Same location, fresh faces

Hole in the Oak, season 2

Alright, so I've started DMing for a bunch of newbies. I'm running them through Hole in the Oak, and I have some thoughts on that dungeon re: new players, but let's just quickly run through the cast (we're running with 5 torches deep, and I must say I am *not* a fan):

Tomas

Thief/Assassin-wannabe. Parents tragically murdered. Outsider. Look, we all know the drill. We've heard this character countless times before. The player has played him before, too -- in the group's last campaign, even. Okay.

Adrian

Halfling Zealot. Worships a duck god. "A bit silly." It's fine; I don't demand much from level 1 characters; it'll get fleshed out in time.

Selina

Mage. Lacks any kind of character, which is also fine.

Unnamed Warrior

I actually forgot their name, but it's another unremarkable character.

Aaaaand... action! (2 sessions)

(Oh yeah, and Oak spoilers from here on out, obvs)

The group starts at the Oak. Nobody brought torches. Mage and Zealot figure out that they can just use the "Illuminate" cantrip and sure, why not. If they continue with it, I'll start demanding concentration rolls with a failure meaning they can't use the cantrip again for an hour. I don't care that much, but the idea behind 5TD is basically "resource management" and if you sidestep that with a thing that exists on your character sheet I don't really see it as a win. But for now, whatever.

Group heads to the carpet hiding a teleportation circle. Adrian decides to check out the passage leading directly north. I ask if they just walk straight across to the other opening, which they do. Adrian is now elsewhere. Rest of the group faff about a little bit, then follow him through. Nobody knows where they are any longer so that's great (is it?).

Group checks out the room with stone seats arranged in a circle, and spends about half an hour of playtime there. Then they move west (toward bat cave). They try to force the door to the gnomes open, but the thief is weak af and the door isn't cooperating; the gnomes tell them to buzz off, they don't want any kind of shifty ppl mucking about.

The ask the moss faces for secrets, and learn that there's treasure at the beach. They then head to the faun's reception room, ring the bell, and a few of them drink the tea. Adrian falls asleep and Tomas pretends to sleep. The unnamed warrior asks what the hell is going on, but Ramius just laughs and says that they can either leave without their friends, alive, or they too can end up in a stew. The warrior refuses, but gets stabbed to 0 hp (from 3, so I mean... yeah) by Ramius's wives. Selina, having stayed passive, trades some of her blood for Adrian and carries the halfling away, leaving Tomas and Unnamed Warrior to the tender mercies of the fauns. Tomas tries to run away, but the fauns catches him fairly easy. Sucks to be Tomas.

Session over. I tell the players that they might want to roll up new characters, but Tomas's player refuses, he'd rather hope for the best. 

New session begins with Adrian and Selina making plans. The Unnamed Warrior player makes a new character, a dwarf warrior named Thorin. Adrian and Selina makes their way back to the moss faces, then head north toward the Hall of Kings (iirc it's named that? I'm writing this from memory, without a map). They find a dwarf warrior where the body/trap would be, and Adrian decides "oh hell naw, we aint going that direction" because someone or something attacked the dwarf with a sleeping dart. That ought to teach me to never assume anything. Anyway, the dwarf apparently drank too much the day before, made a bet with someone, and somehow ended up down here and no, he has no idea how to get out either.

The group heads back toward the glowing moss/moss faces area, then head west to the roots. They look at the roots, then decide "I guess the way is blocked" and head back towards the gnomes. They ask the grumpy gnomes for the way out, and the gnomes, figuring that they can catch two flies or whatever, tell them that if they get rid of the ogre for them, they'll gladly help them find their way out. The group decides that that sounds too dangerous, and decide to instead check out the other painted doors (area 35). They see the fire beetles, decide that that's not something they want to poke at either, and head through the bull door instead.

Adrian spots something lodged inside one of the holes in the passage leading to the lizard shrine/altar, but decides not to chance anything. Adrian is very much paranoid right now, and only wants out. They pass through the lizard shrine, find the beach and dig around a bit (17 silver! the group decides to split the treasure between them). They then make their way to the gnome fishing beach -- there are no gnomes there -- and eventually find the fish shop. They're offered to be led through the gnomes' homes, blindfolded, and pointed toward where the ogre lives (word among the gnomes has spread that there are adventurers that might deal with the ogre somewhere in the Oak, and so the gnomes in the fish shop are aware of the offer), but the group declines -- they don't trust no gnomes. At this point about 10 hours have passed since they left the faun's place, in total.

They head back towards the bull door, but run into the ogre on the way. He's in a bad mood, but some quick thinking has Adrian offering a gnome to him if he helps them find their way out. That sounds like a good deal to the ogre, and the group sets up an ambush in the "HAIL KEZEK etc etc" room (the oval room between the fish shop and the lizard altar, I can't remember the number).

Session over.

Afterword

The players are having fun, at least, but damn they're... new, to this. I don't think Oak is a good starter dungeon for new players. I think it's an amazing starter dungeon for people new to OSR, but I don't think that it's a newbie dungeon. I'll write more about this later. Next session is on Thursday, so that's not too far away.

I think I need to change how I run the dungeon. Like, it feels like they've been blocked by all my ideas, but at the same time I'm not the one that planted the idea that someone hit the dwarf with a sleeping dart. I even pressed the fact that it was a trap that did it. But what's happened is that the players have, voluntarily, removed an exit from their loop. They also didn't bother to check the roots, they just assumed they're impassable. That's definitely on me. Better descriptions.

I think that they're very used to getting the story and what they can do handed to them. I've been keeping quiet because I want them to appreciate that they can do whatever they can imagine, but perhaps that's not working? I'll talk a little with them before next session.

Another issue is that one of the players is super shy (or just bad at talking, that's an option too). Like, can barely talk. I don't know what to do about that. I don't want that to be why he's not finding RPGs fun. I'll ask him in a private message, I guess.

Long time, no C

 I'm back!

I took a break from RPG things and worked on some other stuff for a while, and the group also had issues getting a real session going, so we'll skip ahead with a short look back and then move on with our lives. But first, some news from the development front! (imagine a 30s newscaster voice, please).

Generators

Right, so Digitalocean, what owns Nanobox, decided that that's not a platform they want to keep any longer and are shutting the service down. Worth mentioning is that DO bought Nanobox because they were taking market shares from DO and other bigger places, and offering a really good product (basically an abstraction layer for Docker and I don't know why I'm giving ya'll these details you don't give a shit). DO bought them, and a year later they're shutting it down and telling people to "use our NEW platform instead!" to which I say fi on that, I'm taking my business elsewhere.

What does that mean for me, the customer?

Seeing as how I was the only one that actually used my Generator generator, nothing. Nobody is affected. A few of my posts should probably be updated because they have iframes making requests to nowhere, but I'll get there ... some day.

So no generators?

Actually, I'm working on a new thing... it's not ready for unveiling right now, but I'll get to that later. It's gonna be awesome, though. All my tools are awesome, ya'll know that.

Right, with this done, let's get down to business!

(spoilers for TotSK and ASE, and some Shadowbrook Mansion; beware!)

What's up with the party?

I don't remember where I left off, but the group gave up on Tomb of the Serpent Kings after they (well, one player really) figured it was too dangerous to go on. They discovered perhaps half the map? Ish? Before running into a locked door (TotSK spoiler I guess, but the key hangs from the chain on the basilisk's neck), and a Basilisk, and a goblin that wanted to make a player into their king (the player, incidentally, who didn't want to become king because "they might eat their kings").

Anyway, they (or the leader, really) gave up on TotSK, and then the group shopped around for some other dungeon to explore. Worth mentioning is that the group's not seen all of Hole in the Oak either, again opting out of delving further because it's "too dangerous."

The group decides to make a visit to Shadowbrook Manor; as mentioned in an earlier post they had the option of going there first but didn't care to make enemies with an NPC adventuring group and so went to TotSK instead. Except, the group that went to Shadowbrook Manor left the Skeleton Closet open. There's been a steady supply of skeletons growing in that house, eventually spilling out into the grounds, ever since that group left. One skeleton every other second or so. And it's been at least a month since they left. That's 1,314,000,000 skeletons. I've been seeding the group's travels with random skeletons. Now they finally found the source; a giant WAVE of skeletons growing on the horizon. (I've decided that the skeletons are just milling about until something humanoid shows up, at which point they charge, which is why they've not gotten any further.)

The group decides that no, let's not go to the haunted mansion. Let's go to this place in the mountains where you need a magic sick rock to get in (I might have seeded ASE too).

They take off, after eventually buying winter clothes (mountains are cold) and rations (3 weeks of rations; it should take them about 10 days to get there, they figure it's fine). They also hire a guide, an old hunter/trapper named... something, I can't remember, to help them find their way.

Mother nature says it's not fine. They get caught in thunderstorms and blizzards and strange Spirit Clouds. They have to trek out of the way of a goblin raiding party. They're losing time. They find an abandoned (haunted) tower. The guide says that it's bad news and that if they insist on going there he'll return to town instead. They insist; he leaves and they head to the tower without him. Inside they get a few rooms before getting spooked by ghouls and legging it (current treasure: 9 golden rat teeth).

They make it to the mountain and to the Gatehouse (I think it's called?), and make their way inside. They find the reactor, get attacked by radioactive stirges, find some chrysoberyls (600 gp!), and then get chased by robots, at which point we need to take a break.

After the session, I tell them that I've noticed they're being super careful because it's so far from civilization and that it'll take too long to bring a new PC into the group, and that they shouldn't worry about that because I'll weave a new PC into the game at a fitting place instead.

The "leader" player is offended by this and claims I'm calling him, specifically, out and leaves the group. He also says that it feels like they're never allowed to "win." Let's talk a bit about that because I disagree.

Leaning into the game.

OSR games tend to be very lethal. I've lowered the lethality of my game, but instead crippled characters (a few have lost legs or arms). I've given no mechanical maluses for having a prosthetic leg/arm (except ya can't run) and requiring a period of convalescence. I think that's fair, right?

The group, or rather the player that left because he definitely had the "leader" role in the group, didn't care for downtime. I said, "this guy needs to rest, he just lost his leg, it'll take 6 weeks before he's on his... leg, again." And the group just "decided" that they couldn't afford to wait that long (it costs 1 gp per day at the inn).

Another character lost their arm, this time belonging to the "leader" player. He was retired immediately because again they couldn't afford to wait.

A third character lost their leg; I specifically told the group that there were no maluses (except the running) and that they'd be able to adventure as well as anyone else once they were healed up. Since the character belonged to the same player, the character was retired.

The group has, so far, scratched the surface of three dungeons. For various reasons (traps, fighting when they should be fleeing) they've retired three characters (one belonging to another player) + another character retired when the guy was told I wouldn't let him play stupid because of a low intelligence score.

The cleric has leveled; that's at least 1500gp for him alone. Given that they split the gold equally, that means they've gotten at least 1500 x 4 = 6,000 gp. Sure, they bleed money (the cleric bought a silver Warhammer, and then had to sell it to pay for a new suit of armor (lol)), but they're clearly doing fine.

So why does he feel like they're not "winning"? I dislike the "win" mentality to begin with; RPGs aren't about winning or losing, they're about telling a story together. So when I say "hey, it's fine if that guy lost an arm, he can still adventure" I'm really saying "let's keep the story going for this guy." Because I want the story to grow.

Sure, there'll be losses along the way. PCs have died, but the group's story lives. The world's story lives. I think that's where the disconnect is. Perhaps the character's story is more important to him, and if so then yes, OSE might not be the medium for him.

But at the same time, if the character's story is important to him then there's no reason to retire them. So perhaps getting a lot of gold is more important to him? In that case, he needs to lean into the fiction. Yes, the logical thing to do is to not delve into dungeons. If it's all about making money there are better ways to achieve that than going into horrorplaces that mankind was never meant to know, right? But, given the fiction (you play someone that goes into dungeons to make money), perhaps you need to lean into that instead. Delve deeper, instead. Yes, it'll be dangerous and yes, someone will die. Death is first of all NOT final (as the cleric found out), and even if it is, if you had fun while playing isn't that the biggest win?

Returning to business as usual

So that player dropped out. Luckily, I found another player that wanted to join. The group's deep in the Gatehouse (near the Simulation, for those of you who know) when he joins. Hidden behind a crystal statue is a weird sarcophagus-looking thing:

And with a big red button on it, Buffalo-Frans decides that red is a good colour because it's colourful (?) and so he pushes it.

Out steps Mangle-Manfred, a relative! But why? And how? These questions will have to wait because August-Wilhelm (the cleric) decides to open the very tempting chest, at which point the statues come alive and attack!

A brief fight later, and the group is rewarded with a gold bar (600 gp). Now they just gotta find their way out. Because the player that left held the map. They do find their way out and make their way toward civilization. On their way, they trade with two goblins (who was on their way to an orc camp to bribe the orcs with food). They buy 7 days of rations (x 6, because there are 2 henches, too) for a total of... 5 rat teeth and a lead-clad chest on a cart. The group played the encounter so well ( *whispering* "No, don't sell them the golden teeth of might, we need those!" etc) that I just went with it. Also, killing the group at this point because they starve to death on a mountainside is not ... good storytelling. 

The group eventually arrived at the swamp about two days from Utböle (base camp/hometown), where they met a trader telling them that a skeleton army is laying siege to the town. "Wait, nobody told anybody about that!" one of the players asked. So it's a wrench thrown into the works, but they seem to enjoy it.

There are 2,628,000,000 skeletons across the countryside. A new skeleton joins every other second or so. I'm going to leave figuring this out to the players, lol.

The death of a clergyman

The cleric actually died in TotSK, he spent too long staring at cracks in the ceiling, and the trap came down on top of him. The player seemed okay with it, but the group haggled with the Church of Kedarr (Kedaj), a Cat of Death, and sold the cleric's soul to her in order to resurrect him (the cleric, that is). So the Cleric of Helm is now the Cleric of Helm-Kedarr, and has gotten a bunch of new clerical vows to deal with (have to push things off of surfaces, have to bury their slain enemies). A side-effect of the resurrection is that flames flicker (or outright die out) whenever the cleric is nearby; torchlight doesn't reach as far in the dungeon, either.

Definitely one for the highlights reel.

Bounty and Villain generator (ish)

The weaknesses in my generators are becoming apparent

A sample of the Bounty and Villain generator for Drier Deserts, Hotter Suns was posted in the OSR discord, and I figured I'd give it a whirl in the old generator. It highlighted a lot of issues; mostly formatting at this point. Solve formatting, and you can solve anything else I think.

Ignoring the dice roll (since we're rolling "behind the scenes"), it's clear that a single row will have issues portraying this information. Like, I'd prefer to have the output be something like this:

Dwarfish
Swift 1
Tough 8
Bounty 4k

But that's not possible unless I split it into subtables -- so Dwarfish and Brawny would be in a table, there'd be a table for "Swift" and one for "Tough" and one for "Bounty." That said, it's fairly clear that the bounties are tied to the word; lower values of Swift and Tough means lower bounties. So, the "Word" could be split from the Swift/Tough part and be its own table, I guess.

Further issues appear when we add in the specialties:

 1-7 is easy, we just copy and paste the line 7 times to achieve that weighting. But, again, we'd like to format the result like so

Gun Specialist
Guns 4

Bounty 2k

Which, again, we can't. Yet. Anyway, here's the result of it.

As you can see, it's... okay, but lacking. I will prioritize formatting after I'm done with the sign-up functionality. I think the largest gain is to be had there. It would also be nice to have a function to sum up the bounties across the results, but that's ... soooo far away.

Magical Tome generator

In order to test what I've made, I'll make small generators for a while and see how they pan out. I've already found a bug, and I'm not sure how to solve it yet. It's to do with newlines, and I just hate how textarea (the HTML entity) is so bad. Each small step (fix) will eventually build into something pretty nice, I think, so they're worth taking.

Here are some magical tomes for your troubles.

A Party, Split! (Hole in the Oak, pt. 6)

Prior to this session, I offered the Magic-User the opportunity to switch from the B/X MU to the Holmes MU. The Holmes MU has, in my opinion, a better kit. I felt that the player got disinterested once they had used their one spell, last session, and I wanted to rectify that. While the Holmes MU still only has the one spell slot, they can write spell scrolls from level 1, and they know more spells.

The player took me up on that offer and now plays a Holmesian MU instead. They got to pick their spells from both the Holmes spell list and FEAST OF BUKAKO, which is completely free and worth picking up. Their character, Rodwulf, now knows the spells Sleep, Shield, Beacon of Terror, Enlargement, and Charm Person. Since Falbo is my version of Endon, the players know that Charm Person and similar spells are illegal. That's never stopped a player before, though.

The Session

Before heading down into the oak, the players get Halvar, the one-armed fighter from a few sessions ago, installed as the new innkeeper of The Golden Goose. The sheriff, Näsbjörn, accidentally reveals that the late innkeeper, Johannus, was found with a note stuffed in his tunic. The note read "snitches get stitches" because you gotta hit players across the head if you want them to figure shit out. The players are still not convinced that there's an evil spirit possessing a doll that did this, and instead invented a new miscreant; maybe the innkeeper had enemies?

(MAYBE HE DID! That's a great idea, actually. Maybe someone wants the inn for their own reason, and the murder of Johannus just coincided with an evil, child-killing doll that kills people talking shit about it?)

Halvar has no intention of letting the PCs stay for free, or cheaper, but would like investments. Not for shares or anything, though, but you know if you could help with the bills some? No, if there are strings attached to the money I guess I can just figure it out myself. No, you'd still pay the same for your room. What with this economy, you know...

The group also sits around for a week, letting Rodwulf create a Scroll of Sleep. Incidentally, this also meant that they were just in time for the meeting with the gnomes in the Oak.

The diplomatic meeting takes place in a fairy ring, where, according to the gnome, any oaths are made real. The PCs swear they won't attack the gnomes, the gnomes do likewise (I figure this is a lie from the gnomes' side). I'm not giving the players any indication that any oath in the ring has power over them. The gnome leader tries to get the PCs to agree to attack the ogre, but the PCs aren't biting. The PCs ask a few questions, but ultimately the meeting leads nowhere. The gnomes are satisfied that the PCs won't bother them, the players are satisfied that the gnomes won't bother them. They part ways.

The players figure they're running a bit low on inventory space, and pick up a failed farmer, Bartik to carry some stuff. Bartik is a simple man, with simple pleasures.

And so, they finally descend into the Oak proper.

Stealth release: Generators

I'm releasing Generators even though they're not quite finished

There's not much more to say, really. Right now, the only syntax that's allowed (and works!) is the table id syntax: {{id}}. More features are planned, but I'm also sick and tired of this application so...

Here's an example of a generator (and also an excuse for me to try it out on my own application!). It looks like this:

{{11}} and {{10}} {{9}}, from {{3}}.

{{11}} is a table of male names from, ca, 13th century London. {{10}} is likewise, but female names. {{9}} is a huge (~1.8k) list of surnames, also somewhat accurate to the 13th century. {{3}} is a list of wards in London, again taken from historical sources.

And here's the embedded object, with 5 entries just to show that it works:

And I think that's pretty neat, tbh. There's a lot of work to be done, still, but it's something that can be used now, immediately. And there's some value in that, too.

I've also added error tracking. I hope that I'll catch anything before the server burns to the ground. I don't think it will, but you never know.

The Hunt Begins! (Hole in the Oak, pt. 5)

Session 0 (held in session 5; as my daughter is wont to say these days, "don't judge me!") yielded some good things. We talked a bit about lines and veils – things you don't want to see in the game at all and things you can accept allusions to – and a bit about conflict resolution. We also touched on the worst part of the dungeon, so far: the personality swap trap.

I don't like it. I like the idea of it, but I don't like forcing players into playing characters they don't want. As an effect that fades, it would be okay, but as it is written it's just straight-up bad. It touches on that whole "don't tell me how to play my character" thing. While PCs probably shouldn't pull every lever they come across, certain traps are just not fun. We retconned it, so August-Wilhelm is no longer a coward; the effect faded after a few days. Halvar is still retired, though.

"My" Death &  Dismemberment got positive feedback. I might tweak the actual table some, but the players enjoy hitting 0 HP not being a done deal, that there's a chance to survive. Zordo's player is brought up to speed on what happened in town after they left.

Spoilers below this line.

A generator of generators!?

Generators in the OSR sphere are largely JavaScript-based. It's easy to see why -- JS is immediately accessible, it lets you create dynamic web pages (or snippets for web pages), and it's fucking everywhere. But, as with all great things, there are downsides to the JS generators we've grown to know and love.

They're cumbersome. Like, so, so, so cumbersome. I'm not gonna name names or link you to any of them, but ... yeah. Some of them require you to host your text files elsewhere. Others require you to use extremely specific syntax but offer no validation of them ("test extensively" is not a validation). Others still offer hosting but you can't edit your own generators after having them hosted. Many offer you a blob of javascript you can add to your blog and get a sample output from.

My immediate goal was "I want dynamic table results", rather than "I need to fix everything" or something like that. I wanted to be able to write "2d6 orcs advance slowly down the side of the ravine" and have the output be "3 orcs advance slowly down the side of the ravine"; I figured that was a good place to start. You could make a JS page that just scanned the text for dice rolls and replaced them.

I've still not gotten anywhere near that. I made something else instead. I made a fucking generator. Quelle surprise, I guess, since the title is "A generator of generators!?" and I'm talking about ... well, yeah.

This tool, though, I had a mission statement for. It's a bit undefined around the edges, but overall it looks something like this:

Cassie's Generator Tool

• The syntax should be clear and concise

• Hosting for both the generator and the tables (lists) should be a solved problem for the user

• Users should be able to edit their own tables if they need to

• Users should be able to delete their own tables and generators, if they want to 

• You should be able to use generators or tables someone else has made

• It should offer embedding, no unsightly JS blob

• If the user wants to, they should be able to download all their generators and tables

Here's a first sketch of the syntax:

A table result: {{table}}
A generator result: ||generator||
Dice notation: >1d6<, >1d6+2<

I'm still not sure about the dice notation, but I think it's important to have the difference between what should be rolled and what is information for the reader:
"The weapon does 1d6 damage" should just say "The weapon does 1d6 damage" in the output, whereas "The next >1d4< days" should say "The next 2 days" (plural "days" is gonna be a problem. Hm.)

I've not implemented everything yet. In fact, I've only solved the boring parts. But the good parts are coming. Here's what I made yesterday:

Now, that "{{11}}" says nothing, I know. I'll think of something. Eventually, there'll be helper functions for writing generator entries (like, you'd write {{ and get a search window to find the table you want a result from), but for now there's nothing like that.

The way the code's written, a generator is simply a very thin wrapper around a parser and a transformer, so using generators within other generators should be pretty easy. A few issues loom on the horizon, though. If I become as popular as Facebook, I can't host everything for free, and there might be some resource issues along with that popularity. I might have to move the platform to kubernetes eventually, just for that horizontal scaling. And also because I want to learn it.

Today and tomorrow I'll set up the embed thing, and then I think I might even link to the thing for public consumption.

A wave of Evil Tree Babies (Hole in the Oak, pt. 4)

The morning is bright and cheery, as Robustus tells the rest of the group that he suspects his dog to be a werewolf. The group purchases some Wolfsbane and a silver dagger, and head up to Robustus's room. Robustus grabs the dog by the collar and holds the wolfsbane in its face. It reacts violently, and Robustus tries to stab it in the head. The cleric, August-Wilhelm has either not been following the discussion or thinks that it's a bit premature to just straight-up murder a dog without a fair trial, and tries to drag Robustus away. The dog bites Robustus and flees the room by jumping out through the window. Robustus tells the group to fuck off and leaves the party.

... okay? A brief pause as we wait for the player to create a new character. Then we're off to the Oak, again.

Spoilers etc.

Shades of my former self (Hole in the Oak, pt. 3)

We begin, as always, in Utböle. The party recruits Buffalo-Frans, fighter extraordinaire, brother to Robber-Allan. Brave Halvar recruits a war dog by the name of Goober, who's also a werewolf (unknown to Halvar). Buffalo-Frans hires a man-at-arms named Unwin. Rodwulf, the magic-user, brought his apprentice-turned-torchbearer, Namuun. With the party is still Lafirth, torchbearer.

During the downtime, they've noticed fewer and fewer children in the city. Briefly asking around, they find no clear answer as to why. As they make their way to the Oak, they also find countless dolls spiked to trees.

Pre-session prep

This time around, I didn't have much time to prep anything specific. I did, however, write an initiative generator, so I'm using that for any combat that might occur. Additionally, it can generate HD for any random monsters that pop up.

Spoilers for Hole in the Oak below this line.

Class rework: Magic-User

How do you fix the Magic-User? It can't be fun to have one spell and then not feel relevant once that's used.

Option 1: Barbarians of Lemuria-ify the Game

Steal everything from Barbarians of Lemuria (the best magic system, imo). Here's such a take (only magnitude 1 spells, so far).

If the result can be achieved by training and hard work, it's possible to cast as a Wild Spell (working name).

• Reach the top of a cliff
• Chop down a tree with the snap of your fingers
• Find the book where the information you're looking for is

The result is ordinary, but the method shouldn't be:

• Vines reach down and lift you up
• A whip of fire lashes out and chops the tree in two
• All the books gather in an enormous whirlwind, until the one you're looking for lands on your shoulder, like a bird.

Any Wild Spell costs 3 HP to cast. You can lower the cost by adding restrictions:

• Obvious (chant wildly, dance, etc, you're Doing Magic and everybody knows it)
• Line of Sight
• Casting Time (1d6 * 30 minutes of meditation, wild dancing (possibly naked), etc)
• Personal item (lock of hair, clothes, etc from the person)
• Special Knowledge (tedious, and long, research is necessary in order to cast the spell properly)
• Hour Power (must be cast at a specific time of the day or year: morning, midnight, sundown, solstice, etc are all perfectly valid. "Right now" is not.)
• Ritual cleansing (bathe in clear spring water, anoint yourself with essential oils, etc

A Wild Spell always costs 1 HP to cast, no matter how many restrictions are added. Remember: in my system, the party regains 1d3 HP every 10-minute break on the hour, if they have water and rations as group resources, so the cost is pretty low, still.

Furthermore, a Spell Slot spell, such as Sleep, can only be cast through the regular spell slots the MU gains as they level up; spells cast from Spell Slots cost no HP. 

Discussing this in the OSR discord, it was agreed that keeping both Vancian spell slots with the Barbarians hack was too fiddly (something I suspected when I wrote the post). We'll remove that.

I've always liked Lemuria's magic system, even if it's very much Storygame (with limits). I think this is a reasonable compromise.

BONUS: If I switch to the Barbarian hack in the current world, it would mean that spell scrolls (with stuff like Speak with Dead or similar) are remains of a past paradigm of magic, which means that MUs in Endon (Falbo) would be much more interested in spell scrolls because of how rare they are? It's a possibility.

Furthermore, spell scrolls could still be a regular reward that has no HP cost attached to it; that'd be a good reason to keep and carry them.

This requires Magic-Users to have a HP floor of 2. I'm fine with that. (Remember, death isn't a given at 0 HP in my game.)

Third (?) edit: ALSO this means that CON becomes an important attribute for wizards (you get to re-roll your Hit Die on level up, and keep the better result, so the CON bonus is important). Witches and wizards also eat a lot so they have the energy reserves to regain HP.

Vayra in the OSR discord also came up with this gem: "Also it makes sense why wizards and witches and other magic users are the ones people go to for medicine stuff. Since they have to know it all, they have to stay healthy to do magic."

I love it when rules inform the world. I wish I could come up with something similar for my Thief rework.

Option 2: Risky Casting

Each day, your Casting Value resets to 0. Casting an unprepared spell raises this value by the spell's level. When casting a spell outside those you've memorized, roll 1d20 and compare. If you roll over, the spell goes through. If you roll equal to, or under, a Chaos Burst happens instead.

If I use this system, I'm removing Sleep from the game. Casting Sleep an average of 10 times per session wouldn't be any fun for me as a GM; I also think that the goal of the game is to work with what limited resources you have, and by making the best resource (at lower levels) basically infinite, you make the game too easy.

Furthermore, with this system, we can add in FEAST OF BUKAKO spells too.

Option 3: Cantrips

Each spell you memorize unlocks Cantrips that you can cast however many times you want. Sleep would unlock Tired or Sleepy for instance; you could make someone yawn at just the right time to sneak past them. Charm Person cantrips could be making someone give you their full attention (good for when the nobles are ignoring you) or making you appear slightly more attractive to the person. Floating Disc cantrips could lighten the load of what you're carrying, but you'd still need to carry it yourself, and so on.

I've used a system like this earlier, but my mistake then was probably that the Cantrips were lost if you cast the spell. If we want to make MUs more active and have more options, maybe it should be the other way around: If you memorize a spell, it unlocks a list of Cantrips for that day. Even if you cast Sleep you still have access to the Yawn cantrip.

That sounds pretty good. I'm gonna go with that for now. If I started a new group or the current group's MU dies, I'll probably switch over to the Barbarian hack completely.

Reinforcements (Hole in the Oak, pt 2)

I had a new player lined up for the 2nd session of Hole in the Oak but he declined. He cited an unwillingness to learn a new system. This was plutonium-grade bullshit since he signed up for another game with a GM I know, in a system he doesn't know. The real reason he didn't want to play was because of OSE's lack of skills. I have many things to say about that but in the end, it's the player's loss.


Instead, I recruited a friend to join in. Robber-Allan joined the party. Totally not a thief.

Pre-session prep

In the last post, I had some things I should prep before the start of session 2. Here's how that went:

What else is out there?

• In a hut, a few miles from Utböle lives an old woman. She is wise in the ways of strange things, and she knows that this is not the only world, that other existences connect through various portals.
• Something is stalking the streets of Utböle. People are going home before night falls, and they're shuttering their windows.
• Mevverwen, a traveling merchant, brings a caravan of goods to Utböle every so often. She also deals in illicit goods.

What bigger city connects to Utböle?

Falbo is the nearest city. I've not done any work on it, figuring that I'll do that work when the time comes.

Answer Jeff Rient's 20 questions

I didn't. I answered 2. There are more interesting things to answer than those questions, right now. Instead, I answered 20 questions about the rules.

Map a hex next to Utböle

Utböle and surroundings

0205: The Hole in the Oak
0602: The old woman's hut

0604: Utböle

The session

People in Utböle are behaving oddly. They never stay outside in the evenings, and they shutter their windows. The players made some inquiries about it, but the innkeeper wasn't willing to talk about it. He claimed that it's nothing. The party opted not to press the issue since Johannus is the only innkeeper in town. Lergax, their man-at-arms, pressed the issue of pay from the last session. The party agreed to pay him, and the other hirelings, daily instead of after the delve.

What follows contain spoilers for Hole in the Oak. You're warned. As ever, my players shouldn't read this.

20 questions about the rules (Hole in the Oak, pt. 1.5)

Once, Jeff Rients posted a list of 20 questions about your game world. It is decent. Someone else posted a list of 20 questions about your rules. That is more interesting, I think. Here are the questions.

Ability scores generation method?
3d6 in order, swap one attribute with another if you want to.

How are death and dying handled?
Characters are knocked out at 0HP, and their injury is rolled when they receive treatment. Until then, you don't know if the PC lives or dies. There are various modifiers to the treatment die roll, such as time lapsed between wound and treatment, wisdom modifier of the one treating you, and so on.

What about raising the dead?

1,000 gp * level, it takes 1 * level days to raise someone. There might be side-effects.

How are replacement PCs handled?
Promote a hireling, or roll a new character which will be introduced whenever possible.

Initiative: individual, group, or something else?
Something else.

Are there critical hits and fumbles? How do they work?
There are not.

Do I get any benefits for wearing a helmet?
Style points, perhaps. No mechanical benefit.

Can I hurt my friends if I fire into melee or do something similarly silly?

Yes. If there are 1 PC and 1 monster in a fight, you have a 50% chance to hit either, if there are 2 monsters and 1 PC, it's a 67% chance to hit a monster.

Will we need to run from some encounters, or will we be able to kill everything?
You'll probably need to run.

Level-draining monsters: yes or no?

Yes.

Are there going to be cases where a failed save results in PC death?
Yes.

How strictly are encumbrance & resources tracked?

Not very strictly at all.

What’s required when my PC gains a level? Training? Do I get new spells automatically? Can it happen in the middle of an adventure, or do I have to wait for down time?

You can't level up in a dungeon. You need to describe a training montage for your character, preferably with background music fitting for them. You get new spells automatically, but, again, training montage.

What do I get experience for?

Treasures and monsters. Monsters pay very little XP.

How are traps located? Description, dice rolling, or some combination?

Description. I will try and telegraph traps, I don't find gotchas to be engaging or fun.

Are retainers encouraged and how does morale work?

It's probably a good idea, given the inventory system. Morale is rolled when necessary -- if PCs are knocked unconscious or if other retainers flee and so on. Morale cascades, so if one hireling fails their morale check and flees, any further morale tests are done at -1. If three or more flee, morale is rolled with -2.

I figure it's a good approximation on how one person panicking might trigger a group to panic.

How do I identify magic items?

I don't know. I've asked my players for suggestions.

Can I buy magic items? Oh, come on: how about just potions?
Potions can be bought in larger cities. Magical items are very rare to find on the open market.

Can I create magic items? When and how?

I don't know yet. I'll think of something.

What about splitting the party?

If you think it's wise, go for it.

Class rework: Thief

The goal with the class rework is to fix the B/X (OSE) thief. There are various issues with it as written, but Hear Noise is the worst offender.

As the table shows, Hear Noise is not a good tool. Not all rooms are populated, and so we're looking at maybe 75-80% chance of "hear nothing", all things considered. Even when you succeed, you might get "hear nothing."

We can leave it on the thief, and rework the function instead. Here's a sketch:

Hear Noise
When there's an encounter, the GM rolls Hear Noise for everyone.  Those who succeed are not surprised. Those who fail roll for surprise.

This makes the thief marginally better at not being surprised, but still not immune to it.

The class itself needs reworking though, so here's a sketch. Inspired, obviously, by the OSR discord.

Thief

Has access to Thieves' Equipment List. Rolls 5d6 * 10 for starting money if buying from Thieves' Equipment List only.

Open Locks: Requires Thieves' Tools. A lock can be automatically picked if you spend enough time for an Encounter check (whatever that is in your system). If you want to pick a lock immediately, you need to roll for it. A failure means you cannot pick the lock again.

Remove Traps: Requires Demolition Kits, expensive single-use items that disable traps (small explosives, acid to destroy gears etc). To use it, the thief needs to know where the mechanism is.

Pickpocket:  Leave as-is.

Move Silently, Hide in Shadows: Requires Thief Clothing.

Climb sheer surfaces: Thief skill only. Requires Thief Clothing.

Equipment list (no costs have been balanced or considered for more than a few seconds, sue me)

Thieves' tools -- 25gp
Thief clothing -- 60gp
Black clothing, muffles sound. Small hooks in the palm of fingerless gloves to aid with climbing. AC as Leather.
Crowbar -- 10gp
Backpack -- 5gp
Grappling hook -- 25gp
Mirror -- 5gp
Rations (iron, 7 days) -- 15gp
Rations (standard, 7 days) -- 5gp
Rope (50') -- 1gp
Lantern -- 10gp
Oil (1 flask) -- 2gp
Waterskin -- 1gp
Sack (small) -- 1gp
Sack (large) -- 2gp

Smoke bomb -- 25gp
Fills a 10' square area with smoke. Within the smoke, it's impossible to tell friend from foe. Certain monsters are immune to the effect (infravision, undead). Lasts for 1d6 combat rounds; lingering smoke afterward means all combatants fight with disadvantage.
Flashbang -- 25gp
Hits automatically if the thief is in the first row (marching order). Roll to hit from 2nd row. It cannot be used further back. Save vs Paralyze or stunned for a combat round. The thief automatically pass their save, allies roll with Advantage. Noisy, check for Wandering Monsters/Encounters.
Disguise kit -- 50gp
Demolition kit -- 50gp
Document forgery tools -- 10gp
Wax to copy keys -- 10gp

Poisons
Each poison coats 20 arrows (if you bookkeep these) or 1 blade, and the poison is potent during the entire delve (that is, returning to town means the poison loses its potency).
Paralyze -- 50gp
Save vs Paralyze or paralyzed for the next activation.
Anti-magic -- 25gp
Save vs Spells or lose casting ability for 1d4 combat rounds.
Murder -- 75gp
Save vs Death, can only be delivered by a blade. Only potent for 1 victim. Perhaps gate this by HD, where 4HD or greater only take additional damage? I dislike Finger of Death-ing a dragon (ya'll know what I'm talking about).

Thoughts

The main problem is if we're creating a checklist. You know what  I'm talking about. Where players always look to their character sheet for the answer to whatever situation. We don't want that. We want to give the thief tools that they can use occasionally. Not always. There should never become a "standard approach" to something.

How do we curtail this? Risk/reward is certainly something we can use. The flashbang, in particular, has both good and bad things that can happen. Document forgery tools might land you in trouble with the authorities. Climb sheer surfaces still require a climbing check, and with quadratic falling damage (10' = 1d6, 20' = 3d6, and so on) there's enough risk there.

Within my own mutilated corpse of OSE, there's another limit: inventory. Each item takes a slot. Cost is also a thing that can limit things, although perhaps not as much as soon as the PCs have had their first successful run. A minor treasure is 400gp, that's enough to buy plenty of smoke bombs and whatnot.

Have we moved too far away from the B/X thief now? Are we in GLOG territory? I don't know.

I might give this a try.

A first descent into the underworld (Hole in the Oak, pt 1)

This is a retrospective of Troika, Let there Be Blood, B/X and what else?

The Group

Halvar, a level 1 fighter who arrived in Utböle (a frontier town) from Castle Bloodthorne.

August-Wilhelm, Cleric of Helm.

Gullvar von Drax, another level 1 fighter.

Lafirth, torchbearer.

Lergax, racist man-at-arms.

Muir, man-at-arms.

Loldox, torchbearer, whines a lot.

I usually require clerics to come up with a clerical vow; something that their god requires of them. August-Wilhelm's player decided that their character obeys all laws and cannot tell a lie.

I'm warning you now: the rest of this post contains heavy spoilers for Hole in the Oak. My players should not read this at all.

What really happened? (The Temple... pt 2)

Follow-up from this post.

The group didn't really do too many things. A lot of exploration, a little bit of roleplay, but the temple itself was basically off-limits to them, and this comes down to a huge mistake I made when designing the entries.

The factions

The wombats are basically pacifists with stone spears (and I realize that you could absolutely read them as indigenous-inspired, but they're more inspired by Diane Fossey's Living with Gorillas. Still, for all my talk about trying to be careful about messages, what we have here are an underdeveloped civilization exploited by an industrialized one. Great. fucking. job. Cassie.

Anyway, so the idea was always "how would a new intelligence interpret religious illustrations?" What would they make of it? But I didn't really manage to convey that. The PCs are all sneaking around, there's nobody around (because they infiltrated during the day, didn't they?), so they're not getting this cool "it's like religion in the US, they just don't... get it. But in a kind way." thing. In a spur of the moment thing, I replace the decay spores with floating balls of liquid fire. That the benign creatures use for their baptism rites. Okay.

Oh, and human sacrifice. Great.

Right, so I've lost the way with my wombats completely. This is partly triggered by the players. Don't get me wrong, the fault lies with me, but the group just... wasn't what I expected. Since it's Grottröj you can do FLAILSNAILS and just bring a character over. I got a character with a machine gun. Another character considers killing 14 non-aggressive wombats to "teach them a lesson."

I don't really like that kind of game.

So yeah, their behavior ramped my own ideas up, for ... not great results. Back to the factions.

The second faction is the ants. Nobody runs into the ants.

The Demon is not present. The sun construct doesn't see play.

The Elders (Wombats) don't want to interact with the PCs at all. That's a real issue; you can't have a faction that's completely uninterested in the party. Or maybe you can, but still. Perhaps they could use better motives.

Jacquaying the Dungeon

There are 4 ways to enter the temple catacombs (where the interesting stuff is). However, one of the entries was made impassable by the sun construct. The other three are all located inside the temple itself, so you need to get inside the temple first before you can get to the dungeon. Since the wombats don't like visitors, that means you'll have a hard time doing that.

The biggest issue is, really, that there's no exploration possible if you don't get into the catacombs. I had all kinds of ideas about the temple grounds and the ground floor of the temple, but the group also always got caught by the Wombat Choir (14 individuals, pacifist) when they were heading somewhere (bad luck on the encounter rolls) so they felt blocked by that too.

When we're rewriting the temple (next post in this series), I'll make sure that there are more (and different) ways to enter the catacombs.

Encounter tables

The encounter tables need to be reworked. I like some of the events, but others I'm not a fan of. There needs to be more of the "hell. yeah." things on there. Hole in the Oak, which I'll review sometime... later, has a good encounter table, I think. It's not only "you run into these monsters!" followed by "and now you run into these monsters instead!"

As noted over on False Machine, "beige as fuck" is not fun, and gives nothing. I feel that my Temple might be beige as fuck.

Final Words

I waited too long to write this; most details are gone. The players liked the world, what little they saw of it. The baptism by fire thing creeped them out properly, but overall I wouldn't call this a resounding success. I learned stuff, though, so next time it'll be better. The Demon will return.

In the next post in this series, we'll look at the current layout of the temple (zoomed out) and then we'll start re-working it.

The Temple in the Valley of the Wombat People

The initial purpose of the Temple wasn't even a temple. At first, there was a demon that kidnapped babies, as demons are wont to do. This demon took over, corrupted, a wombat warren. At first, the idea was cramped spaces, having the PCs crawl through dark, narrow tunnels while continually being mocked by the demon. It was a journey through the underworld, from the normal to the supernatural.

The largest issue with the idea is this: I am writing this for a single mission, to be part of a collection of small hooks. It isn't designed or written in a way that furthers OSR play (exploration, faction play, etc).
Then, Grottröj, an OSR convention in Sweden, went digital because of COVID-19. I figured I'd run something and it seemed like a good choice. It was, after all, already written?

There's very little "adventuring" in Grottröj's play, focusing more on the Mythic Underworld and exploration. It didn't quite fit the bill.

I didn't want to give the warren up, though. When rewriting the dungeon, the warren connected to a buried temple. The demon took a less prominent space in it and the wombats themselves became more like Stone Age people. They now had tools and crude weapons.
It still didn't work, for me. The second iteration was a more pronounced Temple, with an incidental warren on the temple grounds. The story had already changed once and now did so again. The wombats used the temple grounds, surrounded by high walls, to farm the earth. That's not very dungeon-like, so the idea I had was that the wombats found the temple and took up religion based on the illustrations and paintings found inside the temple. The temple itself was a prison, think Magneto's prison in the X-Men movies and you're not far off, for the demon. The demon now had a way to influence the real world, through the wombat people. I'm introducing corruption, as both a moral and a visual, theme. Not only is the temple falling apart, but an innocent animal is corrupted (becoming more human-like, I wonder what that says about my view on humanity?). I had an idea of fragile stone floors and crumbling walls. With the demon being a less physical presence in the upper level, still mocking the players, but at times collapsing the floor under them and at other times caressing them, physically, softly.

The temple and its religion were too vague, and so I threw together a basic religion: the Sun erases sin, keeps shadow away, and keeps the forces of evil weak. The god imprisoned the demon in its temple, where the constant glow of the midday sun keeps it weak. But with time, gods disappear and their magic grows weak.
The third iteration had much clearer faction play. The wombats now use the temple and the underground halls for their own reasons. In the Sunrise Hall, beneath the temple building, they grow their crops in the soft glow of a magical sun. They stay away from the Midday Hall, where a harsh midday sun shines down on a golden cage, and they've not breached the doors to the Twilight Hall yet. (There is also a Midnight Hall, where the heretical texts and the tongues that spoke them are kept, but that is locked behind powerful magic and secret passages.) The demon is now its own faction, spreading Decay Spores that infect creatures (much like Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the zombie-ant fungus) to do its bidding. Where do these creatures come from? That answer is still missing, at this stage. Another faction, the Ant People, have breached into the underground part of the temple too, and are exploring it as well.

I still kind of like this iteration; there is some promise here, but I need to rework it to a larger location. I'm still working on a very small scale; I want to make it explorable in a single session. I think that limit, self-imposed as it is, ruined my effort.
In the last iteration (fourth, if you're keeping track) I removed the demon (in hindsight a mistake) and made the Sun Religion take on a larger role. The underground farms are no more. Instead, there's a huge fruit tree in the Sunrise Hall, where the wombats perform weird rituals that fire in various ways. I remove the god, in its place is a Sun Construct, sitting on a throne where the prison once was; in its chest a miniature sun.
This is what I ran for a small group at Grottröj. The pitch, unfortunate as it is, was basically this: an anthropologist lived with the Wombat People for many years and has now returned to civilization. His essays and lectures are popular and everyone who's someone wants Wombat People things. The anthropologist himself wants the religious texts that he knows are in the temple (he was never allowed inside).
In the next post, I'll detail what the group did. I will also give you a rundown of what mistakes I made, and what issues there are with the fourth iteration.

Troika, Let there Be Blood, B/X and what else?

Here's a great idea by Archon's Court

Troika has a great initiative system (or so I thought, but the real thing is too fiddly for me. But read on).

B/X is simple enough.

I'm gonna mash them all together for a test drive this coming Saturday. Here's what's gonna happen:

Initiative is done through a Troika-ish system. Instead of initiative values (PCs having double tokens, monsters having Initiative values) each PC gets 1 token, each hench gets 1 token, and each monster gets 1 token, and the extra End Round token is added, too.

So at the start of the combat round, tokens are pulled one by one until the end round token comes up. Maybe some didn't get to act, that's how combat is.

However, on a PC token, any player character can "activate." PCs can still only activate once.

AC disappears. All attacks automatically hit. -1 roll, that is nice.

Each weapon has both an attack and a damage reduction value. Ranged weapons do not have a defense value, but added Piercing Damage instead.

Armor gives DR according to the following: Leather 1, Chain 2, Plate 3. The same goes for monsters.

Spellcasting is declared at the start of the round and the spell goes off at the spellcaster's activation.

Monster damage is upped by 1 die across the board because 1d3 and 1d4 will rarely touch PCs. So in Hole in the Oak, for instance, a monster doing 1d3 + paralyze will be consistently useless against a plate-wearing PC.

I'm also going to be using a Death & Dismemberment table for downed characters. If a healer gets to the PC before the scrap is over, there's a larger chance the PC survives.

Alright, so the idea is to give the players meaningful choices. To summarize Archon's Court's post, when it's your turn you roll 2d6 for your weapon and assign 1 die to the Attack column and the other to the Defense column. That's a choice the player gets to make. Maybe it will slow down combat, but it's a lot more interesting than "roll 1d20, yeah you hit, roll damage" (I usually roll my d20 together with the damage to speed things up, but it's still bad), at least on paper.

But, not only that, by hacking the Troika initiative slightly we're giving the group meaningful choices as well: when a PC token comes up, who goes first? Is it the spell caster, in order for the spell to fire? Is it the frontline fighter, so that they can boost their DR? What about the ranged PCs, they can pack a punch. Maybe the healer/support guys need to move in and drag the downed fighter away?

Maybe it'll turn out that it's all bad. But maybe it won't. I think there might be slightly slower combat than the slogfest that is B/X combat, but I think there will be more activity, or maybe the word I'm looking for is more focus within that combat.

Let's get on with the modified weapons:

Sample Weapons

Melee

Shortsword

Roll	Attack	Defense
1	2	0
2	2	0
3	3	0
4	3	1
5	4	1
6	4	1

Axe - Swingy Attack, Low Defense

Roll	Attack	Defense
1	1	0
2	1	0
3	1	0
4	4	0
5	6	0
6	7	1

Spear - Swingy Attack, High Defense

Roll	Attack	Defense
1	1	0
2	1	0
3	2	1
4	2	2
5	5	2
6	5	3

Shield - Low Attack, High Defense

Roll	Attack	Defense
1	1	1
2	1	1
3	1	1
4	2	2
5	2	2
6	2	3

Dagger - Low Attack, Swingy Defense

Roll	Attack	Defense
1	2	0
2	2	0
3	2	0
4	3	1
5	3	2
6	4	2

Ranged

Shortbow - Low Attack, Decent Pierce

Roll	Attack	Pierce
1	2	2
2	2	2
3	2	1
4	3	1
5	3	0
6	4	0

Crossbow - Swingy Attack,  Good Pierce

Roll	Attack	Pierce
1	1	3
2	2	3
3	2	2
4	2	1
5	6	0
6	6	0

I am not completely sold on the Shortbow, to be honest, but this is a starting point. I also think the tables need to be reworked. I want to keep the Damage Reduction on the lower side, but that also means that there's not much choice between a roll of 3, 4 on the Shortsword table -- you'll always put the 4 on Defense in that case, since 3 has the same damage but no defense.