Failure States

A combination of personal and professional circumstances over the past 8 months forced me to put blogging on hiatus back in the Spring, but I continued to game on a regular basis during that time. I hope to get back to posting regularly.

I failed the Dungeon23 challenge. It was purely a matter of time-availability and not a lack of creativity, which is comforting despite the disappointment. My chief problems were the scope of the project I laid out and my inability to keep things simple. As the ideas started to flow, I found myself building so many layers of complexity into the concept that I struggled under the challenge's daily demand, making it difficult to get things done in a timely manner. 

Writing by hand was an obstacle as well, and I became frustrated at not being able to go back and edit in order to fix some of the complexity errors that crept in. Then, having to transcribe the daily hand-written installments into a weekly blog post just added to the load. I thought writing the daily posts by hand would take me back to the days when I filled notebooks with material, but it turned out to be a far-more time-consuming experience that wasn't worth the nostalgia (and cramped fingers).

As my freelance writing projects accelerated in April and other things in my personal life required attention, something had to give. The Dungeon23 challenge and this blog were the obvious "somethings."

Were I to do the challenge again, I would probably just draw some simple maps or adapt a few Dungeon Geomorphs, and then populate them according to stocking guidelines, adding my own personal flavor to the results. That sounds way more achievable than what I ended up doing. I have a ton of great notes, however, so Tunnels Beneath the Earth will live on in a more-manageable and less frustrating way.

I also brought Keep on the Badlands—my weekly 5e Roll20 campaign with my long-time gaming buddies—to a close. This was another major disappointment, as I did a ton of work on the campaign and frankly think it's some of the best material I've ever written in over 40 years of DMing. My players never quite grasped how a true sandbox campaign works and kept looking for me to drop obvious adventure hooks in their path, rather than develop their own ideas for what they wanted to do.

They also rejected the survival mode of the campaign, which was baked into every aspect of the setting. I really think a lot of it was laziness brought on by videogames, where they can just press a button or mouse-over a highlighted feature to "do the thing" necessary to advance. 5e also encourages this kind of behavior in the way that it has removed risk and complexity, and dumbed everything down to idiot-level gameplay.

Sessions would invariably boil down to conversations like (actual exchange)...

Player: "I want to capture that wild horse." (a random encounter)

Me: "Okay, sure...how do you want to go about doing it?"

Player: "I use Animal Handling."

Me: "Yes, but what do you do specifically?"

Player: "I handle the animal." [Clicks "Animal Handling" skill on character sheet.]

Me: *sigh*

We played 81 sessions of this nonsense and the party still had difficulty figuring out what to do or where to go, to the point that 7th and 8th level characters decided the best course of action was to continue plundering a nearby cairn field for loose coins and burial goods (an activity they began at level 2). They never even made it to the Caves of Chaos and I just couldn't take it anymore, so I ended things. I have not resumed running the Monday campaign (another player is trying their hand at being DM)—and I'm not sure I will.

If I do run for them again, it certainly won't be with 5e. During Covid, I dove into the OSR (10 years after the fact), and fell in love with Basic D&D (and 1e to a lesser extent) all over again. I think 5e's core game engine is good...it's fast, intuitive, and easy to explain to others. But the power creep and ever-stacking abilities create a lot of decision paralysis, even for experienced players. This tends to result in the same character "builds" appearing over and over again with the same set of optimal choices. 

I enjoyed 5e when it first came out, but the longer I run it, the more the flaws keep appearing and the harder it is to ignore them. I won't even get into the problems I have with WotC adopting Forgotten Realms as the default setting for the rulebooks(!), or their constant editorializing and virtue signaling, or their pervasive efforts to make the game a "safe" and uniform experience for a category of player psychology I don't relate to at all. 

I appreciate 5e for bringing me back into the game, and I think someone could take the core engine and skin it with an AD&D ethos, but man that seems like a lot of work.

On a positive note, I brought my 5e Heroes of Brackleborn campaign to a satisfying conclusion for my neophyte players. When I started it during the lockdowns, it was just to show a few friends what D&D was all about. I wasn't expecting them to fall in love with the game and turn a few sessions into a multi-year campaign. We concluded with the girls having reached 6th level and their characters becoming notable leaders in the town of Brackleborn.

We may return to this campaign in the future, as there were some loose-ends that could rear their ugly heads once more. For now, the girls were interested in my stories about Basic/AD&D and wanted to try it out, so I started a new campaign with them using Old School Essentials as the ruleset. I kitbashed three classic adventures, along with an OSR sequel to one of those classics and some personal modifications / additions. 

I've named it The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower, combining and adapting S1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh with the sample dungeon from Dr. Holmes' Basic D&D Rulebook (commonly referred to as The Tower of Zenopus), and inserting the superb Forgotten Smugglers' Caves by Zenopus Archives' Zach Howard and the dungeon portion of N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God as additional levels.

We've played 3 sessions and, so far, there have been 5 character deaths among 4 players...it's glorious. The girls have had a great time dying, and I try to turn each death into an hilarious moment by cranking up the gruesome details. They also appreciate how streamlined and simple the rules are, given how often they struggled to cope with all the choices in mid-level 5e. I'm adjusting well to running OSE, I think, but realigning my brain to the different procedures in BX has been harder than I anticipated.

On a final note, I had the great privilege over the summer to help a friend catalog and value a humongous collection of vintage D&D materials and other gaming products he purchased recently.

Flipping through a copy of the tournament version of Lost Caverns of Tsojconth, and seeing Erol Otus' foundational artwork in actual copies of Booty and the Beasts and The Necronomican (among many other rare pieces) was a huge thrill.

I'm happy to start blogging again—something I've been shooting for since August. I intend to start posting material from all these campaigns and other adventures / settings I've created over the years. 

I'll share pics and details of the vintage D&D collection in coming posts as well. In the meantime, here's a sneak peek at left (for you Batman fans, that's Dennis O'Neil's desk in the background).

The Heroes of Brackleborn -- Game-Play Report (Sessions 9 and 10)

I took on a big writing project last week, so my work on the Deep Vaults has slowed to a crawl (although I completed my hazards table and am pretty happy with it...I will likely post that next). I’m getting jazzed about resuming my Wednesday night campaign, which is moving to Thursday nights every other week. Scheduling five adults for an entire evening on a regular basis is near-impossible, so I feel like we’ve really accomplished something. We’re also going to try to have at least one longer weekend game session each month. It warms my heart that the girls can’t wait to get back to slinging some dice.

After the last session’s light-hearted adventure (which I ended up naming “The Right Stuff”), I was ready to hit the players with a major shake-up to their reality. At this point in the campaign, we’d been playing a little over over three months and they got “the game.” Now it was time to show them what playing in a “campaign” was like.

To now, the setting’s background consisted mostly of rough bullet points, some of which I gave to the players at the start of the campaign—just some hooks to create points of recognition later. As I started prepping for this session, I added some details for the players to begin making choices. I knew they wanted to be closer to Emelia and her family, so I expanded on that portion of the setting for the players to explore.

I love to world-build, but whenever I start a new campaign, I immediately start looking for ways to subvert what I’ve presented and shake up the status quo. I’m not sure why I do that, but D&D needs dynamism, and the historical eras it emulates were certainly dynamic ones. Dungeons & Dragons could easily have been named Cash & Conflict, and both of those things come to the fore during these next  sessions.

This game-play report covers sessions 9 and 10, which occurred on 7/15 and 7/22, 2020.

Previously...

The girls lent a hand to the bakery moms, who needed help gathering ingredients for a feast to be held that night—an order commissioned by Lord Ferril, himself. Not only did doddering old Mr. Mulberry forget to place the order in a timely manner, as requested by the lord,but he also forgot to give the girls invitations to the feast, which is being held in their honor!

Despite the screw-ups, the heroes gathered the ingredients, the moms made the food, and everyone, along with Mr. Mulberry in tow, arrives at Brackleborn Keep on time.

The Heroes of Brackleborn -- Game-Play Report (Session 8)

My in-person Wednesday-night campaign is still on hiatus due to scheduling conflicts, but it looks like we'll be resuming the campaign in the next few weeks. One day, I'll be caught up with these gameplay reports. 

This particular session was super-fun and mostly spontaneous. The girls really latched on to Emelia, and they had some impressive role-playing moments with her and her father, Lord Ferril. I had decided to expand the party's involvement with the lord's affairs, since the girls seemed content to remain in the village and serve as its protectors.

I planned a "heavy" session with an important event to shake up the status quo and give the heroes a chance to step up and become major players in the town, but I wanted to give them a bit of a breather first, while also lulling them into a false sense of security. I came up with the idea for this adventure a few hours before the session as a series of amusing skill challenges and a test of their general organizational and time management abilities. It was also a good way to introduce more of the village and its townsfolk to the players. 

This session occurred on 07/08/20 (and now feels like a lifetime ago).

Previously…

Inside the goblin cave, the heroes slew several goblins and their boss, a hobgoblin called Gurd. They rescued Emelia from his clutches and recovered some stolen supplies, including four of the six stolen barrels of dwarf ale. They hurried back to Brackleborn Keep to reunite Emelia with the grateful Lord and Lady Ferril.

The Heroes of Brackleborn -- Game-Play Report (Session 7)

My Wednesday night campaign remains on temporary hiatus. We're hoping to get an extended weekend session sometime this month. I intended to use the hiatus to catch up these reports to the current timeline (Session 43), but that plan never quite materialized. This session occurred on 06/17/20.

Previously…

The party defeated a goblin ambush and found a hidden trail to their lair, a pair of cave openings into a hillside deep in the woods.

The Heroes of Brackleborn -- Game-Play Report (Sessions 4-6)

My regular group only meets from 7-10-ish PM and we always have dinner along with it, so we often only get an hour or so of actual gameplay in and not a whole lot happens. I've condensed the next three gameplay reports into one post to save time and knock out several sessions to catch up to the present-day campaign (the following sessions occurred in May, 2020.)

Previously...

After the party came to the local lord’s attention, he tasked them with entering the Gloomy Forest and rescuing his daughter, Emelia, who has been kidnapped by bandits. The party accepted his mission and set off for the Gloomy Forest along the Gold Road where they encountered a trio of bandits accosting a local hunter. Making short work of the thugs, the party captured one and learned some info about the bandit leadership.

The Heroes of Brackleborn -- Game-Play Report (Session 3)

Previously...

The heroes entered a series of rat tunnels and confronted a “rat-man,” who managed to escape. After rescuing the innkeeper’s son, the party finds some loot as well as clues to a sinister plan, but they are left with more questions than answers.

Session Events

The party returns to the burned-out building to further investigate the clues. There, they suss out a plot to poison the town. The two sealed barrels in the cellar turn out to contain liquid poison — a LOT of it. There are four tunnel exits in the old cellar; the party knows that one leads to the cellar of the inn, while a second tunnel leads to a hidden exit in a culvert on the edge of town. Checking out the other two tunnels, the party follows the third one to a hole that opens deep in the shaft of the town well, just above the water line. The fourth tunnel forks in two directions: one heads toward the bakery and the other toward the keep. Both passages end abruptly, indicating that the tunneling was still in progress.

Lurid Lairs: Ettercap Cottage

In my regular Thursday night game, the players are exploring the Gloomy Forest—a hexcrawl sandbox with established encounter areas related to (3) factions: 1) Human bandits seeking to overthrow the local lord (whom they view as a usurper); 2) A green hag named Mamawaldi and her servant, a wight-lord known as "The Blackheart" (the undead form of an ancient warlord who once ruled this area); and 3) Ancient denizens of this forest, some of whom have fallen under Mamawaldi's wicked influence (if not her direct control).

At this point in the campaign, the player-characters have allied themselves with the local lord and largely neutralized the bandit threat. Now, they're searching a section of the forest looking for the last remnants of the surviving bandits and their leader. Although my players are relative novices to RPGs, they've quickly adopted some smart strategies in their exploration, including never entering the forest from the same direction twice in a row. As such, their map is now crisscrossed with paths and marked with notes. They're beginning to get a feel for the lay-of-the-land and discovering lots of the little details I've sprinkled across the forest (which is relatively contained at a mere 8 x 12 miles).

They found themselves following an old trail through an unexplored area after discovering an ancient stone marker that indicated the trail led to an elven shrine. As they went deeper, they began to notice the tops of the trees were draped with webs that became denser the farther down the trail they ventured (making the forest even gloomier). Undeterred, however, they came to a fork in the road where I had placed an encounter area that read, simply:

"A cozy cottage made of webbing hangs up in the trees here. It is the lair of an ettercap-matron named Etta Capp. She likes to spin spidersilk while she looks out the window overlooking the path. Her body can't be seen, but at the window she appears to be an old crone with a tiny wrinkled face and really long, silken silver hair. If she sees an elf, she mentions the shrine and directs the party down the east fork (where her children--(2) giant spiders and (2) spider swarms--will ambush the PCs). She steers them away from the west fork (to the shrine), warning them of a "dangerous forest spirit" down that path."

In case the PCs decided to attack her, I statted Etta out and gave her some minor "Legendary" powers, including the occasional ability to summon a spider swarm, a giant spider, or an ettercap to her defense.

The encounter went down pretty much as written. The girls were wary of Etta but engaged her in conversation and received her directions. They did not guess her true nature (or catch on to the pun in her name, even though Rachel shouted "Attercop, Attercop!" when I first mentioned the webs), and so followed the east path where they encountered the spider ambush. At the end of that session, the group seemed determined to return to the cottage and deal with Etta.

Over the intervening week, I had some thoughts about expanding the encounter a little bit and after some sketching and note-jotting, I felt I had a really good mini-dungeon on my hands. I drew out the map in better detail/quality—an unnecessary step since I redraw everything on the battlemat, but one which helps me refine the layout and figure out the various ways I can challenge the players. I then created a simple key for the interiors and added some notes about how the denizens of the expanded lair would react to the party's intrusion.

The next session, however, the party decided not to seek revenge and avoided her cottage on their return trip toward the shrine. To my chagrin, quite a few hours of hurried work between sessions vanished in the party's rear-view mirror. I'm saving it in the hopes they come back this way, but I was a little disappointed. It's certainly not the first time that's happened to me in my 40 years of DMing and it won't be the last. 

I have dozens of such lairs and micro-dungeons in my folders and I do eventually get to use them (or pieces of them), but I really like this one so I'll share it here. I've always called these micro-dungeons "Lurid Lairs" (after the set of tables in Judges Guild's Wilderlands of High Fantasy, which I was enthralled by in my youth.) This blog might be a good spot to post all that content for anyone to use. I designed this for 5e, since that's the version we're playing, but I think it's easily adapted to any edition or OSR ruleset.

Etta Capp's Cottage

Three trees stand close together here at the forest’s edge, overlooking a fork in the path. Their leafy boughs are thick with spiderwebs. Suspended from the branches is a delicate, 3-story cottage with shingled roofs, shuttered windows, flowerboxes, cornices, etc.--all made entirely of webbing. The area at the base of the trees is also shrouded in heavy webs, except for a cave-like opening between two of the trunks.

The Elf-stone

In my weekly Heroes of Brackleborn campaign, the player-characters defend their titular home village from a gang of bandits and other creatures that hide in the nearby Gloomy Forest. Their party has now made several forays into the forest and have vanquished the bulk of the bandit gang (although not yet its leadership and a core handful of stalwarts.) 

There are many story hooks motivating the players to go adventuring in the Gloomy Forest, but for Armolas, the party's wood elf ranger, exploring the forest is part of her background mission in the village. 

Centuries ago, the region was known as the Gloaming Forest. It was home to her ancestors before they were suddenly driven out by a powerful evil presence. With the elves gone, the forest succumbed to the corrupt forces, becoming a dark and twisted place (and earning its current name). Armolas was sent to this area by the wood elf queen to keep an eye on human matters and investigate the traces of their people left behind so long ago.

In the course of the party's last foray into the forest, Armolas heard an ethereal sound, like distant tinkling wind chimes, coming from an area deeper in the woods. She took note of it, intending to follow up on the curious sound.

On their current foray, in a completely different part of the forest, she once again hears the tinkling chimes, this time much closer. Upon investigation, the party discovers one of the hidden mysteries of the campaign setting: an elf-stone. There are eight of these standing stones throughout the Gloomy Forest, and they were once used by the ancient inhabitants to travel instantly between locations.

The Heroes of Brackleborn -- Game-Play Report (Session 2)

04/08/20

Previously...

While relaxing in the Hogshead Inn, the heroes heard a scream from the cellar. The party leapt into action and killed three giant rats accosting the innkeeper's wife. The rats apparently dragged her young son Mortimer into a dark hole, newly-appeared in the floor.

The Heroes of Brackleborn -- Game-Play Report (Session 1)

A little over a year ago we started this campaign (just before my state locked down due to Covid). At the time, I wasn't expecting my four players -- all brand-new to D&D -- to play more than a session or two, so I didn't put a whole lot of effort into setting something up. We spent the first session rolling up characters, and by the time we were done, it was nearly time to stop for the night.

I started them in a new area of my campaign world, away from the campaign I run on Tuesday nights, and just made up some names. The girls also made up a few details about their character backgrounds, and I supplemented them with some on-the-spot motivations (which I expanded upon in the week between sessions, most of which is reflected in the write-up below).

I laid out a quick ad hoc scenario to let them experience combat. I had no idea where we were going and I had zero information for them other than what I was pulling out of my ass as we went along. Everyone seemed to have a really good time, though,  and when it was over, they all wanted to play a second session.

So, here we go..

My Girls Love D&D

A little over a year ago, I had the pleasure of introducing four brand-new players—all women—to D&D. The first was my girlfriend, Rachel, who often listened in on my regular Tuesday night campaign on Roll20. She was intrigued by it all, but I've been playing with most of those guys since 1985 and she was reluctant to dive into that game. She isn't well-versed in the fantasy genre other than The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter (books and films), all of which she loves. I don't think she's ever once played a video game, and she doesn't watch a lot of television that isn't BBC comedies or Bob's Burgers.

My other three new players were a little more familiar with some of the fantasy tropes. For years, we'd gotten together every Wednesday night for dinner and TV, and we'd just finished watching the unfortunate conclusion of Game of Thrones. I'd discussed with them how GRRM and the showrunners were all D&D players. We had also watched Freaks & Geeks during previous TV nights, which featured D&D in several episodes (and, coincidentally, depicted roughly the same era in which I first began playing the game, when I was roughly the same age as the characters in the show.)

The girls (my best friend, Marie; her wife, Cameron; and our mutual friend, Emily) didn't really get it, but they at least understood the basic concepts--that it was a game in which you went on adventures, rolled dice to determine success/failure, fought monsters, and found treasure. While walking one evening with Marie, she mentioned listening to a podcast that discussed using D&D as a means to rehabilitate prisoners. The show went into great detail about how the game worked, and she was interested in trying it out. I offered to run a game for my TV night gals plus my girlfriend, just to show them what it was like.