Review of the Well of Souls for Dungeon Crawl Classics

I was running Dungeon Crawl Classics for the first half of this year pretty regularly, about once a month. Sometimes twice, if I was lucky with scheduling.  DCC is more adult-oriented, at least the way I play it, and the guys in my group really ran with it--embracing the weird magic (and it's side-effects) and using their decades of game experience to keep their players alive.  I created a sandbox for them, full of places and things designed by fans of the game as well as some of the published Goodman Games scenarios.

When the chance to run Well of Souls came up, I was excited. It was a chance to create new characters from scratch (the existing characters had been auto-generated) and place the characters far to the south of the cold misty forest-lands they were familiar with.

I let the players go nuts as far as race was concerned, and they indulged their love of humanoids with dwarves, elves, and halflings. There were some humans, sure, but with one player going with an entire party of dwarves the humans were in the minority for a change.

Spoilers beyond this point...

The Well of Souls is funnel, designed for 12-16 zero-level characters. It takes place deep in a rocky desert, and the players are led there by their guide, Farid. He has a lot of theories and stories about the Well, some of which are true, and some of which are false. The rumors are well done and it was fun reading them to the players as they peppered Farid with questions.

The other thing the party has to help them are the Tablets of Fate; big clay tablets with pictures drawn on them that hint at dangers and solutions within the Well. I drew them out using the pictures in the scenario book, and it was great listening to the players try to figure out what the hell they meant.

Maps in the booklet are great; I only wish they were darker, or printed on lighter paper. My reason for that is that I generally trace over the maps as players progress, because my freehand drawing skill is worse than a child's. In this case, it was tough to see the maps through the paper, but that's certainly not a big deal.

Having said that, the paper that the adventure is printed on is beautiful and easy on the eyes. There was some unfortunate transfer of ink on some of the pages, but that may have just been my copy.*

The adventure is pretty deadly.  I really enjoyed that it was so different from what the players had come to expect from me that they were surprised on several occasions--despite their always-on SuperCaution(tm).  Characters fell in pits, were attacked by clouds of bats, and were fried in a group at one point. I will say that their caution saved them on several occasions from nasty traps or surprise by creatures.

The players enjoyed themselves, and I enjoyed running the Well of Souls. The one thing I would change is the the door at Area 7. Page 14 explains how it connects to Area 6, but it took me several readings to understand that they connect, creating a loop.

The Well of Souls was the last game of DCC we played for the summer. I hope to get the game running again, and maybe find out what the funnel survivors decide to do in the hot, dry south of my game world. Ideally, I would like to continue with Stormlord's "Treasure Vaults of Zadabad," which is coming out in November. Excellent timing, really...

*I was provided a copy of the Well of Souls for purposes of review by Stormlord Publishing.

The Well of Souls

Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures

My normal game of Dungeon Crawl Classics fell through because one player had Adult Real Life Stuff come up. I still had 2 of my regular players as well as the teenage son of our host interested in a game, so I decided to run Beyond the Wall.

I chose Beyond the Wall for a few different reasons. The tone of the game is more appropriate for a younger player than DCC is, character creation is fun, and the base mechanics are familiar to anyone who's played Basic Dungeons and Dragons.

Character creation in this game is a group activity. You pick a character playbook and roll your way through your childhood and early teens: some of the rolls you make will affect other characters in the party, and others will connect your character to Non-Player Characters in your village.

Normally, the players would also be involved in mapping out the home-village itself, but in this case I used a map drawn by Sarah Richardson and assigned homes and locations to the players and NPCs. The map looked great, in stark contrast to the later scribbles I made to show areas outside the village.

The game is designed to start with a bang, so the characters found themselves in the woods outside of town fighting a mutated, diseased bear. They took it down, grabbed an ear as proof, and were heading back into the village when they ran into a couple goblins on the path. About the same time they saw an orange glow and smelled smoke coming from the direction of the village.

Look at the teeth on that guy.

Quickly dispatching the goblins with a combination of archery and magic, the party ran home. They arrived to find the Bountiful Banshee Inn on fire and a group of armed citizens around the home of a retired mercenary soldier. The Sheriff informed them that goblins had set fire to the inn and barricaded themselves in the house. Bashing in the door, the players were hit by goblin arrows but quickly overcame their foes, with most of the damage to the characters from friendly fire.

The goblins had tunneled up from underneath the house, collapsing the tunnel on their way back and leaving a few of their number stranded topside.

Tunneling goblins speak with a pirate accent.

The players went on to save the village from a plague that the Hobgoblin Chief had inflicted through the use of hex bags, fleece an unsuspecting carriage on the King's Road, kill a great many more goblins using fire, magic, bows and swords, and ultimately come face to face with the head Hobgoblin and his Orc lieutenants in a dark, goblin-modified mine. All in all, it was fun and epic.

Hobgoblin chieftain, uninterested in parlay.

Some observations:

A) Bows were deadly, both to the enemy and to other characters when shots fired into melee missed their target.

B) Magic was very effective. The Elf-Ranger used Entanglement on three occasions, and it wrought havoc every time.

C) The static initiative worked great.

D) It was fun having one character that was neutral-capitalist and pushed for rewards and bounties, while looking for opportunities to rob the rich. And the poor. And the middle class.


So what would I do differently, the next time I run the game?

1) Better time management on my part. I was supposed to be rolling on the random charts for the adventure I had chosen while the players were making their characters, but I really wanted to be a part of that experience. Next time, I'll roll up the scenario ahead of time.

2) More maps. Good maps add to the fun and beauty of the game, while my child-like scribbles detract.

3) Have the To-Hit, Saving Throw, and Skill Check roll types memorized. I kept forgetting which were supposed to be high, and which was low. Because Mad-Cow. Embarrassing and wastes time.

4) Make a reference sheet. The rules are a breeze to read, but in the game I found myself paging back and forth and flipping between documents a lot. There's no reason for that, when I can put all the important stuff on a page or two and have it in front of me.

I recommend this game and hope I get a chance to play it again soon.

Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures

The Town of Cracklinborughford and Drinking With Style

I struggle with the creation of small villages and towns; I don't want them to be generic, but it's tough to make them memorable and realistic. So I decided to give Logan Knight's process a try:

Logan's Interactive Village Creation Process

He based it on Zzarchov Kowalski's Scenic Dunnsmouth, but addressed what he felt was a lack of inter-NPC relationships.

Following the instructions, I generated this map of the town. The arrows indicate houses that have relationships, good or bad, with certain other houses:

The Village of Cracklinborughford, which I thought sounded peppy and industrious.

This is how the village breaks down, by house group number.
6's:  Have a surprisingly large assortment of goods to trade or sell.
5's:  Dress like demons and prance around burning pyres when the moon is full!
4:    Fervent devotee of a known religion.
3's:  Organic body-horror replacements from a fallen star in the hills. They smell of thyme and their flesh is all-too-pliable!
2s:  Members of the same bloodline AND ALSO--are In Charge Around Here. They rule through a council with a representative from each of the Number 2 houses.

The Most Interesting Feature of the town is a monolith of carven white soapstone in the center of town. The village is arranged to form rough curving lines radiating out from the monolith. Most of the townspeople seem entirely unaware of this pattern, but once you mention it to them will descend into obsession over it, eventually seeking to unlock the monolith and what lies beneath.

Other Features of Interest include a mystically placed pattern of stones and a hanging tree. Apparently they don't take kindly to law breakers in Cracklinborughford.

Now that working map is fine, but you can't use that in a game--your players would flip the table in disgust. So here's what the village really looks like; many thanks to Sarah Richardson for reaching into my mind and creating this awesome map:

Here's who's actually in those houses, and how they relate to each other:
6A:  a widower who is firm friends with 3D.
6B:  a bachelorette with political connections to 6A.
5A:  five friends and lovers. They do business with 3D.
5B:  a couple and their five kids. They have vast respect for 3A.
5C:  a bachelor with political connections to 5E.
5D:  a couple and their child. They owe a debt to 5A.
5E:  a woman and her three kids. They have an irrational dislike for 3B.
4A:  a bachelor who knows varied secrets about 6B.
3A:  an extended family with distrust for 2A.
3B:  a widow who frequently mocks 2B.
3C:  a cleric, single parent of 4 kids. Blackmailing 3A.
3D:  an extended family with a long family history connecting them to 6B.
2A:  five associates involved in betraying 2B.
2B:  2 friends and lovers; they have a rivalry with 5A.
2C:  a couple and their three kids. They harbor a terrible suspicion about the widower in house 6A.

While I was looking around Logan's excellent blog I found his recipes for tea-infused liquor and his suggestion to make your own labels for the concoctions you make.  So I made earl gray infused Bombay gin one night, jasmine tea infused Absolut vodka after that (the "Princess Jasmine"), and chai infused Belvedere vodka last. They were all good, but the chai-vodka was excellent!

I can't draw, but I found this drawing on the internet, printed it, cut it out and taped it to an old bottle of Viking's Blood mead using double-sided tape. I pretty much feel like a master mixologist who is super crafty now.

I'm crafty! So crafty!

On Lampreys

I haven't actually said much about lampreys on this blog, despite claiming that it was partially a blog about them. So today I'm going to fix that.

Here is a drawing of the hideous things, by the extremely talented artist Don Kenn:

These things infest Lake Michigan.

And here is a newspaper story from 2012 that will strike fear and desperation into your heart.

A Shortcut Dank and Dark

Matt Jackson posted a cool little map on Google+ and suggested we have some fun stocking it. I enjoy fun, so I gave it a shot.

This is an adventure for Dungeon Crawl Classics, but it's easily transferred to other systems. You can download the pdf here.

A Shortcut Dank and Dark

A short cave adventure for Dungeon Crawl Classics

Written by Brian Wille
Map by Matt Jackson

Overview:  A Haunt of Hobgoblins and Orcs live here! They are at home when the party arrives, and they are not used to visitors. They react depending on their mood, how much blood they have shed recently and the attitude of the intruders. They are generally ready for battle, but are also unobservant and disorganized.


Creatures, Monsters, and Map:
Many thanks to Rafael Chandler for the Shadhavar in the Lusus Naturae preview, and to John Carr for the Night Children Hobgoblins and Orcs.
Map by Matt Jackson 2014

Miniatures Skirmish Rules Sci-fi & Fantasy

After years of reading miniatures rules and trying to play them, only to find that the rules were too fiddly or vague and the games too long, I finally discovered it didn't have to be that way. Miniatures games could be fun and fast, and played with any miniatures of the same scale that I had handy.

I was briefly part of a miniatures wargame club and greatly enjoyed the people and the games. But I never did learn how to paint figures very well, and eventually the games were held in homes instead of game stores. Distant homes, and often with cats (allergic) so attending was no longer an option.

Luckily, the club keeps a fantastic blog with great pictures of their work and battles, so my experiences are not lost like tears in the rain, and you can see what I'm talking about.

http://chicagoskirmish.blogspot.com/

Here is a recent entry, a playtest of a new supplement for Song of Blades and Heroes called Song of Hammer and Forge. It introduces new rules for dwarves, flintlocks and cannons. Which frankly are three of my favorite things.

http://chicagoskirmish.blogspot.com/2014/07/playtesting-song-of-hammer-forge.html

As a kid I played hellishly complicated miniatures wargames like Tractics or Engage and Destroy. I tried Chainmail a few times but there were holes and contradictions in the rules. The only Warhammer miniatures I ever played were demos at Games Workshop stores, and my dreams of playing Mordheim never materialized. Battlelore  is fun but set-up and take-down are lengthy.

When the guys at the club told me I could bring my old Grenadier miniatures or HeroQuest figures, my Ral Partha creatures or Warhammer troops, I was excited. They showed me how to stat them up, explained the easy and fun rules, and the games began. We could get two games finished in one night, easy. We used terrain from the stores at first, but the guys in the club are genius and soon had their own terrain created and painted.

The best of the sci-fi miniatures rule sets that I tried.

I was lucky enough to play a few other rulesets with them, a couple sci-fi battles on distant colony worlds (Tomorrow's War and 5150 Star Army) and a fantastic post-apocalyptic game (Wastelands). There was also an epic Halloween zombie battle with multi-story buildings and vehicles, using customized All Things Zombie rules.

A great pic from Chicago Skirmish blog. Killing zombies on Halloween.

Some day I hope to get some use out of all my old 40k figures (a game I played three times) using the rules to In the Emperor's Name: https://thegamesshed.wordpress.com/2011/07/02/in-the-emperors-name/

If you're at all interested in enjoying a fast miniatures game with a maximum of fun, I strongly suggest the Song of Blades and Heroes series and Wastelands. Put those old figures to use!

http://www.ganeshagames.net/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=Song+blades+and+heroes&x=0&y=0

Rat Queens Dungeon World

Dungeon World was the game of choice at the most recent Monday Night Game Lab, and it was the first time playing it for everyone involved. We'd all played Monster of the Week though, and three of us had played Apocalypse World, so none of us were strangers to the basic mechanics.

The key differences were the types of Basic and Special Moves, the magic system, and the use of hit points. I think we solidly understood everything by the half-way point of the game, except for the concept of Bonds. Normally, you establish Bonds when you create your character: how are they connected, bonded, to the rest of the characters?  In this case we were using pre-generated characters and they had been filled in for us.

On a few occasions we felt the rules were implying an actual modification to the die roll based on Bonds, but we could not find what that would be. Bonds are actually quite important; in addition to helping you decide how you would act in a situation, and how your character would interact with another, there IS a die mechanic involved:  "When a move has you roll+bonds, you’ll count the number of bonds you have with the character in question and add that to the roll."

Dungeon World is a very fun, fast and enjoyable system. If I was going to introduce someone to role-playing games for the first time, this is the system that I would use if we were playing in a fantasy setting.

For more information on Dungeon World:
http://www.dungeon-world.com/

We were Rat Queens in the game we played. Rat Queens is a fantastic comic about a company of adventuring women. They are rowdy, sarcastic, hard-partying and violent. They are sexy and they are hilarious. If you don't know the Rat Queens, you should check them out immediately!
https://imagecomics.com/comics/series/rat-queens

[Major Spoilers if you are playing this at 2014 Nexus Game Fair]
The Rat Queens were in trouble for leading an angry murder of goblins into the city of Palisade while fleeing.  Sawyer Silver of the City Watch offered them a chance to get out of prison by finding and rescuing the missing children of a small farm community. Saying No meant staying in prison, so...

The girls had to leave immediately, or right after they took a bath, because they reeked of goblin and it was making people ill.

Upon arriving to the village one woman remarked, "This is who's going to save our children? They look more like prostitutes than heroes!" That set the tone for their helpfulness.

Dee was able to commune with the dead, getting details on the last time something like this happened from Edna Smith, the dead grandmother of the village headman. The dead are sometimes more useful than the living.

Striking out towards the low hills, Betty got them a little lost and soon they had to make camp. After getting a fire built and eating some rations, Betty broke out her bag of magic mushrooms and indulged. 

Violet and Dee decided that would be fun too and also dipped into Betty's little bag. Soon Hannah was the only one with her wits about her, and keeping watch. Halfway through the night she heard whispers and sensed she was being watched. Getting Betty's attention she told her they had company and to quietly tell the others. Betty thought she was being quiet but had no sense of her own volume, using a loud stage whisper to say "Grab your stuff girls we got company!"

Battle ensued. Hannah cast Light on a rock and threw it over to where she heard the noises, illuminating several humanoid shapes dressed like ninjas. Dee raised a Zombie Servant from the very ground!

Similar dress, but in tatters, filthy, and more flesh hanging on the bones.

Violet went to chase a fleeing assailant but went off-course and ended up throwing her shield, to no avail. Betty stabbed one of them in the back. Hannah clobbered one with her staff. Soon the Rat Queens had a prisoner, whom they began to question.

The assailants were Underelfs, who had been kidnapping children. Eventually they give details about where the kids were being held, and why--the Elf Queen was going to sacrifice them in a hideous magic ritual that would destroy the surface of the world.

The Rat Queens found the entrance and Dee used Dispel Magic to destroy the magic barrier. Walking in they ran into an annoying, smelly little albino goblin. They eventually decided to walk in the direction opposite of "where heroes go" (as the goblin said) and take his chamber pot, making it into a helm for Happy the Zombie Servant, as Dee had named him. Dee cast Light on the chamber pot and embedded Hannah's Light Rock into Happy's chest, a la' Iron Man. The girls sent him forward to light the way and scare the hell out of Underelfs.

They ran into several guards, some with very well-defined pectoral muscles and the open shirts to prove it. They killed or ran them all off.  Happy the Zombie Servant got the chance to eat Elf brains, and moaned for more. A fancy if dirty cape was found, and affixed to Happy the Zombie Servant. With the chamber pot on his head, he looked a lot like Mysterio.

They found a room with an altar, and Violet discovered it was hollow! Opening it revealed a trove of diamonds. Dee left a note on the altar for the Elf Queen: "Thanks for the diamonds." Dee also took the time to draw a happy face on Happy's brightly-illuminating chamber pot.

Hannah cast a spell that allowed her to see a tiny purple pony with wings when she closed her eyes, and that led the way to where the children were. Unfortunately it didn't care about walls, so Violet and Betty spent some quality time knocking through a stone wall to reach the children. Probably there was an easier way.

Kind of like this I guess. Never imagined such an image would be on my blog.

The kids were scared out of their minds by Happy the Zombie Servant but Dee calmed them down and Betty gave them candy. Just regular candy. Everyone trooped out the way they came, but there were a bunch of angry Underelfs waiting for them in the altar room, including the super-creepy necromantic Elf Queen. She demanded the children, Violet told her they peed on the altar, and battle was joined.

Like this, but against Underelves

The kids saw a chance to run out the front and took it. The Rat Queens covered their escape until the Elves were worried more about protecting their Queen, and the girls followed the kids--only to find that the annoying albino goblin was preventing their escape. Betty launched a dagger at him and hits him in the eye! He fell down dead and everyone escaped, with the kids and the diamonds.

The Rat Queens deserved an epic fiesta after that, I'm sure...