Disclaimer first, I’m a sandbox guy. I struggle to run a railroad. I like stopping to smell the flowers. Book of Brute is basically me sticking to a published straight line and I still keep wandering off into the distance. I am doing multiple games all in the same location and time to build my own Solo Sandbox. Pretty much everything that I run that’s not a true one-shot ends up becoming a Sandbox.

I swear, at some point in time some braindead exec must have given a game developer conference talk on Sandboxes, because sometime in the last twenty years they’ve started treating geography as though it creates play.

It fucking doesn’t. Not by itself that is.

Seriously, I have to imagine that a bunch of rich people or people with no gaming experience went, “What’s a sandbox?” and then looked it up in a dictionary and got the idea it meant empty square of sand, not understanding that you build a castle over there, throw down your big trucks, dig a river and fill it with the hose, and then blow up some little green army men as you play whatever the fuck you want in your little world.

A bigger map does not create more meaningful play any more than a larger chessboard creates a better game. A map is space. A sandbox is a network of possibilities. Those are related concepts, but they are not interchangeable. I’ve said it for decades now about 3d video games, that I would rather explore a detailed mansion than an empty city.

This confusion has become so common that the word sandbox has almost lost its meaning. Today it effectively means a large open world, few loading screens, or you can walk to that mountain you can see in the distance. None of those things actually describe what makes sandbox play interesting. Metroid Prime 4 had its literal sandbox of nothing. God of War Ragnarök had its little sandbox of nothing. Insert the example that disappointed you here. Rage 2, No Man’s Sky, you can prob go on for days if you play video games.

An empty field is easily enormous...it still only asks one question, do you keep going? Meanwhile, a fifteen-room dungeon with factions, wandering, limited supplies, uneasy alliances, and multiple paths can generate tons of meaningful decisions despite fitting on a single sheet of graph paper, you might have to use both sides but still, come on, you get the point. The map is not the sandbox.The decision space creates the sandbox.

The Difference Between Space and Possibility

A map describes where actions can occur, a network describes how actions change what becomes possible next.

Many modern open worlds are physically enormous while remaining mechanically bland. They contain dozens of ‘objectives’, hundreds of collectibles, and tens of quest markers, and yet almost every problem has exactly one solution and zero choice. Travel here. Fight the enemies. Collect the meaningless widget. Repeat ad nauseam. The player moves constantly while the decision space never changes. Somewhere around lvl 150 in Diablo 4 you actually stop thinking. The game was solved hours ago, you’ve gone through the motions so many times it has become effortless second nature.

Conversely a tiny wilderness hex map can be an incredibly rich sandbox if every decision permanently restructures the world. Fuck yeah Dolmenwood, let it burn! Do you negotiate with the goblins or exterminate them? Do you flood the mine or defend it? Do you reveal the bridge to the public or keep it hidden for an advantage?

The geography in those examples barely changes, but the future does. That is what players experience as agency. Players can lack ‘freedom’ in a sandbox but still exercise and experience the feeling of agency.

Sandboxes Are Built From Good Questions

Every game asks questions, not every question is meaningful. Some ask tactical questions. Some ask strategic questions. Some ask social questions. Some ask moral questions. Any of these can be meaningful if you make them so.

A sandbox differs from a scripted experience because it refuses to answer those questions in advance or even require you to answer them. Instead, every answer creates the next question which should eventually lead to the next problem. That chain is what produces genuine exploration and true agency...provided those questions actually matter.

Notice that none of this requires a large map, the very first thing it requires is a world capable of remembering what happened. This is hard to do in video games admittedly. It’s not in TTRPGs, the GM just has to keep records, be honest, think about what should happen in response, not what they want to happen to fit some goal such as a story or any other outcome.

The Theme Park Problem

If an hundred quests all resolve in the same way, you haven’t created one hundred opportunities for play, you’ve created one opportunity repeated one hundred times. Likewise, filling an empty world with icons doesn’t make it more open. It makes it full of pointless busywork. A player following objective markers can never be exploring; they’re commuting. The world becomes a checklist of To-dos instead of a landscape of decisions. Ironically, the larger these worlds become, the smaller they often feel because our brains are very efficient at storage. Oh cool this brown hill and the collectible thing behind it looks like the last...how many is this? This is why as you get older time seems to go by faster by the way, if you would like to offset that you need to be doing novel things and going to novel places.

We often see video game designers try and use environmental differences to make it seem like the world is bigger and that there is more going on but when the difference is what the backdrop is and these places are small and next to each other without liminal transitional (I hate that I now have to clarify I don’t mean a liminal space that doesn’t actually go anywhere, I have actually encountered people whose exposure to the word has made them think it means a spaces that feels like nowhere) spaces that change how we interact we end up in Fallout 4 trying to recreate New Vegas and making the world’s saddest theme park.

Why Old Sandboxes Felt Bigger

People often describe older sandbox campaigns as feeling limitless despite being physically small. That’s because their scale came from consequences, not geography.

Players remembered things like: the fort we burned the fuck down, the merchant we screwed over, the bridge we blew up, the baron we set on fire at his own wedding. Not because those events occurred over many square miles, duh, but because each permanently changed the course of the game.

A remembered world always feels larger than one that was only rendered. The first step for players to remember the world is that the GM must remember the PCs and their choices, including what they did not choose.

Designing Decision Space

When designing a sandbox, stop asking, “How big is my map?” Seriously, us hobbyists, it makes sense we see new people make this mistake again and again, but the so called pros? I’ve given up on so many video game companies as I’ve gone from never buying day one to only buying on a good discount.

Here’s some Punk design questions to ponder the next time you make something that is supposed to be a sandbox.

- How many genuinely different futures can emerge from this problem? If there’s only one outcome, ditch that shit.

- Is this a problem, or a situation that doesn’t demand or offer any meaningful choices?

- Is there actually a choice or one optimal path and one idiotic path? Do better. Players can smell optimal like a shark smells blood in the water. You have to hope they pick lolrandumb.

- Which decisions actually change the world? And which ones do so permanently.

- What information is incomplete? Stop over giving information. Let your NPCs say IDFK.

- What competing interests already exist before the players arrive? Oh hey, factions. These never happen in video games and are rare in published modules these days. No, that video game you love with a bunch of reputation meters does not have factions. Notice how nothing really changes or matters beyond some cosmetic bullshit. They don’t matter.

- What will happen or continue happening if the players do nothing?

- What happens to the PCs because they were doing something else?

Those questions and probably countless more like them generate sandboxes. Drawing another continent almost never does, if ever.

The Real Measure of Freedom

Player freedom is not measured in miles walked. It is measured in futures created. A player who can walk everywhere but meaningfully change nothing is less free than a player standing in a single village whose choices reshape the next six months of the campaign.

Oh, hey, Death Stranding, what are you doing here? This isn’t a dunk on Death Standing, that game was intentionally saying, “Hey, fuck you, your char is basically a prisoner with a work release job and your choices are meaningless.” It wasn’t trying to be anything but a take the optimal path simulator. I loved it, it was still mindnumbingly boring, and Kojima on the record said that they didn’t make the first one suck enough. This is connected by the way to why in the second one they fixed the delivery system so that doing one run was no longer the optimal way to play and that having to make the same trek over and over again was the intent.

Confusing maps and sandboxes has led designers to build ever larger worlds while accidentally shrinking the space where play actually lives. A map tells players where they can go, a sandbox asks them what kind of world they intend to leave behind.

You can bring your pitchforks and torches.

I take you back to 1999, Edwards hasn’t yet made “Story games” a thing, Hackmaster is new or not out yet, 3e isn’t out yet, the most popular game after D&D is Vampire. Which is tradder than trad...whatever that fucking means.

The year is 1999 and you might not have internet, you def aren’t going online and arguing game design with randos, in fact in your small town or even large city it was still a jockular wasteland. You had your books, your magazine/newsletter things, and the culture of those you played with.

We had terms for this, the Real Man, the guy who just wanted to fight as many things as possible. The Munchkin/Power Gamer who just came to win. The Thespian, the one who acts. Obviously everyone has some element of each of these traits, don’t lie to yourself. We can see the same split Edwards saw when he successfully carved out story games even further from the trad.

But enough talk about storygames, the point was that each new player, each new GM was learning the game from the texts they had, trial and error, and feedback. In this way we often see the same things repeat, get figured out, and the same mistakes play over and over. If you hang around this hobby long enough you too will see it.

And this is an important note, you ever notice how all the popular rags and the most talked about issues are from the earlier days? The simple reality is that the indie newsletter or zine waned in popularity which is what in turn led to the success of such replacements as Grognardia, forge etc.

Anyway even if you don’t buy the idea that every new GM is recreating a style from synthesis of materials we can see the two general offshoots of philosophy, experience focused and challenge focused.

So as always I go where does a non story game that doesn’t care about balance and is focused on PC decision spaces? Well that’s OSR right, right up until we do enough of it that something resembling a story emerges in which case we are suddenly trad I guess? If we balance it suddenly we are classic.

Note that in the above linked article OC is tied not to story games but most closely to the rise of the 3e losers league, RAW as religion, when the reason Gygax said the DMs guide as for the DM not because he was a horrible person but because he understood what a bunch of rules lawyers do and what a campaign might need.

This is all to say that I am skeptical of what we might call strong theory of play culture but can find no issue with weak theory of play to borrow from other schools on theories. If it helps we can say Strong Play Culture is that there are discrete boxes of play with mutually exclusive values. This is where Edwards comes in and argues that trying to get the thespian and the war gamer to get along and play together is a form of brain damage and that is why I will never stop dragging his asinine games while still using the useful bits of terminology he and his came up with.

Weak culture of play says people behave as individuals and as a norm seeking group that the culture that develops at a given table will ebb and flow in response to the people, their lives, and play.

The modern condition however is that the outside world has a bigger influence on your table than in past eras.

https://oilfantasy.blogspot.com/2023/01/vamos-ver-como-fica.html

We open with agreeing with Edwards that system does matter. We also reject what I’ve seen a few newer players refer to as either the Mercer effect or the Crawford experience that is about as the Oil Fantasy Manifesto puts it tyranny and illusionism.

However Oil Fantasy Manifesto (article 2) also finds itself rejecting the story/neo trad style of games that remove the GM from the game either in part or in total. Punk’s two cents sorry everyone the games where the GM is just a facilitator are the story games with mechanics designed to reduce the GM’s power over the group/play is far closer to the Crawford experience of waiting tables that people talk about than anything else.

Dealing more with Mercer effect, the long winded GM who doesn’t want players is a whole different reality than the Crawford experience. We can say that the Crawford school is the tyranny of fun, the rule of cool, the yes and, while the Mercer effect, to steal from OFM is more about control and this idea of narrative purity and vision.

Fun fact if two people are talking each 50% of the time they will assume the other is talking more and they are the one talking less. Look, the saying just write a novel already is something that has been said in the hobby for ages for a reason.

OFM puts its central identity statement on returning to challenge and rejecting plot. Awesome. GM shouldn’t be a controlling primadonna? Double awesome, no issues with this vision statement.

This focus on the relationship between GMs and PC type players becomes the focus of article 3. Its something of a repeat of the points on is the GM erased by the system or is the GM a overly verbose orator.

I find the most interesting bit this:

“You can only fully enjoy a game by understanding how it works. Playing in ignorance means making unconscious decisions, leading to meaningless interactions.”

Now obviously Gygax didn’t follow this school of thought but that doesn’t mean anything, I point to the Keep Uncertainty Principle, but then KUP is a very not modern philosophy. We might even call it Neo Classical if we were to try and keep putting things in boxes.

The point is that we get a clear mission statement here creating a modern version of the game that is a vision of the classic game while addressing all the same modern concerns that lead to modern games attempting to solve common problems, namely the overbearing GM.

Man what a strange world we live in, that years ago I swear most of the conversation was on toxic players. Obviously we should talk about both.

Article 4, now we are getting to the meat. A good challenge is our topic, hey that’s one of the things I’ve been talking about here on Substack, what makes a good challenge, how do we know if it’s good or not, how can we reliably make them?

I’m really not interested in this idea that the GM would be powerful in such and such style game or that the power would be easy to abuse. You can not fix human behavior with text. I will leave it at agreement that the GM is not an illusionist, a party entertainer, storyteller, or god. Hey if you’ve read much of what I’ve written...do you think my GM means master?

Look I’m going to be real with you, on avg the random person can’t even master themselves let alone a whole imagined world. Game Manager.

ANYWAY.

“A good challenge involves restrictions, respecting the player’s agency, and formal requirements that support it.

Agency-related restrictions:

• There should be no problems without a possible solution.

• No challenge should come without accompanied by signaled opportunities.

• Challenges will not come without parallel opportunities and dangers.

• A good challenge does not preclude a wide range of solutions.

• The players’ agency should never be vandalized by the challenge as it was constructed.

Formal requirements:

• It presents complex situations and difficult decisions.

• It bears a resemblance to the world of adventures.

• It utilizes the game’s known tools and structures to parameterize chances and opportunities.”

Damn that’s some solid reasoning. I’m going to give you my old version, a challenge should have a goal state that accepts multiple solution shaped inputs and that it should be within the world and not adversarially built or updated in real time to foil clever solutions your dumbass didn’t think of when you were being a lazy GM. We also see that my answer doesn’t include the signaling of challenge. This is because I disagree, in my style of play I signal threat. It is up to the player to decipher opportunity from pure danger and to judge the risk. When we signal that there is a challenge here we tend to return to the weak form of railroad, players are now fucking with that challenge because we gestured to it not because they within character decided to take that course of action.

Article 5 is focused on the problem should be solvable even if the solving is not guaranteed, we dunk on Mork Bong as we rightfully should. The simple fact is that if the players can’t do jack shit about it, it is not a problem, it is a situation. Situations can be fun to roleplay in but they tend to not be play producing by themselves to steal from narrative theory you need an inciting incident of some kind. This by the way is what I was getting at when I was talking about how the shitfarmer style of play instills inaction as a virtue.

Which is where we go in article 6, too much risk not enough reward doesn’t exactly inspire players to do things.

I don’t have any great insights or arguments here, I play gold is XP in my D&D, I give out sick loot all the time. Rewards also could be silly things, your goblin spear bearer, the farm you bought that you have never been back to, etc.

Article 7 I’m going to assume is a translation error when it says the classic advice is prep situations. Never prep a situation. Prep problems, a situation might arise from a problem but a problem doesn’t sprout from a situation most of the time. Remember that the end of the world in Mork Borg is a situation...it’s not really a problem.

Anyway OFM defines playground elements as those that can generate more play by creating more problems or changing a situation. I don’t have a name for this, I have toys and tools. They get the job done, but this is a very sandbox play mindset.

Article 8 is about my whole thing about solution shapes. Both the extreme of the GM who wants you to solve the soup cans. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SolveTheSoupCans to the GM who would take almost anything solution shaped.

We do also address the GM’s tool of The Prestige.

No not the movie, the act of taking something and turning it into magic. Rafael Balbi tells us of the time he realized that the GM was taking every input as true. Players either learn to game this or they are repulsed by it. The prestige only lands if the moment of planting felt effortless and went by without a trace.

When the GM says yes to everything it isn’t magic and it’s not even flattery, it’s a cheap insult resulting from a GM who didn’t put in effort. I’m not going to be as nice as Balbi, it’s shit. Narrative focused experience, or simulation challenge, not putting in effort is shit. A shared narrative experience can still be had and accommodate improv without falling into false illusionism.

We then move on to coming after roll play. More specifically roll to solve.

And guess what, Oil Fantasy Manifesto is of the same mindset as me and countless others on what we might call critical moments and also clever solutions.

We do not need to consult the oracles of Fate (dice) or Karma (stats) if the GM has given the PCS a problem and the PCs have given a solution that solves it then there is nothing left to be rolled.

I’m not fully in agreement, I often accept a really good solution without a roll, sometimes I call for a roll on a really good solution because it’s still complicated. Sometimes I call for a roll because it’s a really bad solution but it might just work.

They do make a good point...that asking for a roll on a good idea, by a skilled char can just be failure fishing.

Dear everyone, the D&D movie was good, it was accurate. If that’s not the tone you want don’t set up the game for that tone by asking your PCs to roll to tie their shoes.

In short don’t tell me you rolled for traps.

Article 8.2...I’ve started pointing people to Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom on this. It feels so obvious to just say figure out what the goal state actually is. The goal is to get the ball in the hole, how the players do it? Don’t fucking care.

Design your problems from a goal state. Designing problems in a vacuum is fucking hard. Designing a problem from a goal state is not.

8.3 deals with absurd solutions by title but it spends more time talking about what M.A.R Barker called remote viewing, I call synthesis, and I’m sure everyone has a silly term for it....guys it’s just inductive reasoning. I’m sorry that public education failed you if you’ve gone through a complicated graph trying to describe this. I mean we could make an argument for deduction also being used, but if you are figuring out a specific from the general then we usually just call that world building or stereotype :P

Here I actually point to the OSRs concept of invisible rulebooks. We say that a dragon’s head can’t fit in that bag because that bag can only carry X volume and the dragon is HUGE.

8.4 is on resource management, basically track weight, doses, uses, time, the GM has to make rulings on these things and the use of as a ref in the vein of Kriegsspiel like war games using their invisible rulebooks.

Dear reader, this is why old Fantasy Adventure Games used the word referee not dungeon master at first. Who are you who doesn’t know their own history?

8.5 Risk, fictional positioning, critical moments, and knowing when to roll. Heck yes. Only reason I’m not saying more is because there isn’t much to say. I’ve already talked about this here and elsewhere and https://oilfantasy.blogspot.com/2023/02/manifesto-oil-fantasy-09-promovendo_21.html does such a great job of explaining this that you should really just read it if you still somehow find when to not roll for something confusing because clearly if you’ve read me try to explain it and it didn’t click thats because I failed to explain it in a way that worked for you, read someone else saying the same thing in their way.

Article 9 we finally leave 8 and the topic of promoting a wide range of solutions. This is on preserving player agency. I’m of the PCs need to be presented with the chance to make meaningful choices. When we take actions that make no difference or appear as if they made no difference we as players begin to lose interest in the game. This is about us avoiding the priorly mentioned abuse of the prestige as well as avoiding the Quantum Ogre while giving the players enough data to make informed decisions.

There has been much ink spilled on our friend the Quantum Ogre, I think the first problem is that an Ogre is confusing the conversation, a lot of more narrative minded peeps go whats the big deal, it’s just an Ogre. Here we can make it a bit more obvious, supposing we are in a cave system and we are giving our players clues as to what a path might have. This path is damp and cool, littered with bleached white bones. That path is dry and slightly warm, the air is thick and smokey but the ground is devoid of clutter. If we place the same dragon behind both paths that is a Quantum Dragon. The problem is not the enemy or the location, it is the erasure of choice. Here our little path choice was suggestive of 2 different things, if both lead to the same thing and the GM was always going to route to the dragon then no interesting choice was made and the two paths were illusionism. Just get rid of the false choice and the Quantum Dragon returns to being just a dragon.

Highly collaborative shared narrative style play can get away with more quantum bullshit because the player feels that they have a larger impact on the game through actions other than PC choice. In a game where there is less shared collaboration it is important to not undermine PC agency.

Which brings us to why I don’t roll behind a screen you cowards. If the PC choses to jump a gap after the GM and the PC have negotiated the fictional positioning then it is important that the GM respects the agreed upon outcome and method. If the dice say you eat shit, you eat shit. To fudge in the PCs favor is also undermining agency. When we take away the GM safety net of plot armor PCs make better choices over the long run, better choices make for more interesting games.

Better choices here doesn’t mean choices that are more likely to work though that is often related but instead it means choices that do not disrupt play and or result in much table level debate as well as choices that do not result in spotlight hogging.

This is always a weird topic as everyone is quick to point out that, well sometimes the thief really does need to do X that will make the game revolve around them exclusively for a few minutes and yet we can all point to some example of, “it’s what my character would do” being both not true and or just overly selfish.

When we ask the thief to do thieving shit because the positioning or shared choices resulted in delegated spotlight the game is functioning well. This has shared investment and agreement in choice and consent of the party, this is why classic play had the Caller who had the final say in what the party was actually doing. In trad we saw the caller function be split between GM railroad narrative shaping and increased character focus, this isn’t bad as it were but a highly OC group either needs to develop its own culture with ways of handling choices and spotlight with splitting of the party nonsense or the GM must become the cat herder that I hear so many forever GMs of modern days complain of.

The problem is when it becomes narrative hijacking. In a more story focused game we often resolve such action as quick cutaways, this option is still available to us as problem focused GMs and in this some of the issues then is simple table management skill. Where we need to be concerned on the spotlight hog is that agency is a shared timetable budget, a real-world session has finite time. If a player monopolizes time with their own ‘valid’ choices but is not in alignment with the rest of the players then they are functionally reducing the available agency for the other players. I can hear the chuds as I type just throthing at the mouth. Honestly I don’t have a problem with this, you can do whatever stupid shit you want when I run a game, I love it when a party splits up, each going their own way. Welcome to Pressure Cooker Crawl kids, keep up or die. I’m obviously not talking about whatever stupid argument one might make about why do PCs have to get along. I’m saying that if you are all mid mission at a high stakes negotiation with a mob boss in shadowrun and you get up to rob the safe you are not actually making something happen as is the common argument, you are preventing what was happening. Oh sure you created more friction for your fellow players, great, that is not your role. But put all that aside, this kind of behavior is really just stalling, pay attention next time, its always an attempt to arrest the direction the game is going and hold action within that frame and on the disruptor. It has the illusion of proactivity, those of you who have an office job you know exactly what the illusion of proactivity means.

While this is not Oil this is Punk, agency requires stewardship of shared table time. A choice by one that negates/prevents three is a bottleneck. Make of that what you will.

We also have to talk about risk redistribution, in a sandbox where the world is fucking indifferent to your bullshit a player suddenly becoming unaligned with goal imposes a massive table tax where the party is forced to deal with the fallout of risk that was not their choice, hence again, the role of the caller. Those of you who are anti party getting along, once again as a GM I have no problem with this, just don’t expect me to save you from your own choices or the party. You might be anti traditional party, I’m talking about social group mechanics, these are not the same thing.

Article 10. Is on complex problems and difficult decisions. These are fairly good suggestions on how. The case for why is thin but strong. Simple problems tend towards simple solutions in play, this means less choice, therefore less play. We see this often in third party D&D stuff. I point to save the goat the one shot. On the flip side, complex problems take more time, simple problems are better when you have a short total time. This becomes a table culture thing, combat lovers may grow bored when complex problems cross multiple sessions with limited combat.

Regardless of how we may feel about this as GMs or devs this is a design constraint to consider, this is why ye ol’ wandering is such a useful tool. It aids the GM in rendering an impartial world in a consistent manner if you use it honestly.

The simple reality is that designing good complex problems requires sitting down and designing ahead of time, you can not be lazy and design a good challenge unless you have seriously practiced the skill such that it has become second nature, if you had this skill you would be able to reliably not fucking whiff.

Inversely when someone has moved into the intermediate stage and is consciously making the effort to make complex problems they tend to over do it. You know the game, every fight is actually a capture the hill, every quest an escort as well, etc and worse in a way that feels contrived and not natural.

Article 11 is explaining that Oil Fantasy is not our world but a self coherent plausible alt world and that it functions under Gygaxian naturalism as it seeks its verisimilitude as such forget balance. Balance is not typically within what we would call verisimilitude. That would be an interesting campaign setting, welcome to the plane of LAW, all fights are equalized by (BlankU)

Anyway this is why the idiot thief skyrocketing risk with a stupid bit is so important. Assuming a truly honest and indifferent world going alone is a death sentence eventually, working against risk mitigation is poor play because it’s just low skill.

Article 12 is really about how the GM must be the senses of the PC and how the translation of the fictional world into mechanics is valuable as opposed to what FKR or KUP might argue because this minimizes disconnect and debate. The example given about understanding how jumping over a hole works can’t be anymore clear cut. We would call this a mix of your kinesthetic sense and your sense of affordance if we were talking about you the human player, obviously your PC is supposed to have those, these are senses the GM provides and are related to stats and rolls, natch.

We end what makes a challenge good and move into the posture of the master as my translation gives me its take on the text in article 13. And this is where we take a fair bit of divergence in theory from other retro schools in that it formalizes the idea that the GM can let go of the reins a bit when the primary goal of providing a challenge is not at hand. And while any GM might do this to some degree working in player ideas and one off comments the difference is that this is closer to the shared story telling of a narrative game, after all the GMs job in this framework is to challenge, it is not to tell a story. Here we can think of this as the GM engaging the players as Playground toys in that we are hoping that they give us position material that allows us to create new challenges.

I would say the key to that is that it works best when the GM is clearly assuming control for challenge and also handing off control for genesis. I use, “tell me about-” as a signal that I’m giving the player the spotlight to impact setting/narrative. When we are assuming control tends to be clear, “What do you want to do, roll me a-, roll initiative, you take 46 damage.”

One more thing to note is that OFM notes that over the course of play obviously there will be times where challenge is not fitting. You are leaving the dungeon to go shopping in town, something may happen there depending on the town but this is not the same risk as the dungeon.

Article 14 is talking about how assuming your PCs survive even one session they will begin to have data points that begin to resemble narrative and the GM will use logic to run the world in a coherent way and as such while the GM is not responsible for narrative construction one will emerge through actions and reactions, that it might not be what you hoped for is what makes it emergent. Sometimes your story is that you were a brave knight until you missed 20 times and got eaten by a giant.

Article 15 is some good classic advice on getting started and world building with another example of giving the PCs the authority to do world building if the world building itself is not related to challenge.

16 is the one that might be wild to some of you, it’s not true until it is introduced at the table and technically agreed upon. Honestly this is a great way to go about it as GM, you should be doing this anyway to a degree, seriously it makes running FR so much easier. Where I differ from OFM is that I see the GM’s notes as equal to the PCs inventory and as such these notes are technically entered into the game if they are part of challenge. This is often important when we are running devious and deadly traps 😛 this helps to keep the GM honest but in exchange also allows for far greater risk and imbalance. Lastly it encourages you to actually make the dang notes and thus do meaningful session prep and not wasteful prep and as such you think about the challenge you are creating. Example, you put a pirate bar in town, you say there are 80 pirates of various levels with the captain being level 8 and you define how they react and what lookouts and other defenses they have. You have designed the challenge, you design a problem to bring the players to the challenge, what they make of it from there is then their choice.

Article 17 is really about putting it all together but it claims to be about fictional claims. That when we say something we are speaking it into the shared imagination space and once again how we can use horizontal shared narrative declaration to do this and the GM has veto and check in the power of the authority to create challenges.

The example given is actually a fairly good one. Player says they run to the water trough outside the tavern where they hitched their horses, the GM says the trough is empty, the player must find a different water source. Both the trough and the empty are fictional claims. The player makes a reasonable claim about the world and as such it was accepted but as it would make the challenge of putting the fire out null the horses have drunk it dry or what have you.

We see therefore that we could classify this as a NSR culture of play in that it is very classically minded at times but with many modern sensibilities and non trad mindset with an OSR opinion on balance that is technically not true of classic play. I point to the fact that what floor you are on is supposed to determine how dangerous of a monster you could meet in classic play and other such stuff, but then I’m not the one making this claim, Retired Adventurer already did in six cultures, I’m just repeating it.

What strikes me is that most all of this should feel old hat to you. I would call this a table adapted style of play culture which is why it may feel like you are already playing it, debate on skills and is 2:6 to open a door technically a skill aside. Look, the story lover gets to tell an emergent story and try and shape it, the improv twitch fan gets to work in some silly bit about crabs or some such nonsense, the combat junkie gets to gank things, the munchkin gets to solve things to find solutions, the GM gets to world build and challenge build as sees fit but also the freedom to shrug off the yoke of le epic plot or all the world building etc.

In this we see that Oil is openly a refutation of Forge theory that games needed to be focused on who they were for and what they were “about”.

I point to my four pillars of play, Combat, Investigation, Social, and Puzzling. We see that these do not quite so neatly align with GNS theory. Investigation and Social go in narrative one could argue and clearly Puzzles goes in games, this leaves Combat to simulation but exploration the movement aspect of investigation is typically assigned to simulation. We do often see this as how games are made and talked about but obviously the idea that to mix them is brain damage as Ewdumb said is just deficient.

Oil and OSR put the investigation and puzzling pillars at the forefront of the play hierarchy as combat is handled via system while socialization exists within the same fictional claim space and negotiation of scene...are we still doing phrasing?

We also see that it is not inherently a social focused playstyle but it is also not anti-social. It is just not prioritized.

When we seek to find solutions to common problems within the same space we will of course often find common solutions.

Now go burn some lantern oil.

Back when I wrote about Gary’s use of the word superhero in chainmail and thus OD&D rules a good friend reached out to me and said, “You do know that the argument that when the people who worked on 3.5 said a 5th level character is supposed to be equal to the greatest real world expert they were talking about skill right, not fighting ability?”

Another later, messaging me once again and not just leaving a comment, I beg yall 😛. The article on critical moments was unclear to some, this is wonderful feedback, I love feedback. Leave a comment, tell me I’m wrong, ask questions, etc.

See, when I wrote about Critical Moments based off other people’s musings on the topic the examples I used were all player facing while all the GM critical moment points were implied (Seriously, I thought I could just invoke Gygax saying don’t over use the dice and be done with it) via other parts of the text. I would then briefly revisit this idea in the Invisible System article briefly when talking about the blind following of procedure and watches.

I know I ramble and talk about a wide range of topics at a time, I’m usually trying to stay on target, my lazy GM answer to both is that those articles weren’t about skills or skill checks, this one is.

I’ve never really had a desire to write about Skill Checks, I write about whatever is bouncing around in my head lately. Do we start by talking about the d% skill focused systems? If so then Runequest in ‘78 might as well be the beginning for what we call SKILLS.

Nah.

What Would Gary Say?

Gary reportedly used a mix of roll under stat and Lore derived rulings sans rolls, people have also pointed out that there was a skill system, it just wasn’t called that. 1:6 vs 2:6 chance of spotting secret doors, that is an actual skill being expressed. Saving Throws, the same argument could be made that they were skills and these were roll high.

Up until 2000, which some of the newer 5e players weren’t around for and I would hazard many modern players weren’t playing back then even if they could have been, most games were either a fairly even mixed bag of roll high and roll low, or low roll leaning.

This led to what we would now call a lot of bespoke mechanics, one off rules and players who couldn’t keep track of all the rules. Hackmaster was born of blending 2e’s bones with Runequest’s skills with its own opinions on pretty much everything. At roughly the same time 3e was designed to be ‘streamlined and easy to remember’ this gave us the Difficulty Check and the brain dead simple roll high add or subtract your physical ability and also your education/training in the skill. Skill ranks were bad due to a number of reasons, like empty filler ranks but hey they tried.

It even seems fairly solid when you just look at it at a glance. Okay so the avg human has a 10 in any given stat thus a +0 modifier then you add your skill rank’s modifier, your feats, racial modifiers, items, and situational modifiers. Someone then looks at the d20 and says well TN 10 ia 50/50 so the DC for something a normal person could do 50% of the time should be DC 10.

If you can do math you immediately see the problem, but we will come back to that. Quick, what’s something you can only do 50% of the time? While you think about that I’ve grabbed my lockpick set. Oops, that took me like 4 seconds? Did you think of something yet? Here’s LockpickingLawyer in case you don’t believe me.

I think that was what, two seconds? You know because he did it so nice and slow for the camera. 20 seconds if you include him actually just putting the rake in and then not doing anything but talking to the audience before actually trying.

And this is supposedly where our real world greatest expert comes in, not in the ability to fight, not in the ability to do magic, sorry Copperfield. In your ability to paint, to know, and to remember....okay so how skilled is that? IDFK, lets assume a completely reasonable range of +6 to +12, I mean no, you can easily start with a +9 (still talking 3e folks) and this doesn’t account for actually trying, 6-12 is what we will call real world stupid humans who didn’t min-max and had to waste precious points on stupid shit like memorizing the Gettysburg address or learning cursive which if you learned it in middle school chances are you wasted 300 educational hours on zero actually value. Before you argue speed, learning shorthand would have been both simpler, faster, and is faster. You use cursive to sign your name, not required, in a previous job I had to look at thousands of signatures a month. Most people, even the old fucks, have a scribble as their signature. This is why DocuSign is worth so much. Hey could be worse, you could have learned to dance like a square.

Anyway, let’s say you’re now a fifth level artist and you’re painting the Sistine Chapel, you have an impressive +15 to create painting. In fact because rules as written you can’t crit fail or succeed a skill check in 3e this means our painter never has painter’s block. He can always reliably produce at minimum a 16 quality painting. Add masterwork tools to that and suddenly he can’t do worse than 21. This master has never painted over a bad work, he’s never chucked a canvas, he is the ink bender.

Have you thought of that thing you can only do 50% of the time yet? How about drawing a perfect circle with your eyes closed? Michelangelo? All day, everyday, on his back high on paint fumes. Now tell me about something truly difficult you’ve never failed at...ever.

There’s a design trap (Ironically not Cook’s shitty build traps) that 3rd and 4th edition D&D fell into so completely it became a genre. The players are getting more powerful. The skills are scaling. The challenges need to keep up. So the devs reach for the obvious lever: bigger numbers.

Wait hold up, how the fuck is a bigger number a challenge? Oh no I need to roll a 19 on the dice, riveting gameplay. You ever play an MMORPG? Welcome to level 1, RATS! Congrats you fucking lations you’ve made it to level 100, Demonic Rats! Welcome to the treadmill, 4e was the edition I played the least, I won’t lie. You never felt like you were getting stronger, it always felt like the most effective thing my character could do was die and let one of the named setting mary sue NPCs takeover, because well everything was always exactly the same range. Which brings us around to 5e and banding. Look, the people at WOTC can say whatever they want, it doesn’t matter what they say, anyone with a pulse and an IQ over 80 can tell you that if players can hit an Ancient Dragon at level 5 in 5e but not in 1e then obviously that banding makes an impact. Obviously I’m not saying don’t up numbers as needed, I am saying THINK about the tool you are reaching for and how you are using it.

The topic of challenge is a challenging one, no need to solve for all of it here and now, let us stick to target numbers.

The DC 70 Lock

DC 15 lock. DC 25 lock. DC 40 lock. DC 70 lock installed at a forty-five degree angle, underwater, in the dark, cursed by a lich who specifically hated locksmiths.

Player, “I cast Knock.”

The trap isn’t that the number got too big. The trap is that somewhere between DC 25 and DC 70 the lock stopped being a lock and became an abstraction. And players are very good at identifying when the fictional layer has been abandoned. When it has, they respond in kind, routing around the category entirely rather than engaging with it. Not because they’re min-maxing or being difficult. Because the fiction stopped asking them a real question and they found a workable answer. This is what nonsensical difficulty inflation actually produces. Not harder challenges. A prompt to find the ability that makes the challenge category irrelevant.

Encyclopedia Brown

It’s reasonable to argue that setting good TNs comes from having a wide band of knowledge. This is a simulationist mindset that we see most strongly in 3e but we also see in many osr styled sim games. There you are having a grand ol time and suddenly it matters how many coins the fighter can actually pick up and carry.

The argument the simulationist gives against just making up a ruling is that a lack of consistency and poor calls will lead to the ruination of the game. That TNs must be logically derived, usually some argument to balance or fairness is made. The anti narrative crowd generally nods their heads along here, right up until it’s time to become an expert in 13th century construction techniques while working on your rotation in emergency trauma surgery.

Seriously, am I going to post page ten of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide again? “Punk we don’t read the bible.” I know ya’ll, I know, some of you do. Okay skip past ol fire crotch the demon, past the forward that is focused on art vs science, past the table of contents, you should definitely go back and read the preface, but here we are effectively the second page. Boom intro to stats. I’m sure that’s not like important or anything.

The DC Is Not The Obstacle

Here’s the thing most skill inflation discourse misses: the DC was never the obstacle. The fiction was the obstacle. The DC was just the expression of how much fictional weight that obstacle carried.

A DC 15 lock works because everyone at the table can picture it. It’s a real lock on a real door with real consequences for failure. The number is almost beside the point. What matters is that the lock has texture, it was installed by someone, it protects something, it exists inside a fiction that gives it weight.

A DC 70 lock has no texture. It’s a number pretending to be a lock. At that point you’re not describing a lock anymore. You’re describing a wall that someone has labeled “lock” for mechanical convenience.

Players feel this immediately even when they can’t articulate it. The fiction broke. The abstraction is showing. Time to find the ability that makes lock-shaped walls irrelevant.

Difficulty Is Fictional Weight, Not Numerical Distance

The mistake is treating difficulty as a property of the number rather than a property of the fiction. A DC 10 check can carry more genuine tension than a DC 70 check if the fictional stakes are real and the character’s relationship to them is established and the outcome actually matters to the world state. A DC 70 check carries no tension at all if the fiction can’t support the obstacle as something that genuinely exists.

This is also why the cascade of increasingly elaborate fictional justifications for high DCs the reverse inclined wall of ice covered in oil doesn’t fucking work. You’re not adding fictional weight. You’re adding fictional absurdity, which is the opposite of weight. The players aren’t thinking “this is a serious obstacle.” They’re thinking “the system is trying to prevent me from succeeding and dressing it up as worldbuilding.”

Which is exactly the wrong relationship between player and fiction. The fiction should feel like a world that exists independent of the players’ success or failure. The moment it feels like an obstacle course designed to frustrate them, they stop inhabiting it and start solving it. Those are completely different cognitive modes and only one of them produces the during layer where meaning actually happens.

We then solve for the worldbuilding as players. Also honestly, Punk’s secret sauce, learn basic physics and you can basically stop having to be the stack of books with legs. Whenever you need you then either say because magic or you threaten to walk through the math. You get really good at telling which one will convince them it’s not worth it.

Or take Gary’s shortcut and just understand the curve, “but Punk I use a d20!” Okay and avg human is +0 thus a TN of 10 is a 50/50 if you can’t figure out how to make reasonable TNs out of this I honestly don’t know what to say at this point.

What High DCs Are Actually For

None of this means high DCs are wrong. They’re just rarely about difficulty.

A high DC is a statement about the fictional state of the world. DC 28 doesn’t mean “this is very hard.” It means “this specific thing, in this specific context, for this specific character, represents a genuine threshold in the fiction.”

The number should be legible as a claim about the world, not a claim about how much the designer wants to challenge the players.

Which means the right question before setting any DC isn’t “how hard should this be?” It’s “what does the fiction say about this?” Is this lock genuinely extraordinary ancient dwarven engineering, built to protect something worth protecting, with a history that explains why it’s still intact? Then a high DC is a statement about that history and that craftsmanship. Does the fiction support that? Can the players feel it?

If the answer is yes, the high DC carries weight. If the answer is “we needed something to challenge the party at this level,” the DC is a wall with a label on it and the players will fly over it.

The Magical Problem

Knock, Fly, Teleport, and every other ability that routes around a challenge category entirely isn’t a balance problem. It’s a feedback mechanism. When players reach for category-negating abilities instead of engaging with the challenge as presented, they’re telling you the fiction broke.

The fix isn’t nerfing Knock. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve played in a game where the GM has banned create food and water. It’s restoring the fictional weight that makes the lock worth engaging with.

Real obstacles don’t get routed around. They get engaged with, because the fiction makes engagement feel like the only honest response.

Create Food and water is a reward because after a certain number of wagon trains you will get bored of it. I’m not saying maybe, I’m saying will. If you haven’t you just never hit your saturation point. Those of you who actually have played 200+ sessions of Harnmaster Gold focused on logistics of the world’s shittiest army and disagree with me hit me up so we can discuss notes.

When I started thinking about skills and targets Dark Sun hadn’t been announced, now the conversation about survival is honestly played out.

Mfers I’m tracking the water and food for the wagon trains in Book of Brute, have you ever done your own logistics for an underdark march? What about actually fielding an army, I don’t mean no handwaving bullshit or just given an army. I mean you earned every dirty c.p., you’ve actually figured out what the economy could even support in terms of food, let alone bodies?

Closing Thought

Difficulty inflation is what happens when designers pull on the Karma lever, bigger number, bigger challenge, without asking whether the fictional substrate can hold the weight.

Set the TN by what the wargamers of Gary’s time would have called positioning supports, the oracle of it is called Lore, dismissing position because it sounds ‘narrative’ just makes you an idiot. If that last sentence was too hard, things don’t happen in a vacuum, the events preceding may impact future outcomes, this may resemble a plot at times in hindsight. 😛

Make the obstacle real. The number will become obvious through play.

I’m not happy with this article, expect a part 2 someday.

The rest of the day is without event so they travel 16 hours.

As they make camp, exhausted and dirty, Oluf polishes his new dagger, “You ever get the feeling we are being watched?”

Tek is looking at the other dagger, he had claimed it, he didn’t really need it but it was nice. It had strange runes on it, he was still learning this tongue, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t common. “Shaman Ruin, do you know what this says?”

Ruin peers at it. Int check as not a known language, “Gnomeish of some kind, I would suspect it’s the local dialect, I can prepare a spell that will allow me to translate it for you if you want.”

“No need, save your magics, this does not belong to me. This tool was well cared for, it clearly belonged to a great warrior, it should be returned.”

Oluf wordlessly offered him the other dagger.

“Thank you friend but that one is clearly yours, this one tells me the right one will come in time.”

Brute flips the simple black metal rod up into the air, for a second its a mace, a short sword, it lands in his hands as a hand axe. “I never would have thought myself a stave user.”

Ruin goes back to studying wild magic and probability.

The 11th. As they break camp a gnome steps from the rock. It’s Karmurrine. I’ve once again changed an overly long repetitive nonsense name and this time made it less like the name of the old man back in Milborne. It’s the leader of the Deep Gnomes. “I am glad to see that the Trolls were not the end of you and yet I must ask how did you fare?”

Oluf digs around in his bag as she prattles on. He pulls out the sack of Troll fangs. “Pretty sure we got them all.” He gives the bag a good shake and then pours a few into his hand.

Falgrin nods, “Aye, searched the whole cavern, if there were any side passages I didn’t see them.”

Per the module she warms up but that a wisdom check will clue the players in to the fact that she is still slightly diffident. Lajen almost can’t fail, yep. I feel like diffident is a poor choice of words. The point is she still isn’t trusting and is still keeping her cards close to her chest. I guess it was just a troll lair, even doing it in one go isn’t that impressive. I will however point out that the module feels that if the Trolls hadn’t been fighting each other they would have totally wiped out the gnomes.

As she’s trying to parse this, she casts ESP, she’s not stupid she has observed the squad a few times, she knows that Brute is the shot caller. She reads his surface thoughts. Conveniently I know exactly what Brute’s every thought is. He’s hoping that now that his crew has finished with a basic pest extermination after being set off on a vague first quest of go, get stronger, and get back in a few days before this vague threat about some greater evil oh wait nevermind go kill the most active Troll Lair you will probably ever see. He was really just hoping that they would finally be told more about whatever this greater evil deep in the dark was behind all this.

She’s about to be all mystical soon all your questions will be answered. I know what you’re thinking, she opens her mouth.

Tek offers her the dagger. “I am sorry, this is all we could find.

She’s confused she looks down at it. Her eyes unfocus, she grabs it. “Gulko, one of our bravest warriors and most skilled rangers. He lead the initial charge against the trolls. This was before the newer threat mind you. Perhaps we would have been able to deal with the Trolls sooner..thank you. This will be returned to his family. It means a lot.” She pauses. “Answeres I have promised and tests you have overcome with ease. I owe you answers and yet I cannot give you them,”

For they are copyright, jokes about the mindsquids. Yep I’m still calling them that.

She continues, “Your timing is perhaps as impressive as your skills. Return to the surface, I thought the things would be roused, hunting you, and yet they seem unaware of you.”

Oluf and Falgrin share a knowing look. They didn’t exactly leave witnesses, sure weird mind control potion and no doubt spies and servants of all kinds. That’s why they had been leaving Great Dale tags everywhere. The official story Lyntern was selling and Garyld was backing that the New Haranshire Guard had been deployed on long term border patrols due to the ongoing civil war.

“If you hurry you will find the answers you seek. But be prepared, it will be the fight of your lives. I was not lying when I said how long it would be safe to wait. Whatever they are, they search for answers. It’s no small miracle that they don’t hunt for you.”

She tells them what they know. Ruin makes a Monster Knowledge check. Yeah Ruin knows what a Mindsquid is.

The module says this encounter should occur when the party’s avg lvl is between 5 and 7. I feel like with an avg lvl of 6. Not even the mythic Oluf can bump our avg above 6 right now, I feel like doing this before Brute hits level 7 will be more interesting and dramatic. I’m carrying around all these XP drains all the time. I gave the entire last bandit raid to the rescued dwarf hostage.

That said, man that early encounter with a level draining monster could have set this back and obviously we have done as the book said and done side adventures. We are now at a point where the book is once again encouraging the players to go to the surface, restock, take a break from the tunnel slog.

It also suggests not rolling wandering before some encounters like this one, do I listen? Of course not. I rolled 1 in 6 checks every four hours because that’s the rate this tunnel has so saith the book. And nothing happens.

....Brute and Co have made it to the Orc Cavern around 6pm, for ease lets call this point at which the party enters into the orc below the world cave.

6:30 pm. The party is ascending the stairs, Ruin has explained the strategy depends on if the monsters have beaks or no beaks and high collars.

I’ve been debating how to tackle PSI, frankly I think the Complete Psi is full of shit, its magic. Nobody gives a fuck about the difference in how you control the energy and the nature of the energy. Any sufficiently advanced science and all that.

When I had Ruin make a monster knowledge check I went and read my old manuals and I decided to embrace that old note about how only some of the Mindsquids are psionic and the rest use magic and the beaky ones consider themselves the true mindsquids.

The true mindsquids would never be anyone’s lackey, and that alone I think makes that argument from the start of Night Below about how this isn’t meant to be a PSI campaign for a number of reasons, and there it was the answer sitting in front of me.

Powers should be as rare for NPCs as for players. Not even the great race of purple weaklings can overcome the odds, their innate talent gives them a slight edge at most.

There 70 feet out Brute and Tek are just beyond the lanterns edge as they come up the stairs and around the bend two horrid looking creatures.

Neither party is surprised says the dice.

Initiative is tied.

Pre initiative segment -4 It’s Oluf who acts first then. He had his shortbow at the ready. He is firing into the darkness but fuck that he crits. It confirms a 24 to hit.

Segment -3 The arrow lands for 12.

Segment -2

I roll the monster’s HD now. Oluf apparently hit the tougher one, good man. Their HPs are now 36 and 31, evened them up a bit. He starts loading a new arrow.

Segment -1 Korin also had an arrow at the ready. A max damage arrow makes him almost as good of a shot as Oluf

Segment 0 as he deals 11 to the other target. Korin unevens them.

Segment 1

Segment 2 Oluf fires again. This is why segments only are funny. Suddenly Oluf has no rules holding him back the weapon speed of his plus his dex determines how many shots he gets. Rate of fire and everything else? Doesn’t matter, those are low detail resolution guidelines for normal men. This is every fractional second resolution. Oluf gets his abilities just like any monster would.

Segment 3 Nelc had a sling stone of light. He misses it and it lands harmlessly at their feet. Hey, that’s nice placement Nelc.

Olufs arrow lands for 5.

Ruin begins to cast a spell, Ruin is holding a small bag with a candle sticking out of the top of it.

Brute, Tek, and the squids each take a one segment step. Brute and Tek are now 62 feet away from the squids. The Mindblast has a max range of 60.

Segment 4: Falgrin breaks left. Crocus right. Elroy is keeping the lizards back. A good 200 feet back from the rear combat line. Squids stop in place. 55 feet away.

Segment 5: Squids mind blast Tek and Brute..who both make their saves. 51 feet away. Let’s say that the special attack of mind blast has segment speed 3. Fun fact the mage squids are worth more XP than the psi squids.

Seg 6: 46 feet away.

Korin finally fires his second shot, the normal not readied arrow.

Seg 7 Arrow lands for 5. As 4 Giant centipedes appear behind the Mindsquids. Thanks Ruin. 42 feet away.

Seg 8 Oluf fires again. Brute saves vs both mind blasts Tek fails one and is paralyzed for 5 rounds aka 30 seconds. 37 feet away.

Seg 9 Arrow lands for 10. 33 feet away.

Seg 10 Brute is now 28 feet away.

Seg 11 Brute is now only 24 feet away and still charging. He makes both saves again, lucky.

Seg 12 Brute ends the turn 21 feet away.

We pause here at 6:30:06 pm. Mindflayers make a ML check to decide if this battle is going against them or not. They have a base 15, let’s say they are taking a -5% due to being out numbered 4 to 1 and a -10% due to having taken over half their HP in 6 seconds. Could they win this? Sure in theory.

They stand and fight. I reroll initiative and we move out of segments. Why? Because the Mindsquids had to stop and think about their plans. The party did not.

The party goes first, having won. Oh Oluf, Korin just killed his squid.

Movement happens now. Brute moves 5 feet and the Mindsquid saw it coming as he read Brute’s mind, it was too late. The last thing the monster saw was his own head bounce on the floor through the eyes of another.

6:30:12. Nelc is rummaging through their pockets and satchels. “I see how these could be a real threat if encountered in large numbers or if you weren’t ready. Well I’ll be damned.” He pulls a dirty goldish coin from a pocket and flips it to Oluf.

Oluf knows it by feel. “Fucking Frandor lead.”

Falgrin considers how far they have traveled. “You know-

Korin, having known the dwarf the longest, knows what he’s thinking, “Those caves were unusually chaotic.”

“I was thinking busy, but nah, distance. Mines to The Hold ain’t that much farther than say Frandor to the caves or Frandor to Milborne.”

Nelc puts away a few unidentified potions and hey sweet cloak that one was wearing. Tek claims it, fair.

Ruin has the summoned monsters make a good mess of footprints before dismissing them. The insurance policy was perhaps not needed and magically expensive but no regrets and Ruin had been wanting to try that spell since we found that spell book with the Hobs in The Great Dale.

Their new gnome friend steps from the rock wall using her meld with stone and other natural abilities she had been carefully watching this fight from a distance.

“You have done well indeed, but eventually others will come looking for their kind.”

As she says that Falgrin chops off the others head and Oluf and and Nelc are already tying stones to their ankles of the squids.

Brute grabs the head he served.

“Uh?” The Gnome is clearly confused by how everyone is ignoring her. Damnit she’s important and has important things to say.

Falgrin hold the sack open and in the other head goes.

Lajen is the one who finally pays attention to the self important dead weight. “I’m listening, please go on, the others are busy with their work, they mean no offense, but you wanted to know why? This is why. Focus on the objective, everything else is secondary. They will come looking yes.”

“I see, perhaps my prayers have been more answered than I thought.”

“Your actions speak of your faith as well as your need.”

“I am trusting you with this.” She pulls out a map, it’s not fancy. “This was the map made by the last band of adventurers we trusted...they never returned. I hope you can forgive my prior lack of trust, but it was not just the risk and the unknown that made me hesitant.”

“Your concern for others is a credit but we have sworn to protect the people of Haranshire, that includes the good people living under it.”

“They will not come looking for a week, maybe more, it’s never been more than two weeks between sightings.”

“The safest it would be to wait.”

“Yes, I was not sure, I hoped to keep you away from them, for even a little while longer. When you made short work of the Trolls and we knew where they were. I took a gamble.”

Lajen looked at the map, whoever had drawn it had tried to draw it in travel legs, there was the Troll cave marked on the map. The group that had made this map looked to be moving slightly slower but not that much than the Squad was. This wasn’t a short jaunt or even a quick campaign they were talking about. “What do you know about this city?”

“We believe it is the headquarters of whoever is behind this, many Underdark species have been gathered together but we lost contact with the group after they went scouting.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Some years.”

This had been going on for a while, of course it had. “Grell nest, more active than it used to be?”

“You would be correct.”

“I’m going to have to talk this over with Brute. Is there anything we can get you from topside?”

“We had to leave so many things behind when we fled, we get by but we do not mine much good metal, what we do goes to weapons not needs.”

“Which is why it was a big deal that Tek returned that dagger, you won’t be burying it in place of a grave.”

“No, it will go to the head of that family.”

“So pots, pans, kettles. Anything else?”

They talked for a while with the gnome.

One of the ideas I’ve always had was to build a retro like of my own, not a clone, not OSR more NSR, the idea that you had never seen a ttrpg or wargame before but you had a bunch of pieces, a cover of a book, random shit from different games, maybe you even have a Rosetta stone in the form of an AP, pop culture, or a char sheet.

I’ve joking called this game Taped Box, for years now. I thought it would also be fun to document it and do the world building alongside, I’m going to be avoiding my long winded story telling style here.

In this article we cover pick our resolution mechanics, basic combat and such, and do some macro and local world building. We end with something we could actually play.

Now because we are building from this imagined almost zero I’ve decided the game uses mostly d4s. Why? No particular reason, but the d10, the d20, and the d6 have been experimented with a lot while the d4 feels neglected to me. Even the humble d12 once the butt of jokes is seeing more use these days.

Next we look at all the stats, do we really need 6? Eh I’m not sure for this project yet but as we are aiming to keep this semi viable with B/X style games lets say yes, but lets make it slightly different. Wisdom is now just Sense. Both common and perception.

Now instead of 3d6 or 2d10 or 1d20 Taped Box is going to start out exploring 5d4 as its main resolution mechanic.

This gives us:

We see that the game as I’ve given the modifiers is a little more high power than normal while we see a much tighter central distribution than normally used for games. I wanted a game that didn’t have a wild swinginess to it. So we are taking advantage of how dice pools... well pool.

Hmmm for Saves we are going to trim it down to Physical, Agility, Mental, Weird. You are either tanking it, dodging it, outsmarting it, or othering it. I have six or seven different stats so I can’t just go and line them up but I think we will say that you get a 4, 6, 8, and 10 to assign to these saves. Str mod will apply to Physical, and Dex to Agility, Int to Mental, Sense to Weird. This gives us an interesting build variance.

Our first Taped Box test char is 5d4 dtl 17 Str, 15 Int, 14 Sense, 11 Dex, 13 Con, and 14 Charisma. Avg Dx and Con, nothing bellow, fairly strong but far from the strongest around.

For saves we then have a base of 2 Phy, 0 Agi, 1 Men, 1 Weird. I’m going to assign 4 to Physical for a total of 6, 10 to Agi, 8 to Mind for 9, and 6 to Weird for 7. We are starting a level 0 so we will say that a level increases these saves by 1. As we always fail on a roll of 5 as such we can just barely make Physical Saves.

Lets add Appearance in real quick, the avg of Con and Charm. 13 App, of fairly avg looks.

Now to keep us in B/X land HD will still be D6 on paper but found with 2d3 which gives us a low of 2 a max of 6 and a mean of 4.

And I get 4. 13 con doesn’t give us a plus so that’s it.

Let’s knock out weapons real quick. Light 1d4, Normal 1d6, Two Handed 2d3, Heavy 2d4.

Now I want to do a stamina system but I also don’t want it to be super involved. Lets use a 5 second combat round, every 30 seconds you take a strain. Tracking of turn can be done with a d6. Each time you gain as many strain as your con score you gain a level of fatigue Each level of fatigue increases your task rolls by 1.

We now move to armor and how do we hit? Easy we roll under our Dex and add any relevant modifiers. Armor has Damage Reduction, Avoidance, and Agility Modification.

Lets suppose that Leather Armor has a DR of 2, Avoid of +2 and Agi Mod +2. We pick up a big shield, DR 5, Avoid +4, Agi -2. We add the Avoid to the roll to hit the fighter and also check the other way, if the attacker managed to hit by more than the Avoid bonus of the item then the target doesn’t get the benefit of the DR of that item. We see that our fighter has a total of 6 Avoidance. Avoidance is figured largest to smallest as such an attacker would have to beat their Dex score by 7 to completely bypass the armor. Agility Modification acts on made Agility Saves. Impact on movement speed is derived from carried weight, not the items themselves directly. Our fighter doesn’t have a dex mod so he doesn’t get a modification from his own ability to his opponents ability to hit. If he had a plus 1 then the order would be 4, 2, 1. Hit shield, hit armor, hit target.

You can carry 50 lbs without being encumbered. + 10 pounds for every 5 points of strength. You can also track with ‘slots’ assuming that a 5lb object takes up 1 slot, a 10 pound 2 slots. Round to nearest. As such you start with 10 slots and gain 1 for every 2.5 strength.

Being encumbered cuts your movement rate. Let’s start from an avg walking speed of 2 to 3 mph. I went with 3d3 for this table for a number of reasons. We add our Dex mod to this roll.

Our fighter gets a nice 8 and we get a movement of 29 feet per turn...before any encumbrance slowing us down. Let keep it simple, 75% at encumbered, 50% at double, 25% at triple, and 0% at over triple. So we could carry 240 lbs and still move at 7 feet a turn. Nice. Keep it at under 160 lbs and we can move a solid 21.

I’m not a fan of spell slots, lets use a spell point, or mana system. Let’s keep it super simple. Int Mod + 1d4 and we start with a massive 5 mana. Kid doesn’t just have the spark, he is blessed by magic. A character that rolls a negative starting mana value can never learn magic...under normal circumstances.

Lastly pick a Boon and a Bane. These are your background, your personality, your experience. When your boon is relevant to the task at hand roll an fewer d4 on all tasks (4d4) when your Bane is relevant roll 1 more d4 (6d4)

We are going to give this boy the Boon: Reincarnator, coming from a different world and having memories of a past life he has a wide realm of knowledge and experience to call on. Bane: Car Passenger Syndrome, due to having only ever known travel by modern convenience he sucks at judging distances and travel times and gets lost easier than others.

I started with the rice drop method to get the shape of the continent, are there other continents out there? Who knows.

Now for the roll dice on map method, ideally you want a bigger map or smaller dice for this but I’m just looking for the general. You also need a system for making sense of it.

Green = Nature

1. Grassy Plains

2. Meadow

3. Forest

4. Jungle

5. Swamp

6. Green Hell

Brown = Earth

1. Active Volcano

2. Inactive Volcano

3. Desert

4. Mountains

5. Crater

6. Badlands

Purple = Oddity

1. Hell Mouth

2. Null Zone

3. Cult

4. Ancient Empire

5. Ruins

6. Alien Incursion

White = Weather

1. Sun never sets here

2. Tornadoes are common

3. Somehow always raining

4. Inverted Season

5. Snow and Ice year round

6. Sub Zero Temperatures Daily

Yellow = Outside Influence

1. Seat of the most powerful church

2. THE Wizard School

3. Refugees

4. The Guild

5. Merchant Hub

6. Foreign Military Base

Blue = Reactive Civilization, Red = Active Civilization

1. Newly Established Frontier Pop < 50

2. Hamlet Pop < 100

3. Village Pop < 500

4. Town Pop < 1,000

5. City Pop < 10,000

6. Capital > 10,000

Red and Blue rolled fairly balanced, don’t go placing any value judgments on them yet, Blue is more reserved, traditional, and prone to thinking and law, while red is less reserved, more progressive, and prone to act first think later, they have a tendency towards chaos.

These also aren’t the only location, they are our “landmark” building blocks. I already imagine some mountain is causing the jungle desert nonsense.

Using some custom fake dice I’m going to find where my char enters the world.

And I get that he’s in the desert area along the coast.

We are going to say each square is about 96 miles across.

We now draw some circles and roll a d12 twice to find and enter and an exit, you might want to reroll if the numbers don’t make sense. I at this stage add the ribbon for a river. I got an 11 and a 4. This makes sense, there is some river coming down from the mountains and exiting to the coast, it is the lifeline of this dry and sandy culture. Now I’m doing the steps slightly out of order, but I don’t like the centered feeling starting from biggest city gives you, it tends to produce worlds that are a little too neat.

I have then rolled to see where we start within this area finding that we are a brat from the Capital. There is a castle, a port, and a market. I haven’t named it yet.

While the land is often sandy and harsh there is some land that can support crops and even proper lumber but....well something migrated down from the mountains years ago and the lumber industry has gone dormant.

What is that ruin over to the west? Nobody knows for sure, a big hole opened up there under the sand, ruins of a bygone age now stick out. Reportedly some have even gone to investigate it. None have ever returned. The law doesn’t forbid investigation, the land often does, and the old and wise caution against foolishness that it might as well be a forbidden place.

Okay so we have a landmass, we got a local, we have a basic system. We still don’t have names, but let’s start smaller first. I put together a simple d6 wandering list for my three main wilderness environments. I have river, coastal, and everywhere else, I don’t see a reason for that one spot of woodland or the urban tables at this point.

Looking at pressure we see that society built far away from the coast due to tsunamis and sea monsters as everything got placed by the placement clock in the northern portion minus the one town I drew at 4.

They have built a keep as they fear attacks from the east from their neighbors. The leader of the keep is loyal to no one. It’s been two generations since the old fortress fell to darkness, he will not let such a plight befall his command.

The mine to the east is the source of the area’s wealth rich in copper with modest veins of silver and gold occasionally found. Poor in iron.

The estate to the east used to grow much of the food for the capital and honestly still does but having to send it up river enriched the Counts pockets so much that the Sultan decided upon an irrigation project many generations ago, now the estate of the count is much more properly balanced.

Ah the capital, now it takes shape. Azgiar, the jewel in the sand. Narrow streets and channel locks make up the feet of this tiered city that reaches up towards the heavens with a defiance that borders on the heretical.

My circles are not exact, Azigar is also fucking huge, the outskirts are farm, the under city is all docks and ports. The second tier is warehouses, the third tier is the grand bazaar. The 4th tier is High Town. The 5th tier is the Lower Palace and Hanging Garden. While the 6th tier is the Upper Palace. The 7th tier, if it exists is the temple to the Sun King, few worship this deity but rumors speak of a high priest long ago striking a deal with this fearsome god of fire and judgment. Only the Sultan and his most trusted would be allowed here. A tier even higher than the Sultan, I doubt it.

Okay knowing where I’m from I’m now rolling to see where dad is from and where mom is from. He was Lower Palace Guard, she was a

8. Farm Tier

7. Dock Tier

6. Upper Palace

5. Lower Palace

4. High Town

3. Bazaar

2. Warehouse

1. Underhive

Middle class girl working in the Bazaar.

1. Tavern Waitress

2. Shop Keeper

3. Clerk

4. Artisan

5. Servant

6. Bathhouse Attendant

She was a tavern waitress, how quaint. I’m going to bang my head on some character building and next time we explore how getting stronger works. Items to figure out as well. Skills and the question of classes? I’m leaning classless ngl.

Then I think, if I was a psychotic post apocalyptic baseball coach whose golden ticket was winning games, what would I really say if I were being honest.

Man the best thing is you don’t even have to go looking far if you were somehow unaware of your local baseball team there is a mountain of literature out there fiction, non-fiction. Go read, it is fascinating shit.

Anyway, I had relatively nice coaches, one of them was just incompetent and fell into the problem of over-training as was the problem of the science of his time. In this I consider myself most fortunate.

Sensei never had this problem. The masters had already mostly sorted it out. Trial, error, survival, numbers.

I’ve talked about it before, I do not practice my Kata as I should. Shame on me for not continuing to hone but only doing the bare minimum to maintain. I repeat Bruce Lee as I know I am past a number I long since ago stopped counting. Vanity. “Repeat,” Sensei says though my monkey mind can find no flaw in my form. Doh, what an obvious flaw.

Sensei was hard like the mountain. Coach was soft like jello. Sensei had walked the distance. Coach had a degree.

I reflect on my silly made up coach whose background was that he rounded up kids. He’s young enough he doesn’t know the world before. He came up through The League. He was never the star player, he was well, fairly mediocre. He excelled at his new assigned role from Company, catching runways, acquiring kids, legal, extra legal, The League really doesn't care, the mandate comes from Company.

Oh in case this wasn’t clear this is me talking about the odd art of roleplay. Or being a writer in this case and trying to be something other than you are.

A lot of the poor fucks in his position moralized the job. Joe didn’t, it was simple arithmetic as he saw, the average team player was better off than any rubble running brat, that much was obvious right?

Then you had the runaways, those are even worse off, do you really think like Compnay man’s little Bobby who thought he could hack it out in the wastes alone wouldn’t be better off in a structure in environment that sometimes tells him no?

Surely the industrial…oh yeah…about that. Eh we pretty sure this kid is not a mutant because we think he only gots the three fingers on his right hand because of chemicals and shit, or maybe a manufacturing incident, hard to say we weren’t paying attention to cog #34578 until it showed aptitude for selection.

Now the farm kids, now those are tricky I won’t lie, but think about it, if they take money they needed the Company money more than they needed the kid, they can always make another when times are better right? This great wheel they call a game is all about keeping what economy is left going kid, we need people growing food and having kids and thinking there’s a reason to go on. It’s simple economics, now I might have failed out of The Academy and all that but it don’t take no genius to figure this out right? Hell half the time the kids wanted out, Sawyer was one of those. The League was his chance at being something bigger than another busted down broke farmer like his old man.

Joe justifies and the system rewarded him. He sees the system as having worked for him because he is honest about the fact that he wasn’t cut out for The Academy and so he certainly wasn’t going to make it at Company, hell he wasn’t even good at playing ball.

Joe Williams is in denial, of some sort. His despair stat currently sits at a negative 3 on a six point scale. We can call this coping.

Poor Wally is a 4 out of 6.

Sawyer makes Joe look relatively well adjusted.

I return to the interesting game of being someone you are not. Right now as I’ve painted the game in the first inning, everything looks okayish. We don’t see Wally at 4 despair. A fair chunk of the kids are even well adjusted, perfectly flat zeros.

The game hasn’t broken them yet.

The importance of good play testing, time to go run through the game some more.

One of the things we often see in the boardgame space or the wargame space is this idea of a solid number. 10 times someone must win. 100 turns. Play it 20 times.

This is all excellent advice.

What is a TTRPGs you’ve practiced this enough? 20 levels? 100 sessions? 10 combats?

Each of these feels so obviously not the answer that it feels foolish to even write it out and yet how do we know? It is little wonder we have so many uninspired games.

I know when I’ll see the first kid drop out roughly it’s just a matter of numbers. It’s just a matter of contact.

I don’t know what the magic when you’ve done the bare minimum to count enough is…but let’s explore.

Using a recent example of a game I was play testing for someone they had the skill Degrapple, this was needed to attempt to breakfree from a grapple. I obliviously took it and its active counterpart and went about terrorizing the game.

Because the game broke down around the fact that every NPC would have to have degrapple if he wanted them to have a chance. No, grappling wasn’t even that good. The real killer combo was Accuracy and Brutal. A different play tester took that. I had the slow inefficient try and restrain them so they couldn’t do anything option. Hence why everyone needed grapple.

1 play test of grapple degrapple would have caught this.

100 play tests without would most likely have caught it too lets be honest, but for arguments sake let us say that 100 would have not as a method of rhetorical slight of hand.

My proposed first formula of an argument is that we should therefore playtest each mechanic and rule at least once.

“FUCK ME. You mean I actually have to play the thing I made, Punk? Also doesn’t Deadball Era have 6 actual stats from which you have…say Punk how many rules and mechanics does your game have?”

Nervous laugh, you will just have to see when it comes out now won’t you.

“Oh no you don’t, you’ve been play testing this game so much that you had thought’s on play testing,” says my longest and most faithful readers.

The second argument for the volume of needed play test to truly say we have play tested something is three times. Where am I pulling the magic number three from? Nowhere really, the argument is if we catch the obvious on the first pass we will catch the subtle on the second pass…or we won’t. So give it one more shot. By now you’ve probably made up your mind about how something feels, how it should feel, you have either found your problems or you never will without OUTSIDE INPUT.

See now you are at does it make sense to you doesn’t help you anymore.

This doesn’t mean you are at the awesome stage of feedback.

Ha, no.

You are now at try and explain teach the games rules and mechanics to four people. Why four, odds, that’s why.

“Oh shit there’s a third argument for the formula of play testing, Punk?”

Yeah, then after they have played once they will give feedback, twice they will have some points, the third time you will have to pry it from them or they will repeat what they said the first time because you didn’t listen.

At this point can you say you did the minimum of playtesting.

Anyway I’m going to be giving out copies equal to 1/2 the total downloads of the first game Cowboy Action Poker, first comment, first served but the deal is you have to play one full season and tell me how it goes.

I need to batch gen some teams and write up a few things, make a few tweaks, but I figure why not put the line out early.

The weather is fine, its the start of training season, the kids at least know the basics, maybe a practice game will get them into it.

Coach Williams takes the mound. “Okay, Arty, you go first, set a good example and show them how it’s done.”

Art, Arty, was the oldest of the team at 17. He would have rather been making something but, perhaps he could make this work into something interesting.

Coach isn’t interested in power, he’s going for control here, he puts all three of his Throw into control as he pitches. It’s high and to the left but the spin he put on it gets it right into the sweet spot, he still had it.

Art gets a total of 12 which puts it deep into left field.

The Center Fielder and the Left Fielder are roughly equal distance from it, the ball is a flyball. They both have one chance to get there in time. Coach put the best runners in the outfields.

Truck the CF trips and falls, the Left FIelder busts ass and gets into position. Arty is just short of the base. Left Felder, Sawyer the Left Felder easily catches the ball like the star player he is.

“Good hit, great catch, get to get the angle right, anything with an arc to it is going to be easier to catch. Next.”

Ray took the bat, smiling like he always did.

Coach Williams is finding that he just can’t pitch for shit today but he’s still able to put the ball right where he wants it. Ray hits the ball and it’s a flyball coming down right next to Sawyer. That’s two outs and the team already has a most hated player.

YoYo ain’t the worst player on the team but dang, he might as well be. He hits a line drivel right to the third baseman, seriously guys why can’t any of you hit for shit.

Zap is the worst catcher on the team, it’s why he’s on third. He still catches the ball that came right to him as it was such a weak hit.

“Okay, you kids have shown that you were paying attention after all. Switch it up. Next inning I’m actually going to put some heat into my pitch. Let’s see some Grit.”

Sawyer took the bat from Wally. “Let me go first, old man looks like he’s already getting tired.”

“I heard that you brat.” Coach puts 1 in control and 2 in power. He throws to the inside.

Sawyer put some grit into it and cannons it deep into the outfield, the entire outfield watches to see if its a homerun, Sawyer ain’t, he started running before he even finished dropping the bat. He makes it to first, Arty was CF and the closest to the ball, he jumps trying to catch it and nope. Sawyer keeps running and he’s got the wind behind him. The ball rolls one square away.

Arty has the ball and he throws to second base, will he make it in time? Nope, just a touch slow.

Sawyer points to Wally. “Show us what you got!”

Coach is still in the groove as he pitches the best throw he has in some time. He puts it in control and throws an absolute heater of a 14.

Wally misses.

“Don’t think, just Swing.” Sawyer says.

My fucking dice have a wild sense of humor tonight. Coach throws and Wally just knocks it sky high, it’s a fly ball straight past CF. Arty dives and catches it.

“One out.”

Next up was Donkey. The first was a strike. The second was a home run. Donkey is so named for being negative but he’s also the best batter on the team right now with a +3.

And just like that Team B is up 2 in the first inning with only 1 out.

Coach ponders the ball for a second. A little competition never hurt, but a lot could. He put some grit behind his pitch and focused on power.

Poor Truck misses, strike 1. Coach eases up a little. Strike 2. Not that it matters. Strike 3.

“Two out.”

And so the game went on.

Coming soon Deadball Era.

Nobody even got hurt this time, lame. Almost not true, Coach nearly pegged Wally in the head by the dice, good thing he had control. Wally only has 8 Grit that would have been a serious injury for sure. The goal of the game is not to kill your players, Coach.

I often take certain things for granted, a shitfarmer is not someone who is poor at farming, that would be a shit farmer. No a shitfarmer is the guy in ye ol’ fantasy Hamlet that’s pulling the wagon of manure, human this hour, beast the next. The unsung hero of society, it’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it as the pampered fucks can’t be arsed.

Mudcore is grim, low fantasy, mundane nobodies with common gear. It's Grimdark if you get to do any of the grim. We can think of it as a question of escape vector, Mudcore is the starting place and while it may have a certain stickiness, epic and heroic deeds combined with smart play can lift a PC up out of the mud that our best way out of the mud is usually a spot of the ol’ ultraviolence, well murderhobos going to murderhobos. The shortcut is always making your own windfall, hence why I like to fall back on the question of what’s the easiest way to get Plate in most lame OSR games.

My first time playing a shitfarmer, sorry gongfarmer was in DCC, its occupation 50, you start with a shit scraper and a bag of night soil. Yep a big sack of shit. This was a level 0 funnel, I love lvl 0 funnels. You kill off a few characters, you have an epic adventure, you exit the otherside a badass with a class level.

The Shitfarmer genre of play asks what if you were never allowed to be a badass. Not, its hard, or unlikely, straight up just nope fuck you, I shat on your plate, you are not allowed anything but shit. Every attempt at subverting your fate was just another excuse for the universe to spread cheeks.

I played in a 4 year long Harnmaster house rules hacked up mess every Tuesday ages ago. Some highlights were of course, no getting stronger, that’s unrealistic, your a normal human, no magic, you aren’t special, you must pay 90% of earnings in taxes, though you are functionally slaves you also have to pay for your room and meals, and stat gen was 5d6 take lowest 3.

I shit you not, the first 30 sessions we were losing money, we would make fewer copper than we spent when the local lord would have his knights round up the peasants and send them off to go take care of a problem. This quickly meant the party went into debt to the very lord sending them off to die. Until he died of…I don’t remember what illness got him. Yes even the noble had to make his weekly don’t get sick roll.

Now my character, she was a prostitute, thanks dice. We will skip the messy details and leave it at my character had more free time during the day than the others. This time was used to hunt. The GM was confident that there was almost no game to even hunt. This was the clue to the coming famine.

And so with the lord dead, war did come to the land and the party went from slaves in all but name to actually slaves. This got our asses dragged to some magical mega city where our new jobs were to work in sanitation. Yep we went from farm to sewer but it was still shit. The job, kill monsters, unclog shit, the gameplay, actually decent dungeon crawl.

Aside from no treasure and we now made a slight profit if nobody got hurt, sick, or nothing went wrong. In which case kiss that copper piece goodbye.

We had gone through so many chars at this point, well everyone else had, I’m a bastard who doesn’t believe in a fair fight. The party was now living on the streets.

I had started cheating on my taxes like any good adventurer or under the table cash transaction profession, I was aiming to buy a longbow. Not a special bow, just a normal fucking archery stick. Then winter came and the famine hit. Suddenly the weapon fund became the emergency stash as I made sure the party didn’t starve or freeze to death over winter as the work “magically dried up.”

Come spring we would foil a terror attack, save the king, kill a dragon, and stop a dirty bomb, all while being level zero fucking losers. My reward was my char finally dying of Aids.

It's tempting to ascribe something special to long campaigns if you’ve never escaped the three session curse, but length of campaign doesn’t prove that a game was good. We all kept coming back because: Spite, the GM was a player in our Campaign(s), Sunk Cost, wanting to prove something aka ego. Myself? Oh I wanted to see if we would ever be allowed to be more than shit.

Spreading IT out

So here I was on someone’s discord recently talking about how I feel about peasant sim games. I can hear you now, “Punk, I read your APs, you love peasant games, I read you talking about the effect of intentional heavy metal poisoning by a rival kingdom, your chars are constantly bitching they never get paid despite being employed by the crown.”

Yes. I will wallow in the mud like a happy pig. I love nothing more than rags to nightmare. “Uh…hey, Punk, isn’t the saying rags to riches?”

Power bitches, its all about the power. Just imagine Bane from the Dark Knight picking up yon billionaire and doing what he did to the Wayne boy. Guys, that movie fucking ruined that plot. Bane did in fact break Bruce Wayne. He did not break The Bat. Damn the comic was so much better. You break the Bat and Bruce goes off and goes full Playboy Mansion and drug addiction.

Where was I, oh yeah no guys I will happily play your Call of Cthulhu game. I will call you soft, that is neither threat nor promise, it simply is fact. I am not adverse to losing, I enjoy competitive YGO, a game not unlike coin flipping to see who gets to kick the other in the dick. You think I’m joking but there is a reason this community has its toxic rep, we joke that the power creep will eventually get so bad cards say return your opponent’s card to the store. The game is just, no fuck you, in card form.

So we defined what makes it not Mudcore or Grimdark albeit I phoned it in on the Grimdark. We talked about the fact that Shitfarmer is an enforced status quo of if 99% of the population is Peasants you are the bottom 25% of them but I’ve neglected the formula.

Standard RPG Risk = Reward

Mudcore Risk = Friction which may compound into progress.

Shitfarmer Risk = Negative Returns and Effort = Loss.

Now if you’ve been studying or reading along then you see that the problem with Shitfarmer style is that it rewards inaction. This creates a broken incentive loop of play where the optimal strategy is to let the GM hang themselves if you are good at stealing victories and just a never ending string of losses if your not.

As we can not put spite in the box, that is to say, no amount of player nudging via setting Lore and art, or rule slash mechanic will ever instill the personality, skill set, and mindset needed to make it work long term, at best a short campaign is optimal.

See I don’t think you can make a Shitfarmer you can only ever accidentally play one. The first problem is that the GM has to be well, an idiot hyper focused on realism who lacks the social skills to understand the table dynamics. A stubborn group of spiteful players, and a brutally simulations ruleset. We can make the ruleset, we can not make the product.

Players are great at bypassing and problem solving, if the players are ever allowed to win it's now Mudcore.

CLEANING UP THE MESS

Of course you are more than welcome to go out there and make your own shitty game. Encouraged even. I feel that enough time has been spent on the problem and not nearly enough on the solution.

If you are a GM suddenly realizing you are a shittygm remember you can instantly escape to the mud by just turning the games engine back to Effort = Friction = Progress.

Because if you don’t the first thing the players will do is audit your spreadsheet. You can not hide the spreadsheet from them, you can try but you have maybe six sessions before someone starts auditing food prices.

Once the magic circle shatters the hyper-realism will never again look like realism, it will always look like bad design. The table then either course-corrects or disbands.

Course-correct has two forms, the positive and the negative. The players can only engage the negative arm and only the GM can engage the positive lever.

Players, you know I never forget ya. Welcome to the Losing Less Sunset. You got two things on the menu here, Curating the Finale and the Pure Spite Win.

With getting up to the mud out of the question and certainly never out of it off limits. Your best win is setting up an ending you find most satisfying. Go out in a blaze of glory, do that stupid bit you’ve always wanted to do. Fuck table culture and good etiquette. Find your spotlight and own it all the way down.

Those of you who are more like me. Do you like breaking shit? Your new win condition isn’t winning the GM’s game. Its breaking the misery engine. If the GM has infection rules you cover your spears in shit and you gank the noble for your last character and for your next one as well. Burn it all down. Find every stupid piece of shit and use it to your advantage. Your homework is go watch Misery…just don’t actually harm the GM, I know, I know you’ve been considering it since session 25.

In this article Varies and Arch chew over the Art of War through the lens of a recent adventure.

You wake up not exactly sure where you are. Laying by a stone fireplace, the log glowing softly, the floor is simple wood planks. You look about, there is an elf in blue scale plate, sitting alone at one of the three tables in the small building. There’s a bar and a...thing behind it. It looks like a human, it doesn’t smell like one.

The elf you may recognize as Varies Silverleaf is sitting at the table that has the only view out of the front window, he’s staring out into the distance but at what you are not sure. You get up to see and yet the world still seems so high up. Ah, this is a dream, you have fallen into the land of Nod. The dog whose vision you are borrowing thinks, ‘someone is coming’.

The door opens, the thing behind the bar turns. “Welcome to the Grim and Lantern,” it says in the exact way it always does. Beyond the door behind the figure you see row after row of wisteria vines that have been given uniform tree shape, the fog cuts off the view far into the distance and that doesn’t make it any less unsettling. Above the door there hangs an oil lantern and in its light and shadow the figure under it looks to be cloaked head to toe in black and gold.

“Master Silverleaf, why the longface?” The human man says as he takes a seat at the table across from the cleric.

“Because I came out here to be alone with my thoughts, what brings you here, Architect?”

“Probably the same thing.” Arch held up two fingers and from the shadowy thing two long tendrils crawled across space, whisky glasses, full, they were set on the table with utmost care and unnatural speed.

The dog you are riding along with settles down seeing that nothing interesting is happening. You briefly see it in the reflection on the silver sword resting against the table. A large black shaggy dog, perhaps a wolfhound?

“Alone with company is acceptable.” Varies rummages about his bag of holding and pulls out his pipe. “But fair warning, I’m already leaning towards a me I don’t enjoy.”

The skunky smell of pipeweed is unmistakable, Purple Meadow a connoisseur would hazard.

“You hurt someone’s feelings again.”

“I tell Murray that, the world is thin, that if someone has already opened a fairy circle under us and dragged us into the Feywild then we’ve already been made. I point out how everything points to a Green Dragon of advanced years with some kind of Druid or more likely a Green Hag at its service. Everyone wants to deal with the problem. Instead we must press onwards as the wizard is worried that he doesn’t know enough, isn’t prepared enough.”

“Annoying without doubt, but I know you have dealt with countless donkeys and bulls over your many years.”

“And then we get to Hill’s Edge and the wizard and the fighter go and start a fight with the temple to Cyric and the locals.”

“Not a great move, I won’t lie, where were you, this seems like the kind of thing you normally work so hard to prevent?”

“Talking with the temple leaders. To make a long story short, we waste a day drawing even more attention to ourselves. We willingly walk into an obvious trap, the fighter starts trying to bargain away his voice with the hag who jumped us and the wizard writes one of the changelings a contract, which it starts redlining right there. When I wake from this meditation we head into the feywild village that is the home of the cult to the dragon, because the wizard still wants more information.”

Arch looks down at his drink. “I’m going to need another.”

Varies takes a long draw from his pipe. “I know. I’ve been racking my memory of how to get out of this mess.” He picks up a thin book off the top of the table that you hadn’t noticed from your low angle. It says in glittering golden elvish script, ‘The Failson’s Guide to Minimizing Loss.’

“Uh...Vee, I don’t think you’re remembering that book quite right.”

“Oh I am. ‘By the means of these seven considerations I can forecast victory or defeat.’ On the subject of moral law, it’s a cult, we aren’t going to be winning people over easily, no matter what the fighter thinks. Of the question of which of the two generals has the most ability, without a doubt the dragon. The advantages of the elements lie also with the dragon. The question of discipline? I could barely keep them from dealing away their lives. Which army is stronger? Well we are outnumbered and the hag is easily able to punch holes in the veil and drag us into the feywild at any time. The better trained officers and men, lets call that a wash. Now greater constancy in reward and punishment, you would think the band of adventurers would do okay here but no. Even at best.”

Arch swirled the liquid in the glass, “Right, I follow, Murray is the failson general who isn’t listening to his advisor and so now you have to get him out of a mess of his own making. One that by the looks of it is pretty bleak. Though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been associated with long delays.”

“And the worst possible is to besiege walled cities.” Varies looked far away in thought as he said this.

“If it is quite unequal in every way then flee.”

“There are three ways in which a leader can bring misfortune upon their army. The first is to command them to advance or retreat when they can not obey.”

Arch starts to speak then closes his mouth, his right sleeve becomes a shelf of books. He flicks through his personal library until he finds The Art of War. He reads closely for a second, “I retract my statement, the elven translation seems highly accurate. ‘Thus the good fighter is able to secure himself against defeat, but cannot make certain of defeating the enemy.’”

“I thought the rename was more honest, I’ve been practicing this skill for many years and I have still yet to find any art in war, but losing less is always needed. The answer lies no doubt here somewhere. We can’t play a defensive game, the hag and the dragon own this wildland, they have made that abundantly clear when we got pulled through a fairy circle that just popped up in the middle of our camp. He who is skilled in attack flashes forth from the topmost heights of heaven.” Varies doesn’t even look as he picks the sword up off the ground and causally flips it out of its sheath, up into the air out of his hands, and lets both the sword and the sheath land back where they started without his guiding hand. “What the ancients called a clever fighter is the one who excels in winning with ease. Murray is focused on the part all wizards focus on. ‘He wins his battles by making no mistakes.’”

“Not realizing you are making a mistake, the root of all problems honestly. Hence the skillful enters into a position in which defeat is impossible and does not miss the moment for defeating the enemy.”

“‘Thus it has always been that the victorious strategist seeks victory first and then enters into battle only after it has already been won.’ That is where you walked in on my meditation. The dragon mind you is an expert in 6.2. To impose one’s will on the enemy but not allowing the enemies’ will be imposed on it. I’ve already determined then we want to explore indirect methods of attack.”

Arch traced a holy symbol in the condensation on the tabletop. “One thing you’re lying about though.”

“That I seek to make peace and heard rumor of a dragon causing terror? I do suppose that I would have never been able to find such a skilled strategist in the art of hiding and yet now she invites me into her home. Numerical weakness comes from having to prepare against possible attacks; numerical strength from compelling our adversary to make these preparations against us. Knowing the time and the place of the coming battle we may concentrate from the greatest distance to fight. Water shapes its course according to the nature of the ground. The soldier works out his victory in relation to the foe faced.”

“In a desperate position, you must fight, 8.2. Hence in the wise leader’s plans considerations will be made of advantage and disadvantage such that they will be blended together. Worse still your fighter is of a hasty temper, he is sensitive about his honor, and he is reckless, meanwhile the wizard is a coward.”

“I’ll spare us the analysis of the position, this would be seriously dangerous hemmed in ground using the terms of the book, where the enemy has already taken all the advantages.” Varies tapped the ash out of his pipe. “I’ve already solved it, charge the enemy’s ambush, use the attack by fire, move like water, create the opening, and exploit it.” He palms a gnomemake lighter that he had up his sleeve. “I will either kill a whole bunch of idiots burning down a section of the feywild or I will die with my idiots.”

Believe it or not, the game itself is not what you might expect. It’s no F.A.T.A.L. it is in fact a very straightforward traditional fantasy game with an old school mindset but through the lens of the divergent Japanese school of TTRPG design theory.

For this actual play report and review as I go I’m going to start with a full human party, every demi-human has darkvison, I’m also not going to take default stats. There are 7 of them and you roll a d3 for each. Humans get a +1 to Str and Int and a +2 to Endurance, they have no negatives. You get 1 bonus point you can place anywhere.

You then roll 2d6 x3 to find your Health, your Speed, and if you have potential for magic. That is a BIG IF. A roll of 7 gets you 1 spell usage, 10-11 gets you 2 spell uses, and 12 gets you 3.

Given this you probably want to put your high number in health and your lowest in magic. Going low on movement will fuck you because certain items, like armor, reduce your move. Nothing like throwing on your plate and picking up your ruck and going fuck I’m slow. Upping your HP requires you to spend advancement points on abilities and that’s limited, you can spend AP to acquire more spell slots and the trade off is better ngl.

The game has a simple lifepath system that gives you some skills. Speaking of which you get 10 AP and 3,000 XP to spend. Now I’m fudging the silver budget A bit, I want my knight to start with Plate armor, he lost his horse and spear though.

I’ve actually used this book so much the spine is being held together with duct tape. I should really buy a new copy.

Anyway enough talk, let’s introduce the main character.

		Focus	End	Reflex
		2	5	3
Str	5	7	10	5
Psyche	2	4	7	5
Tech	3	5	8	6
Int	2	4	7	5

This is Sir Fero Vlask, a rough and tumble hedge knight. He’s got a max Life Force (Hit points) of 40 and in his armor, assuming he makes his block he can negate 12 damage with his shield. He is the main character because he’s the highest rolled :P He’s a young man, he only fought one battle before the war ended. His side no longer having an army he earns his coin plying the only trade he knows.

		Focus	End	Reflex
		3	4	3
Str	2	5	6	6
Psyche	2	5	6	5
Tech	1	4	5	4
Int	5	8	9	8

This is his old war buddy Baz, a self proclaimed master of the arcane arts. He’s up there in years but his mind is as keen as ever. He adventures as he still thirsts for power urm knowledge, yes, knowledge. He knows 3 spells and can even cast them all in the same day. 36 LF but only 1 armor.

		Focus	End	Reflex
		3	4	3
Str	4	7	8	6
Psyche	2	5	6	5
Tech	2	5	6	5
Int	4	7	8	7

Meet Jacq, veteran of the resistance, back when there still was one. These days even he has to admit the Overlord is doing a better job than could be asked. So he got his card punched and became and official guild contractor, which is how he got involved with this lot. They had been looking for someone with the skills of a scout. Close enough. 32 LF armor of 2, you get the picture.

		Focus	End	Reflex
		2	3	4
Str	3	5	6	6
Psyche	1	3	4	5
Tech	1	3	4	5
Int	2	4	5	6

This is Squire, Marty, no last name. Little orphan boy raised by the church, he was sheltered as a kid but he dreams of adventure, when Sir Vlask told the Abby that he would make a knight out of him it was the happiest day of his life. Vlask tells him to stop dreaming of swords and honor and has instead been training him in the spear. 32 and 2.

		3	4	2
Str	4	7	8	3
Psyche	4	7	8	6
Tech	3	6	7	5
Int	3	6	7	5

A new party member, a traveling minstrel who goes by Plume. He’s fleet of foot and skilled with a bow, he also has a gift for spirit magic. He just doesn’t got advertising that. 40 and 2.

		Focus	End	Reflex
		1	4	2
Str	2	3	6	3
Psyche	1	2	5	3
Tech	4	5	8	6
Int	3	4	7	5

And then we have the witch. Her name is Sara. She introduces herself as an errant cleric of the Trade God, this is without a doubt true. It is terribly misleading. Her contract binds the party to her will. She means well. 32 and 2.

The adventuring party was known simply as The Last Lance. Vlask, “I’ve broken my last lance.” This was meant to have been a statement of saying that he no longer would play at war. Sara had instead seen it as acceptable, she would not ask for war or the farce of sport, he would never have to break another lance. “Besides it sounds so romantic, the gallant knight, a hero of a fallen kingdom, swearing to never again break a lance and still serving.

He had signed the contract to make her go away, he had figured he could just run. Like he had before.

Spring has come and so The Last Lance having made it through a mild winter taking easy city work finds itself seeking adventure, a new land, and the guild always needs caravan guards. As Sara is a cleric of the Trade God the guild official behind the desk is hardly surprised, the church has made it clear, their servants get top priority for this kind of work, nobody ever argued with being favored by fortune. The clerk looks through the index and sees a solid three job route. A logging camp shipment needing guards, a horse trader who needed guards for the trip back, a goblin sighting in the area. She punched the commission and it was official.

The boat left the next day. The boat’s master was an older man of the name Kalanos, the river barge didn’t have a name and Plume muttered about this being bad luck.

For the first few miles the river if flanked by rolling hills but then it gives way to forest along the southern bank as the river draws narrow and runs faster. The boat is picking up speed and suddenly with a jarring thud they come to a sudden stop. We will call it a normal TN of 15 to keep your feet. Tech Reflex add relevant class or skills. Vlask knocks his head and bangs hard against the floor but his armor protects him from the worst of it. Baz and Jacq also stumble but they don’t crit fail. The others make it. Arrows strike the boat.

“Keep your head down.” Vlask barks. “Plume?”

"Nine on the bank, a bunch jumped in, didn’t see how many, they comin’.” He fires off an arrow. “Eight on the bank.”

Sara places the squire behind Plume, “Watch his back.”

Marty nods.

Baz growls staff extended as he stands, “Carbunculus crescent iacta.” This creates a 5m blast radius that deals 4d6+4. They don’t make the take half save.

Plume knocks an arrow. “And then there were none, look alive people.” Readying for the first cutthroat to stick his head over the gunwales.

Everyone regardless of what they did this round, even if it was just stand up, takes one attrition.

One of the oddities is that in Goblin Slayer you roll for initiative every turn, this can be slow at the table if people aren’t used to it but it actually gets pretty fast and keeps it lively. Now that said the module I’m using says that it will take them one round to climb up the boat, that’s what I would argue too honestly. This means that there’s no real reason to bother with initiative this round.

A hand reaches over the edge near Vlask and then the hand was falling back into the water. Jacq almost missed his but stabbed the man in the back. The young squire landed a glancing blow and yet it proved fatal as the man fell face first into the ship, the dagger he carried in his mouth, well it wasn’t pretty. Marty only just hit the guy, rolled the lowest possible damage, and still killed the guy. I love this game.

Baz swings his staff and crits, his staff normally does a simply d3+1, the quality of his hit adds an extra 2d6 due to being a total of 22. He knocks the man with the sharp edge of the gemstone at the edge of his staff and it makes a satisfy crunch. “Can’t use fire on boats.”

Plume also crit, party is being stupidly lucky. 25 to hit gets us an extra 3d6, the arrow deals 4d6+3, yep also dead. I’m using 9 Hp d6+2 archers with 2 armor as they are roughly what I can see as reasonable for throwing 22 enemies of, though one of them on the bank was a lot tougher, he just wasn’t that much tougher, the toughest is in the water. These would be about lvl 1.5.

A cutthroat hiding among the boatsmen pulls out a long curved dagger and goes to backstab the cleric.

Vlask is within 5m, once per round he can use his guard ability to take a hit for someone. He make his block check, easily beating the attack, the dagger glances off his shield. “You cur, you attack a woman from behind. Have you no honor.”

“We slavers, mate, ya take a hard knock to the head in the war and now your stupid?”

Sara sighed. “Negative trade devalues the economy too much to ever tolerate.”

And the Iron Band bandit just looked at her in confusion. Seven men make it into the boat, the captain and the other boatmen joining in where they could. Kalanos carried a hatchet, in a bout of fury at the betrayal of the man he had hired he flung it and my dice said crit. The trade god works in interesting ways. A second attrition is taken.

We could group the 7 bandits but meh. 11s Baz and Plume. Baz considered another spell but instead tries to crack on in the knee and misses. Plume kills a bandit.

10s Marty and…the bandit Plume just killed nice. Marty crits, my dice are rolling hot tonight people, never seen so many 12s in my life. 5 bandits left, we might not even see a fatigue point in this combat, that’s okay we will see more combat in the day.

Next up the 9’s Vlask and the bandit leader. Vlask lands a blow only for the bandit to try and gut Vlask who neatly blocks it. The bandit is tougher than the rest of his men, he looks at the knight and realizes he is so far out of his league.

Next up is the bandit fighting Vlask. Vlask blocks all the damage.

Jacq

Jacq hits, one point short of a crit and deals enough to kill the bandit he was fighting. 4 left.

Sara swings with her holy scepter and misses. She dodges out of the way with a 14 just beating the 12 of the attack.

Marty dodges, Jacq dodges. Third point of attrition. Top of the round. Everyone rolled like shit except for ol’ Baz the combat mage, nothing gets him going like a bit of violence. He misses again. He never said he was good at the melee parts of it.

Jacq cuts down yet another. 3 left.

Marty misses as he thrusts wildly.

Sir Vlask crits and that’s the end of the enemy leader as he deals 3d6+6 to a man who only had 5 left. The head goes rolling across the deck of the boat.

Moral check, hah nope. We exit combat time.

One of the bandits makes a run for it, leaping into the river. Plume’s arrow finds him in the back.

The last bandit looks to the river and looks to the crew. “There’s no getting out of this is there?”

The captain Kalanos pulls his hatchet from the corpse. “By the old laws we will use your meat to fish for our dinner.”

And then the crew fell upon him. The party makes 30 gold and Plume recovers all but the one arrow that floated downstream. Next time the party makes land fall at their destination.

I honestly could have used stronger enemies but as this was the first combat and it will be the first of many I have no problem throwing the party a softball.

Plume notes the scars, the brands, the emaciated, and sickly look to them. “Shame what people are willing to turn around and do to others.”

Stature without a doubt is why I keep beating my head on size mechanics. I’m a fighter, I love the high fantasy open field battle, but my style loves a tight space. I enjoy the drama of combat just as much as I enjoy the stage.

Poise, the reason I can’t stand zone shit. I will ask you to fight on a balance beam. Yes, I realize that I could just call for a check, or stick the beam on the zone but its just not the same. Poise is meaningless to me without a sense of space. I’ve got nothing on the calm and confident manner meaning. Nobody does it well I guess. Your unfazed badass comes across like Johnny Utah. I can’t stand people who play CoC or Delta Green but refuse to even make an effort.

Charm: Something I lack and that’s okay its the thought that counts when you make a diplomacy move in any game I run…but still try. You can’t let the weight of your Karma and the Fate do all the work, you have to play your part.

Burden: If you aren’t tracking the weight of each ration and especially if you are using usage dice for your rations and oil you aren’t playing OSR. I’m sorry but its true, that’s some NSR poser shit. Track the weight of your arrows like a real psycho murderhobo ranger who cares about the logistics. To paraphrase the Sniper from TF2 be a fucking professional.

Reach: Oh look I’m back on stature and tunnel fighting. That was easy. Or more relevant to Substack, I started this because I realized that I was at the point where I wanted things to reach beyond my table. Look my groups know that I’m usually making multiple things and also when I run a game its dry erase because everything else ain’t fast enough, I’m not a visual person. You will know exactly how tall this building is, any detail you need ask, but I’ve also been taking that as an excuse to not even try on the more visual side. I want to grow my reach, like it or hate it, I have to stretch my skill.

Mercy: I play a cleric of peace almost every Thursday and have for… a long time. I have a whole char you might have read some of, Varies. He tells me mercy is letting people live even if its the dumbest thing you could do. I watched Xmen 97 the other night, how could I not think of Kurt. I read so much Xmen as a kid. As I child I took Mercy for granted, that it was right, that it was good, that it was the law of the land so to speak.

Resolve: Resolution mechanics. I minored in stats, some players and devs drive me fucking nutty with their lack of resolve. Nothing is more elegant than a mechanic that tries to resolve the question at hand in a fun and working way, with the whole argument about does it correspond being a whole other fucking ball of wax.

Privilege: Go read Blitz on Behavioral World Building. I beg you. One of my favorite characters I ever played was a half-elf in a world where both humans and elves hates half’s. I also think of table role privilege, I have a player who is a read the monster manual throwback. If I have to tell him one more time no he doesn’t have the ability to declare he hit when he has no idea what the actual number is. Fuck you the monster had a magic item. I’ve had the privilege of studying the greats and arguing with many of the third generation of RPG makers. If you can’t think of something to say about this topic in the world of games you might not be looking in the right places :P

Secret: I have an Upcoming Article I call-

Tact: Mom always said if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say nothing at all. I learned to say this to mean what I didn’t say. So many roleplayer’s lack the ability to speak with tact I find. Luckily roleplay is a great form of practice.

Loss: The fear of loss ruins more games than any other desire mirroring I think. It makes people play slower and slower.

Strain: Star Wars. I could have sworn I remember it from some other game I don’t remember for sure though.

Regard: I call it Renown when I track it. Counterpart to Weird and Infamy.

Endurance: Have I told you about Sword World G? The G stands for Goblin Slayer, as in the Goblin Slayer TTRPG by group SNE that is an official licensed hack of their Sword World 2 engine for one of the most grog experiences you will ever play. You can die from running out of endurance.

Composure, I’m taking notes on a first time gms heartbreaker as I do this. I never understood as a child why we have this impulse to give the newbie a hard time. I find myself acting like he does, by jove it worked on this guy, I think he finally got it. He understands the composure it takes to manage a table when someone is being a shit, we are being kind we are taking turns, we aren’t dog piling the guy. I don’t think this is the best method but then again my sensei hit me with a stick hard enough that I had bad bruises. It made me one hell of a fighter. He’s learning quicker this way than he apparently ever did. Something to think of, as I watch him learn composure.

Intensity: oh back resolution, how much. I don’t care for the binary shit. Yin Yang Motherfuckers but in all seriousness. So often the question of how much is where the game turns, it makes sense that skill systems came to be as complicated or simple as they are. Right now I am playing a game that has skills but he didn’t have an actual idea of what the skills did. We have determined that they give you plus one. The stats don’t seem to do anything.

Directness is tonight’s theme. If you think I’m sounding like an ass you should hear the DnD GM.

Desire is what brings us here tonight. We all want to have a good time, we all desire to appear smart lets be honest, you don’t make a system of your own if you don’t got a chip on your shoulder, I’m guilty af. The devs desire will push this game to be better than it is now. The first thing he had to accept that his desire to make a Video Game was getting in the way as he started telling us about his Novel.

Promise, one of the things that you have to remember as a GM. What is the promise to the player.

Charity: The tricky part of it is trying to do it kindly, yin yang fuck. This group that has some turmoil of late is working out their issues. Perhaps this is the true reason the forever GM is such a strain, when the players see Mercer and expect it even if they don’t think it consciously. You have to work with the GM first my friend to get that kind of thing and the GM has to have the charity to leave space for the player in their little world. As a player you have to have it in realizing the GM is human and is dealing with you and 5 other idiots, 10 enemies, 3 timers, 8 conditions with turn trackers, and the turn order because you the player can’t be asked to remember your own turn.

Grit is the name of a stat in Deadball Era the game I’m working on that is about kids playing deathball after the end. It’s a solo or two player game, its dark as fucking hell be warned. Its your HP and your ability to try hard. It protects you from injury.

Fortune: I’ve never been lucky, I’ve been on a shit streak tonight, I’ve taken out the most guards, all non lethal. I’m playing a drunken grappler so I’m doing this at a Minus one.

Distance: I play logistics DnD, my megadungon the PC eater asks you hey what does your army march on. Oh you didn’t bring an army, oh dear. You won’t go the distance. Oh also fuck zones.

Familiarity: When we first started making we always make what we know. I mean this as we fall to the avg of our knowledge not necessarily that we make what we think we know. We have weight, it doesn’t do anything. We have individual body armor parts that is ablative. Did I mention the re4 attache case or maybe more accurately the Ultima inventory system, or Shiren the Wanderer. I told him to play it, he has’t yet. Sad face.

We always have regrets when we share with the world. I think any artist who doesn’t is lying to themselves. I think about how people will take these things. The Punk mask is a little rough, Arch is a fucker, but I’ve got some mean one’s in the cast. Playing a villain is hard, I’ve had my shares of regrets of how I’ve handled it in the past. I think there are perhaps too many people who don’t think about this, that is all.

Hunger: Feed the host/GM. Thinking is energy, talking a mile a minute, emoting, moving fast.

Devotion: He’s learned that you got to put in the effort, that takes devotion, the players are putting in more effort into his game at the table than he did in this system he’s been working on for 8 months?

Oh shit you got to put in the Labor. We return to the Dojo. Seriously read them as well ffs. The

Have some pride in what you do, no matter what it is you care about or do.

Edge: Find your strengths. Find your weaknesses. Learn to work with both of them, it will get you farther.

Love Just Another Dungeon Punk.

So many classic adventures speak of parties sized 6-10, as time and everyone going I have a small friend group and social circle went we have greatly reduced it to 3-4, this of course is ignoring hirelings and retainers. Anyway PCs head into the cave, the Pet, the Mounts, and the NPC retainer wait outside.

The module notes that entering the cave should be extremely distressing for PCs with olfactory sensibilities. I have no clue what this is supposed to be other than flavor note. Since the PCs were told the objective and are natives and made a check they know the usual details about Trolls. Ruin knows the usual wizard details about them.

Nelc scouts first, he makes move silent and hide in shadows. He rolls he gets surprise. He has picked the weakest looking one, he made that look easy as he deals exactly 32 to a 32 HP troll. It will begin to regen in 18 seconds.

2:00pm Neither side is surprised. Party won inti. We aren’t doing segments until it matters.

Lajen and Brute move to take the space in the cave mouth entrance where it’s 10 feet wide. They let the other Troll with the silly top knot run to area 2 to warn everyone else.

The narrow spot in front of Brute and Lajen looks to be 6 feet in width. Falgrin uses up another 2 oil flasks. Oluf and Korin ready arrows. Tek has lit a torch. They count as clubs or simple and so he can use them without penalties as a weapon. Ruin is once again not doing anything.

Nelc has vanished from view again. Ruin has no clue where he is.

Lajen casts silence 15’ radius in the cave intersection. Deja Vu. They hear the entire cave become a riot of noise, there’s one unusually loud one Korin swears. As long as there are multiple howling trolls they can not realize easily that there is a silent spot.

2:00:6 The party was holding waiting for a turkey shoot. The Trolls move at 12 and tactics for the most part are to charge and eat. 9 Trolls is certainly a lot.

Oh look, fake segments. Korin and Oluf fire the most pathetic shots of their lives, missing would have been less embarrassing perhaps.

Ruin having held action begins casting fireball Scatter-Blast in the back far enough that if it blows their way it should be just short of Falgrin’s oil trap. We check back in 2 segments.

Nelc taps Ruin, oh good, he retreated to formation.

The loud one that normally causes problems for casters may now notice that he is in the kill box if he makes his check. Nope he realizes too late, he’s still intent on eating Lajen’s bones. The Trolls are moving at 5 feet a second.

The fireball goes off right as the leading troll is just within arms reach of Lajen. Not the most powerful scatterball. Only 4 this time. Oh look one in each direction, good placement Ruin.

Oooof, that is some impressive coverage. And damage. The Trolls in area 1 must make 3 saves the Trolls in area 4 must make 1. The party only knew they were there by sound...odd that they didn’t come out with the rest.

The tough failed 2 made one. He goes down in a blaze of glory. The pack he leads let me double check assuming they saved all could they make it? Okay 3 of them could if they made like 1 or two saves. Nope, nope and almost but still nope.

Area 4. They only have to make one save and there is no chance this will kill any of them. Two take half.

Oh no nobody is left to go run for the Shaman per the Troll’s tactics. Let’s see maybe some of her bodyguards were either standing closer or were coming to check.

Yes no check. No. The area four Trolls are suddenly going to make an int check, do they stick with their smart plan or do they go and be properly troll like. The module notes that they have an Int of 5, maybe someone else came up with their plan.

“Those assholes just cast fireball at us, let’s fuck me up,” one says in Trollish, the others don’t hear, they are already charging. They enter at the top of the round.

The party is holding, they aren’t in any rush.

Oluf gets his two shots as does Korin. Korin almost misses, come on man. They deal across four arrows 26 to the lead which is enough to put him down.

Nelc that speedy little bastard backstabs having made his move silent move stealthy checks. He picked off the one in the back, we will give the others a chance to notice and turn around. Not today says the die, bone soup, the big guy looks tasty and the trolls are hungry. The farming hasn’t been going well. Well maybe if you stopped shitting where you ate and slept.

Oluf says to Falgrin as he’s loading, “Have you noticed that the old oil flask just doesn’t pull as much weight as she used to.”

“I’ll pay ya back.”

“Nah, it was good thinking, I’m just sad, this is like a pyro’s dream and.” He knocks an arrow for emphasis.

“I could carry a jar of pitch for ya and the Elf.”

“I like that idea. Fal, be honest do you ever get tired of being the reliable but unassuming rock.”

“I ever tell you the story of King Dumas and his gemstone clogs?”

The one troll hits Brute’s poleaxe. Paying the charge tax. Brute shakes the corpse off his polearm, “The Dwarven king who tripped and broke his neck?”

“Aye that be the one.”

Poor Lajen takes a claw and a bite. The claw isn’t too bad...the bite? He’s glad he used two cure lights on himself as he takes 18.

Falgrin grabs the potion of extra healing off his chest rig they had looted from Horror on the Hill. He trades it for Lajen’s lantern as his action.

Tek tosses the torch to the oil trap. The troll takes 5 and it will burn for two more rounds.

It’s on fire, it’s numbers are depleted, it’s never going to fail its ML check under normal circumstances. It goes and runs for the shaman. Lajen wants to drink a potion. Oluf and Korin want to shoot the fucker in the back. Nobody is fucking with Lajen drinking a potion so we can resolve it now. Lajen is going to drink all three doses. Con check to chug, he makes it. Drinking a dose is a single segment. He drinks the whole thing in 4 seconds. Nice. Almost as good as his healing roll. If he hadn’t decided to chug the potion he could have saved that last dose. He doesn’t think anyone will mind though. Nobody is ever mad that the healer is up.

We switch to ultrafine timekeeping as Falgrin continues his story.

The Troll breaks ranks and runs this would proc an aoe but Lajen is kind of busy, Brute is within threaten range but isn’t engaged and is still set.

Seg 1: The Troll takes a 5 foot step.

Oluf goes next, this is what he was waiting for, his arrow travels at 250 fps. He is not shooting into a melee. He doesn’t get a bonus for point blank or any of the fancy nonsense Korin has. Anyway it’s a max damage arrow.

Korin fires next, he does get a bonus for point blank range.

The arrows find their target somewhere around now, it drops to the ground.

“So like I was saying, he was this outrageously rich king. Dumas Glitterstone. This was ages ago before there was only the one member of the clan course. He made these shoes, perfectly put together cut from pure diamond and set with rubies, emeralds, sapphires.”

The howling had stopped.

“Being a proud and jealous sort he cut them to fit his feet and his feet alone. The thing is one day his feet started to hurt.”

The fire continued to burn.

“Maybe someone had tampered with the shoes, maybe his feet just kept growing as some dwarfs’ feet are known to do. So he goes poking about and he finds this little pearl he doesn’t remember in the right shoe’s toe box. He was quite paranoid.”

“And then he removed the stone, I’m not seeing where this is going Fal.” Oluf said grabbing a torch from his bag and using the fire to set it ablaze.

“Oh, most humans would assume the shoes broke and that’s why he tripped and broke his neck. Nay, see he was walking down the grand flight of his palace one day, little hole in his shoe, barely bigger than my pinky. It snags on the pearl edging of the stair case, he was probably dead before he figured it out, but I like to think he realized that the hole had always been there, cut to his feet after all, that the shoes had picked up a pearl, that he got lucky, who knows how many times. One time the little unassuming rock proved harmless enough.”

The fire went out.

“The next time he caught a little pebble it wasn’t.”

Oluf decides Dwarven... history, folklore, parables, whatever were weird. Why didn’t he just patch the shoes normally, for that matter, diamond clogs? His feet killed just thinking about it.

The cave is silent.

Tek whisperers, “We go?”

Ruin starts casting a spell. Horvath’s Guess, it’s such a good bit of bullshit. You have to use it well though. I roll against int and wis. Ruin does not flub the wording. The exact question is, ‘How many alive trolls are in this cave system.’

Ruin gets back the answer of 20. The party takes 10, they haven’t moved and are just resting, talking in a low hush.

Wandering. We round.

2:11 The party was ready for this so it’s not surprising. Roll inti and party goes first.

Oluf goes first, yeah that’s a hit.

“Not the goons, the shaman,” Ruin says.

“What?

“The one with breasts. Trolls are matriarchal.” Korin answers.” Also a hit.

Less of a question and more confusion he knows what the word means, “What.”

Nelc goes next, he slings a light stone at the shaman. It’s a miss. That’s okay the stone hits the back wall. Let’s make an item save. Yep the stone doesn’t care that it hit a stone after being slug. It bounces 6 feet, so more or less against the back wall. That’s fine, it’s doing the job.

Falgrin noted that all the trolls were carrying water skins when they first entered. Here he had been hoping that some of them would have been dumb enough to not know about grease fires. Instead it seems to have made them cautious. Well he has brought as much oil from old Drag as he could reasonably carry. He weighs it in his hand. He’s holding until they get closer. Tek has a new torch.

Lajen casts silence, it will go into effect before the trolls get to Brute or Lajen.

The shaman stops moving where she is and begins to cast either Darkness or Bane. She goes with darkness. It will resolve before silence goes into effect. She’s countering the daylight 60 feet radius stone so the room will just be Lajen’s 60 foot red light.

She’s three segments slower to act than Lajen and was already moving, honestly we are being kind, letting them (two heads giving her an int of 9, I wonder which is the dumb one, left or right? Left.) resolve at the same time or technically her’s first.

Oluf and Korin get to make second shots though first. Korin deals 19 to the shaman and Oluf deals 4 to a body guard and 5 to the shaman.

The leading bodyguard decides that the guy with plate and shield looks like more effort, the big guy with just the polearm looks stronger but also more meaty and easier to hit. It’s clearly a good shield. Besides, the big guy seems like the real threat.

Polearm hits first. Not a great hit, 16 damage. Claw misses as the Troll fights to get at Brute. Claw misses. Bite hits as the Troll gets close enough to sink its teeth into Brute’s arm. Brute takes 7.

Falgrin makes his toss, yep he hits the troll in Brute’s face. Tek is holding the torch, he considers throwing it. Nah. He considers moving up, he could get past Lajen, just not the troll. Not without taking an attack. He chooses not to act this round.

Darkness and silence go into effect. The cave is now normal light not daylight.

2:11:06 Actions are not being resolved at the same time, the party had initiative and the Trolls had the momentum, now the party has both.

Oluf and Korin fire, Korin have switched to the good arrows. Oluf misses once, Korin however reminds everyone that with a good bow he is the messenger of death itself. The shamaness doesn’t look too good.

Lajen takes a step back trading places with Tek, using the staff of healing he heals Brute for 6.

Tek makes a two weapon attack, one axe one torch against the oiled troll bodyguard now in his face. Seven damage from the axe, 1 from the torch, 11 from being set on fire. He will burn again next round. Now per the old monster lore there is a 25% chance that trolls throw rocks instead of claw claw bite, given that there are three of them currently not able to get to the party I will say that they will just throw having now thought of it as they realize that these invaders are not something they can just rush and eat.

Ruin is still sitting on spell slots. Hey where did Nelc go? As the one in Tek and Brute’s face goes for his water skin to put himself out Nelc appears from behind Brute. Sneakattackmotherfucker.

Brute steps over the burning Troll corpse, the poleaxe becomes a flaming greatsword+1. He’s not as skilled with longswords as he is with axes, he should really practice more. Eight on the dice +1 for weapon, + 7 for Brute’s strength.

The trolls were going to maybe throw some rocks, maybe help their ally. Per the rulebook I checked you can’t cast Bless on someone already in melee and therefore I am saying you can’t cast Bane on someone already engaged in melee, this does make Bane tricky to use but Bless less powerful.

However, Tek and the others aren’t in melee. She falls back to area four so she can have a clean line of sight on the party, be out of the silence, and within range. This takes a full round to cast. The two trolls are now going to make some targeting selection. Odds they go for Brute, Even they both try to get to Tek or Nelc. The D4 of fate says they are fucking up the Shaman’s plan. Poor communication kills, thanks silence, I’ll give them both an Int check to see if they realize anything. One of them makes it, the other doesn’t. Brute will be facing two, Nelc will be getting one. Brute takes a single claw for 6. Nelc takes half damage from all large sized creatures, he takes a claw for 3. The other Troll goes to attack Brute and crit fails. He hits the other troll for 6. The other attacks miss.

2:11:12 Shaman and bodyguard 2 heal for 3.

The Shaman is the only Troll not in melee, she is in darkness, the attacks Oluf and Korin make will be at a minus 4. The range is normal. Oluf misses the first one, fucking darkness. The other one sounded like a good hit though as it deals 10. Korin also gets a hit and a miss.

Falgrin hits the one in front of Nelc with the Oil.

Tek and Nelc go next. Nelc misses, that Bane spell, curse it. Tek does not as he crits with the Torch and lands a normal hit with the axe. The far better of the two outcomes. Spicy torch crit for 11 fire damage, not so spicy axe for 5.The oil burns for only 4 damage, it will burn for one more turn, not that it matters. The troll drops to the ground.

Brute hits the Troll that clawed him, hard 3d6 for the weapon+1d6 for flaming, giving us an on the dice of 22 for a total of 30. Not enough to kill it, but man its getting the same rule Oluf did, make a shock check, you just took more than half your HP in a single HIT not just attack sequence. The Troll falls to the ground unconscious, not dead. I am saying that the other one knows that the Shaman hasn’t been burned so she’s still ‘alive’ for whatever that means for a Troll. Per the module they fight to the death, he’s a loyal bodyguard. The notes say they are all terrified of her, that she never retreats once drawn into combat.

I’m not even requiring a roll as his 5 int points spark an idea, he might be able to save the shaman if he called the other troll tribe...course that would probably mean they get eaten by them instead. I roll and the die says the troll is thinking this as it tries to decide it will only have time to take one action. He picks run. He breaks off moving at 90 feet an action.

2:11:18. The party moves up, all but Tek and Brute giving chase. Tek takes the time to stop and press the torch into the Shaman and like that she is no more. Brute hits, Brute kills.

This tunnel is far wider, there are no narrow spaces, this is less optimal fuck, Oluf takes his shot as does Korin. They deal 15 to the uninjured runner. Nelc however is running him down, he made his stealthy checks. He makes his to-hit. Big damage, it goes down. Its at -17, it will get up in 6 rounds. Hey is this bullshit where the whole argument about dead at zero started from? I again point to the open of the module that recommends the At Death’s Door rule for handling PC’s dropping to zero. It still hasn’t come up so we will have some time to think about it, but I’ve been leaning towards negative HP worth of your con score is dead. Maybe I’ll even steal Dragonbane’s Rally rule.

Nelc looks up, fuck there are the other trolls, these don’t wear the odd top know hair style, their markings are clearly some other tribe. Nelc has surprised them. He is not surprised. He runs back to the ground, thanks boots of speed.

2:11:24 Party has time to set formation in this new tunnel thanks to Nelc being so fast and als getting surprise. They can hear the trolls stirring up the others. How many did ruin say there were? 20 Nelc tried to remember the explanation of how the spell worked, that meant there could be up to 25 trolls at the time of casting right? So like 20 more to go, great. Up side there could have been as few as 16.

The new formation looks like this. Front row is Falgrin, Nelc, Tek, Lajen, Brute in that order from west to east. Backrow is Ruin, Oluf, Korin. Tek has grabbed Korin’s shield and has torch in hand, he understands the pack now. The dog was right, the pack was strong. Falgrin and Brute each threaten 10 and eat up the sides. The other three have enough space to spread out in the remaining 20 that nobody has to worry about getting hit by Falgrin’s axe or Brute’s sword and the most Trolls that any one of them could be facing at a time is three for the middle fighters two for the edges. This sounds like a bad deal for poor low HP Lajen and Nelc but they are also our hardest to hit. Really it is Tek who has the hardest position as the ‘spear point’ even if they are flat line and not arrow right now.

I am saying that since these two tribes were at war they had gotten ready with all the other noise and time, I ignoring the sleeping checks and I’m ignoring movement the entire Slobber tribe, minus their sick had gathered to either finally defeat the Top Knots once and for all, they were tired of being trapped in the rear of the cave by the stronger tribe, they had the numbers, once whatever the Top Knots were fighting had killed them all or vice versa the Slobbers would be free.

2:20:00 Its on the Trolls round the corner, the encounter begins at 40 feet. The Trolls are advancing 4 abreast.

Oluf is wrapping one of his oil soaked rags around an arrow head, he is a bit busy this turn. Korin fires, he’s switched back to the normal arrows by the by. He hits one for 8.

Brute sets.

Lajen hits the first three rows with Bane. Ruin has cast Scatter-Ball into the middle of the charging Trolls 5 of the orbs this time, nice, not even going to roll for scatter distance or direction because of the tunnel and placement. Dang, the odds of rolling 6 4s is pretty low. Miniblast one does 24, mini blast 2 does 21, mini blast 3 does 13, mini blast 4 does 18, mini blast 5 does 13. Add 6 to each for being a Spell Razor. Ok I actually do need to figure out scatter dang, nope rolled it and it worked out exactly as I figured. Ok saves.

Front row Trolls have to make 1 save, two take half of 30.

Second row trolls have to make two saves. Only 1 save. Lol get dunked on.

Third row has to make three saves. They did annoyingly better, I actually have to do math.

Fourth and final row of Trolls has to make two saves.

Scatter blast, in theory lower damage, higher risk, in skilled hands? It’s what fireball wishes it was. As 16 scary Trolls become 4 not so scary on fire trolls.

We take a time out for the combat round as I talk about dungeon ecology. Trolls typically live in small packs, 3-12, they don’t often like to share. There is a fair chance they can’t even speak the same dialect as another Troll pack. Trolls give birth to a single child once about every five years. This problem had been growing worse for awhile, also man, that was like generations Ruin just set to the flame.

Anyway even with Bane, even with their numbers decimated, the odds of them running? 0%

The leading two get target selection the rear two get a chance to throw either rocks or spears, I’ll not require a check to see if they brought spears if they ma-nope. 99 and 98 on a 25% chance to not charge and eat. They burst into a run, they arrive within range at the end of turn.

The two lead Trolls pick Lajen and Brute so saith the die of fate. I personally would have gone for Tek, he’s not wearing metal armor and he’s even more meat than Brute. They must really hate the holyman and Brute just seems like a good fight.

Lajen takes both claws, it is not his day as he gets hit for 11.

Brute takes the full sequence, you know after it gets past his set spear where it just moved 30 feet to get into range of him. Brute is just short of killing the thing, an absolutely poor damage roll. Okay back to Brute taking the beating of his lifetime. Claw 1 total = 6, Claw 2 = 7, Bite = FUCK ME, max damage on the bite, 12. This would have dropped Lajen or Nelc.

2:20:06 Oluf feels like an idiot for wasting the time to wrap an arrow, he lights it in Tek’s torch and makes the shot at point blank, there’s no chance he will hit an alley given the spacing. Korin doesn’t think as he splits his shots, one on the one on Brute, one on the one on Lajen, his point blank bonus kicks in as the Trolls are 20 feet away from him. Then there were just the two.

Next is Nelc. Falgrin flanks, moving up, a swing of his axe and they fell theirs. Tek is next. Lol 4 fire damage, does the torch go out as he uses it as a weapon? Nope. Oh Brute? That will do.

Again the cave falls silent.

“Fuck that was all of them right?” Oluf looks to Ruin, Lajen casts his 4th level spell, thanks WIS bonus. Cure serious wounds. Not great, 12, not bad. He burns through his prepared healing spells. Brute is back up to 51 out of 57.

Ruin looks around at the carnage, the burning trolls. “I think so?”

I make a wandering check as ten minutes pass as the party bandages up, recovers arrows that survived the item save and loots the area they are in. Nothing, the cave has indeed fallen silent. Oluf knew he had stashed the scrolls somewhere in his bag of holding There we go, he hands Lajen the scroll of cure light wounds.

Brute looks at Oluf, “I’m fine.”

“Yeah you are, and I need a change of pants, it’s just taking up space in my bag, let the Cleric do his job so I can keep cowering behind ya you big oaf.”

“And if we need it later?”

“Odds are by the time something almost beats you again Lajen will be full of the divine mojo again.”

I am taking yet another time out to talk monster ecology and tactics. This entire troll lair would have been no more dangerous if they had hid in their lairs and did the clever tricks the module had in mind. The problem really is all of these clever tricks are out of Troll behavior of charge and eat hence why I did give them their 25% rolls. I even let the sinkhole trolls linger close enough that they could try and drag a PC to the pit.

The module calls this a simple hack and slash, which it was. It talks about what the Trolls do if they get bottlenecked in an area, how they try to deal with fire. When you talk GM craft online you will always get some stuffed shirt who will argue that you shouldn’t have monsters rush mindlessly, THE TROLLS ARE INT 5. Lets play the old stats game, we are talking maybe an IQ of 80 more like 70. Trolls aren’t great at hearing so maybe we could argue this was a big stinking cave, that is all well and good until you cast fireball and start having a dude who screams so loud that you can’t cast in a 20 foot radius around him right after a bunch of guards who are always awake and alert right at the front door.

I imagine that the intent was for the players to learn to sneak past the guards, maybe some invisibility and stealth, a distraction tactic something, so they could get into a fight somewhere not the front door on a return trip. This would have been a far worse tactic than just doing hit and run.

Like I was legit considering having Falgrin throw a ration and see how many Trolls he could bait if we had to fall back, but we didn’t have to. So you see the problem if you have monsters hide in their rooms you are doing it wrong, if you have the monsters be aggressive you are doing it wrong to some people.

Poppycock. Each NPC should be ran as it is. Trolls are dumb and have a 25% chance to not charge and try and eat. My love of a good control point + Brute’s lore of he’s supposed to be gladiator turned soldier turned hero all at the young age of 18 because he’s been trained since he was old enough to hold walk and swing a stick? Yeah he knows basic fucking tactics.

This is a masterclass in Troll lairs, Brute and Co are just a highly effective band of murderhobos and the dice agreed with the course of the plan.

The PCs not getting a single crit with anything but the torch was also not expected, I was really hoping to have that moment of ARGH! The severed claw is trying to kill me. Nope.

GM wise I am happy with the asskicking Brute and Lajen took, it’s been feeling a little easy, you know the most dangerous thing so far being that micro dungeon I rolled up for Oluf. Followed by the green dragon but that’s the thing, the module tells you the GM she doesn’t want to fight or want treasure, she wants food. I had included the line about the farmer saying his cow had gone missing for nothing but the excuse of okay I rolled an encounter with 8 commoners in Milborne, hence Brute’s fight club. I used the dealing with dragons roll tables I always use. Of course the module doesn’t want the entire party to die to a green dragon at lvl 1-5. It tells you kill half if the PCs are dumb enough to try.

The entire if two claws are made the trolls will stop the attack sequence and instead drag 30 feet towards the water or the pit? Man It didn’t happen often enough or anywhere close enough, that’s where the size of this lair actually works to the PC’s advantage, assuming the party makes it to the Sinkhole without raising the alarm and the trolls in this area are asleep, and you place a troll right next to the pit, this section might as well have been labeled Troll Pipe dreams, because that’s the only way I see a party that has even made it to the Troll Cave would have a character die to being thrown into the pit and having rocks thrown on top of them.

Keeping up the after action, fireball scatter blast is a little OP IN BIG SPACES. It’s only dangerous in small spaces. These troll dens were clearly planned for fireball casting, there is a note about how the players will destroy the fur pelt in the shaman’s room that is worth a pretty penny if they cast fireball in here. It really feels like I should have played the trolls as cowards but that just doesn’t fit, also it notes that the Crawfish Trolls like chasing their prey to the water then drowning them part. This doesn’t support the hide and ambush plan, if anything I think running this as anything but the simple hack and slash the module calls this is wrong. The rock spear throwers, which the module notes they only do if bottle necked or forced to fall back. Note that phrase, fall back. Yeah the Trolls didn’t think to snap off a stalactites and bring them with, yall saw the roll, if anything the module thinks I was too kind giving them the chance.

What? Yeah you heard me. See the thrown spears are less deadly that the claw claw bite, dragging is slow and gives up the two claws as they drag. Trying to use the water skins to put themselves out if aflame is an action spent not trying to kill the PCs. The posted guards tell you exactly who they alert and last but not least… the module notes that if a Troll throws a spear and misses there is a flat 50% chance they will hit another troll (if line of sight and within range and still has to make a hit, but they are Trolls, they will easily hit each other more often than not. The listed range for these rock spears is also slightly shorter than a normal thrown rock. This entire lair is clever tricks and solid Troll combat with excuses for them to not just TPK.

The two guards right before a 4 way intersection bit has been repeated a few times now, I feel like the teacher is like come on class just spot the strategy, don’t fight Trolls in the fucking open. You should have just had at least a few tunnel combats just to get here, the GM should have been using the D8 times 5 to determine the passage dimensions like the module said. I have double checked my sheets (jokingly) and have confirmed that nobody in the party is dumber than a Troll. If the Trolls are smart enough to try and come up with tactics, so are you.

Back to it, I’m not tracking time for the rest of this game day, fuck that noise.

So off topic, one of the stuffed shirts who ‘worked for TSR and others’TM died here (to the rock pit), he also has told me that I am using the wrong edition (though the GM he played it with was killing him in 3.5, man I’ve narrowed that down. Lol. Anyway I’m sure it was just a time slip, he’s getting older. But as the module says Chapter 14 holding your breath it leaves little doubt to which fucking version Night Below was written for.

As the party gathers around this pond, treasure clearly glinting at the bottom of it, maybe 10 or 20 feet down Tek says, “I was best swimmer in my tribe.” He shrugs off his leather armor.

Nelc lends him his good dagger, “Axes suck under water.”

“Thanks, friend.” He grabs Brute by the hand and leads him to the pond edge. “Stand here, you pull me out if things go wrong, okay good.”

Tek takes a 10 foot running leap into the pond as he dives hands out stretch in perfect form, dagger grasped in both hands tip out.

He dives 20 feet 3 seconds. Honestly as a swimmer I never really did for depth, there was this one pool we had to compete at. The diving blocks were on the shallow end, it was the most bullshit home team advantage because every self respecting team’s pool was regulation you don’t dive into 2 feet of water. Injury risk alone, the change in speed and the psychological factor got a lot of shitty swimmers. I was just like for fuck’s sake, dive shallow. Anyway, I am giving Tek a dex check to not bonk on the bottom of the pool. He makes it. For my amusement lets double check this, assuming that we were playing dragon bane and he had only the base skill in swimming due to his stats he still would have made it on that roll if we were comparing it to untrained skill. We could certainly compare to other odd systems and ideas, but what we needed to know was is Tek good enough of a swimmer and the die said yes. How accurate do we need to be in skills? This I still wonder after all these years.

I am saying that Tek is able to grab the other dagger he just found as his other action this round and has put the flask on his belt pouch, he is starting to gather the coins, he can fit them in the belt when I roll for him to be surprised. He is as a giant crayfish attacks. We don’t need to bother with encounter distances as it swims at 12’, it darts out of its cave. It makes two attacks at Tek, First one is a miss, second one is not.

Math time, the +2 for both daggers counters the not proficient. It does nothing for the fact that Tek is still at a minus 4 for being underwater, luckily he’s not at a -4 for darkness, the 60 foot radius of light 25 ish feet above his head is. He makes a con check holding his breath from the pain. He hits with the dagger, he’s not trying to win this fight, he’s just trying to survive the encounter. He deals 5 damage, it lets go. He surfaces 14 feet, a series of powerful dolphin kicks. He’s short. My dumbass had to look up videos of crawfish swimming to figure out how well our crustacean could follow, it doesn’t matter, Brute reaches down and grabs Tek’s hand as he is attempting to surface, the armored river monster right on his heels. Tek is lighter than Brute’s max drag, lol. He pulls the barbarian out in one mighty yank.

The pincers again snap but this time at Brute the one at the water’s edge. Nice try horror of the watery deep. It’s not dead but it sure wishes it was as the simple creature realizes that it just pincered at more than it bargained for. But hey it came in on a red hot 4 reaction roll and that was only because I let Tek’s charisma mod count here, why I don’t know I never give it to places where it doesn’t make sense, I guess I was thinking hey I’m not food modification. Anyway I gave it it’s modified ML check for being badly hurt, vastly outnumbered. I gave it a minus 50% to its ML of 13. It still chose to stand and fight to the death. Everyone else goes now by the way.

So like I was saying Tek dives into the pools depths and gathers some coins, no wonder why the thing was so out to get him, there was no other life in this pond, perhaps the Trolls had eaten everything else. He almost felt bad.

The party ventures by Falgrin’s rule, keep to the left wall having hit the rear of the cave they now come to area 10. The party is not surprised, they encounter four sickly looking trolls at 60 feet. Lets render this by segment not by time or turn. All actors declare their actions. I’ve played a few games where you have to write it down, this is slow but it’s amusing for a number of reasons. I don’t think anyone could argue with the trolls going for say all four of them attempting to overbear Brute in a charging tackle right? That way they could pull him apart and eat him easily. Sounds good to me. For this to be the most fair we will do individual initiatives.

Lol, ‘fair’, I am amazed I wasn’t hit by lightning. Two of the trolls will be going dead last as they rolled that poorly. Lets count backwards for clarity.

3:00 pm (I actually think it should be closer to 2:57:18 but I’m rounding it, maybe they lingered by the pool for a bit) Segment 12: The universe exists, light travels, people perceive. Trolls adjust to daylight segment 1. Wait daylight? Yeah the party is back to light stones they were assuming that the cave was cleared of trolls and wasn’t trying to be stealthy. The Trolls wheeze and rasp wet and loud. Everyone realizes what’s going on.

Segment 11: Perception over, thinking begins.

Segment 10: Trolls are adjusted to daylight.

Segment 9: Nelc is the first to react. Sling stone, six segments. He launches the stone on segment 4. It’s not a magic sling so by the book it gets no bonus to its speed no matter how fast Nelc is. For some things this is debatable, for a sling....we might have found a future house rule.

Segment 8: Nobody is doing anything right now, everyone else is still ‘reacting’

Segment 7: Lajen starts casting protection from evil 10’ this requires him to trace a 20 foot circle per the rule book, I’ve never seen anyone be like you have to move around, also what the fuck is tracing with holy water, how much holy water would you need for this spell? Oh wait like any good cleric Lajen can just use his holy symbol, he’s not casting this spell afterall. But lets says yes he is sprinkling holy water around like a fucking idiot. Man you can really feel how much older editions wanted clerics to be wizards. I still haven’t ruled out moving Lajen to a spell point system. But yes Protection from Evil is faster than Bless. Bless all you have to do is throw water at them from a great distance. Nope, dumb. Ruin begins to cast Web. As we already established this is Delving Deeper web, it has some downsides it has some upsides. Ruin is aiming it at the narrowest part of the tunnel they are in, thanks Carl Sargent for another wonderful chokepoint. Ruin creates a 3x1 web of nonflammable web down the length of the tunnel. It will take a Troll 2 turns not rounds to tear through. Not rounds, turns, that’s 20 minutes. Delving Deeper is really clear on rounds vs turns. It resolves in 2 segments.

Segment 6: Korin did not have an arrow at the ready, his rate of fire is cut to 1 and his weapon speed for a +1 allows him to add his dex bonus up to plus 1. We are ignoring the question of rounds and turns and rendering this segment wise but I love how consistent the math is.

Segment 5: Troll Number 3 is annoyed because Troll 1 and 2 are kind of in the way, he starts to push past Troll 2 moving at 2.5 feet per segment. Web finishes as basically two trolls do the I’m trying to get past you in this narrow space only for them to then see next segment that the web in front of Troll 1 means they have nowhere to go.

Brute, Falgin, and Oluf (he rolled really low, very sad) start their actions now. Falgin is still carrying 6 flasks of oil. He’s mostly just getting it ready at this point, he lights a torch using his tinder box, I don’t ask him to make a don’t fuck up check this time. We can ignore him for a while. Brute is setting his poleaxe, lets just assume that setting is as slow as attacking, the weapon could be faster but Brute can’t bring out it’s full potential. He can only speed it up to a weapon speed of 8. This means it will be set on segment -1 or 11 of the next round.

Oluf is far faster than his weapon, it limits how fast he could do this. It takes him six segments to fire, at this range only one for the arrow to land through.

Segment 4: Solid hit Nelc dang, 7 damage. Start the timer, the Troll will heal for three HP in 73 segments. 18 seconds or three rounds really is so much easier. Ruin could start acting again, but chooses not to at this time.

Segment 3: Troll 2 finally reacts but he’s dealing with Troll 1 and 3 in the bottleneck. Troll 1 is actually hit by the stone. Nelc starts slinging another.

Segment 2:

Segment 1: Troll 1 starts the process of trying to tear through the web. Oluf finally fires.

Six seconds have passed. There is now no reason to render this in segments except a bit of if we actually care.

3:00:06 pm, Segment 0 or 12: Korin fucking finally fires. Oluf is reloading.

Segment 1: Brute has set spear at the front. I have made my point I think, now we can drop back down to a lower level of resolution.

Korin and Oluf fire their 2 arrows, and the lead troll goes down to -6. Nelc makes his sling not a great hit but hey this is a sink all the damage we can plan. Brute drops the poleaxe and draws his composite long bow, he has outgrown it by some margin, only able to put +4 behind it and not his full +7. He’s also still not proficient in bows, the one thing they didn’t train him in, hey Brute you could spend that CP you are sitting on. Nah. Bow’s aren’t my thing, this is just a back up plan. Both hit anyway. Tek picks up the rod.

“You want that button,” Brute says.

Tek is now using the flaming greatsword.

Troll 2 steps over Troll 1 and continues to tear at the webbing.

3:00:12. “Dwarf if you aren’t busy can you grab a quarrel of arrows, no rush.”

“I was just thinking we might be here awhile.”

A round of missile fire later. Falgrin has found the arrows and is in the process of reloading the crew. “Or not, just the one left.

Tek closes 30 feet up to the webwall and starts cutting, while the things are nonflamable per the DD spell rule, they still can be cut easily by a flaming slashing weapon. Let’s say a normal man can cut five feet of webbing in six seconds.

The Troll spits at him. It is apparently a world champion at this as it launches a glob of gunk 30 feet. It hits, as expected Tek is a lightly armored guy, it’s going to start costing him quickly. I really feel like the troll being proficient in spitting is ridiculous. It’s a con check first, Yep Tek does not contract Lung Rot, thank the fates, I mean we have Lajen on hand but still. He now has to save versus wands...I haven’t updated Tek’s saves ever, this has been fairly low save so far. Updated, rolled, and he would have made it even as a level 1 .

“FOUL CREATURE! EAT SWORD!”, Tek cuts the glob of spit out of the air.

Oh the Troll still gets two claw attacks by the way so its still working at the webs.

3:00:18. Troll 1 heals 3. It’s still at negative six through. “Tek, back.”

Fire away boys.

Tek realizes Brute is right, he had assumed sickly had meant not dangerous. He falls back.

Ruin casts Ruinous Magic Missile. 5 red bolts shoot out. “Spare one, I need materials.”

Combat is now over. Brute takes the Rod back. They kill three. Brute switches to the axe as Ruin explains the goal. Stick the biggest piece of a non burned troll in the bag of holding. It takes a week to regenerate a limb. They can survive without their heads, they don’t need to eat, they seemingly don’t need to breath.

This is one of my favorite fighter traditional games, the troll hack off.

It takes 10 attacks to hack off an arm. He deals a total of 160.

Falgrin how you doing on your arm? Well first of all he misses 4 attacks. It takes him 19 hits in this time he deals 137 damage

Due to the rules of Troll Hacking Tek gets the honor of being the head hacker. He lops it on the first try. By rite of the fighter tradition Brute was raised in Tek has claim on any one magic item from this venture or a future. He only deals 6 damage.

Korin and Lajen find the entire game kind of off putting and aren’t really fighters, they are standing guard for wandering. Nelc is looting.

You better bet your ass Oluf is getting in on Troll Hacking.

Oluf misses once. It takes him 20 hits to lop the leg he picked. He deals 179 damage in this time.

Tek goes to the last leg and gets it on the first try, he then moves to split the lower junk from the rest and again gets it first try. You fucking show off. He does it again.

By the rules of Troll Hacking drinks are on him next time. The Troll is technically his.

This took 2 minutes 24 seconds. Not that it matters but the troll heals 33. It still takes a week per limb. When Trolls play the game against each other they are always sure to throw the head away as far as possible as a ‘up’ Troll can basically speed it up by going hey there’s my arm, it’s reattached now. The limbs die off in a week if not reattached. Only the largest piece regenerates into a Troll, it doesn’t matter if it’s back up to its full HP value, it is a harmless lump of meat for at least a week. It went into the bag at negative 489 HP for those of you who may care. The Troll will be back to 0 in 49 minutes if we don’t bother to determine Oluf venting, Oluf gives it a few extra stabs just because he’s annoyed at losing.

Nelc isn’t even done looting the room at this point.

We check back in with the party at 4:50 pm. The party is surprised by 6 Troglodytes. Yes I rolled wandering every ten minutes as they walked and looted, they were practically on top of them before this happened. The encounter distance is 10 feet. Oh look right past where the party is there is a bend in the tunnel, from this our witless monsters appear.

Reaction check? Go and kill. Men are their favorite meal and they are so very hungry. Perhaps the Trolls had died but maybe the humans were vulnerable now.

Of course the Trogs were also surprised, Nelc has been leading the way and the party is 60 feet back. The fact that this tunnel was long, quite, empty, and seemingly not used by the Trolls had resulted in caution after Lajen gave a lecture on Lung Rot. Tek continues to be impressed by the Great Chief. His shaman is strong and his holyman is the most wise person he has ever met.

Anyway we render Nelc vs Trogs. Nelc is more surprised than the Trogs are but not enough to matter, these effectively cancel out. As Nelc was surprised on a 5 after adjustment and they were surprised on a 6 Nelc has like a fraction of a second, He starts to shout, “Fuc-” now they roll initiative.

It is a very slow round as Nelc is the second to react on a 5. He’s taking cover behind the bend and slinging a light stone at them. He bops one in the head for 3.

Due to the bend Brute can’t charge, he doesn’t have to through, he makes a normal move. Then the Rod is a polearm, oh look he’s within range. Not his best work he thinks, he makes sure to put his muscle into it. He of course can’t not kill any of these starving Trogs as the highest HP of this pack is 11 but he doesn’t know that. Tek is right behind Oluf, who is actually ahead of Brute as he pops out from the blind spot in the tunnel and shanks a Trog. This is your reminder that while Nelc can cover more ground, Oluf is the twitchiest thing for miles. He sneak attacks with a throw dagger, wait he can make ranged sneaks? The Trogs can do it, all a sneak attack is attacking an unaware victim in a weak spot of course you can duh. Oluf you have been carrying those throwing daggers since day one.

Yeah we are never at a good range for them. 3*4 = -1 less Trog.

Everyone else does boring things like move. The Trogs have raised the alarm. The squad can hear more coming. Oluf I don’t think you have enough daggers.

The Trogs fall back, Nelc and Oluf each take 1 Trog javelin. This is not me just clarifying who is throwing but what they are throwing. As they have really good skill with their special weapons. Brute takes the other 2 attacks. Brute gets hit once, taking 6. Okay Oluf had been right, this lair was full of assholes.

The PCs have 3 rounds before the entire Tribe comes down on their heads. They of course don’t know this, just that the alarm has been raised.

4:50:06 Oluf doesn’t get a sneak attack this time, he and Nelc take out a Trog together, blade and bullet. Brute may now charge having the space and distance. The Trogs having a move of 12 fell back 30 feet previously. And then there was one. An arrow flies past Brute’s head, a near miss as he feels it graze his helmet, it finds its target and puts it down.

Yeah technically Brute wasn’t in melee as he only had to close 20 feet but I figured I would give it the risk chance. He never doubted Korin for a second.

4:50:12 All of a sudden he sees the Trogs coming at a full clip, running at 90 feet per round. He of course sees them when they are 60 feet out, thanks light stone.

Too many to count in a short span. “Ruin.”

“Working on it.”

The tunnel is narrow, a blessing, Brute sets his spear. Lajen sets his shield beside him. He almost never takes missile attacks but yes Lajen carries a +2 Tower Shield. This was determined by the fact that Lajen’s original shield was 10 gold 15 lb when he was created and that when we found the +2 shield it didn’t specify what type.

Anyway, the party has ceded. Brute will take 4 spears and Lajen will take 3. One of them comes close to hitting Brute. Then the first hits with claw claw bite. Nada.

Of course I should have checked the set spear but come on we all know what happens, yep it’s dead.

The one on Lajen finds no better luck getting past the shield. “I don’t like to complain but I’ve done some counting Ruin.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, I was quite good with numbers back in seminary,” Trade Clerics, Lajen hasn’t mentioned that he had been traded. “I think there’s oh say 40 of them, mind you this is my guess based on trying to count shadows but.” He and Brute each take another 3 attacks. “Eventually one of them will get lucky.”

“I’m running low on mana, I have to make every spell count.”

“If I get hit, I’m charging you for the next healing.”

“Fair enough.”

Brute kills another, Lajen and him each take another 3 attacks.

Ruin what fucked up shit do you have on the menu for us today, I know you didn’t prep skewering as it would have been useless against trolls, its really just a goblin popper. Ruin knew it was Trolls so obviously the last second level spell for the day was flaming sphere Hackmaster 1e. It is created 10 feet in front of Brute and Lajen. Creatures within 5 feet must save or take 1d4+1, creatures in contact must make a save or take 2d4+2 a save means no damage is taken. Ruin can move it in any direction for 30 feet in a round and can move it in whatever direction. It can roll over barriers less than 4 feet tall, it has a 3 foot radius.

Ruin was waiting until the pack was so dense that the sphere could crowd surf. The GM may adjust the save if there is little to no room to dodge per the spell description.

I will spare you all this math but Ruin kills 24 Trogs, they each got 2 saves. The Trogs now get a ML check, lets say at 5% reduction from their normal? They stand and fight, the chief leads the charge against Brute, he had put himself in the middle of his tribe as a good leader does. He chugs his potion of haste, wait a minute Punk thats not by the book. Yeah whatever. He throws his spear at Brute, a hit for 7 damage. He charges attempting an overbearing claw claw bite, Brute is at a -2 for his set spear, why because I say so as he dodges the spear thrown at him. Still he hits.

I make the overbearing check first. Still giving Brute -2. The poleaxe finds its target. The Trog Chief gores itself charging up the spear and tackles Brute to the ground. Brute is helplessly pinned, he loses the dex bonus to his armor. Still the claw claw bite missed...the dice favor Brute today. Sorry Trog Chief I tried to give you an edge. Brute makes his save vs the stench, just barely. He gags and coughs, “Fal.”

Falgrin who has been standing behind Brute this entire time grins, axe at the ready, holding his action this entire time. All he has to do is swing sideways not down. Oh look there’s also that one on Lajen. Falgrin cleaves. Now there is not.

Nelc’s voice comes from behind the bend, “You doing okay there Brute.”

“Just fine.”

“Pretty sure the stench could kill me.”

“I doubt that.”

Brute spends his action getting up. Tek leaps over him with a mighty leap because he got the hoops, he makes 16 feet of distance and 6 feet of clearance. He throws his hand axes at the nearest target, piss poor damage. It kills anyway.

Their leader died, their numbers decimated, they still stand and fight. ML is really high for so many creatures, it makes sense, but it sure leads to a lot of fights to the death instead of running.

4:50:18 Anyway Ruin mops up eventually, this fight is fucking over between Oluf and Korin raining death and the flaming sphere and the party now going on the offensive.

The party finishes looting the fuck out of the cave. The party almost untouched save for Brute and a tiny bit of damage to Tek wall out victorious, richer, and have done it in one go. It took pretty much every spell they had ready and a crap ton of oil and a few precious magical healing items but so it goes. While the book doesn’t mention it we will be continuing the set trend of a first try bonus of 1,000 XP to each participant.

Sidenote I hate favoritism bullshit in modules like this but a note I just saw as I looked to see what comes next, is that if there is a gnome in the party we get a cool weapon, otherwise fuck you. Mfers, imagine how long this journey would take if we brought a gnome? Move of 6’ obviously the book should have been like hey GM tell one of your players to play a gnome don’t worry they will eventually find boots of speed and your players will be so tired of waiting for the slow fucking gnome they won’t argure that he gets the coolest item we have found up to this point, that’s why we put these boots of levitation here so the party doesn’t have too much of a fight.

Hey maybe the fucking gnomes who are worried about being killed off by the mindsquids and the dero should be like hey party we have this weapon you have finally proven yourselves and earned our trust, here go take this weapon and become out champions.

Nope, the Svirfneblin are stupid and racist. This is honestly the biggest issue with the adventure so far. There’s a treasure you’re not supposed to go after in this cool dungeon. There’s this cool weapon they have. Nope fuck you, you can only have the tomb loot if evil and you can only have the gnome loot if gnome.

Also the Trog fight felt like a slog, yeah it’s an entirely optional fight, the players don’t know that, they were doing what players do. Exploring the cave.

I really shouldn’t complain about all these lovely kill boxes and choke points and yet, anyway. The party travels away from the lair for about four hours and makes camp at 9pm. Lajen stays up and preps spells, as does Ruin. We make two wandering checks. The night passes without incident.

A humanoid shape rises from the map on the table “Really? Yet another format?” The shape is a dark blue gridded with white lines, the sound of a thousand pencils scribbling accompanies the appearance of sketched lines creates a nondescript man of middling age, he wears a three piece suit studded with silver, creating a checkerboard of the darkest navy and metal. Where a tie should be is a golden cord with evenly spaced knots tied in it.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, I figured that since all my other characters have been summoned in this room we might as well keep the theme, this is Arch, he is an asshole.”

The summoned thing grabs the chair you were about to sit in. “It’s true I’m afraid but I am just a product of my environment... as is everyone else. So, my punkish compatriot, why have you summoned me? Surely these fine folk have more worthwhile pursuits than listening to the ramblings of a madman?” Arch waves his hand over the map and where his hand passes over a miniature circus springs up and mice in various hats pour from his sleeve as they run off into the miniature world.

The next one summoned was to be Mourning-

The mice pause their revelry as they look up frozen at Punk.

Arch makes a gentle shushing sound, “It’s okay little ones. I am here and she is not.”

“As I was saying, but wrong perspective for this topic,” Punk said sliding a tablet across the table.

“Oh I am so very sad that this part was retracted, I could have driven a battlebarge through it.” Arch looks at you, or maybe through you, “And they call me cruel. Punk gives me a buffet and tells me to be civilized.” Arch sighs. “Fine, let us begin. Architecture is the magic of designing and building structures via the organization of components into a more complex but working whole. I detest the idiots who say art and science as if one could carefully separate the two. Punk’s willing audience, don’t lie to yourselves, unless you are a particularly well read individual, the magic of what makes a good amphitheater from a poor one might as well be ancient Greek to you and those ancient Greeks would no doubt be impressed by your magic loudspeakers and find your understandings of the basics of technology dismal.”

The mice begin working together to write out a few words on the map.

1. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - Clark’s Third Law

2. Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced - Gehm’s Corollary

3. Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from technology - Girl Genuis

4. Complacency turns yesterday’s technology into today’s sorcery - Arch

The circus around the mice turns into a maze. Arch picks up one mouse in a knightly helm and places it at the end of the maze. “I love to begin at the end, reserve engineering, take this section, ‘They’ll remember them because they made perfect sense.’ Speaking of traps, this statement is mostly true, but we could remember a trap for not making any sense, for being deadly, for making someone feel smart or dumb. ‘Begin with a question’ yes, this, a thousand times over and then the writer just loses me honestly. ‘But civilizations do not build entertainment.’ I pity your world Punk, Götterdämmerung seems to be well under way. Obviously the writer didn’t mean this, it is followed by ‘They build solutions.’, I would have used joining architecture for clarity but this is why you didn’t summon the oracle of procedure. We can take this to mean that they do not build entertainment, they build solutions to problems and that solution might happen to be akin to entertainment.” Arch pulls a breadroll from his pocket and tears off crumbs and creates trails to dead ends in his maze. “This is a topic you have been talking about lately, the failure of the circus.

“I’m still not so sure of my own thoughts here. I think the easy place to begin is that solutions have a termination condition, I think that is what you were trying to show us with your ratrace. My own musing about goal confusion and the fact that the moment entertainment exists primarily to accomplish something else it stops being entertainment.”

Arch returns to filling in more of the map, the table somehow never running out of room. “A bridge that must persuade people to cross it is a failed bridge, a theater that never has to persuade anyone to return is a very entertaining business. The distinction is worth more than most ever realize. Nor are you and your penpal that far apart, if at all. A puzzle built because I genuinely want to know how the latest band of murderous romantics thinks is entertainment, a puzzle built because I need them distracted for three hours is infrastructure. That relationship is architecture and if purpose doesn’t survive contact with design then it is a failure.

If you build an amphitheater to maintain civil order, every design decision ultimately serves that end. Thus we must design around it. If you build the same amphitheater because you love music then the same stones get arranged differently as you are prioritizing acoustics. When architects forget they are building cathedrals they build that insult of a warehouse your progenitors called a church. When entertainers forget their place they construct cathedrals to boredom and call it sophistication.”

“Where are you heading with this?”

“‘What trap belongs in this room? We should be asking, what problem has this civilization been solving for generations?’ It is the right question but I see your friend also began at the end as he supplies his own answer and I find it doesn’t hold much weight. Survival strategies are one potential reason a trap might exist but notice the question posed is what problems has this civilization been solving for generations, also honestly axe the generations aspect as it just muddies the question. Let us reduce the equation. What problem does this architecture attempt to solve? Punk, aside from fictitious dungeons, what else leaps to your addled human mind when I speak of traps?”

If Punk was annoyed by his rude guest he didn’t show it as he mulled the question over a draft. “The first is not in England or in France but actually Egypt.”

Arch drops the pyramids and so much sand into the world. “How very Tomb Raider, Doctor Jones. You’ve conjured up images of rolling boulders, dart launchers, and pressure plates, which as you dam well know there is very little archaeological evidence of. We are more likely to see hidden passages, blocking stones, false chambers, psychological deterrents and hostile architecture itself: steep shafts, cramped crawl-ways, loose footing, and darkness. Oh sure perhaps once upon a time there were more mechanical traps, but by the time the Greeks were writing about the wonder of the pyramids they were already ancient and tomb robbing had been going on for centuries if not millennia.”

“Right, less kill the thief and more make theft difficult. Focus on deterrent. Like locks, they don’t really keep people out, from a behavioral standpoint they just change opportunity cost. If someone really wants to get in your house they will. I might pick the lock, the junkie will just break a window.”

“And both might set off a home security system but the data supports that either is unlikely to be caught. What was the police response time in your hometown again, Punk?”

“30 minutes on paper, 55 in practice.”

“And people wonder why there is a growing trend of people putting cameras inside their own homes. I digress, but obviously neither of these is truly about survival, the Pharaoh was a corpse and in theory the Slenderman wetdream of you filming yourself 24/7 is really about the concern for when you aren’t there, exceptions aside. The point is that a trap that kills one thief has protected treasure once, a hidden entrance that confuses every thief for a thousand years is beautiful. Where else?”

“Myth and legend, the Greeks loved this shit, but we also see it in other cultures, punishment, it has almost nothing to do with survival and everything to do with the putting of one in a place.”

“A holy-man who never has to raise his hand because every fool who dared to try and steal from his altar only to be found dead in the morning light almost assuredly cares not for his survival or even the objects as he resets the poisoned needle. Hmmm, perhaps that is too far for your modern audience, cybersecurity and honeypots might be more within frame of reference and yet it does lose that subtle solution of power that con-men hold so dear. We can expand from con-men of the religious bent to the cons of haunted houses and from there it is not far to the fun house. Winchester Mystery House is a very fun house, aside from the fact that it was designed to kill invaders and was born of a widow’s paranoia, once again, no generation, no never again.”

“Right, and it’s always tempting to say that such behavior is irrational or illogical, but as it is goal seeking behavior it is logical if perhaps not normative.”

“Really, Punk, I’m disappointed in you, what of nature? The trapdoor spider, the Venus Fly-trap, pitcher plants. I could go on but obviously they are there, and then we get to war.”

“Be it maneuver to draw your enemy into a place of weakness and flank them or in the very real boobytraps of the Vietnam war, or even in the most simple form man engages in, the hunting trap. One could define a trap as a hidden danger, position, or mechanism to change behavior.”

Arch claps sarcastically. “Very good, you were paying attention in class after all.”

Ravel walks in the door, she’s dressed to the nines and bares a striking resemblance to a certain famous cartoon figure. “‘Ello boys.”

Punk pinches the bridge of his nose. “No, just...Ravel, why are you here, and I don’t mean for the reference to the play on words?”

“Can’t I just show up to make a mess?”

Arch’s hand at one point had turned into an old fashioned rotary phone, when, was unclear but everyone watches it morph back. “Actually Punk, I used the phone a friend option.”

“You texted me on that?”

CHILDREN BEHAVE Punk cleared his throat. “Ravel, I assume this is leading up to something?”

“Oh honey, of course. The honeypot might be seen mostly as a cybersecurity term these days but obviously it didn’t start there. Notice how the change of behavior comes from a hidden danger that arrives from willingly entering into a position. Poor silly bear, his paw stuck in the very honey he desired.”

“You’re going to get me into trouble one of these days.”

“Ruoh roo loosen the ascot Freud. You’ll crash the mystery machine.”

“Please if anyone is a trap lover it’s the building wearing a people suit,” Punk said.

Ravel perched herself on the edge of the map, heels finding purchase somewhere between Cairo and a labyrinth Arch hadn’t gotten around to finishing. “Sweetheart, you’re both so busy cataloging who built what that you’ve skipped the one who never signed anything.”

Arch stopped sketching the map long enough to look up. “Go on.”

“A canyon is a trap. No malice in it, no architect, no toll. Water just wants down and the rock just wants to lose, and after enough centuries you’ve got a chokepoint that funnels every fool and every deer through the same fifty feet of stone. Nobody hid a needle in it. Nobody has to.” She traced a fingernail down the map and a river appeared, cutting itself a canyon in real time, mice scattering to its banks. “That’s your geography. Force was always sitting right there in the dirt, doing its work for free, long before anybody thought to call it a trap.”

“The architecture of the gods,” Arch said, “Unsigned. Unauthored. Utterly indifferent to whoever walks into it.”

“So put your pressure where you like. I’ll grant you it sits honestly enough between geography and architecture, chronologically speaking. Water pressure, then chokepoint, then eventually some clever mouse notices that affordance and builds a wall at the narrow end. Technically correct.” Ravel hopped back out of the map world and into the basement. “But technically correct is where good ideas go to stop being useful, isn’t it, love? Because that ordering makes it sound like architecture is just pressure’s obedient little servant, showing up after the fact to formalize what erosion already decided.”

Punk leaned forward, rescuing a few mice from the great flood Ravel had sent rippling through the world. “And it’s not.” The mice came to rest on his shoulders.

“It’s a heist, darling. Architecture doesn’t respond to things, it steals. The pharaoh’s engineers didn’t invent the idea of a narrow, dark, disorienting passage. The earth’s been building those since before anything had a name for narrow. What they did was notice the canyon and put their own flourish to it. Same friction, same funnel, except now it’s got a signature.” She smiled sweetly. “The bear doesn’t know the difference between a log and a trap. That’s the point. The moment intent gets folded into cost that used to belong to nobody it is no longer that the architecture is happening downstream of geography. That’s called design.”

Arch scowled, “I will accept this line of reasoning as reflective of the limitations of mortals, few ever have the chance to bend the earth and heavens to their will and I resent Ravel’s little heist being taken as the final word on the matter.” He waved a hand over the canyon on the map and it simply filled itself back in and laid down back into smooth ordinary ground. “Pressure does not require a chokepoint, some ignorant river cut by accident.”

Punk lowered the rescued mice back down, “Gee, Arch is mad that someone assigned architecture a passive role, shock.”

Ravel snickered.

“And yet I doubt either of you could argue that so very often architecture manufactures the constraint from nothing at all, to shape routine, behavior, choice. A corridor doesn’t need a false floor to frighten you. It only needs to be long, low, and identical to the last forty feet.”

Punk looked up from the festival the mice were holding in his name. “Hmmm? Sorry, I was thinking of ritual.”

Ravel seemed content to go about helping the mice create costumes and had completely checked out of the conversation

“That is where I was heading yes, which brings us, inevitably, to The Labyrinth.” Arch normally seemed indifferent, in this he looked downright offended as he all but spat the word. “A maze like the one built for the mice has choices, it has dead ends, it has a failure state.”

The sound of darts drew all eyes back to the map, a poor mouse had taken a wrong turn.

Arch continued, “A labyrinth has no choices in it whatsoever. One path, a way in, the same way out. The Cretans didn’t build it to trap the ‘Minotaur’. So much as later minds decided a single unbroken path was the correct shape for something monstrous to live in.”

“Those cretans,” Ravel said softly. “And centuries later a cathedral floor in Chartres has one traced into the stone for pilgrims to crawl on their knees.”

Punk accepted a mouse rolled blunt and lit up. “The more things change the more they stay the same, my old man couldn’t fucking resist a tourist trap.”

“He couldn’t be bored, he had to be in control, he never learned to be still, it hurt his ability to learn, it nearly-”

And then the room was silent and still. “We are not here to unravel real people, but your insights into why he was such a sucker for a last chance sign are noted, Ravel. Arch, you were saying?”

“The road sign saying last chance is still applying some kind of pressure but when we look at the wallless labyrinth we see that it seems to be without friction. Nor is it that threatening, the cost of it is manufactured wholesale out of pure mindnumbing repetition. Fear and reverence, as it turns out, can be built from the same material. Only the intention differs.”

Punk took a long drag. “I recently saw a picture of one such tiled path. The caption said the center was close but the distance you would have to travel via the path was ridiculous, no I don’t remember the number and I do not give a fuck. If stepping on tiles out of order doesn’t carry risk I’m just walking where I fucking want. It’s why I wouldn’t have hacked it in the military, there I was touring the academy and they go on about how you have to walk in the line on the path and how you can’t cut across the field and I’m like nah I have more self respect for myself than this. Then the lightning and tornado alarm went off and the guide then clarified this rule suddenly didn’t apply, oh look the grass is safe. So the only reason for a rule is, Ravel?”

“Oh that’s easy, blind obedience. Not doubt someone somewhere thought that was a good idea, it was not theirs to question why, unfortunately now you have to train the thinking back in and since this was supposed to be officer school its little wonder butter bars carry the connotation they do. Fighting done by fools and leaders who are cowards by procedure. I think Arch has scored the point here about collapsing architecture into the formula being confusing at times. I would replace Geography and Architecture with constraints. Fear and pressure, learned behavior, routine with opportunities. This simplification demystifies the how it actually works and is actual behavioral terminology from the B.F. Skinner worshipers.”

Punk looks at the map and all the ground they have covered, “And yet we have not addressed the daily use portion.”

Arch points to the temple, the draw bridge, the dam, the labyrinth, and the maze, each with a different hand. “Haven’t we? I see little reason to meddle here, if drow use lantern colors to signal constraints and opportunities then some dungeon roving punk like you or Varies just comes along and learns the code and then turns the traps against the unaware. How we live with a trap of our own making is just a constraint. Beholders love pressure plates because they levitate, Goblins who have never met other shortfolk simply make every trigger and response above their heads. Which is where it all falls apart, once it becomes infrastructure it becomes obvious, where it is obvious, it is prone to failure.”

Ravel had finished outfitting the mice into three cultures. “He has woven his argument. We can thus restate the recipe as what is the goal of the trap, what is the denial mechanism, and how does it use constraint and opportunity to shape choice to fit our grand design such that sorting occurs correctly and punks don’t disrupt the system.”

“I can’t just download the understanding of behavior into people’s minds. If one can understand how civilization is the product of behavior they can learn the magic of architecture, but I suppose one more hint, Punk wanting to cut across some grasschewers lawn would be a desire path. Honestly, Punk, Ravel, if people still struggle with building a trap that is logical to their world, that the creator can live around, that doesn’t forget its goal at this point, the problem isn’t traps but theory of mind and an adversarial mindset.”

Ravel watches the fire spread over the map as the world burns and mice wage war on each other. “His hint about the dam not saying damn, working backwards, he’s right but I guess I’m here to add my own spin to the yarn, what do we not want people to do, in theory this actually solves many of the daily living problems if we work backwards from this state. Similarly we want to work backwards from what we want in group to do and out group to do. We arrange things such that they look like they are presenting opportunities, things that people may want to desire. Denial mechanism is anything from the traps method to its aim or cost. Simply put, what behavior this makes too costly to attempt. Punk’s only going to be happy with that tile crawl path if it blows up in his face, going back to his why not just walk to the middle.”

Arch sighed, “You really are a dungeon punk you know that, why do you have to go stirring up more bad behavior?”

Punk blew a long black cloud of smoke. “Because I don’t respect authority and I find how focused all you would be on dictators are with putting things into neat little boxes abhorrent.

Arch tapped the map, and the holy-man’s altar rose back up out of the dark of war and flame. “Since neither of you trust a formula let us dissect the thing we already built. Goal, first. Not ‘protect the altar’, that is far too broad, too romantic. The goal is that the altar remains untouched by anyone who was not invited to touch it. Say it plainly or the rest falls apart.”

“Denial mechanism,” Punk said, following along.

“The needle, obviously, but the needle is not the mechanism, the needle is the consequence. The mechanism is that theft becomes too costly to attempt more than once, and the holy-man never has to be present to make it so. We are denying an attempt.”

Ravel picked up a mouse donned in priestly robes and set it beside the altar. “And here’s where our two levers finally earn their names. Constraint is the needle. It closes the option. Touch this and you die, so most hands stay in pockets. But constraint alone is just a locked box. What makes it a trap and not a vault is the opportunity. The altar looks unguarded enough to rob and valuable enough to risk. The opportunity is the bait, the constraint is the bite, and the mark never sees the second half until it’s already too late.”

“And sorting?” Punk asked.

Arch grinned. “The priest touches the altar every morning and loses nothing. The thief touches it once and well, have not the gods spoken? Same object entirely different outcome. The trap was never testing who touched. It was testing whether you belonged there in the first place. That is sorting. The faithful congregation knows to never even try. The architecture creates a culture who behaves.”

“Over the past several months I’ve argued that mechanics are behavioral architecture. They encourage repeated actions until those actions become habits, and habits eventually become identity. Looking back at Third Edition, however, I realized something I hadn’t considered before. Those mechanics weren’t only directing players. They were directing the referee.”

(The referee is also a player, this is exactly what is meant when we repeat the old saying about system impacts tone and mechanics act upon players. No disagreement here.)

“Whether every table enforced those expectations perfectly isn’t really the point. The point is that the rules acknowledged the relationship between identity and behavior.”

(It's a good idea to cut off the do you kill the orc babies and does it cause you to fall from grace as a Paladin...but it's also not helpful for the larger discussion on making such concepts work I think.

See in 3e all relationship to behavior was punitive. Behaving “correctly” was not by systemic design rewarded while behavior that was deemed incorrect by the GM was to be punished.

And this does not need to start with ill intent, when all you have is a hammer everything begins to look like a nail.)

“The important part was that everyone at the table understood the character carried obligations. The paladin’s powers existed alongside expectations.”

But what were they? Honor and Oaths? I served the maimed god as a paladin once upon a time, I took only two oaths sworn to Tyr and Tyr alone: to meet out justice where there was none and deliver retribution to those who pervert law and make war on good.

(This is a reoccurring issue I would argue, take, “Suppose the cleric never visits a temple, never prays, ignores every teaching of their faith, and treats their deity like an unlimited source of spell slots. Should the church promote them? Should the god care? Should fellow priests notice? Should divine magic continue exactly as before?”

What teachings exactly, this is one of my most common arguments when I go off on atheists can't write religion or play religious characters well unless they first came from a religion and have also studied others.)

After AO killed Tyr my oaths meant so very little and led me back to where I started from. A return to the forest, throwing off the chains of the lawful after so long bound by the concerns of petty lords who passed grotesque laws like they passed wind was a breath of fresh air. Or so I want to say and yet it was not so easy. To protect and care for all children of the forest is not a doctrine you will find scribbled upon some holy wall and yet I can think of no truer tenant of Angharradh.

I was never one who would fit in among Hanali's faithful, flighty and vain. I remember those early Cinnaelos'Cor debates. The question being could you serve Angharradh if you were ugly, if you didn't always dress your best, how quickly it devolved into an excuse to not toil.

Aerdrie Faenya and Hanali Celanil never had particularly organized congregations, their temples few and far between, the faithful flocked together and departed freely. Should the church promote a cleric? I ask can a church promote a cleric? What a lawfully non-divine outlook. Humans, I tell this unto you, the temple is not your church, but a place for the congregation to gather. What then is the church? The machine of bureaucracy, nothing more.

In my wayward wanderings in service to all that was good and beautiful I had recently lost an ear and my face still bore the marks of war. As they spoke of inner beauty and piled up precious gems like dwarfs I found myself drawn to a dream.

A prayer I meditate on ceaselessly, Moonbow light my path and guide my hand. How does one know a cleric doesn't pray? Must we go out upon the street corner like some kind of performer and make a show of it like some common strummer?

No, that is not how faith works.

And with strange eons even death can die and the unmade can be remade.

Forgive this ancient elf, the Spellplague still seems as if it was only yesterday. I envy those who are untroubled by such affairs.

Selûne places very few demands on her followers. The great confusion of congregation as I humbly call it, was an eye opening experience. Canon lawyers debated old tomes from when they were separate as if they bore any bearing on when joined.

Yet to all but my youngest friends there was no darker time in Toril’s long and storied history than 1488. We prayed and nobody answered. The Era of Upheaval is a polite way to label it and I do not know if there is still that much politeness left in these old bones. Many gave into despair and would not see the celebration of 1489.

Again I have returned to where I began. Perhaps this is but a mystery of the moon, to wax and to wane.

This is not to say that there were not blessings within the hardship. I remember those days when there was still much debate on if our half-elven brothers and sisters even had half a soul. The metaphysics aside the logic of exclusion never sat right with I. Having once been reincarnated as a human my sense of self is perhaps not the common one but children of the forest is about as clear as you can get and still I have listened to high priests of Corellon call half-elves soulless abominations. A machination of the drow to deplete our number.

The first prayer a novice of Selûne is taught and charged with is thus, Let all on whom my light falls be welcome if they desire to be so. As the silver moon waxes and wanes, so too does all life. Trust in my radiance, and know that all love alive under my light shall know my blessing. Turn to the moon, and I will be your true guide.

I shouldn't have to give a history lesson on word choice, on our people, and yet. I can't remember the last time I saw an Aril-tel-quessir. A lie, as a faithful of Moonbow I still plumb the depths of who I was before, I can not fault the majority who are happy to shed the memories of past lives. They weigh so very heavy upon the soul.

Forest meant the world and children applied to all living things within the world. Via action and this Moonbow’s clearest tenant was always the destruction of the undead, the perversion of life, good, and beauty and the seeking of peace.

Oh how complicated even that is.

“That is a tremendous burden for a referee because identity has become largely subjective. One Dungeon Master may believe the cleric’s actions deserve consequences. Another may see no issue at all. Neither referee is necessarily ignoring the rules because the rules intentionally leave those judgments open.”

Identity has always been negotiated. To one degree or another. Perhaps it's inevitable that Corellon’s gift grows rarer by the year. The desire for simplicity, for standards, for consistency is always about control. Even when dressed up in the most beautiful of intentions.

Just ask The Morning Lord. If even the gods can falter then what hope does any mortal have? It seems to this tired bladedancer there never was any consistency.

Define innocent merchant. I have cheated thousands of those lawfully claiming to be innocent merchants. Drow slavers like those who took me from my home. Oh but they were not innocent, you quibble. They were lawful were they not? They acted as their god directed, they followed the laws and customs of their land.

Ah but you didn't do it for personal profit you might try. No. I took their gold as well as freeing their captives, I burned stalls and wagons, killed kidnappers, all for personal revenge. The gold while funding good causes still lined the bottom of my coin pouch.

There was once a human Paladin I traveled with, he insisted that we solved everything lawfully and fairly, that deception and wisdom were underhanded and that you had to judge people relative to their culture. Afterall, are not Drow just the first victims of their culture?

They tortured him to death of course.

A Drow Matron wise in her years would obviously argue that the flesh trade is the oldest trade, that the disruption of commerce and civics does far more harm than the inconvenience caused. After all do they not feed and clothe their slaves, what harm is done if they take those unwanted by other societies? If they were wanted would they have been so easily misplaced? The merchant is innocent; he doesn't know where his wares come from after all, even the gods make mistakes.

Every moral system believes its judgments are obvious.

Your humble servant,

-Varies Silverleaf

(Players do what is rewarded, if you want behavioral obligations to matter you must allow for the system to reward it as well as police it, otherwise the system trains everyone to treat ethos as vulnerability.)

They journey down to The Hold and make it by the evening. The road work done so far has reduced some of the travel time.

The party equips and adjusts. They rest, yay the lizards are already here. They made good time.

On the 5th they set out from Max’s Den at 6 am. They have 3 days to get to the meeting. Lewis is staying behind to oversee The Hold and their new companions. Brute has no problem with this, he can think of no one else he trusts to watch their backs.

I rolled to find out if there anyone exceptional amongst the cavemen. A d100 1% chance and sure enough one of them is actually a PC. I rolled each of the cavemen to figure out who our badass is replacing Lewis. It was obvious which of the cavemen was our exceptional character. He tells the party that his name is Tek son of Aan. His people used to be servants to the temple that they had been rescued from. The waters of the chaotic gods blessed some and made them chosen and others were shunned. These are the descents of the shunned who were cursed by the waters. Tek has taken Leather Armor, a +1 battleax, two throwing axes, and the two-handed axe +1 and the mace+1. He wears a backpack, these are awesome, he had already decided this during the raid I say as he was our bravest of them. He carries 6 spears.

Tek-Aan is an impressive specimen of a fighter whose lowest stat is his 9 int. His next lowest is 16. This man was born to fight and I'm excited such a great char was living amongst the cavemen we rescued and is a PC. That he starts at lvl 2 is rough but I rolled his HP and he also starts with a solid 24 HP. He has ten fewer than Lewis at a lower level, Tek is pretty much better in every way. Lewis can retire and be the steward of our house. His home terrain is Subterranean/Forest due to his people coming from generations of cave dwellers. He is skilled in blind fighting. Brute and the others got full proficiency in their class stuff as training before their adventures began, they got full proficiency in anything their class does at the cost of the full CP they had at start, they now have to gain new CP. Ruin was built under Hackmaster and so technically has BP whatever. Tek did not receive formal training. He has 6 CP. He spent 2 on axes. 1 on ambidextrous, 1 on duel weapons, 1 on spear, and 1 on hurl. The rest of his NWP points went to his class package I'm saying to keep him consistent. The jumping, climbing, endurance, tracking and all the things he learned in life. He is 16, 5 foot 10, and weighs 165 lbs. Because he is a Barb and not a pure fighter he will never be able to specialize but he will pick up expertise in battleaxe assuming he makes it to level 3. He also has some serious potential for growth but lacks formal training. With anything not an axe/‘club’ or spear he has a -2 prof.

The party decided to do some grinding. I will spare you this.

The 6th. The party does more cave grinding.

The party arrives at the cave the night before and sleeps.

The 7th. Either with one day left or that very (depending on how the NPC was counting a week) morning the party arrives at the meeting location at 9 am. They are bright eyed, they are well rested. They have made a new friend. They are loaded to the teeth and I question just how much a normal party is supposed to grow in 7 days given the travel time needed. I award 1,000 XP to everyone for pulling that BS off. Even Lewis who stayed at The Hold, it just seems right since he's doing vital work.

I finally give everyone the level ups they have been sitting on. Crocus is the most HP I think I’ve ever seen on a rolled lvl 6 ranger at 64. Lajen is going to be stuck at lvl 6 for awhile, Ruin is close to 7, meanwhile Oluf has hit 10. That ratbastard. His lackeys show up to help Lewis out at The Hold. A good rule of thumb is one leader half the lords level, 80 0 level soldiers and 12 lvl 1s. So says a random old rulebook I had on hand.

Observation, Max is a 7hd lvl 2 Druid. My cavemen are 15 2hd f2 HP 9, +1 PC. Tek, Tek we aren't counting as he's his own person. I'm saying that Oluf has raised a band of lvl one rangers, thieves, and bards, a classic group of merry men. Per my copy of Open Ref a lvl 10 should be a lair of 150 Bandits compared to less than a 100 being for a level 8. Oluf’s rival down the river has an unknown number of men. I’m going to give Oluf 150+10 for each increment of 3 of dex he has at the moment over the avg as we have stated to be this game's rule. I find his std bonus to be +4 at this time. Lewis suddenly has an army of lvl 1 for simplicity's point, having rolled his theme and got outlaw archers style robin hood and our general theme. For every 50 bandits there is an additional 6th level fighter, hello Garyld and co. Checks out, we are set up. The ratio of the New Haranshire Regional Guard is reflective of the party ratio of PCs. This suddenly got complicated....I’m going to say all of Olufs recruits are mostly humans for ease. There are currently 11 PCs. Razor, Tek, and Crocus all the rare 1%

This works out to 19 lvl 1 wizards and 19 lvl 1 clerics. 38 dwarfs, they get a pc roll being a new population no. They are old school dwarfs as per DD, technically fighters. Nelc recruits 19 lvl 1 Fleetfoot Halfings, words of his deeds have reached his people. There are other survivors. They can rebuild. Lewis is suddenly glad that they prepped the bunks, thanks Garyld. We will say fixing the forge by building a shielded gated blow chimney is 1,000 gold.

One of the dwarfs is an engineer so we have another person to oversee construction. I pay his upkeep now and Lewis starts on the initial plans left behind for the Fort. He has some money left after paying all the upkeeps to 9 months from now as instructed. If we aren't back by then...dead. He spends the 20,000 Brute approved for the first tower. The tower will stand 130 feet tall, the first 30 has already been built. This covers stairs and most everything.

Brute Squad is left with 56,810 (We currently pay 5 gp a month a head to support our new followers at a 5 gp poor standard of living that's per month not per day thankfully. Technically we will see rent income for The Hold at some point.

The lizards are awesome by the way, the normal movement for them is 12’ these are 15’. The normal carrying capacity for them is 630 lbs. Lajen can create food and water. We have continual light sources, we have food and water, oil and rope. We have arrows for days, we have two bags of holding. Everyone here has made their brave enough to go into the underdark checks. Here we go the map switches to grinding scale. The party is moving at the slowest member which is 15’ as everyone now has their exceptional movement being experienced adventurers or is riding a lizard.

This gives us a travel speed of 3.75 miles per hour. The recommended wandering rate here is my classic every 4 hours. Tek tells the chief under the earth of the raid on the hill and how great war chief Brute saved his people and how he now fights to save all from the horrors under the earth. I've raised Tek up to lvl 5. He went face to face with a Hill Giant that Ruin had slowed. Tek’s HP gains were insane as he rolled 12, 12, 7. He now has as much HP as Crocus...and almost as many restrictions.

Still this lady is like hmmm I am not impressed, “I shall lead you to a trial. If you bring the wrath of the Underdark down on us it will be the doom of my people. Go to this cave of trolls and slay them.”

I roll, yep, the dice say the party knows that trolls are weak to acid and fire. Anyway encounter 3 hours into the first watch, the next two nada. We are saying she talked to us for an hour and so we are leaving at 10 and that for my sanity she moves at 15’ in tunnels. The party has traveled 11 and 1/4th mile of the journey; they have no clue how long it is but this crazy rock lady is leading them on. We encountered a gelatinous cube, I hope you saved room for jello. It surprised the party with its invisible surface catching the lead, Nelc, Nelc makes his save.

1:28pm “Oops, that was close.” Again the cube lurches at Nelc. Ok per advanced 2e normal weapons can hurt it, I have magic. Stab. It has 20 HP. Nelc stabs for 3 whole damage, Oluf comes in with the bastard sword +1, he can't backstab a jelly, 7 damage. Elroy show him how it's done, 12

Anyway...

Chapter 20: Into the Unknown Dark

Party is pressing on, a forced march covering another 30 miles when goblins 1d8+4 Goblins. 10 of them. Tek crits one of his two hits and it does not confirm, rough. He still kills two goblins in a single round like the machine he is. Combat lasted a round.

The 8th; The party makes camp at 1 am and rests for 8 hours. I’m using con checks and various rules for falling asleep and resting. So far this hasn’t been an issue. Lajen can’t sleep, he takes the first watch and Korin takes the second. Neither of them needs to recover any wounds and Lajen doesn’t need to prepare any miracles. Lajen begins the day with fatigue having failed to rest, he is at -1 for attacks, saves, and most checks.

The party begins moving again the next day at 12 for ease. They camped right before the treacherous footing of moldy cave passes. Movement is halved. The air is cool and damp, Tek is glad he brought good furs, a dire wolf he had slain.

It looks to be 15 miles of difficult terrain. Now I was running the encounters wrong as this section of tunnels is supposed to be 1 check every four hours. Today’s travel logs them 5 murderous ogres and 8 pathetic goblins. The goblins around 2 pm were a rounding error at best. The Ogres at 8pm? 14, 15, 16, and 27. 30 feet out. The section of tunnel they are in is 20 feet wide for about 80 feet.

Lajen and Brute are leading the way, the tunnels are packed as the ogres press side by side. The frontliners do their jobs. Nelc fails to hide in the shadows. Brute runs the runty one clean through. Lajen makes a shield bash and misses.

Korin is firing from the third line into the ogres rear line, not into melee. He hits for 6.

Tek in the second row slips between Brute and Lajen and is now on the left flank of the ogre Lajen was fighting. He chops into it twice, 8 damage. He should have used a bigger axe. Oluf pops out of the Ogre’s blindspot, he wasn’t giving the good bastard sword back to Elroy as he ganks grandpa Ogre in one devious stab. He had gotten fairly good at the old backstab himself though.

The lone Ogre survivor makes his stand and fights, Tek is not wearing metal armor, is in his face, and did just chop up his brother. He swings his curved sword only to find air where the caveman had been. Two hits, one a critical and Tek deals 13 to a 16 HP creature. Crocus attempts to finish the monster off, biting at its ankles but she can only hairy its movement. Brute puts it down, rod extending and retracting. Total combat value of xp 1,470 in the day plus gold value found on bodies, brings us to a total growth of 319 xp each. Tek figures 40 more days of good training at this rate until he improves as a fighter. He was learning so many new things.

It seems this wide spot among the stalactites and mites was the Ogre’s lair. In addition they find 6 gemstones, 4 pc of jewelry, yet another +1 longsword, 3 gp, and a potion of slipperiness.

The party makes camp here. It is Nelc who can’t sleep this...night? It was night right? He packed his pipe. Purple Talltail. Usage check says...he doesn't smoke his entire stash in a single sesh. He finds himself drifting off.

Nelc’s adventure in the dreaming is here: https://open.substack.com/pub/gearheart/p/dragonbane-riddermound-fafo?r=5rzlha&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

The 9th. Nelc wakes slightly dazed and confused but is filled with a new life for adventure. We begin the morning with a round of wandering checks, there is no lazing about, its bleak, might as well get to the point.

The party doesn’t know they still have 5.8 miles to the troll cave through this horrible terrain. That is five hours of travel at this rate, the first wandering encounter is 2 Hill Giants, they surprise the party.

10:13 am, 60 feet out, this section of tunnel is 25 feet wide for 20 feet. The section the party just came from is narrow, only 10 feet wide going 15 feet back. The Hill Giants are in a part of tunnel 35 wide by 40 long. Leading are Brute and Lajen, Elroy and Ruin are third row. Oluf and Crocus are in the second row. Tek and Nelc are 5th. Due to spacing Korin and Falgrin are technically the 8th row as rear most guard. I now roll to see how big the tunnel space around them is, 10 feet wide for 40 feet in length. They could hold this for days Falgrin thinks to himself as he watches the path the party just came up from. He and Korin were riding the same Lizard, for whatever reason the party was giving the other two a break and Lajen had gone on foot for this section, maybe he just wanted to stretch his legs. As for why they are riding double, well they combined + gear + load are still under the lizards carry. Nelc has named this one Mister Pointy as it is the lizard carrying an unholy number of arrows and bolts. The lizard Falgrin normally rides he has taken to calling Drag due to its tendency to drag its tail when it's being lazy. He’s been moody lately, maybe that's why he's riding with Korin on Mister Pointy. Lajen has named his mount Spot due to being a spotted lizard, he is not the most creative namer. For those of you who really care. Drag is currently carrying 200 lbs of various gear. Spots is carrying 60 weeks of iron rations. Mister Pointy is carrying 120 POUNDS of arrows and an additional 80 lbs bolts. The dwarf and Elf still don’t eat up all his carrying before he takes a speed hit.

NOW first of all, the party was surprised but just how shocked were Nelc and Oluf being thieves? Oluf was not, his reaction bonus and surprise adjustment means he goes first. Then Nelc, then the Giants. Then we see from there.

Oluf and Nelc are both going to try and go unnoticed, it's a tunnel but, sneak attacking isn’t about being invisible it's about not being noticed. Oluf fails his hide in shadow rolls, Nelc does not.

The Hill Giants are carrying bags as they are known to do...oh fuck. That is a very full bag of rocks. Due to the space I am saying that the giants can only make throws at the front line. Sorry Brute and Lajen. Yeah that will hit. We were bound to hit real combat eventually, it's amazing it took this long.

Lajen suddenly realizes he was not cut out for being a meat shield as a boulder slams into him for 13, Brute takes 11. Two more like that and Lajen is down, possibly dead. Brute figures he has maybe a minute to fight for his life. More likely, 30 seconds.

10:13:06. Nelc makes his move silent, the Hill Giant finds itself taking +1 bastard sword in the back. Nelc might not be proficient in it, he might not have a strength bonus, but he understands hunting giants now. At his level his backstab is what times 3? Add the mod, Nelc rips this hill giant open for 37 damage. Because he is now in melee with them they can’t make a ranged attack without procing the old attack of op.

Yes I was wondering when we were going to introduce that rule. Now, reach determines threat range, so the giants can just, you know step back and then throw but whatever. Nelc’s threat range is a joke even with the bastard sword. That said the Hill Giants may be more interested in smashing the bug. We now find out just how dead that one giant with the new taint piercing is. Fairly, he has 36 HP left. The other one was not near so beefy. With only 60 total HP. Brute, Tek, Crocus you are some grade AAA meat shields given that you out HP one of our 2 Hill Giants.

Oluf can’t easily slip between Brute and Lajen, he can’t move 80 feet in a single move. He could try taking a pot shot, the odds of hitting Nelc are low, he is so small. Oluf draws his short bow, he will only get the one shot this round, That would be a hit. Every little bit helps.

Nelc stabs the other one, it’s not a sneak attack, it's just a max damage bastard sword vs a large sized creature. He deals 14 to the other one's knee.

The giant, being of 6 int and in great pain, swings for Nelc. Now the Bracers don’t stack with armor but per the 2e source I opened does stack with the def adjustment and also with the boots of speed having running room. His effective AC at this moment is -3. Because of that stupid minus 3 the Hill Giant misses him by a hair. The boots of speed allowed Nelc to just shift out of the way as a bag of boulders slams into the ground where he had just been standing. Nelc flipped them the bird. Does the other one take the bait? Yes. Does he hit, HA. Not today.

Nelc gets lucky twice.

Korin has a clear shot on the less injured one, everyone is surrounding the other one. He puts an arrow in both its legs for a total of 15.

Brute makes a charge at the one Nelc stabbed in the back, he hits like a ton of bricks, still the giant stands. Lajen isn’t holding the lantern right now, everyone has a continual light necklace, a simple bit of fabric kept the band of light mostly ahead. He has his +2 Flail, he just doesn’t feel like moving up. Crocus tears past him after Brute, I rule that she can make a bite as a charge. She latches onto its ankle and attempts to shake, still the stupid thing stands tall.

Tek had moved at the same time as Korin fired, he is still 22 feet out, the downside of being in the back, he doesn’t have a clear line for a charge or a charge-able weapon. He stops here. Falgrin turns Mister Pointy around so that he is facing away from the giants.

“Fal!”

“Just turn around.”

“Trick shots aren’t my thing.”

“You are shooting from a non-moving saddle, it's hardly a trick shot. Sides, we’re rear guard, they got the fore.”

11:13:12

Segment 0: Pre initiative actions go here. Oluf goes first; he's probably the fastest thing for leagues when it comes to pure reaction times. He's using the short bow +1, he's not moving, his attack will resolve in 6 segments, that's how long it takes to actually complete the action. The arrow was already knocked and aimed.

Segment 1: Nelc goes slightly slower, he is using a bastard sword +1 his attack will resolve after 7 segments including this one.

Tek starts moving, He moves nine feet a second, that seems like a solid stride idk.

Segment 2, movement starts for people of avg reaction time. Nobody but Tek is moving, he has now covered 9 feet.

Korin is a +1 Dex using a +1 Long Bow, who is an elf specializing in bows firing at short range in tunnel combat. We will say that the need to turn and shoot negates his elf bonus and pretty much every other timing bonus or to hit bonus. He still shoots on this segment and it will resolve in 7 segments. He didn’t get his normal ROF 2 due to not having it ready at the top of the round.

Oluf’s arrow traveling at 250 feet per second finds its target; it deals a grand total of five.

Segment 3: Normal missile fire occurs now. Tek is still moving, he has covered about 14.1 feet, still a bit short.

11:13:14 Segment 4. Casting begins now. Ruin is not even paying attention though. Two seconds have passed. Tek has covered 75.4 feet in 8 seconds of combat time. Add another 2 seconds and Usain Bolt has run the 100 meter dash. Of course, Tek isn’t running or double moving. Assuming these are good hand axes he is now just within range. Now Brute is also quick, he starts his attack on the casting segment. With a +4 axe he could be a lot quicker, right now it is a pole axe in length and so its effective time to resolve is 8 segments. Crocus is using a bite she already made contact with, her attack resolves now. She tears out the hill giant's achilles and he goes down like a puppet with his strings cut.

Korin’s arrow lands for 6 damage.

Segment 5. This is when normal melee starts. I’ve already said that these Giants are using their sacks as clubs. We will be back with him in 4 segments. Oluf makes his second shot. Tek hacks, both will resolve in 3 segments.

11:13:15 Segment 6: Oluf makes his second shot. Tek is in the way. We will try out my new idea for adv/dis for hitting the target or a friendly. Target it is.

Segment 7 Nelc ganks for 10. Man he is rolling hot today. 

11:13:16 Seg 8: The arrow lands, for 4. Tek gives the giants the old two hand chop for a total of 8. 

Seg 9: The giant had already committed to swinging at the Hafling he can’t change targets to Tek. Not with that roll, he misses. 

Seg 10 Nothing happens except for Brute just about to make contact with a powerful thrust. 

Seg 11, With a perfectly average blow in terms of quality to hit (on the dice) Brute punches a hole dealing 17 damage. The last hill giant goes down. 

Seg 12 Everyone realizes combat is over. I check to see if there is a Hill Giant lair nearby. Nope. Not sure if it's good or bad honestly. 

11:22:18 Party takes time to bandage wounds, loot bodies, and recover surviving arrows. 

I think this is a good example of how normally weapon speed and reaction time and segments aren’t needed and can drop away to allow for faster and fun combat. Therefore more game. Assuming I switched to the lower level of detail resolution that is Basic Underworld combat, or as I like to call it CQC, Korin and Oluf would have fired both shots in the missile phase of their turn, the Giants MAY have gotten 2 attacks instead of one. Here let’s figure out if the one that Crocus killed gets a dying attack on her. Yeah it hits, you happy now you monsters? Okay, apparently that dying attack was more of a falling on top of. She takes a single point of damage.  

Lajen burns 3 casts of Cure Light Wounds. Stingy but effective. Brute and himself are still a little banged up but nothing serious. 

12:37 Goblins beyond the line of sight, the party hears them, the Goblins hear the party.

Goblin's reaction? Go and kill. Korin hears the usual Goblin battle cries before he sees them. 

The party is traveling a narrow gap. I rolled and found that it is difficult terrain for large creatures, narrowing to 5 feet for an 80 foot run. The lizards being cave dwellers are like pffft, but the riders must dismount. 

Brute is on point. He sets his polearm. The Goblins are 110 feet away, he can hear their hooting and howling. He couldn't see them, so he set after moving 30 feet.  Let's roll to find the ceiling. Dang, this is a deep narrow crack in the earth, the rock ceiling is about 24 feet above Brute's head. That's enough for range attacks. I didn't roll for all the goblins just as a group, they are armed with short swords and shields. They wear chainmail. 

I'm not bothering with time for this. Goblins died as Brute trades blows killing each in a single hit, his set pole axe always hitting first. But Punk wouldn’t the Goblin’s stop charging after they saw the first one? Its dark, they are dumb, its cramped, the ones in the back are pressing them forward, when lets say the third goblin realizes that he shouldn’t charge the 4th one is still pushing him on, the 4th one stops short. Now Brute just kills them normally. Maybe Korin and Oluf shoot some arrows, who gives a fuck, its 8 goblins. 

Impressive since I know the source material well and am not impressed by spectacle. It's almost as if attention can be held by many different things.

That's it. That's the whole review. What else could I say? That without going back and rewatching the cartoons or finding replacements for the comics I read to pieces that I felt it was true to the source and couldn't find anything worth nitpicking?

Charecterization felt natural and right. It made the themes of the original story so loud that even the most media illiterate person could follow it.

“But, they made fun of the names!”

Did they? Oh sure they made jokes about the names, just like you did when you were first aware enough to get why Fisto is a funny name.

Being mad about it is a facade, get behind yourself :P, Fisto learned it, I'm sure y'all can too.

The little critic: “The movie simply didn't challenge me. It was childhood nonsense about the power of friendship.”

Is challenge the point of film? If so I think the only good film was F for Fake. It was the only time I've ever felt challenged by a movie. What even does challenging mean in this context? We talking like Joyce deciding that convention was getting in his way or more challenges how we think about something?

Recently talking about X-Men 97 with a friend who didn't read comics as a kid and they mentioned that they found it interesting that so many stories have a holodeck episode, yes, they are a Treker.

As gently as my booming voice could convey, “Yeah, Plato's cave is hard to escape, almost as if it breaks out of the earth and chases us, Moriarty or Danger.”

“Punk, what's your point?”

“Oh, no point,” he lied.

The fuck is overly choreographed you round faced fuck who has never thrown a real punch? News at 11, local idiot says 3 minutes is forever. Dear people who have never done martial arts. Jason Borune is shit and you should be beaten until you understand why, go watch Bruce Lee or Donnie Yen. You will no doubt hate Jackie Chan.

Nothing ever happens TM.

She found the earth sections confusing. She thought there was a draft where it was all made up. Hey guys why did it take him 15 years to find a sword right down the block. Shit is this some kind of metaphor? Fuck, I thought they made the themes so obvious any idiot could get it. Empty your cup.

It is pay what you want, its technically a one page game, you will probably never play it as its a social game where everyone needs their own nerf gun. Yes I used generative AI to create the few images it used. I don’t care.

I was originally going to save this for post 100, guess I’ll have to make a new slopgame :P before I write 19 more articles.

With that out of the way lets talk design postmortem.

The game is actually stupid easy to understand, it’s Spoons meets Poker wearing a cowboy getup. It also includes my poker variant 4-card Bid, because in play testing we found that Texas Hold’em was boring as fuck.

You really also don’t need to know how to play Poker, I’m not going to lie.

One of the parts I didn’t expect to stick around was rolling for hat color, it seems silly, it has no mechanical impact on the game, but it does tend to have an impact on the butts in seats.

The hardest part of taking a game for children to something for adults is you have to dumb it down and make it fit preconceived notions. We never bothered with a win condition and yet I knew that the published version needed one. To low of a debt and the game is no fun, too high and you get not fun for a different reason. It had to be just high enough that reaching for your six shooter had to seem like it could be a worthwhile gamble.

Meanwhile one of the things that actually got cut was the random events table and the mechanic that used to invoke it. It was a table that used the number of duplicate cards in play to determine what stupid random effect happened. This was a development born out of everyone getting a matching deck and hiding cards up their sleeves, in their hat, etc. Perhaps I’ll eventually add that back in an update.

Some of you might be going wait what right about now, yep. Cowboy Action Poker wants you to cheat at Poker. If you ain’t cheatin’ you ain’t tryin’.

I also like the term Situation TTRPG, we’ve seen a rise in them. The narrow scope Roleplaying game, Alone With The Fucked Up Guy Looking At You, is just the first example of this hyper limited situational focus roleplay that comes to mind. I guarantee ya, I had exactly one poker roleplaying game in me and expanding the scope would also ruin how each state of play currently interacts with the others.

One of the curious parts of the rewrite was noticing just how many rules are in the game for a game about cheating at poker.

Last thought for now, excpect for nobody to win, it typically dissolves into accusations of cheating and shooting at the drop of a hat ;)

“Punk is this one of those social commentary games?”

Already riding off into the sunset

They make dinner some ways away from the cave mouth. The smell attracts Inzeldrin.

“Little humans, what brings you back to my lair?”

The fog rolls out of the cave mouth first, then the dragon’s head.

It was brave Lewis who stepped forth. “My Queen, the land is under attack by fell forces from deep beneath the earth.”

“This is known to me, I have some communications with a younger shadow dragon.”

“We have come to enlist you aid. Whatever aid it may be. I beg of you my queen. They have allied with the Hill Giants and seek to destroy you.”

She blew a snort of lethal gas into the wind over the party’s head. I had rolled on the dealing with dragons table.

“I will not aid you in the war against the under, my place is here, but for 10% of the gold and items you carry I’ll let you camp here whenever you wish and you may make use of my well, whatever you find in it is yours, but you must tell me of the worlds.”

“Can we make use of this deal at any time for this one time fee?” Oluf asked.

Oracle yes but. “Yes, but if I am not happy with your story I get to eat you.”

Fair.

The party gives the dragon a selection of potions and scrolls and 800 gold. Thankfully she asked for on us and we are traveling light and fast. Having left much on The Cut and much at The Post.

Ok so party makes camp secures dinner and plans at 6pm they take an hour nap. Gets up at 2 am and takes about an hour to get ready.

3am on the 3rd. 5 Days to the extra credit goal. I’m using Red Arrow Black Shield for my base of how strong the Duke is so no party is ready for anything level 10+ our highest lvl is 6. Now, I am doing Horror on the Hill as they step into the well having set it down in front of a dragon’s cave.

And into a strange clearing before a Mysterious Cottage. The cottage is white washed with green shutters. Bright green. Gravel walkways connect to trails, three of them into the forest. A pleasant garden of bright flowers surrounded the home, White curtains delicately embroidered hang over each of the four windows.

Two women come bustling out, the sisters smile and invite them for tea.

Brute holds his hand up and signals ready and hold to the party. This was bad. “Hello there.

“Hello yourself there handsome, fancy coming in a bit, have a cup of tea?”

“That is a wonderful offer, but I’m afraid we are in a hurry miss.”

“Oh you charmer, perhaps we can work something out.”

“What do you mean.”

“My sister and I are not without our means, we can pay you for certain jobs, you can pay us for certain aid and information.”

Oluf eyed the ring. “How much for your lovely magic ring?”

“36,000.”

“I could do that. Do you have a magic bag.”

“Of course.”

“Well then show me it so we can talk business.”

“Then come in and have some tea. We must talk business.”

“We really are in a press for time miss.” Korin says.

“Oh you charmer.” She pulls a bag from her robes and pulls a lamp from it. “See.”

Oluf had slipped into shadows and has backstabbed. He knows a witchbitch when he sees one. That cottage scares the shutout of him and he is chaotic good. He knows how this story ends. Is Lajen mad? No He knows what a fae deal is. He didn’t like how hard she was pushing the tea. All sins can be forgiven. I rolled for how the party felt about this. He succeed the movement and stealthy parts. Crit for extra damage 10 for the dice+1 doubled, Add plus one for Olufs Str and he stabs her for 21 damage. She is down.

Everyone else gets to react now. The party wins, they know that they go with the Squad. Oluf goes on an 8. Lajen tries to stop him as he throws the collar around the other sister. He has attached it to the invisible rope he and Ruin have made. It deals her four damage as he yanks her to the ground.

“Oluf stop.” Lajen says.

I roll her save as a 6th lvl, she fails, she will be dead in 6 seconds. “Don’t you fuckin’ heal this trash.

“You don’t have to be this way.”

“Hell I do. Old ladies ready to invite someone into an obvious trap, not questioning the magic portal, not questioning where we came from. Just a hand ready to take coin and a deal to be struck? Fuck em.”

The bag weighs 15 lbs and can hold up to 500 lbs. Congrats Nelc and Oluf. The illusion fades the little cottage of white and green fades to show a mansion of gold and silver that then dissolves into nothingness. Only the women and the things they have on their bodies outside the house remain. They loot also a staff of healing two potions, and scrolls, and a wand of paralyzation.

The ring alone has made us far more dangerous.

Lajen sighs. “I must charge you the next time you need healing to preserve the balance.”

“That’s fine holyboy. Just know I saved you ass.”

Brute coughed. “We move.”

3:10:12 “You can have the staff of healing.”

“I already have the last one we found.”

“How many charges does the new one have?”

“We will find out when we find out.”

35, having rolled a d100 because why not. The old wand only has three charges left, because that was a d6 per the module.

Okay 1 square on the world map is 300 feet. Brute sees we have three trails hes had time to check his magic compass. There are two trails going west, only slightly north, there’s a ridge that rises some 320 feet and 100 feet above his head. The bush is fairly thick. But there’s a strange magic to these trails. Per the module on the trails the party movement is 300 feet a turn. Or 30 a minute. It’s fairly easy hiking it seems. The climbing is rough though.

Off the trail is slower at 75 feet a turn. The hill runs at 1 wandering check every 30 minutes. On a 1 in 6.

The party has arrived at local time noon. Already they know something strange is up. They aren’t here to think about metaphysics and the planes. Ruin had given the gist of it on the boat ride. The well is a thin spot between worlds. It drops you in a parallel plane and it’s always going to be something similar to where you came from. An ancient green dragon? Two old witches who wanted to turn you to stew.

Everyone is fine alignment wise. Brute picks South West because it’s the path closest to him, randomly determined starting location, nothing more.

9 squares. No wandering. The local time is now 1:30.

Oluf looks up at the cave mouth 50 feet up. “I could climb that shit and fix a rope but there’s little odds that there’s anything of value?”

Not worth the time.

3:00:12 pm. Witches house. 4:10 A clearing with a goblin camp right on the other side of the witches house? Yeah right. It’s the middle of the day there is a chance either party could be surprised. Nope. The encounter distance is 150 feet. Time now switches to combat speed.

The Hobs have gone first. They have three men stationed at the entrance and attack on sight. Oh hey the dice agreed. They close 60 feet.

Korin, Brute, Elroy, and Oluf take their shots. Brute is excited to test his new long bow that wouldn’t break when he put some weight to it. Brute’s first shot missed wide. His second shot as he adjusted his aim, his power, does not as he deals 4 damage on the arrow and +4 damage for his strength bonus. His dex was what made him hit. It’s a clean kill. Korin kills the one with the fancy looking sword. Oluf kills two. Elroy kills two.

“Do you boys need any help?” Ruin asks.

“Nah.” Lewis sets his spear. Falgrin and Lajen flank him. They do so 30 feet out. Thanks Falgrin for being a 10’ dwarf.

Lajen has his flail out. Good for him. Lewis is using one of the now 2 +2 Bastard swords we be rocking. He’s starting with shield up though. Falgrin still has his trusty +2 dwarven battleaxe that he’s been hauling around.

3:10:18 The rest of the Hobs are now coming by the way the alarm raised. This is a guard post and they fight to the death. Makes the witches even more sus huh. Lajen realizes he perhaps owes Oluf an apology. Nelc is gone.

The front line finds it a close shave but nothing they can’t handle as the Hobs stop short and throw spears.

Brute and archers return the favor..Brute kills two. Korin Kills 2. Elroy 1. 11 of the 14 slain.

Falgrin closes flanking wider making a 5 foot gap. Falgrin you always manage to make me happy, 9 damage. He takes out his. Lewis shifts to two hands, just lacking the power to take out another. Trickier than it looked.

Lajen feebly swung his flail and missed.

Nelc makes a sneak attack from the bushes at hits rolling max damage with a +1 longsword. The last Hob fights fearlessly having made his check.

3:10:24 Wounded and knowing death is all but certain it swings as Lajen. Curse that holyman. Miss.

Lajen swings. Hit. It’s enough to finish the job. The party takes ten to gather arrows and any loot.

3:20:24 Having taken ten I’m allowing the party to start from the trail.

3:30:24 Nothing.

4:20:24 pm. Cross roads. Brute looks up the one trail. It’s a good little hike. Hmmm going around might be slower but climbing down would be a pain, they didn’t bring a lot of rope so they wouldn’t want to leave any behind. They have 100 feet of silk rope. 50 feet of the invisible rope. And 100 feet normal hemp rope. He had the ladder function but that was limited. And of course Oluf was a great climber. Maybe a grappling hook was in order?

The North trail it was.

4:30:24 pm, nothing.

5:30:24 pm 90 feet ahead out of the bush pops a giant horned lizard. It blinks at them uncertainly. Are food or threat? Uncertain.

On the trail it’s 1 a man for hiking but 2 per fighting says the module. Okay that seems fair.

Oluf takes a shot it’s a clean hit for 10. Korin takes a shot, 4. Elory, miss. Brute hit, 6. Weapon speed of the various bows is what determined the order . Oluf hits for 10, consistent Oluf. Its dead. The party takes ten to gather arrows and mats.

5:40:30

6:00:30 At the top of this steep rocky hillside is a hideous idol carved from granite, a single hobgoblin prays to it. The party is 90 feet out. Oluf goes first just barely, he snaps off a shot, The arrow punches through.

There are two trails going south. One going north. Brute picks north, they don’t stop, Oluf is out one arrow, it broke.

6:30:30 Nothing.

7:00 pm A single ogre 300 feet out.

Brute and Elroy Hit, Oluf and Korin miss. Olufs second shot hits. They take ten to gather arrows and loot, nice 200 gp.

7:10:06 Crossroads. North and south in effect. I flipped a coin and Brute picks south,

8:10:06 pm The party has been at adventure work such that they have 5:49:54 before they need to worry about exhaustion. They are going to push themselves today. Lajen opens the shutter on the lantern as the sun sets at 8:10.

They have a waterfall and a river crossing, no bridge. Its really a stream, it takes them an hour to cross. Why, because the module says so.

9:10:06 Luckily nothing interrupts the crossing.

11:10:06 pm 210 feet out are skeletons. Lajen pops three of the four. Its a -4 to make the shot, the party holds. 120 feet.

11:10:12 Pop. The party presses on.

12:10:12 pm. The party decides to camp in the south end of this large clearing. Korin will take the first two hours of the watch.

The party begins moving at 9 am. Nothing wandered their way overnight. 4 days left.

10 am. The party has arrived at the ruined monastery. Brute made good time, which is impressive considering I randomized his starting location and his direction choices.

The buildings are granite and so are the columns, vines, moss, and fungus grow but the intact buildings see to be cleared of the plant growth.

Now the party is moving at 30 feet as that’s their slowest speed, we are resolving at 6 seconds. The squad will move an extra square every second move. Encounter rate is up to every two moves. The party can double move or slow to a crawl to avoid traps. Right now they are moving normally

10:00:36 am. Oluf points at the doors and the smaller building, “One, stay away from the obvious like vein vent thing in the ground, second, lets go check it out.”

10:00:56 am They arrive at the door.

10:01 “I bet there’s going to be treasure let me pop this bitch open.” Oluf makes an Open Lock. He doesn’t care about the pagan deity, or that it matches the statue they found.

10:11:06 Nelc pops the gem out of the statue’s eyes as he moves at 80 feet in 6 seconds and climbs like a thief. The statue of 12 feet was a nothing. In the same time Lajen shined the light stepping in with Brute and Falgrin being the front of the ten foot square and Korin, Oluf, and Elory the second row. Lewis, Ruin, and Crocus are the back row.

The party is not surprised as the doors surrounding them pop open, out stepping 12 skeletons. Party got first. Lajen starts to pray. Falgrin steps 20 feet south, Brute steps 40 north. Elroy steps forward 40. Oluf climbs the statue and goes for the other eye.

Elroy kills his, 11 left. Falgrin does as well, 10 left. Brute hits and of course kills. Lajen’s prayer ends and he gets 9. The encounter is over.

10:20 Nelc took 10 minutes to search, hes’s actually moving faster than that but whatever, he now has a +2 dagger.

10:20:36 The party opens a door into a kitchen, two giant rats. Oluf shots them.

10:20:42 Oluf goes to pick up his arrows. He searches the pile and finds eight more rats. They bite at him.

The party slays 8 more giant rats

10:20:48 and collects a +2 arrow, Oluf takes it.

10:21:12: A library, the party fans out to do some reading taking ten.

10:22:48 In comes three zombies. They surprise the party. Claws fail to find flesh.

10:22:54 Second verse same as the first that’s that.

10:32:54 The party finds three scrolls.

10:33 Korin immediately spots the secret door as they enter into a garden, the sun can be seen overhead where this peaceful fountain is, four giant centipedes 40 feet out.

10:33:06 Well that was easy.

10:33:18 A magic pool and fountain, Nelc drinks from it and gains 2 hp. “You guys got to try this.” Lewis drinks and has to save which he does. “Hmm I think you have questionable taste.”

Brute drinks and adds 2 to Str and Dex. Wait what. Yeah Brute becomes an 18/00 then a 19. He now deals +7 damage just when he hits because he says so. His bow is still limited to +4. Korin drinks and also gains +2 Str and Dex. Lajen drinks and finds he’s never been better gaining +1 to all.

Elroy loses a hitpoint. “That is the foulest thing I’ve ever drank.”

“It can’t be that bad,” Falgrin says and drinks gaining +2 Str and +2 Dex. Ruin drinks and gains one to each ability score. Oluf drinks and gets...+1 to each, Oluf you lucky dog. Crocus drinks and gets +2 HP Good dog. Elroy moans, “Do you ever think the universe is out to get you?”

Technically an encounter shouldn’t have happened here but I wanted to honor the time based wandering of the movement to get here. Also per my house rules, Lajen, Ruin, Oluf and Brute are now no longer meremortals. Magic has pushed them to 19s. Meanwhile Korin seems to have become an entirely different type of elf as I take this excuse to say the waters were dedicated to making him a more proper elf.

We also say that he is a weapon master in bows having been an elven archer now all this time he can get the benefit of that weapon point. This is a big deal. He gets +1 for being and Elf. He gets +1 for his bow. He gets plus 1 for his dex to hit. He gets +3 at point range to hit and damage. His eleven skill with the long sword and sword he is proficient+1 with. He gets +2 for range on the other ranges. Such that med is 2 and long is 0 and extreme is -3.

The party has grown fairly strong in a fairly short span of time.

The party moves 10:33:24 they go north through a door into a Hobgoblin garrison. The party has just surprised dinner, the enemy has their weapons on the table, four are sleeping

The party begins to move. Ruin begins to chant. A black magic arrow with an angry red face shoots through the room dealing 10 damage as it skewers all targets.

10:43:30 the party has looted the room, the gang likes the new belt pouches which gives them an item action.

10:43:36 Opening the door to the north the party decided they didn’t want to go down stairs.

10:43:42 As the party turns around and is heading out of the room 2 zombies come up the steps behind them. The zombies surprise the backrow of Ruin and Crocus.

10:43:48 It’s not even close for Crocus, Ruin does just fine as the zombies get two attacks in and then zombies go pop. Thanks Lajen.

10:43:54 Brute opens the door only to find a dire wolf on the other side of it. It surprised him and is only ten feet away, legit the other side of the door. Plate says no.

10:44:00 Plate still says no. Brute responds with hitting it for 15, still it lives. Nelc backstabs it for 8. Let’s move quickly for a bit.

10:44:06 The Squad goes past a tight alley and notices a secret door, they note it for later.

10:44:12 Ancient alter, the stones have already been picked from the statues eyes. There’s a pit before it. Nah fuck turn around I don’t want no blood pits.

10:44:18 Door. Empty room.

10:44:24. The door is locked. Nelc tries a key. He’s in. Oh look a weapon stockpile and a shit ton of arrows. The party takes ten to gather arrows.

10:54:36 Secret door, hmmm another empty room.

10:54:48 The door is stuck, Brute forces it open. Dire Wolf, it’s acting at the same time as the party.

10:54:54. It lunges for Brute as he hits it for 17. Nelc finishes it off.

10:55 From the door ahead Falgrin is charged by an Ogre. It is 30 feet out. Korin shoots it for 14, Oluf finishes it off. As they see the other Ogre right behind it.

10:55:06 It misses Falgrin by 1. Falgrin hits it for 9. Oluf backstabs it for 12. Nelc loots the bodies.

10:55:12 Locked chest. Nelc opens it and goes oh cool stuff. He tosses a dirty bag at Oluf. Oh fuck why is that bag so heavy. It’s a 1,000 lb capacity bag of holding is why.

10:55:18 Nelc frees some cavemen. They don’t speak common. The party takes some time to communicate and make peace and show the cavemen to the weapon catch. The cavemen seem to understand?

11:00 The party is not crawling this, we are moving at good clip still. 60 feet per 6 seconds, we want the fights and we have not been getting them, we are on a clock checking for wandering at the end of every move.

11:00:12 Torture cell 2 goblins, now 2 dead goblins.

11:00:18 Secret door, pass through.

11:00:24 A man writes at a desk. “Who in the devil are you?” Nelc backstabs him for more HP than he has. The party has been moving quick for awhile they stop and search.

11:10:30 Korin is happy to finally have a good elven cloak. Also the obvious secret door out of this room duh. The party starts in room 55.

11:10:36. Nelc and Oluf are racing up the statue, who will be the first to bag a gemstone eye. Neither thinks to remove traps. 4 robber flies fly out of the statue’s mouth and they each take 2 attacks.

11:10:43 And 2 more but are fine. The party quickly finishes it off.

11:10:54 I can’t believe how rare 1 in 6 is being today.

11:11 Oluf unlocks a door. 4 goblins, They run. Oluf shoots. 2 goblins Korin shoots 0 goblins.

Hobgoblins and Goblins are coming up the hall from the south. Ruin casts lighting bolt. No they are not.

11:11:12 Party moves 60 north

11:11:18 Locked door now unlocked door. Party takes 10 and mostly finds rope and packs. Their new friends are happy with their equipment.

11:21:18 They are going back around to the right, they are already pushing time.

11:21:30. Oh fuck Hobs, oh fuck people.

11:21:36 Oluf and Korin take 3 hobs between them. A Dwarf is being held hostage. The party rushes in. Brute goes for the bug bear. It looks to be on its last legs, Crocus tears its throat out. Our new cavemen friends hack. The combat is over. The dwarf is happy to join us. Gareth Ironhands is his name, master smith. Awesome friend, get your shit we move.

11:31:42 All is going well, almost too well.

11:32 Back top side. The cavemen are leading, they seem to want to take us somewhere. The party is back to running.

11:32:12 They are back in the temple room a direwolf is here...for some reason.

11:32:18 It goes down having made the mistake of picking a wide open space.

11:32:42 They make it out of the ruined temple with 5 friends and as much as they could carry without being slowed.

12:12:42 They have made it to the southern edge of the clearing. The cavemen want them to go south.

1:32. The cavemen shout up to the cave and their friends come out, climbing down the 50 foot cliff.

Brute asks of no one in particular, “Any clue what they are saying?”

I rolled against the party’s best int, Ruin shrugged. “The usual, great figure of legend has been sent to lead us to a new land and good times. He comes bringing gifts.”

“Hmm.”

2:00 pm The gang sets out, 16 cavemen and a dwarf as well.

The party makes it out of the parallel plane at 3:00 pm. Total time in alt world? 26 hours.

Now see I’m a big fan of the planes. When the party went in I set up some tables. Some where rolled before, and some after. I now roll the after tables. And Brute gets very lucky, the sun is just beginning to rise.

6:21 Am. Inzeldrin grins at them, “Back so soon.”

Korin asks, “What do you mean?”

“Why little knife-ears, you were only gone for a little over three hours. Now the deal, tell me what you got up to or I may eat someone.”

The party recounts their adventures. Inzeldrin is especially amused by Oluf killing the two witches.

“You have done me a favor and so a small boon in return. Also because your pets have been so well behaved.”

She worked strange dragon magic and suddenly the cavemen could speak common at 66% fluency.

8 am on the 3rd 5 days to goal. The party sets out for Thurmaster and arrives at 8 pm. Garyld is ready on the boat. The new friends seem okay. The wind is with them, the river is with them, the river is riding high, Garyld makes obscene time. They arrive at Kuiper’s Landing at 2 am on the 4th while most are sleeping. Kuiper’s Landing being what they were now calling the far side of the river across from the farm where the road work had begun.

Brute explains to his new tribe that Kuiper is a powerful hunter and good friend of his. His fields are rich with food and he needs strong hands, in return he is helping us strengthen our home.

There is a round of chanting.

Oluf sells the cavemen on The Hold.

You can consider this part two of my Designing with Enemies series, https://open.substack.com/pub/gearheart/p/emergent-metagames?r=5rzlha&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web or part three of the Jira series.

If the last parts were storytime this is more about actually pulling apart the machine and seeing whats going on under the surface.

There’s a habit in RPG discourse where people say “the mechanics matter less than how the table plays.” That sounds harmless until you actually treat it as a design statement instead of a vibe. Because there’s a point where that sentence stops meaning “flexibility is good” and starts meaning something much more specific:

The rules are no longer the primary resolution system; something else is.

The Substitution Problem

Every tabletop RPG has two layers:

Declared system: the mechanics printed in the book

and

Effective system: what actually decides outcomes at the table

In a healthy design, those two are tightly coupled. You roll dice, consult rules, resolve states. Social dynamics may influence how people choose actions, but not the resolution engine itself but there is another configuration that shows up in practice systems: the declared mechanics become too thin, too optional, or too rarely invoked to carry resolution.

At that point, something fills the gap and it is almost never random. It is usually: social authority, perceived system mastery, charisma in argument, group status and trust, or who the table defers to. In other words the resolution engine quietly migrates out of the rulebook and into the room.

The Silent Engine

This is where analysis gets tricky, because nothing breaks in an obvious way.

The game still runs. Dice still get rolled. Procedures still exist. But the actual decision function has become who is making the argument? Who can push a ruling through without resistance?

These become the real inputs to outcome generation. Not character stats. Not resource states. Not formal procedures. As such the system begins to depart from what we would expect based upon our constructed model from the RAW.

Why This Happens in Low-Density Systems

This shift becomes more likely when a game has: infrequent mechanical resolution, weak binding procedures, large GM interpretive space, or “fallback” mechanics (the infamous universal clause like “just roll #dX when needed”.

In those cases, the system is not actively occupying the full resolution space. So the table compensates and the compensation is always human. Not by accident, but because humans are always available and are cognitively cheaper than complex procedures.

Likely does not mean certain of course.

The Structural Consequence

Once this substitution stabilizes, something important changes. The most important skill in the game is no longer system mastery.

(Clarification, this is not a good thing, this is generally a bad outcome for the health of the game as it leads to the rewarding of bad behavior easily and incentivizes further social hierarchical games instead of the game supposedly being played. Here important means to the players in the pursuit of what gets rewarded, nothing else.)

It is influence over the interpretive layer. That creates a hidden optimization problem as players begin to improve at: framing arguments, shaping GM perception, aligning with group expectations, reading social authority gradients. Meanwhile, the formal system becomes less relevant over time, because it is no longer the bottleneck for outcomes.

This Is Not “Roleplay vs Rules”. This is where most discussions go wrong. This is not about: narrativism vs simulationism, roleplay vs mechanics, story vs crunch. It is about something more basic. Whether the system actually occupies the resolution function, or whether it delegates it to unmodeled social structure.

A game can be extremely narrative and still be mechanically closed. A game can be extremely crunchy and still collapse into social resolution if the crunch is rarely binding.

The axis is not style, it is system closure.

The Hidden Design Risk

The danger isn’t that players will “abuse” social skills. Every player plays to the GM (is this why we see people hunting for better GMless systems? IDK) to some degree, while framing action in the causes and effects of the world play is occurring in is what we all hope for.

The danger is more subtle, when social skill becomes the most reliable resolution tool, it silently becomes the dominant mechanic. At that point, the game still looks like a rules system, but it behaves like a negotiated consensus engine and once that happens, you can’t analyze outcomes purely from the written design anymore, because you’re no longer observing a closed system, you’re observing a group.

Why This Matters for Design

If you accept system closure as a design goal, then every RPG has to answer a hard question: What portion of resolution is explicitly modeled, What portion is intentionally left to human judgment, and what happens when that judgment becomes the primary determinant?

Because if you don’t answer that, the answer still exists. It just defaults to whoever is best at operating the social layer of the table.

Yet there is one less obvious reason why this matters for design. You can’t put it in the box or the book. If a game is heavily running off assumptions and other social group natures that are nonportable then you’re essentially trying to build an engine but the parts that actually make it work aren’t in your model.

The rules of a game don’t just define what can happen. They define what must be used to decide what happens. When that definition weakens, something else takes over. Not necessarily chaos. Not necessarily creativity. Just a different system running underneath the one you thought you were playing.

The Gambling Trap

Now to make it clear that the social layer is not the problem in and of itself. If you design a game with 100% system closure, you create a deterministic slot machine. You make inputs, but you lose the agency that makes the game. If the system demands that every possible action must be mapped to a procedure, the game stops being about choice and starts being about navigating the menu. Inevitably you start doing a price comparison on the number of chicken wings to cost and then you make the most bang for your buck order and hope to get lucky.

A beta reader told me they couldn’t follow that train of thought. Which is interesting. Because the sentence is doing exactly what a low-density system does, it leaves enough interpretive space that the reader defaults to social negotiation: “I don’t understand this” rather than engaging with the procedure. The point is: optimization without meaningful variance is just purchasing. The gamble collapsed into a menu. Did I order correctly? Man these wings taste like ass, I’ve optimized the number but I hate the wings themselves.

The Invisible Weapon

Man I was just ranting about how people couldn’t follow the simple plot of the movie Weapons because people struggle to see a weapon as anything but a gun in the modern age. Of course if you’re reading this you ain’t the masses, if you read designing with enemies you already know the shape of this invisible weapon.

Punk is once again talking about trust, take a shot. The trust issue is the audit lens applied to game design. If someone is allergic to clearly defined procedures in a game, they are likely allergic to accountability in reality. Rules-light systems function as a shield of plausible deniability: if the rules aren’t binding, you can never be “wrong”, you can only be “misunderstood” or “out-maneuvered”.

Toxic nodes (PCs or GMs) don’t want a “broken” system; they want a Negotiated System.

A negotiated system allows for:

• Arbitrary Prioritization: They can ignore the “system” when it hinders their goals and invoke it when it validates their authority.

• Gaslighting: If the resolution engine is entirely social, the loser of a conflict can’t point to a rulebook to show why the outcome was unfair; they can only point to their feelings, which are easily dismissed.

• Control over Information: If the system is invisible, the GM is the system. They own the “source code.”

Transparent Tension

If we can’t, and don’t want to anyway, erase the social layer, and we can’t rely on pure procedure, then the goal isn’t to make the system “perfect.” The goal is to make the friction points visible.

A system designed with ‘enemies’ in mind shouldn’t try to stop the table from being human. It should index the human conflict.

Instead of hiding the resolution in the social layer, the game should force the social conflict to be the input for the rules.

• Bad Design: “The GM decides based on the vibe.” (Toxic control).

• Good Design: “The rules provide the procedure, but the social layer must resolve the interpretation of the procedure.”

Let me give you the most universal example I can think of, one so basic that if you’ve ever run a game for more than three sessions you’ve already lived it without necessarily having the language for it.

Making camp and setting watch.

Most sim rulesets have a procedure for this. Shift assignments, watch order, wandering monster checks, maybe a perception roll if something goes bump. The procedure is closed. It’s binding. If you skip the watch and something comes out of the dark, the procedure resolves that honestly and without negotiation. Nobody gets to argue their way out of the owlbear that found you sleeping. The rules were clear, you made a choice, the world responded. That’s the procedure doing exactly what a procedure should do.

But here’s the thing. I would throw hands with anyone who insisted we formally invoke that procedure for every single camp made across every single game day of a campaign. Not because the procedure is wrong. Because that’s not what the procedure is for. The procedure exists for the nights that matter. Somebody has to decide which nights those are. The rest of the time? Yeah we set the same watch as always, why did you ask GM? Something interesting about tonight that makes the normal measures insufficient?

I’ve actually had the GM who pulled the you don’t say you were setting a watch. (As if make camp doesn’t imply the very act) “I also didn’t say anything about breakfast, ever in this campaign, I had assumed we were eating food.”

That somebody is the table. Players reading the fiction, GM reading the players, everyone collectively sensing whether this is the kind of night where the watch matters. Deep in hostile territory, carrying something people want to kill you for, three days from the last sign of civilization. Or whether this is the kind of night where we just say “you make camp, morning comes, what do you do?” and move on.

That judgment isn’t the social layer corrupting the procedure. That’s the social layer doing the job the procedure can’t do, which is reading whether the fictional stakes are real enough to warrant running the engine at all.

This is what transparent tension actually looks like in practice. Not procedure replacing judgment. Not judgment replacing procedure. The social layer deciding when to hand the wheel to the rules, and the rules driving from there without flinching.

The camping example shows you something else too. The failure modes are obvious from both directions and you’ve probably sat at both kinds of tables. The GM who never invokes the watch procedure because it slows things down and nothing ever happens at night because nothing ever happens at night. That’s social resolution eating the procedure alive. Three sessions in and everyone knows the nights are safe because the GM doesn’t want to deal with it. The procedure exists but it’s not occupying the resolution space. Something else is.

Specifically, one person’s preference for narrative momentum dressed up as a table culture.

The other table is the one where every camp is a fifteen minute administrative exercise in shift assignments and roll schedules regardless of whether you’re sleeping in a duke’s guest room or a goblin cave. The procedure is running but it’s running blind, divorced from the fictional stakes that give it meaning, optimizing for compliance rather than play. You’re declaring watch shifts in town. The guard is six feet away. Nobody is learning anything except that procedures invoked without judgment are just friction wearing a rulebook.

Assumed behaviors are load-bearing fiction. The watch can be assumed at times. Breakfast is assumed. Horses get fed. Wounds get rebandaged between sessions. The fiction of a game runs on a vast substrate of undeclared assumed competence and resolution that nobody wants to formally invoke because invoking it formally would make it meaningless. The procedure exists for when the assumption breaks down, not to replace the assumption entirely.

Do not try me on this. I will write a whole system with procedures about all the things we assume occurs in play and dedicate it to you. Here’s the rules for taking a shit because DumbAlex2667 asked for them. First you must roll for circumference, obviously.

Moving along.

The middle is the only place worth being. Procedure binding when invoked. Human judgment governing invocation. The social layer isn’t in the resolution engine. It’s deciding when the engine needs to run.

That’s not a vibe. That’s a design goal. And the difference between tables that get it right and tables that don’t is whether anyone at the table has ever stopped to ask which layer is supposed to be doing which job. This is why Rules-light can work for some but not others.

If you don’t build it that way, you’re just building a machine that rewards the person who is best at manipulating the room, which isn’t a game. It’s just politics with dice.

Well the Delta game has more or less hit a wall where the GM won’t run the game Sawyer is in until after a session of the other groups game is ran. This creates a black box of a problem where I have no clue why the other group can’t get their shit together but we see that they fell into the classic three sessions to failure that has become so endemic of our hobby.

Actually, I know that the Agents are all relatively new to roleplay and are new to DG, they are also not milsim enjoyers. The cowboy team is more experienced in RPGs and well argues about night vision googles. I love this conceptually but I feel like team newer is facing the three session slog because they are new and inexerpeicned.

Yet the GM does have an easy solution, just run sessions that are not tied to the plot…this creates a problem of course for our GM as they are now balancing the risk to the characters in some other adventure when they clearly had a PLOT in mind.

A game like Delta Green where I would expect to lose chars fairly regularly is probably not the best choice for such a style of games, we see this in its best works where the PCs are interchangeable parts, the King in Yellow is a marvelous play that weaves its cast into and out of the problems and the fact that the resulting chaos just so happens to resemble a plot once you’ve driven yourself mad looking for meaning well, if you haven’t seen the sign, you haven’t seen it.

Here’s the other thing we note if Clean up team is supposed to be taking care of Main Teams mistakes this means that Main Team must do badly, we see just from this simple relationship that Sawyer was never likely to see much actual play. This is annoying from a player viewpoint but it is interesting from a in world perspective where the Agency is actually using it’s resources well as they are not burning out Clean up team, main team is like the ablative armor on a highly efficient tool that is Clean up.

Sometimes The Lore Makes for Bad Play

I have made props for the level the GM is going at with trying to depict the Agency with both Cowboys and Agents unknowingly working together thanks to a certain important agent you should know if you are a fan of the setting.

I respect the dedication to keeping the two groups separate but we see that this setup was actually a poor fit for play as Clean Up team is by design always reactive, the fog of conspiracy does not automatically create problems to play around, for fog to be meaningful both ‘factions’ must be able to take meaningful action that impacts the world and other factions.

This isn’t a problem unique to this newer GM though, Delta Green as written presents its world as one that has a very specific world and thus a feel. The average member is over 50 it points out in the book and I just roll my eyes and go yeah sure buddy. Grandpa still got it, blackbagging it with the best of them.

FUCK NO. I get it, the age of the agents is a commentary on the agency itself a reflection of the generation, you can feel it flipping between The Fall of Delta Green and the Handler’s Guide.

There is a specific, high-fidelity earnestness to The Fall of Delta Green. It isn't just research; it’s hagiography. Hite writes 1968 not like a historian, but like a true believer. He possesses that classic Gen Jones intensity with that cusper-generation desperation to prove he understands the myth better than anyone and he treats the era with a total, uncritical devotion that only someone who desperately wanted to be part of the hype could sustain.

If The Fall is written by the true believer, the Handler’s Guide is written by the guy in the black turtleneck who has been nursing a grudge against the universe since the Clinton administration killed his innocence. It’s a masterclass in the Gen X aesthetic- of permanent exhausted disillusionment. There is a specific, tired smugness to it. It’s nihilism as a comfort blanket.

The Handler’s Guide (2017) is a fascinating artifact, not for what it says about cosmic horror, but for what it reveals about the designers' inability to escape their own formative trauma. 9/11 feels like the main character of the HG at times, I get why, it kind of blew an actual hole in the evil wizard of New York bit. The attempt to patch it up and say he was ready for this as well rings false as fuck to the settings own myth. That anyone, anywhere, anywhen could be blindsided by a horror they didn’t understand and was outside of any paradigm that could be fitted into the victim’s world view.

I imagine it would be greatly disappointing then to have reality paint your monsters as trite. You can feel the old tired saw of he who fights monsters eating away at the edges.

It comes to a head in Iconoclasts, where Glancy (a skilled GM and designer) flew too close to the sun as he brings the Machine to the Mythos and the honest reviewer must find the Mythos wanting, but we haven’t gotten there yet.

See by 2017 the world had fundamentally shifted, we were already living through the aftermath of the 2008 crash, the rise of surveillance economies, the explosion of the social media manipulation to erode the consensus of reality, and the fall of the top secret clearance. Fastforward to 2024 and now and while currently social media isn’t being flooded with footage of people being blown to a black and red tinged mist by cheap quadcopters (like it previously was) it certainly makes the small concerns of Delta Green seem rather dated.

Now we arrive at Iconoclasts, taking place in 2016 Iraq as if to say hey team that wrote the Agent’s Handbook how were you so naive? For those that don’t know it you start by playing ISIL recruits fucking with something that they didn’t understand and now DG has to come in and clean up your mess. The Father of War then collapses into heavy handed symbolism that is great artistically sure but not that interesting from a play perspective.

We can divide DG into the two games it wants to be. Game A is The Pitch: You are a tiny fragile human facing the infinite void and the chaos crawling from it.

Game B, the Reality: You are cogs in a military-industrial machine that happens to fight animals that appear as if they could go toe to toe with a military-industrial machine.

If a ritual can be drone-striked, it isn’t an existential threat its a line item pretending to be a tactical problem at best. If an ancient horror can be investigated by a task force it is not madness but a case file.

The agency must be impotent to incompetent else the State Machine makes the monsters look like little league. Behold the local max of the teams style, they have practiced the ‘penmanship’ of Institutional Dread for so long and to such a point that they are unable to step back and let the mythos be truly alien.

Wow, I didn’t realize I was writing about why Impossible Landscapes is the best campaign book for DG, as much as I love God’s Teeth which is the perfection of the institutional dread, Impossible Landscapes actually feels like mythos.

What is interesting is that IL almost mocks the idea that DG can never escape the institutional dread as a kill team from the past/future/now tries to erase you, it is only the great scale of cosmic indifference that keeps this from overwhelming the rest of the book and in a rookies hands I’m sure Kill Team Green will quickly overshadow Lang.

See the dread, the war machine, the cog, that all feels real and its cynical bent fits the Gen X sensibility, but it leaves very little room for the mythos. Congrats Glancy, you told a story that erased the distance between the ISIL recruit, the DG Agent, and the god of war. You're not afraid of squids from space, you're afraid of your boss, budget cuts, and the inevitable realization that your conspiracy is just a shitty office job.

Keeping the players in the dark isn’t building mystery, it’s hiding the only thing that gives the game’s play meaning and the players any form of agency.

Now you might think that you don’t want meaning and agency in your horror mythos game. You would just be wrong. Not even interesting wrong, just plain old boring wrong.

The Mystery Box approach to The Conspiracy is a crutch, it allows the GM to pretend the world is complex without actually doing the structural work to make it functional. By keeping the players in the dark you force them into binary reactions that collapse the shared imaginative play space into two simple states.

1. They only see the machine. This is when the org feels like its everywhere and knows everything. Except for when it is nowhere and knows nothing. In this form the players are just employees, not investigators. They are cogs and have no understanding of why sometimes the strain is place on them and other times the teeth of the machine churn everything around them into nothing.

Or

2. They only see the pointlessness. The players have no understanding of the conspiracy and how it relates to the mythos, every win is temporary, every loss arbitrary, and every set back as meaningless as if it hadn’t happened. Taken to the extreme without the conspiracy to support the framework the game becomes a pure nihilists comic horror lottery, roll the dice, die and move on. No tragedy, just a lack of data and a bad coin toss.

If your Lore is so fragile that telling players hey this is what the org is actually trying to do ruins your game, your Lore isn’t deep, its so thin as to barely be there.

If you want the players to feel the weight of the state machine they need to see how the gears grind, if you want them to feel the horror of the mythos they need to see where the same machine is failing to contain it.

The problem with DG beings and ends with the fact that it encourages you to treat information as a reward when this is already the GM’s natural tendency. It also encourages the selling of the illusion that the conspiracy is everywhere.

I think they got it wrong. Delta Green as written treats the conspiracy as a ceiling. This is what they know, this is how in the dark they are, therefore your players must be even more in the dark. I use it as a false floor.

I love showing DG as competent, with resources that could win wars against third world countries, that has seen this before and knows things that you don’t. Able to be everywhere and know everything. The institution exists and someone is in charge with working protocols in place.

The thriller frame assembles itself naturally under these conditions if you allow the players to engage with the machine, players settle into it with ease as competent people with institutional backing solving problems is a satisfying cognitive experience, even when half the puzzle is trying to figure out which cogs are working against you.

The initiation into deeper and deeper layers of the conspiracy is the easiest thing we can do as GM’s so why do I never see anyone use it well? You can use it to ask horrific questions, you can use it to give horrific answers, it will quickly pose horrible problems.

Then you pull the rug.

DG has nothing here, we got no clue, and the protocols didn’t just fail but bite us in the ass.

The horror comes not despite the players understanding but because of it. They know where the map ends, the competency runs out, and they have just run into a hard problem in the dark.

Players can be in the dark, players can not remain in the dark. Already the classifier of agent or friendly suggests that they know just a tiny bit more than the normal person. The scariest thing Agent Sawyer can ever face is the machine no longer needing him and by design that’s the one thing the conspiracy can never give the game as his entire world view was first warped by his upbringing, then the trauma of 9/11, then by his unit being eaten by Ghouls, and finally rebuilt about the fact that he was a member of a conspiracy that gave his life shape, meaning, purpose, and shield. To him the fact that he knows nothing isn’t a flaw but a feature. It protects his view of the world because his frame of the machine is based in how powerful it is around him.

Putting Chaos Into Order

The Gm’s instinct feels like wisdom, the mythos is unknowable, knowing reduces horror, therefore the players should know as little as possible for as long as possible. It feels protective, like your guarding the horror, keeping it pure, preventing the players from solving the mystery and defeating the dread.

Its wrong and its lazy but I already said that, I’m now saying its also the reason most Delta Green campaigns never actually have an emotional response and tend to be snuffed out quickly.

A black box doesn’t produce dread it only produces indifference. Indifference is not scary when you are the one feeling it.

Therefore the conspiracy has to be real first and it has to have teeth that could bite a god. Suddenly the org that fights monsters isn’t a counterpoint to the mythos or a flaw between two conflicting promised games but another horror.

Speaking of other horrors. There is one DG structurally cannot deliver. What Sawyer can not survive psychologically is being irrelevant. Not discarded because he failed, not being consumed because he got too close. Certainly not dead. He was already pre numb to these before the recruitment read in that made him an AGENT. I mean the org chart updated and he’s been let go, the work is either over or changed.

By design DG always needs operatives, lawful or off the books. There is always another case file, another handler call, another thing in the dark that requires someone like Sawyer to go and take a look at the problem. The machine runs on expendable competent people and it never runs out of use for them even when it runs out of regard for them.

Which means if you want to run Delta Green at its meanest, the level it’s capable of reaching you have to build toward the thing the design won’t build toward for you.

You have to build the conspiracy, the institutional relationships, the read ins to things darker than black and more than top secret. You have to build an org where the players can glimpse a potential future where DG wins. Not with fanfare but with the quiet bureaucratic indifference of decommissioning having proven that the work is finished and there is no need any longer and frankly we could have saved the tax payers some money far earlier by right sizing some time ago.

Running Advice

1. Build the Conspiracies

2. Make Mythos Alien, if it seems familiar you’ve already failed

3. Read them into the first ring of hell at the start of or at the end of the first case. Not everything, but enough. The shape of the org, the weight of the dark, the sense that this has been going on for some time and will remain so.

4. Let the Thriller assemble as you let them explore the org and conspiracy

5. Let them build their model of ‘how the world works’

6. Find the edge of the model and show it to them, not with a monster but with a gap. The place were the handler’s perfect unfeeling deadpan wavers just a bit, the case file is missing pages, the protocol that doesn’t exist anymore.

Let them feel the floor give way. Under this style of play high PC turn over isn’t a flaw, its a feature. PCs die, new PCs come in, the org keeps its course, and the players should feel the shogoth like nature of the org.