The cool parts of Blades in the Dark [review?] and more on Fire Elixir

I could post the logo of the game but I feels this one explains better the mood of the game. This is a mood blog after all.

I respect John Harper a lot as a designer. It's not that I love everything he makes, but I do find that he is among the rare people who knows what he wants to achieve in a game, dares to go beyond certain assumed borders, and aims to make it make sense through all of it. I just read Blades in the Dark because I believed it could help me finishing the other half of this rules. Turned out it was a great idea.

This is going to be a long post. 

You might remember that previously in this blog I divided game rules into two: Core Rules (those that deal with guiding the game pace correcly, creating game loops and generating content) and Resolution Rules (those that arbiter how well the PCs perform); from which the former are the ones that really carry the game and the latter, while they can be good or bad, are lesser in importance.

Well, BITD resolution is nothing new: Some sort of the classic "roll Xd6, highest result determines outcome, partial successes abound", with a freaking amount of Attributes and Skills (called "actions") and Moves. Too much for my taste. 

On the other hand, and this is one of Harper's strengths, the game's Core Rules look very very fine. That alone makes this game very valuable: apart from OSR games, its very hard to find games that have Core Rules at all. And if in D&D those rules are:

You must level up > XP is taken from treasure mostly > there is this dungeon stocking procedures that generate both monsters and treasure, get in the dungeon > level up so you can get into deeper dungeons;

in Blades in the Dark we find another consistent game-driven loop:

make heist/achieve turf  > get (or lose) REPutation > increase band's tier, alongside a lot of debris and side-effects which generate more possible heists, or alternativelly expand your gang into more districts to get rep, resources and powerups. 

I had attempted to do the "Gang Character Sheet" before in my games, as in making a sheet for the gang itself with its own stats and stuff, but never really found a way to use it that made sense. I think that this is also the second big success for this game. Your gang sheet decides which cohorts (NPC armies) you can use and how powerful are they; how likely you are to get hold or produce certain resources, influence or fight other gangs, how many Vice Dens you have and how much Coin they apport, which communal skills does the gang bestow on its members (for example, I liked that a gang of assassins can develop a feat so their members increase their Insight or Prowess beyond human scope, so it explains how to do ninja related stuff, etc)

I think that the game would benefit a lot from cutting off the character creation options (which tend a little towards the "snowflake" PC) in favor of making them faceless pawns with one or two distinctive traits and putting them under the mantle of their gang's benefits (which, starting at Tier 0 would be very small). The bulk of the advancement should go to the gang, while giving the characters little advancement its OK: This is first and foremost good for the game: You are more disposed to put your character in risk if your investments are really more on the gang itself than in the PC. It is also good for the fiction, as the gang life is dangerous and PCs getting plot armor works better on epic types of fiction, but not so much in the noir. 

More things I love: On my homebrews I always like to implement quantum elements: That is: when you leave things undecided in a quantum state, and you decide during the game what has happened in the past. For example, I like that new PC Wizards can decide the spells they learn during the game, so they dont pick void options, and until then its a "nameless level 1 spell". When they choose magic missile, the fiction decides it was always a magic missile, and they keep that spell from now on. Or the (now classic for me) quantum pocket: You have an ability to produce an object that you were always carrying, but you decide it at that very moment. Normally that object must pertain to a family of objects (a doctor can produce a specific medicine, or a commoner can produce anything that can be bought in a small shop). BITD takes this towards the extreme edge, and i LOVE IT:

PCs are thrown into the score, with no preparation beyond their initial approach to the mission. They have a given load number: up from there, they can produce as much items as they want during the heist, but each time they do it, the item is now tracked. But there is more: the flashback mechanism allows you to do your heist preparation completelly in retrospective: Basically when you find some obstacle (let's say you find a guarding dog while sneaking through the garden) you spend some strain (one of the game's economy points) to say how did you prepare against it (maybe you spend a fucking month befriending that dog so it wouldn't attack you?) and if the outcome is uncertain you roll to see how well you did your preparation (on a bad roll, the dog was just pretending to be your friend so he could fuck you up tonight, dude. Who cons the conman?)

Those are, of course, mere simplifications of a more complex ruleset. Too complex for my tastes, actually. The game is an authentic leviathan of 300+ pages in small letter, and to my rules light mind, it could be surely be purged from half of it. Its not about the page count, but I think that it has a lot of layers of metacurrencies running around (reputation, coin, trauma, clocks, strain, tiers, skills, actions, moves, approaches, etc). Really, this might seem like heresy, but as I was reading I was like: "nah, I will ignore strain altogether. Spending strain to flashback? nahh just allow 1 flashback per character and maybe some more if they get a critical or have a relevant skill". But I don't want to say the game is bad for that. It's just part of my personality to modify and simplify according to my taste. I am a practical man. And I love that the game is as it is, because that means I can use it to work out my own version.

Have you heard of this gang of shadows?

To finish up, I'd like to talk a little about the setting. Doskvol is a victorian mix of Venice, London and Prague, where the sun is dim and there are evil ghosts all around. The city is protected from the horrors that lurk outside by a electrical barrier that runs on leviathan oil (leviathans themselves are horrors that must be fished like whales by crazy ppl) and everybody accepts the existance of ghosts around in their everyday life. I'm not sure if I could use a setting like that, I am so fucking bad at victorian stuff. I just don't get the mood. But an obsession is again growing on me: Could this setting be ported into some more familiar to me, like the A-HISTORICAL ROMAN EMPIRE? 

Check further entries.

Lord of the Rings and MERP - Iron Crown Enterprises [review]

Today, in the "whats hot in rpgs today" section of our program, I present you a small review on two games that are 40 and 30 years old respectivelly.

I was reading this blog the other day, and I remembered the days of my highschool in which ICE's Rolemaster and Middle Earth Roleplaying was what the cool guys were playing. Not a trace of D&D back then. I even bought the book eventually, but never managed to actually run it because I was probably busy worrying about lots of other stuff. One of my friends at the time "borrowed it" for a time (20 years and counting). But I achieved to learn the game between classes from the cool guys, and eventually I made my first character: a human bard that I imagined like this: 

I remember that the session featured skeletons, a riddle for crossing a bridge, being thrown in the cell of a coliseum and managing to get out by enchanting the guard with my only spell (some sort of confusion or sleep, can't remember). I was fucking excited with how awesome it had been. 

One thing that the game did very differently than D&D is the nature and importance of critical hits. Basically on combat you rolled your percentile dice, and there was a "VS armor" table telling you how much HP you dealt to your enemy, and wether you scored a big critical, a small critical or none at all. If you did, you rolled on a secondary table that had tiny descriptions in small letters of what happened descriptivelly; depending on the weapon used and the armor they wore. Some of them narrativelly killed your foe instantly (or your character) no matter their remaining HP

For example, rolling a 40 in the crush criticals table (for example by using a mace or falling into a pit) gives you "blow to forearm, +5 hits. If no arm armor, stunned for one round". Rollng a 110 on the slash critical table is "Impaled in heart. Dies instantly. Heart destroyed. 25% chance your weapon is stuck in foe 3 rounds" On retrospective, I think that this tables made combat a lot of fun, helped with the combat narrative and made use of otherwise aesthetic things (suddently, having your character wear arm armor was important, even if for a marginal case)

Magic and Unarmed attacks had their own tables too. When the setting "monk" equivalents got some levels they got to roll in the "big creatures" critical table, which was the one the balrogs used, instead of raising their chance to hit.

shit quality, but you get the idea

Unlike D&D, it is not centered on stealing loot or delving into dungeons, but still uses advancement through XP. Which is very interesting because I'm always trying to run away from XP=Gold for some reason or the other. MERP awards experience in eight ways, some of them worth a thought:

1. HP loss. Every HP you lose translates to 1 XP

2. Criticals. Every critical you deal has a value in XP. The most interesting is that you get double that amount when somebody deals a critical to you. This means that theoretically you and a friend could level up ad infinitum dealing criticals to each other in a dirty alleyway.

3. Kill points. Depending on your level and the monster's level, you get an amount of XP after dealing the killing blow

4. Maneuver points. When you overcome the classic "roll vs a TN" challenge, you get XP depending on the challenge difficulty (picking locks, convincing guards, all that classic shit)

5. Spell points. You get XP = 100 - (10 x Caster level) + (10 x Spell level) when casting in combat.

6. Idea points. Basically give a random amount to somebody who had an idea to overcome something.

7. Travel points. 1 XP for each mile on an unfamiliar area. Half in civilized areas, x2 or x3 in dangerous areas, and divided by 10 if flying or sailing.

8. Miscellaneous. As long as XP is pre-assigned to specific goals, and not used as "I give you XP for that cool thing you did before" it seems to me like an idea that I find underused on the OSR. The book sadly seems to encourage the latter.

To finish my review, I'd like to say that the book works as Race and Class, and now I realize its heavy parallel to D&D (the 6 stats under other names, using levels, saving throws, etc). It has a LOT of subraces, some of them I don't remember at all being in LOTR (Where do the woses appear in the movie? WTF is a dorwinadan?) and has a nice bestiary:

(WTF is a Dumbledor? wasn't he from another franchise altogether?)

Searching for the old MERP manual, I've managed to find their publisher's second attempt at Lord of the Rings rpg, called simply "Lord of the Rings Boardgame", dating from 1991. And of this one I want to talk a little more, because from the design point of view, it feels very tempting to use, to learn from and to modify.

While MERP (1982) is percentile based, ICE's Lotr (1991) is entirelly 2d6 based. It is much more basic than its older counterpart, which can be bad or good sometimes. But from the "design" point of view, there are some points that caught my attention.

There are 12 skills: 

1. Strength

2. Agility (balance and nimbleness, also initiative)

3. Intelligence

4. Movement (Speed, MV per turn)

5. Defense (adds to armor)

6. Melee Bonus

7. Ranged Bonus

8. General (covers climbing, riding, etc)

9. Subterfuge (thief checks. Too many dexterity divisions, or its just me?)

10. Perception (do I see the trap?)

11. Magical (you get 2 spells per bonus, also adds to the casting roll)

12. Endurance (your HP). 

skills from 1 to 11 can be as high as +3, and as low as -2

skills from 6 to 11 are "bought". You get +5 bonus to divide between them, but any skill that is not raised gets a -2 instead. I like that this makes a great gap between casters and non casters, fighters and non-fighters, or sneaky hobbits and clumsy human. I would go even further and make it so the first +1 only applies to a favored weapon, which is more in line with the original books (Legolas=bow, hobbits=slings, for example) but using another of the same type (ranged/melee) only drops you to 0, not to -2

skills from 1 to 5 and Endurance depend entirelly on your "class"

There are nine "race and class" packages that you can choose. They all come in a pregen sheet with weapons, equipment and certain skills raised or lowered. The classes and examples it cites are:

Hobbit Scout (Bilbo, Frodo)

Elf Scout (Legolas)

Human Warrior (Eowyn, Boromir)

Dwarf Warrior (Gimli, Thorin)

Elf Warrior (Glorfindel)

Human Ranger (Aragorn)

Half-Elf Ranger (Elrond)

Human Bard (Gandalf)

Elf Bard (Galadriel, Arwen)

I love how the wizard word is totally out of the question. Wizards in this game are treated as bards. The spell list is kind of short, there are like 20 spells with the classic ones (sleep, fireball, identify shit, etc). Anybody can cast spells providing they raise their "magical" skill, so classes are little more than archetypes that help players to get into the character.

Combat is done in a grid, with movement, attack and half attacks. Depending on the action you take (spells go first) you act in a given order, with same actions acting in order of agility. Attack rolls use a small table modified by offense/defense of those involved, with the high results resulting in straight leaving your opponent unconscious (a natural 12 always does, at least, knock out your opponent) or maybe even killing them. Armor adds to your Defense bonus and substracts from subterfuge, magic and movement.

Too basic when compared with the MERP one, maybe. I see the simplicity of the 2d6 as a great excuse for complicating it using the critical tables of the original one!

Strength doesn't affect combat in anyway, which is plainly stupid in a game that uses it as a factor. Seeing that weapons are differenciated by modifying damage done, but with two handers and  unarmed combat having penalties to hit, I think that a good way to fix this is to have Strenght offset those penalties by a proportional amount. 

The resting 8 of the 28 pages ruleset is dedicated to an oddly specific set of questions. My copy is in spanish, but I found a screenshot that will speak better than my words:

The choice of 14 situations that are thoroughly covered by the rules is very interesting, it says a lot about the challenges that the PCs are supposed to face and about the world they tread on. In which other fantasy game did you see a page dedicated to SNEAKING THROUGH TOWN BY NIGHT?

 None of the books have anything such as "procedural challenge generation" or anything that drives the game forward other than the GM's work, but LOR makes up for it as it was originally printed in a book alongside a module (bigger in pagecount than the actual game), so you could say that the first module was part of the game itself. 

(Skimming through it it seems that it features at least Gandalf and Merry as NPCs, as well as a couple of Stone Trolls)

It is cool to know that if somebody decides to play it after all this years, after lots of iterations and games on the Middle Earth that have been published, s/he can find some help with My_GaMe_FiXeS in this small corner of the blogosphere. Nice coming into spring for everybody. 

Eowen at the doors of Meduseld

A note on clerics and [review] of Tomb of the Serpent Kings

This just came in the mail today! 

I remember watching a person some time ago in OSR forums, sharing this idea of an introductory dungeon: basically a dungeon designed to teach new players into the game, the same way that a tutorial stage eases you into a complex videogame. I loved the idea then and I do now. I now realize that person was surely no other than Skerples; one of the most productive authors of the OSR scene on diverse games or topics (medieval life, glog classes, etc). You can tell he puts lots of love and thought into things, or, at least, that is the impression it gives me. The text bricks in which he designs what was to be his latest, already published book (Magical Industrial Revolution) are a joy to read; surely one of the most original while gameable ideas I've seen for a setting (or have you ever seen magical preapocalyptic based game before?). Haven't read the finished book, though, but possibly will in the future.

I saw the module in the picture at a cheap price and I like to have physical books at home. You never know when you are going to need them! 

The book is 24 pages long, which is enough for a detailed 3 level dungeon and a short bestiary with the monsters who appear in there (special mention to the skeleton jelly, a T-1000 type skeleton which just cannot be destroyed by normal means and must be lured into pits or similar. Very Prince of Persia). Every dungeon room has a description alongside a small note explaining which lesson does the room want to convey. The last two pages are a full map of the dungeon itself.

The art, on the other hand, strikes me as terrible and lazy. I could have understand it if it was personal art made by the book author (as in "I will just doodle something"), but not something I would commission. Honestly I think some functional small doodles over every monster would have been better. Watching more from the artist (Scrap Princess) tells me its her style, and I guess its a matter of opinion, but nonetheless this is mine.

I dont know if I will run this straight yet. Maybe. I have some potential "new players" in my campaign, so it could be a nice way to try it as it was intended to. I must say I have a personal problem with it because I also have a personal self-made low level dungeon which is also snake themed; and I feel that running one would make redundant to run the other. Luckily, the book provides an idea at the very start that could help me:

So, now its the time for my (sort of related) note on clerics:

We dont know much about the OD&D cleric's religion, as there are some details left for the players to fill up themselves, so to suit that dungeon I mention above (which holds some clerical relics) I made up a religion that is snake themed: Snakes are the symbol of their god or goddess. Whichever. The monks are required to sever up their eyelids to imitate the snake's eyes after a certain level (fun fact: snakes have no eyelids), and most of their time they go around blindfold, to prevent eye soreness. This grants them part of their powers (abstractly representing an increase of "true vision" type powers such as know alignment). Also it gives clerics a very distinct outlook.

The fun part is that it kind of suits the classic cleric's spell list; with spells like sticks to snakes, snakecharm and neutralize poison having now a good explanation in-game. It also goes very well paired with growth of animal if you happen to have a sacred snake or speak to animals if you want to befriend one. Snake poison can also play a very interesting part on the commune if you rule it to require a time spent in trance.

For now I have never have a cleric PC to use this rules, only passing NPCs. Who knows? maybe someday.

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

Dagger (a review)

I like to skim through obscure manuals a lot, and I though on making some reviews in order to remember what I like of each thing, and because it might help this people to visibilize their work. This is a review for Dagger, allegedly an OSR game for kids, and I was curious on how it was adapted from common retroclones. And I found a game with the nice simplicity I love in gaming rulesets (Curiously, I feel that kids are conversely capable of learning any kind of complex rules when they want to, if its by their own initiative. It is us, grown ups, who love simple things because we lack the patience and the sense of endless time we had as kids, but what the hell, this is not an entry for deep thoughts!) 

The game is free at drivethru, and the link gives you the revised and the original version. 

The game has no attributes, but uses just classes. Fighters get 2 attacks: that's their combat advantage (all characters start with the 15 hp, which seems like A LOT even for a kid-aimed game. I would stick to class based hp myself) and it makes them get double advantage for +1 swords (which add to damage instead of to hit)

All rolls are done with 2d6, magic and combat, and something I love is that all spells are resumed into four: 

Blast (choose the way it deals damage), 

Heal (all forms of healing, curses, etc) 

Protection (armor, but probably could work to protect against evil, etc) 

and Charm (charm, sleep and somehow manages to include Web).

I find very curious that 1 of the 6 pages is dedicated to combat fumbles, magic fumbles and fumbles in general (It tells a lot about the author's objective with the game XD) 

The most stealable thing I found was the nice way it handles monster Treasure Type: d6+monster HD VS this table:

1-3 no treasure

4-5 coin purse

6-7 sack of treasure

8-9 treasure chest

10+ treasure horde

With each treasure having a specific GP, Gems, Magic Items, etc. honestly I find this system much more attractive at first sight than the classic B/X one.

The monster list is very concise (one line description) and one thing that is inspiring is that surprise is never rolled: it happens if the GM sees it fit. And by this rules, bugbears ALWAYS surprise unless you do something about it.

Advancement increases HP only, all the rest happens diegetically (through items found, etc)

Saving Throws are fixed at 8 but dwarves, elves, etc have bonuses for certain situations. Interestingly enough every monster has their own saving throw rate listed, not based on anything. It is very simple but I like its adjusted with love by the author, not just calculated by their HD size.

This is all about the revised version, but, as the download also gives you the original version, I also read it, and found something cool too: the spell list.

The book states that it is a sample list and that you can use the TSR original, but I like to imagine that this was the "official, complete list" (which ties nicely into the game being that the top level is five). Four spells for level, and having Charm and Hold Monster and no Charm of Hold Person, which means that you have to be really high level to use that game-breaking charm spell. I would try to tie protection from evil into Cure Light Wounds and bless into an optional variation for Light.

This early game version uses d20, evolutionary Saving Throws and Monster to hit matrixes (which I think that were wisely removed in the final cut)

Finally, as a catch all, attempting uncovered risky situations as sneaking, jumping, etc is covered by 1d6 vs a TN fixed in the moment (hell yeah!) fast and fair, and very appropiate seeing that there are no attributes to use for that. That puts the weight on using inventory or alternate approaches to avoid doing that risky roll, or to increase the chances somehow.

It is a little odd, but what I find most lacking in this game is a reaction table (which is trivial to add, anyways), and double being a game for kids wich would benefit a lot in my opinion from monsters being talkative or neutral.