The Zoz Koans (anonymous)

Dungeon Master Foo instructed his students:

“There is a line of dharma teaching which emphasizes the flexibility of the Old Ways. The referee must be prepared to improvise, as when a random encounter indicates orcs, and the referee then has to decide what the orcs are doing and what their goals are when the party encounters them.

“But there is another line of dharma teaching, exemplified by the Guide of the Great Patriarch Gygax, which emphasizes the thorough creation of a milieu before play can begin, and various sutras on the preparation of dungeon levels, wilderness hexes, and the keeping of strict time records.

“Now, tell me: which teaching has the old-school nature?”

After a silence, Nubi observed:

“Dungeon Master, these teachings may conflict.

“Improvisation is necessary, but it seems a necessary evil, for if the referee simply makes everything up on-the-fly, the milieu will lack cohesion, and verisimilitude will suffer. Furthermore, there is nothing to stop the referee from using on-the-fly decisions to railroad the player characters. Surely, these are not the Old Ways?”

Dungeon Master Foo nodded in agreement.

“On the other hand, it is well known that creating an entire fantasy world is both tedious and impractical, and many a referee has succumbed to burnout, or wasted years on worldbuilding pointless and uninteresting details. Surely, these are not the Old Ways?”

Dungeon Master Foo nodded in agreement.

“What, then, is the proper dharma path?” asked Nubi.

The Dungeon Master spoke: “When the eagle flies, does it forget that its feet have touched the ground? When the tiger lands upon its prey, does it forget its moment in the air? Begin with just three hexes of wilderness, one town, and one dungeon!”

On hearing this, Nubi was enlightened. 

Read the rest in Playless Play: THE ZOZ KOANS OF DUNGEON MASTER FOO. 

[illustration] World of Guweiz

Official Soundtrack of the post:

This post is dedicated to the artist called Guweiz who did all this drawings. One of his recurring themes is this samurai girls, under a seemingly endless rain. Doing who knows what, at what seems to be the outskirts of a flooded modern city. Some part inside me remembers waking up early in autumn mornings, to walk the way up to high school on days like that. And that specific kind of magic. Lots of grunge.

This one above summarizes the essence of the ¿setting? perfectly for me. It's title is Countryside. Notice how there is a constant presence of that warm lights around the girls. Sometimes its pendants, sometimes butterflies. Sometimes lamps. As if that light hold a great importance to their survival or the missions ahead. Maybe that is why our girl came to the countryside now; to gather a little light for the road ahead.

There is something that speaks to me in this world. What kind of plot or setting would it had if it was an RPG? would this girls be the PCs or the Monsters? what do you do in a world like that? Is it a normal autumn in our world, or is it another one, smaller, where the autumn never leaves? Where you put a lamp on your door to keep your home safe from whatever is lurking there? 

Notice the giant oni armor at the background. Did she just beat him? is he pledging service? or just a dead cask that happens to be there? Whats going on in this city?

Is it all in the end a metaphor for teenage life? Why so many girls? And how do they get their XP? If you have any ideas of what this setting could be about, please tell me.

BlueLite: A debugged Holmes 1977 D&D (pdf in english and spanish)

I just bring this here to not lose track of this gem. Its made by this guy, and its a revised, clarified and reformatted version of the blue book, which also features:

* All rolls being made with a d20 (thief skills, common skills, etc have their numbers adapted to the same die)

* Bugs fixed and small improvements (2 handed weapons attack every turn as normal, Strength is added to melee damage, etc. See end notes in the PDF for more details)

* Magic items and potions are now created randomly

* Only 10 pages long, which makes it easy to use, and also being streamlined makes it easier to modify should you want to. Personally I would have used one or two extra pages for describing the monster's aspect and behavior

* Awful art, just like the original

Author's link:

Bluelite-RPG-by-Troy-Press-4.pdf (troypress.com)

Traduccion al español:

BLUELITE_Español_V0.1.pdf - Google Drive

Frontier lands as a Megadungeon (Dark Tower inspired)

So I was trying to make something playable about the Dark Tower. But instead of just using the setting, I want to just get the inspiring bits. I don't want to feel constrained by book characters or be a huge nerd about the lore details (because I know myself, and if I go down that way, I will become so obsessed with sticking with canon that I will get stuck in the research phase)

And what the hell, deep down I want freedom. Freedom to create, make and discard. There is something about me and the mystic western imagery that asks me to have a room to put the things that I might come up with.

For now, the Appendix N that I am working with is: 

The Dark Tower series (IV and VIII mostly, as they are the ones that deal most with the youth of Roland and take place on the Mid-World)

Into the West TV 2005 show (Greatly reccomended, never heard of it until recently even if it was produced by Steven Spielberg. I love how it shows the dynamics between indians and whites without plainly ignoring or glorifying any side. It might not be "really what happened" but it is consistent enough that works for me.

Final Fantasy 8 (If you think about it, the plot is easilly portable: A school state that trains young kids to kill, then sends them out in missions as "mercenaries?" "paladins?" "witch hunters?". Also the anachronistic world suits partly into the vision that I have for this setting)

This blog entry that got me thinking on "how would a Middle Earth equivalent that is based on the american frontier instead of middle ages Europe look"

The premise is that the PCs are young gunslingers (which are a sort of equivalent to knights) that have some missions given by their elders, and must eventually go on a quest for the Dark Tower (or the setting equivalent, though we could probably use it without copyright issues as it comes from the Robert Browning poem)

Then I started to look into quest-based games to see how they worked (Pendragon, PBTA, etc). But since I got enamored with the OSR sandbox style, where PCs decide their path and gain XP for tangible shit (gold by default) games where the GM gives the players a quest through the voice of an NPC dont work much for me. I just dont know how to do it anymore. 

My idea is to run the whole game as an overworld megadungeon: Lets explain.

Gilead, on the left side of the map, is the starting town. To the west of it, the wilderness works as a Level 1 dungeon floor (with LVL 1 adequate monsters and that). On it, you can find one or more passages to get into new lands, that work as a dungeon level 2. And such until you get to level 10 where the Dark Tower in its field of roses is supposed to lay. This works as an invisible wall: theoretically there are no walls that prevent you to pick up a horse and riding towards it, but you will have to find your way into 9 "dungeon levels" that will trigger crazy monster encounters unless you have leveled up yourself.

Certain pathways might make you "skip levels", so, for example, you can go from the lands of level 2 to the lands of level 6. But an scalated progression from 1 to 10 is always possible if you search for it.

This might remind you a little about the "West Marches" thing, but it differs in something crucial: The lands you cross are significantly bigger. The West Marches supports itself on the premise that all sessions begin and end in the base. In here, once you delve beyond level 2, you are not supposed to sleep home anymore. Reaching out into the wilderlands is a matter that might take years.

Of course, you might find other towns in the wilderlands. But the more you go west, the less chance for them to be "civilized", and the more for them to be weird. That if they are not a bunch of ruined stones by the time you get there. It is not easy to stand long in a level 5 belt. Of course, you can rest assured that those who do are powerful warriors, have adapted somehow or are doomed to perish.

Just a reminder to put battle horns on the inventory list

As I don't want to bother in creating a world in detail (neither would do it with a megadungeon) I will try to rely on random generators. Lets say that when you find a settlement, roll 2d6 + the dungeon level

3-6 - Small outpost (Farm or the like)

7-8 - Small Town

9 - Bigger Town or City

10- Fortress

11 -Nomad tribes

12- Small outpost (abandoned)

13- Small town (abandoned)

14 - Big town (abandoned)

15 - Fortress (abandoned)

16-17 - Nomad tribes (weird)

18-19 - Small outpost (weird)

20-21 - Small town (weird)

22 - You reach the Dark Tower

Basically the further you get from Gilead, like it is the bastion of civilization that allows other towns to flourish, the rarer the conventional towns are. Instead you go getting more and more indian tribes, fortresses that can withstand the hazards or failed attempts of colonization.

This is an over simplification, but more or less what I have in mind. Actual geography like mountains, rivers, sea lines, roads, etc overlaps with this "danger" map.

Over this base, I leave some thoughts:

* All of this starts counting to the West of Gilead. But on the other directions there might be other lands differently incremented in level (so they are, in a way, locked; until the PCs level up a little). The city being the home of a true knightly force is the reason that it can stand being confronted with high level lands. Still, the only level 10 land ever is the one in the west, where the tower lies.

* The level might spike suddently by entering a dungeon or a cave

* The idea of having towns set on the level 4 wilderness pairs nicely with the feeling that frontier towns must have felt like, back in the 1820s

* Once again (and this is a problem I stumble upon many times) XP for gold makes no sense if the PCs are from a knightly or elevated condition, with interests beyond the material. At least if the only XP comes from gold. XP must come at least from three sources: treasure (including outlaw bounties), monsters and (yes, I know what I said) quests. But I got some ideas to automatize the latter by derivating them from the "lawful" or "friendly" monsters in the "bestiary". 

* I love technological anachronisms. I found out that one can advance technology very hard without breaking the fantasy feeling as long as you leave out mass production (Gilead being a monarchy should be able to stop untamed capitalism), roads and cars and, to a degree, TV. A land that is not practicable to pave or to build cable lines for much time (because there are constant earthquakes, monsters or other disturbs) gets rid of the latter two, and, by taking away trade, slows the first one considerably. Still, you can have a small amount of autogenerated electricity (windmills, etc) and power up small devices as fridges, music devices, battery powered tools, radios (I love the idea of a radio station transmitting across dangerous wastelands)... etc. On the other hand, I love the trope in which electrical devices are more prone to being tricked against you by evil sorcerers.

* That being said, technology is set around the 1840s, with the advenment of the Colt Dragoons. Gilead aesthetic and customs are set on the arthurian era, with a foot on the medieval retellings and the other deep down on the primitive celtic myths.

* The world is divided on "baronies" or "states", some of which have big cities as capitals and some of which are in safer zones than others. At some point, the frontiers are blurred and the territories are unclaimed. Trains only go to level 3 zones, and are dangerous to drive beyond that. The most extended way of transport is by horse.

* Alternativelly, a map in the style of Out Run in which each level bifurcates into two, which later might converge, can also work.

*The whole bulk of the game is the bestiary. That is where the color comes from. Depending on what to choose as encounters, the game will feel more medieval fantasy or more "real life west", with my ideal point somewhere in the middle. Dragons, elves and dwarves as we know them are 100% off this project (I see many people talking about pinneaple on pizza, but little thought is paid to those who mix dragons and revolvers). I'm not doing goblins with guns either, and no different races are to be playable. Curating a good bestiary is the key to get the feeling straight. This takes me to the next point.

* In normal D&D, you hit monsters with swords until they come down. And it is ok, it makes sense somehow, because of myths, tradition or internal archetypes. But firearms are different. Firearms are not suited to kill monsters but men. Sometimes men with other firearms. This is just one of the reasons that makes fighting and monsters different in classic fantasy than in western clichés. It is ok to have monsters with great hp that will go down in a few shots. Most high level humans are to be like this. But it is kind of anticlimatic to shoot down fantasy monsters to death. Thats why I'm thinking that beyond human, undead, really big animals (its tricky to draw a line on where a big animal stops being an animal and starts classifying as monster: lets think about the Graboids) or demonic versions of those (Like in the White Buffalo, or Mononoke Hime) many monsters are not to be of the kind that can be "just shot"; but rather to be avoided, dodged by pure horse speed or dealt in other ways (and maybe shot once they are weakened or unmasked). From the top of my head I'm thinking on:

- Enormous sand hands that form on specific parts of the desert and grab/swallow people into the ground (See Stephen King "the beach" short story)

- Wraiths. I just love using them.

- Psychic leeches of any kind

- Colossus of the Shadow of the Colossus type

- Monsters that can pass as friends or manipulate the PCs' acts.

- Any of the entries at the Goblin Punch's Book of Tigers suits a setting like this better than common fantasy bruisers.

- Same can be said about Lovecraft-type monsters in general. 

- Non-monster threats such as thinnies or starkblasts (Dark Tower), earthquakes, tornados, stampedes, plagues, etc. 

- Its OK to have a gunfighting vs missile wand confrontation with a sorcerer, if previously you have succesfully defeated some number of his magical tricks.

* Some staples that are very useful in this genre are magically enhanced bandits, really clever tacticians, former gunslingers turned evil, indian tribes who are wary of strangers, cultists of forgotten gods and any equivalent of John Farson's rebellion, all of them normal humans (except when they are not, of course)

* PCs game loop usually ends at Gilead, though if they can find other rest/supply settlements, they can also use them for the services they have. Maybe some specific resources (like revolvers, for example) can only be found consistently on that base city. But thats OK. There is one last trick that you can play at some time, which is to stage the downfall of Gilead at a certain point of the PCs life. Be sure to make it so a part of it is played by NPCs and monsters (Doppelgangers? Evil Wizards?) that the PCs have previously met. That will make it personal. 

* If you've read Wizard and Glass, you might remember that all factions relied on things like the wind direction, the height of the grass or wether or not it would rain (remember when Cuthbert and Alain dug the powder ditch to blow up Citgo?). If you are sneaking somebody and you are both riding a horse, there is a chance that the horses will say hi to each other and give your position away.

I think its important to use all that. I want players to wait until the moon is full to attack a given enemy, because it allows them to see them from a greater distance. I don't know how to implement it beyond learning all those tips by heart myself and using them, but I find it worth it.

I want to also encourage them to search and use real life survival tips, with rolling only required if it has a chance to fail. In that sense, your player's knowledge is your character's knowledge. Unless the GM says otherwise, if you describe what you do and it makes sense, you have at least a chance that it succeeds.

* On the hp/gun damage scalation as a problem in high levels (or when a gun does d8 damage but a level 6 character has 6d6 hp). To keep the gunfighting a constant threat, characters should stay at relativelly small HP levels. A high level character having 18 HP seems like a sensible maximum. This goes more in line with the original Into The Odd rules. I already did something with it on the Trigun adaptation and might be useful to do it here (though I must add that, even though Trigun might share many things with the Dark Tower, it doesnt really vibe in the same world/themes or whatever, at least for me. Trigun is biopunk, here we lean more on good old magic)

* Horses, horses, horses. When I said I want to rule this as a megadungeon instead of a hexmap, I mean it. Each "area" is mapped as a series of interconnected "rooms", even if intangible. Each ·"room" is randomly generated (lair, treasure, settlement, empty, crossroads, path blocked, etc) and the rules for movement mirror those used in dungeons, but the movement used is instead: Horse (Sprint), Horse (March) and Walk. This makes each exploration turn takes more in-game time, so things that depend on time, like healing, take more time. And that feels nice. I should also be learning more things about horses, because I'm a city guy. I think that horse tending and behavior is a largelly ignored aspect in both fantasy and western settings; as well as horses themselves. Which is weird because their imagery is so powerful that a almost any character on a horse looks automatically like an adventurer.

The Dark Tower: A Rant

This post is about the Dark Tower books by Stephen King. Probably won't make much sense if you haven't read them before. 

I read the saga somewhere around the change of century, when only four of the seven books were written. I was really on fire with that shit, like fucking mad. I remember reading this old web for theories (god, I found it! so many memories!) on the old age of internet, and thinking about the tower all day at home, high school...

I eventually read the last three and I didn't like them much. Not just the ending, but the whole three novels feel much different than the rest, and I think most readers might agree with me. I will try to explain what I feel by saying this: While the first four feel (as Stephen King says they were) channelled more than written, as if a voice related to the tower itself was telling him when and what to write, at intervals, during thirty years; the last three feel like written analitically and in a rush, trying to make sense of what he had been writing "in a trance" up to that day. There are many other things that can be blamed for this, I guess (Self inserting as a character, devaluating Roland's world by inserting a Keystone World set in our era, trying to build a Stephen King expanded universe, lots of epic build-ups wasted like Flagg, Crimson King, Patrick Danville, Eyes of the Dragon crossover, etc) but I think the reason I cited is the most overlooked, and maybe the reason for all the rest. 

In a way, I feel that the setting became sort of "spoiled" and that the only way to enjoy them is to "forget" the newer books, as if they didn't exist. Sometimes I think about how cool it would be, after I saw the entries about "1937 hobbit as a setting" and the "What if Star Wars episode IV was the only Star Wars movie", and I go even deeper: What would happen if only Roland's youth scenes were the story?

And by this, I mean all the collected flashbacks: Cuthbert and Roland at the hanging of Hax the Cook, the manhood test with Cort, the whole Mejis arc, the whole Wind through the Keyhole (alongside the fairytale on it!) and the spare comments of Roland all across the books: "I once saw a man called Flagg turning a man into a dog". Cutting down all the obvious ties with the real world and New York, and focusing on the ripe lore of the Mid-World. I think it would almost stand on its own as a good story: it has enough foreshadowing for the readers to picture the fall of Gilead and the final confrontation at the Dark Tower, without the needing of showing beyond that or more detailed narration. I only need to know things like that Roland and Cuthbert shot Alain by mistake at the battle of Jericho, and that something happened around the horn of Eld, whatever. Someday the Gunslinger will head to the tower, and thats all; everything ends after the Wind Through The Keyhole confrontation with the skinchanger, and Gabrielle's Deschain revelation. Sort of a weird sudden ending like the one the very Stephen King already did in Colorado Kid, but it works in my mind.

But this is a blog about RPGs! I should focus this imaginings to more practical purposes: How would The Dark Tower, Flashbacks Only work as a gamist setting? Well, at first glance, much better than the original one:

You got the epic struggle between the barony of order, descendant from Arthur of Eld, and in ultimate stance some sort of paladins of the White, versus the forces of chaos, incarnated on the more tangible threat of John Farson's rebellion, the deceptions and schemes of the evil sorcerer called Marten/The Covenant Man, and then, behind them, the Crimson King whom all of them seem to serve in some way. The Dark Tower's nature is not really ever explained (I guess that thinking about it is GM's job), but the journey towards it is a great gaming quest. The PCs are, of course, Gunslingers, either formed or in training; with duties and powers similar to Jedis with guns; but with status more akin to medieval knights. I'd like to make an entry soon detailing ideas for a setting inspired by this. But I realized that doing that would require from myself to explain possible readers and even maybe myself certain things, and that this rant would require certainly more than a paragraph: hence this whole entry.

To close this, I'd like to unfold an idea I'm holding this days. When I was reminded of the Tower this last time, I felt the urge of reading the fourth book: Wizard and Glass, that I had not read in a long time, maybe almost 20 years (I remember reading that book while on detention class at high school!). Reading it now, with my (adult? father's?) current eyes, I felt some heavy themes underlying on the book; maybe even the central core of it. I won't argument much as I don't want to persuade anyone, just state them the best I can:

The first one is the relationship of Roland and his parents. Their mutual treason and conflict represents in a minor scale the breakup of civilization that would come in the Mid-World. The chaos forces who tainted Gabrielle do the same into the world's bastion, Gilead, of which Steven Deschain is a personification. The impact on the mid-world is devastating, just as the treason was in Roland's heart. Both happenings are an allegory of each other, and lead to each other. The initial state is never to be repaired, but instead it becomes even harder and harder to even remember correctly as a faded picture. It calls for restoration through a desperate quest, which is once again sent by Roland's father: The Dark Tower was though to be a myth by young gunslingers, and most of the mid-world, but at the end of DT4 Roland points out something like "Our father's know otherwise, as is the secret they keep, I'm sure of it". It is by stepping in the shoes of his idealized father that he attempts to fix a the situation, and it is only by carrying his guns and mimicking his father's determination, overriding to extremes the joyful heart he inherited from his mother (That he could rise above [his divided nature] and willingly embrace the insanity of romance was a gift from his mother. All else in his nature was humorless... -DT4)  that he intends to do it. If anyone of you is familiarized with the tarot, you might picture clearly the Emperor vibes here.

This is more or less how I always pictured Roland's dad. 

I usually disregard descriptions and go along with what my 

subconscious gives me

The second one is the will to explore the world as we watched it when we were kids, as opposed as the one we live in today. Scientists might say its the same planet and everything, but they are just deluding themselves. 

There was a world before, one we put together where everything was at the same time very ancient, older than time itself; and at the same time, very new and with an infinite future bursting out of its thin skin. A world that was infinitelly vast and at the same time very simple to comprehend; in which laws are obvious and natural. With the years, we forget this world and put together a new one; deeming the other one as childish and false. We have formed a new worldview that fits our life better, but, to which degree is it more real than the other? We might argue that we have more life experience, yes, but, while we have lots of what we believe it is world knowledge, we also have a lot of limiting scars, fears and frustrations which (who knows?) maybe they take our eyes out ot the paths, instead of showing us them. And in any case, the former world is equally real in its way, and still calls you to be explored in search of the hidden treasures you left there unchecked. 

This world is represented in the saga at least in a triple way: the way that Eddie, Susannah and Jake perceive the Mid-World (I think it was Jake who thought somewhere in The Waste Lands: "this world is really dangerous, yes, but is much more real"). The way in which Roland remembers Gilead; and the way the world, including the nostalgic/magical New York, is presented to us, readers.

And now that this personal short analysis is done, I will focus the next post on something related but more practical: Ideas for a game/setting that takes the good parts of the Dark Tower; preferably the ones that make it really magical. As opposed that "Oh, its a western ambiented game, we should use a poker deck to randomize it, so cooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool"