience in the economics of a campaign under other GMs is rather limited. Might as well throw it out there and ask what other GMs do, if anything, to account for the (hopefully) HUGE amounts of loot their PCs haul out of the dungeons.

My Thoughts on a Point About the Recent Candlekeep Mysteries Brouhaha

 

Something you Tavern readers might not realize is that I don't always drink the Tavern's Kool-Aid.....as in I don't read every post here and listen to every podcast or watch every YouTube video. I like Erik personally and enjoy the OSR, and I suspect that most people here are closer to my POV and less overactive Tavern fanboy.

I mention this because recently there has been some drama over WotC editors......editing a writer's submission to meet the needs of the desired publication. Erik posted about it at the Tavern, and I'll state my opinion....he didn't really hit on the important points of the problem very well. (Note: I pre-wrote this post days ago......)

BUT, to be fair, I thought he did a much better job on the YouTube video, and for you non-Kool-Aid drinkers, that would rather listen than read....go check it out.

Now I'm not going to insult you by going over everything I just suggested you watch, but I have a couple of main take-aways from everything I've seen and some of it is from personal experience, which I'll get into in a bit:

1. When you get hired to write something, there are established parameters that you need to conform to. Some are kind of understood, like "submit in English please" and others need to be (and usually are) spelled out, like "submit 5,000 words in this format". If you've been hired to submit a short adventure, regardless of word count, submit a short adventure! Regardless of word count, an adventure that is "a showcase to the deeper lore and history of the FR." kind of stretches the boundary for a short-story. Bringing back and or fundamentally changing a couple races......again stretches the boundary for a short story/adventure.
2. Most every writer has some big idea or a series of ideas.....I assume it's part of the creative process, but a successful writer, in addition to conforming to their client's desires (as expressed in written and unwritten standards mentioned above) does a good job of differentiating between what is and isn't important for the submission. Not the story, the submission. The piece of work that has to be edited and published to meet the needs of the publication itself.

Point #1 is a bit common sense and easy to argue/debate. If a writer is contracted for 5,000 words on an adventure to be written in English for D&D 5th edition and they submit 7,000 words for a French version of 1st Edition AD&D, the publication will just reject it outright and refuse to pay. No brainer there.

Point #2, and this is what I'm seeing in all this drama, is when a writer doesn't do a good job of meeting the needs of the project or audience. Usually this is when they meet the technical aspects of the contract and either ignore the unwritten aspects or disregard the needs of the publication or end-user.

Back when I was in charge of organizing the GenCon and Origins Tournament Adventures for the HackMaster Association/KenzerCo, I ran into Point/Issue #2 more times than I'd have preferred. I'm 110% certain that my early drafts my own writing attempts were guilty of this as well, but I'm sure I've gotten at least somewhat better due to dealing with other writers.......have I gotten good enough, not my place to say.

I will say that as an adventure editor, the whole idea of a writer trying to explain their big "backstory" and/or NPC "motivation", pretty much pisses me off*. I don't want to have to sift through pages of details of shit that is pretty much never going to come into play, or matter, at the game table.....and that is as an editor. As a GM I don't have the time or inclination to read three paragraphs of details, buried in four pages of text, on why one NPC feels a certain way about another NPC.

Show, don't tell.

If you need one NPC to be a dick in an adventure, simply give the GM that direction instead of having to make a reader....or end user, glean that information from a large body of text. If it is something the PCs won't see, it can probably be excluded altogether. Motivations and backstories are internal adventure points, not external, or party-facing. If you don't consolidate and/or dumb-down this unnecessary information, your editor will do it for you....

.....and he/she will hate your for it, and you'll probably hate them for it as well. Current case in point.

HackMaster Tournament adventures, back in the day, had a pretty standard format in that there were a specific number of encounters and there was a general rule as to the numbers and types of encounters. You wrote to a specific level range and while you could tweak things a little bit.....you want to swap out a trap encounter for another combat encounter, go for it.....but expect there to be more editing issues. Unless you inserted combat stat blocks in the body of the text, something I did (in addition to them in the end as a battle-sheet) a tournament adventure ran six pages or so (it's been a decade so my numbers are fuzzy).

I had an author submit twelve pages of content. It took me so long to edit that it would have been easier to just re-write it myself and use the basic idea for each encounter, but no I did the editing back-and-forth with the author. Now I was also the Head GM and as such I have to make sure that all my table GMs have what they need, when they need it, to run a table smoothly as all the tables play concurrently. Depending on the complexity of the adventure this might mean I give the GMs the adventure the week before. Usually a day's advance notice is sufficient because I'd take the time to prep maps and other game-aids when I could. I'd been known to provide battle-matt overlays and even monster tokens, broken out by encounter, so GMs could focus on running the game and not looking for minis or drawing maps.

Anyway this author was going so far as to try and provide me updates to the adventure the morning of the tournament, making sure he was clear enough on some NPCs motivation. It was all too much, and when asked for an evaluation of his adventure I gave some bluntly honest feedback.

If you are able to do so, I encourage you to look at the adventure T1 The Village of Hommlet. I'd argue that there's a lot of game play to be had, multiple game sessions' worth for certain. My PDF copy is 25 pages, counting the covers. The "Backstory" for the entire adventure is roughly a page and half, spread between the intro and some more on the ruins of the moathouse. Even that is a bit of  stretch because there is a generous three pretty much "read to the players" paragraphs and extra notes to the GM that are a mix of "backstory/motivation" and actual notes (like how some buildings aren't numbered). Everything else is condensed to a simple statement where needed.  

For example, entry 25 states that the herdsman "and the Druid of the Grove are friends". As a GM, that's all I need. I don't need to know that the herdsman's prized ewe that won a blue ribbon at the last Spring-Fair came down with hoof and mouth and the Druid spent two days on round-the-clock care, bringing her back to a state of excellent health such that the herdsman was able to sell her twin lambs later that spring for a record price, allowing him to afford his middle- daughter's dowry so she could marry up in social standing. The herdsman now considers the Druid of the Grove a friend and ally and makes a small offering every week.

Yes, I have been given this level of ridiculousness before.....I wish I had saved the files, but at pennies per MB of storage, it wasn't worth the hard-drive space.

Lastly, nobody values your story more than you do. This is a given and just suck it up! If someone values it enough to pay you five cents a word, then make sure they feel they got five cents a word value! Just because you think you are worth ten cents a word, or than your extra 1,000 words are worthwhile....well they just aren't. Deal with it...preferably in some self-evaluation and not on Twitter/Social Media.

*This is why I'm not a fan of overly detailed drivel, er backstory and motivation. My frustration at having to deal with pages of ultimately useless information and distillation of days worth of my wasted time spilled out into a truthful, but clearly negative review of this author's work. Now I definitely know better now how to appropriate review or critique a body of work.....I'd argue I knew then and refused reason, I created an enemy that day. I'd argue long-term wise this guy got his revenge and then some.

Hitting the Party Sideways

One thing that has always gotten under my skin was the concept that as an adventure author, of course this is HackMaster (Association) specific, that my adventure had to "Hit the Party Sideways", or have elements so far out of left field as to surprise the players to the point where it'll lead to a PC death.

Now granted this was usually in context of one of the two big national (Origins & GenCon) multi-round elimination tournaments, but as a GM or a tournament/adventure author, should our goal ever be a player-character death? Personally I say no. My job is to make a fun, engaging adventure that sets up the possibility for the PCs to kill themselves. Despite the apparent adversarial overtones of the GM/Players relationship (we did have PC kill stickers after all), I'm there to have fun and I root for the PCs just as much as against them.

While this "hit them sideways" bit was usually a generic challenge, I have had it issued with regards to a specific group, in one case the winner's of the tournament last year. Evidently my buddy Topher and his group kicked too much ass and needed to be taken down a peg or two. Now I will admit that back in the day I called bullshit. Now I'll admit I was friends with Topher and had actually flown from Boise to Chattanooga a few times to game with his group......ok that's an exaggeration. My work flew me from Boise to Nashville a couple times and I did the added two-hour drive to Chattanooga on my free Monday nights to sling dice. Anyway, this group was a well-oiled machine that wasn't a collection of PCs, but a group that started having their collective shit together before they started rolling 3d6. When Topher played (he was normally the GM) his PC was a Double-Specialist Diviner, basically the magical equivalent to Sherlock Holmes. In a heavy hack & slash game like HackMaster, Diviners seem kind of lame since they are non-combative one-trick ponies that seem kind of useless on the surface. Useless that is unless you need to find out some information about something......which comes up so much more often in a tournament situation than you might imagine.

In any regard, good job creating a PC that either shines or hangs back and does jack squat. In most gaming groups this would not be a good PC to play, but in a good cohesive team built from the ground-up to work together, this guy could be a tournament wrecker......could be.

I'm not one to care if a specific group/table/player/PC finds one particular encounter easy because of good roleplay, character design, teamwork, or just dumb luck. Technically, especially in HackMaster, it is possible for me to set a single 1st level Cleric with a wooden hammer up against a Red Dragon and have the Dragon succumb in one blow due to a critical hit. Statistically impossible, but still can happen. As a GM/author you cannot, I dare say should not, plan for/against outliers. It's kind of a waste of your time.

If you're writing for a group other than your own, make up a story and make it make freakin sense for your game world. Who cares if somebody isn't sufficiently challenged by one particular encounter, or hell....even the whole thing. Now I'm not saying that you shouldn't put in the effort to make it fun for everyone involved, but spending an inordinate amount of time of making it sufficiently "sideways" is not a good use of your time.

I'm not quite sure I can tell you what is the right amount of "sideways" and I'm not sure one even exists because that seems to go against my personal philosophy, but I can give an example where I had added some.....and where it didn't matter. This particular encounter takes place in what is essentially an exit shaft up and out the mountainside of a Dwarven fortress. It's really designed for exit OUT of the complex, but the players are trying to use it to go IN. The wide corridor extends a good 100 meters into the mountainside and ends in what appears to be a dead-end. At the end of this hall is a stone tray filled with large tiles, Dwarven runes on one side and copper pegs embedded in the other side (I actually had props for this of placards with Runes on one side of a bunch of cards). The end wall of this hall had tile-sized indents filled with little holes. Now this was basically a lock for the escape hatch out of the mountain. The idea was that there was a password to open the lock where you had an eight-letter word you needed to spell out in runes using the letters provided. Once the last tiles was placed, if the word was correct, the secret door would open. If not, the ceiling would drop out and crush the party.

Now it is important to note that this encounter was designed to be a time-waster more than anything.  The tiles were large enough and spread out enough that it would take more than a pair of thieves to "pick" the lock. Three thieves could try, but ideally it took four. If a party had three or four thieves in it, they suffered enough and should be able to get a pass on this encounter. This trap/lock was like a memory game. Every letter corresponded to a section of hallway, with an extra section at the end above the tiles. For every letter/rune in the word that was incorrect, that ceiling section came down, doing a specific amount of damage.....but so did the section above the tiles. With enough trial and error, a group should be able to figure out the word needed and open the secret door, which was well down the corridor they had already walked through, definitely not within the area of the trap.

Now with the right spells, skills, magic items the party might be able to eventually find the door on their own and bypassing it (and the trap) would take some effort, but mostly because it wasn't where you would normally look. A party going that far would still be wasting time and having to use resources that would then not be available to them later in the game. The time-wasting effect would still be there.

Now I'm sure this wasn't a sufficiently "sideways" for some of my adventure reviewers, but come on.....this was basically just a fancy lock on a fancy door that was really made for one-way use. If you needed it to be a little more....I don't know...extra: remove some of the needed tiles. Maybe this lock had been used more often than originally intended and some of the tiles were showing some extra wear & tear so one of the brighter Dwarven guards temporarily removed some key tiles so newer replacements could be made.......

......that makes sense to me. Hitting the group sideways by spelling the "password" wrong to begin with, that's probably more like what I'd been told to do all along.

Last 20 Hours - HYPERBOREA: Beasts and Cannibals Kickstarter (AS&SH)

Quick reminder - the HYPERBOREA: Beasts and Cannibals Kickstarter is in its last 20 hours.

The goal was 10k - it's knocking on 20k.

Gotta love Jeff, he knows how to publish good stuff.

Stretch goals hit thus far:

• $12,000 = Inside Cover Maps. ***ACHIEVED!*** Printing on the inside covers is a traditional and well-received component of classic RPG adventure modules.
• $15,000 = Additional Art. ***ACHIEVED!*** We will commission additional pieces of interior art to further improve the visual component of each adventure module.
• $18,000 = Bookmarks. ***ACHIEVED!*** Every print customer receives a free 2 x 6-inch card stock bookmark inserted in each module purchased. These bookmarks will feature the cover art seen above.
• $20,000 = Xambaala Gatefold Cover. XXX-ALMOST-XXX We will create a gatefold cover for The Anthropophagi of Xambaala, displaying maps in a gorgeous and utilitarian spread.

Goblins Henchman Has Made a Video about his Spreadsheet Adventure Module Idea

Goblins Henchman over on G Plus pinged me earlier today to ask if I had looked at his "proof of concept" Spreadsheet Adventure Module idea, where text is basically linked to an adventures map as a pin or pop out (I have no idea about the proper technology)

I hadn't seen it, but as the video in question is a mere 5 minutes in length, I've seen it now and damn - this would work great, especially with a sandbox type adventure setting where, instead of looking at the map and referring to the hex number or the keyed adventure location, you just click on it and the info pop up right over the map.

Could you present an adventure just using this method? Doubtful, as it doesn't make for a convenient first read through (and GH notes this) but as a supplement to an adventure it would rock.

I don't know the time involved in making such and it might not be cost effective (time-wise), especially on larger releases, but for some smaller releases it may be a selling point.

Add your thought's here or comment on the video. I'm sure Goblins Henchman would be happy to get your feedback.

Kickstarter - Off the Beaten Path, Desert Excursions (S&W and System Neutral Adventures)

Thom Wilson is one of the workhorses of the OSR. Constantly producing high quality stuff and on time too. Thom's latest Kickstarter is Off the Beaten Path, desert Excursions.

So, what is Off the Beaten Path, Desert Excursions?

A minimum of twenty single or double page desert excursions to use as side quests or stand-alone adventures for your Fantasy RPG. There are over twenty-six pages of encounters found within dry deserts and desolate locales. As your player's characters travel through the arid wasteland, they will come across burial chambers, deserted villages, sunken towers, troublesome oases, and more! These adventures are a great way to add additional encounters during travel, or to handle an unexpected change in direction!

Its literally is something to pull out when your party goes "off the beaten path". Its a great series of adventures if you sandbox or if your players tend to stray from the expected story line (or simply useful as random encounters and events)

You have a choice of Swords & Wizardry or System Neutral versions.

PDF's are 6 bucks, at cost POD is 9 (you'll still need to pay the POD cost and shipping), 13 for PDF plus POD (where I'm at) and 18 for at cost POD in both S&W and System Neutral versions.

There are daily stretch goals and the funding period is only 10 days so don't wait too long ;)

We'll be Using Dyson's Serzen's Seven Stairs map for the October Tavern Adventure

The people have spoken. As has +Dyson Logos : "SOMEONE needs to do something cool with Serzen's Seven Stairs because it is such a "crazy fantasy dungeon" style map." I will attempt to do something cool ;)

A few quick notes:

If you only have the ability to back one RPG related Patreon I implore you to back Dyson's. For as little as 50 cents a map you are supporting a creator that has released dozens of professional drawn maps for free commercial use. That's the resources I'm using here.

Supporting the The Tavern via Patreon or Paypal subscription allows me to put time aside to create weekly monsters and magic items for Swords & Wizardry Light (and other OSR games) and post them for free at The Tavern. Purchases made via The Tavern's RPGNow affiliate links are funding the free adventure for the month of October (we had a goal to raise $300 in affiliate monies and we did) Half the monies raised for the rest of the month are going towards art purchases - commissioned and / or stock art.

Notice the top of the map? That certainly looks like a dragon's head. I wouldn't mind commissioning a pencil / ink drawing of a party of adventurers entering the dragon's mouth. Art budget is probably going to come in between 60 and 75 bucks (currently sitting at 40), which is less than I would like so I may dig into the till. We'll see.

I'm pretty damn excited to be doing this if you couldn't tell. Heh!

In any case, this was all funded by you, Thew Tavern's Readers. Thank you :)