Justin Achilli

Month: January, 2011

24 January 2011

One More Look at Vampire’s Green Marble Cover

The other day, I said I’d scare up a few more photos of the original green marble cover artifact for Vampire: the Masquerade. They’re better resolution this time, as promised. You guys who came to visit that grainy photo spiked the hell out of my page views, so here’s a little more for you.

Up in the Danger Room, all sorts of relics of the World of Darkness and White Wolf Publishing dwell. Part library, part IT morgue, part game room, and part Federal disaster area, the Danger Room is upstairs, next to the server room. It’s where people run some of the office games (the Elysium meeting room is better for this, to be honest), and it’s where a lot of the uncatalogued White Wolf history lives. There’s a copy of everything we’ve ever printed up there, from some coffee-stained storypath Whimsy Cards to the complete run of World of Darkness titles, old and new. There’s even peripheral stuff — if you look on the left, you can see one of the standees from the Hunter video game. That kind of orange rectangular piece against the bookshelf in the back is an autographed Brom print of Stewart’s. Just above that, a little to the right at the top of the bookshelf are a pair of countertop Rage standees, for the core set and the Wyrm supplement. I also found one of Mark’s notebooks with handwritten sketches for a science fiction game. (It’s not the one that became Exile, sorry.)

There are also several piles of dead computer junk, broken Nerf guns, and various other things in storage.

In the center of the room are a pair of carpenter’s tables, which we hijacked from the building supervisor and turned into gaming tables. There’s a game up here most of the middle weekday nights. Those are also the old meeting room chairs, and I once swiped one of them for my office chair because the chair I had previously used became… somehow broken and on fire. I blame the Sabbat.

It’s called the Danger Room because it’s only partially floored. Walk too far and you’ll fall through the ceiling of the World of Darkness development area on the first floor.

Here’s a better shot of the cover slab I turned up while rummaging last week. Weirdly, that’s my old desk up there, too. I worked on everything from Clanbook: Cappadocian through Revised Edition Vampire through the relaunch and Requiem on that faithful old beast. It’s about six thousand pounds and full of sharp metal flanges. I’m not sure why we kept it, to be honest. Sarah Timbrook had that desk before I did, when she came up from the warehouse to do inventory and eventually international sales. I was 22 when she had that desk, and I was 25 when I inherited it. I’m 37 now.

I remember my then-girlfriend introducing me to Vampire. We were both big Anne Rice enthusiasts, and very much interested in the darker side of things, the beauty and sensuality of danger, and the wonder of the night. Once I took my first step into the World of Darkness — with Mage, ironically, and not Vampire itself — I was hooked. I couldn’t escape… and I didn’t want to. Every shadow hid a lurking Kindred, every early-morning fog hid a Telluric mystery, every visit to Celestial Park was a peek into something beyond the Veil. Two years after being introduced to the game, I packed up my pickup truck with my few belongings and moved to Atlanta to work for the company. Three years after that, Rob Hatch turned Vampire over to me, to work on what ultimately became Exalted. Even though I’ve quit twice, I still can’t escape the powerful allure of the Kindred, and I’m now helping guide them into the realm of MMO computer games, 20 years after Vampire first arrived and 16 years after I first joined the carnival.

(Hey, look, Eddy’s talking about the look back over at his blog, too.)

And here’s the real gem, a side-by-side comparison of the object art and the printed book itself. Notice that the subtitle is different — I think in the first edition, the marble slab had no subtitle on it and it was dropped in during digital layout. Thereafter, for the second edition, the subtitle had its font change and the vinyl graphic applied to the marble plate itself. The color-correction is different on the print copies, too, giving the books a little more of a blue tint.

I feel a little bit like that rose myself, sometimes, a little beaten up and wearing those years with some degree less elegance than I might. But it’s been a wonderful ride with Vampire, and it’s a dazzling look back here on the precipice of two decades. To all the players, readers, and admirers of Vampire, thank you. You’ve made 20 years of serving the Kindred — and here’s to many more! — well worth having.

6 comments
21 January 2011

Win a Commissioned Officer’s Edition of EVE Online

Yours for the taking.

Hey, you! You want a free copy of the Commissioned Officer’s Edition of EVE Online?

This version comes with 30 days worth of game time, plus a neural booster that increases your character’s learning rate, so you have an edge in coming up to speed with your skill training.

The contest is simple: Down there in the comments, leave me EXACTLY 50 words about why you should receive it. I’ll pore over the answers and get the game shipped to you in a week or so. Let’s call the due date on this contest Wednesday, January 26, at 11:00 pm my time (US EST). I’ll pick a winner on Thursday the 27th unless some meeting or some lunatic coworker violence precludes me, in which case I’ll do it once I recover.

Due notice, this isn’t a CCP-sponsored contest. This is just me with a copy of EVE on my bookshelf, but since I already get my game time comped as an employee, this would do more good in your hands.

So sharpen your 50-word-writing Internet pens and dazzle me with your elocution. Have fun!

19 comments
20 January 2011

Talking at Flowcharts

Task resolution systems. Oh, good heavens.

When these players' characters talk to an NPC, they're talking to the GM, who can improvise or rationalize a genuine personal response.

In many modern tabletop games, you have a core mechanic that resolves most game situations. Whether combat, occult research, technological repair, or fast-talking the security guards into beliving you’re supposed to be here, there’s a common system to it all. It might be a d20-based system, or perhaps it uses the storytelling rules, or perhaps it’s the One Roll Engine or the Coinematic Unisystem. It might be damned simple or it might have graduating complexity. Combat is probably more specific and complicated than the other situational resolutions. Tabletop RPGs do have their roots in wargames, after all.

Most importantly, though, tabletop roleplaying games have a GM: real, live, thinking (in most cases) rules arbiter and narrative director who can interpret dice rolls, take the role of non-player characters, and improvise situational results.

In most cases, you don’t have that in a video game. You don’t have a guy there who can, through informational relay and creative interpretation, change the results.

In most cases, that’s fine. Most games are designed to do one thing well, so the fact that there is no “hacking” resolution mechanic in Starcraft II doesn’t matter. Lara Croft doesn’t have a portrait-painting minigame. Minecraft isn’t “missing” cryptography.

In most cases, though, the gameplay designed for non-combat contested tasks is just the combat system with anemic set dressing and a whitewash vaguely suggestive of what you wanted to do. The vast majority of computer roleplaying games are designed with combat first and foremost. “Roleplaying” in a computer game context really means “advancement,” not “you take on the persona,” and as such, fighting stuff to level is your primary gameplay.

What if my character wouldn't say any of these? Then all I see is broken immersion and a game that wants me to play it on its terms, not mine.

Fast-talking or seducing an NPC with a social character in a computer RPG is usually just reskinned combat. You’re clicking the social attack button and subtracting that social attack value from whatever social defense value belongs to the NPC. You click your numbers at its numbers and eventually something happens, which is probably a text dump. It’s exactly the combat resolution system, except that combat has all sorts of nifty particle effects and fancy animated maneuvers and yomi-based move-and-countermove. Social interaction challenges maybe have some facial expression changes and your reward is READ THIS, FUCKER.

Combat has open-ended results, but when dealing with a computer-controlled NPC, the social interaction reward is either the linear plotline that you would have been on anyway regardless of your conversation, or it’s an extra handful of clicks through a dialogue tree (which is actually probably a dialogue diamond that’s  going to likewise direct you back into the linear plotline that you would have been on anyway regardless of your conversation).

My big two offenders, largely because of their profile rather than doing it any worse than any other game, are Fallout III and Dragon Age. Both of these are basically combat engines with varying amounts of text piled into the interstices between combats. In Dragon Age, you can have extra cut scenes or dialogue options as a social character, but eventually, you’re going to do that goddamn quest or the game isn’t going to move forward. Fallout III lets you choose a flavor of additional dialogue text, but in no way does its claim that you can make any sort of character you want change the fact that you’re going to be firing that hunting rifle at mutants’ heads way more than you’re going to be Diplomacying the world into revitalization.

These are not “social interactions.” These are more obstacles to click through to get to the big fight at the end that you’re going to have to have anyway. At the best — at the very apex of what they can achieve — they’re lore-delivery vehicles. To paraphrase one of my recent favorite observations, an NPC is just an object you click to get text.

Clicking "mock" on an NPC is not the same as talking to a real person and having an interaction. Also, I'm pretty talented at UI design.

For true “social interaction” or investigation in a video game (to distinguish it from a tabletop RPG with a GM), the gameplay has to be different from the combat engine. If the combat engine requires me to select a target and then spam the hell out of the special attack buttons, then a social interaction engine that requires me to select a target and click the hell out of the “fast talk” and “devastating repartee” buttons is no different from that combat engine.

This guy thought he had a "relationship" with an NPC, and the truth of the matter was more than he could handle.

Further, when you put “social interaction” in a multiplayer game, and all it requires of the player is to click on some predefined sequences with an NPC, the designer is spitting in the player’s eye and insulting his family for three generations, at the very least. Social interactions are for interactions between players, not the limited-output constructs of the game. Whispering filthy innuendo to your PSP isn’t social interaction, either, so stop trying to tell a player that talking to an inanimate object is. This is a simulation of social interaction, just like videogame combat is a simulation of actual physical violence. Capcom doesn’t tell me I’m really engaging in some badass karate maneuvers when I’m playing Street Fighter.

Like I said, good heavens.

 

13 comments
19 January 2011

Vampire: The Masquerade’s Original Green Marble Cover

Look what I found up in the Danger Room at the office.

Sorry for the crappy picture quality. Phone camera and all that. I’ll try to snap a better shot tomorrow.

This is the original marble-surfaced plaque that became the cover of the first edition of Vampire: The Masquerade back in 1991. The letters up at the top are physical items, hand-placed; they’re not engraved into the surface. That “The Masquerade” subtitle is an applied vinyl graphic. And of course, even though it’s looking a little worse for the wear, that’s the original rose, adhered to the marbled surface, that made its intriguing, minimalist statement about the sensuality of what it means to be a Kindred.

It’s 2011 now. Vampire turns 20 this year. Chokes me up a little, it does.

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14 January 2011

Asynchronicity

Lots of pictures of young women with game peripherals draped over their private parts turn up when you Google Image Search "Adult Gamers." Think about that next time you tell someone you're a gamer and you wish they would take you seriously.

One of the most difficult challenges to hobby gaming is scheduling time to play. The extended time necessary to play most tabletop RPGs — four-hour sessions are the short games — compounds the difficulty.

MMOs have a very distinct edge in this regard. First, their massively multiplayer nature means that, whenever you log on, you’ve (probably) got a vast quantity of other players on at the same time, who are potential co-players in whatever game occupies your attention. There’s no making sure the schedule is clear, finding babysitters, or juggling existing plans because everyone in-game when you log in is already there. Second, most games, whether the vastest of level-grinds, the most expansive of sandboxes, or the briefest of skirmish or challenge scenarios, have digestible amounts of content. “Quests,” upon which many MMOs rely, are basically bite-sized protions of content, designed to be consumed while the player has a finite quantity of time to spend in-game. You can string as many of these together as you want for an extended period of play, but in their simplest form, they’re discrete measurements of play.

(Single-player games do this, too, of course, but since my real enthusiasm is for people playing games together, I’m not going any further down that path.)

Time is the resource in question.

Both of those points, though, have a common element: time. Time is the hurdle facing all players of long-form games. Even this isn’t solved in MMOs. In fact, it’s part of the economic model. The only resource of actual value a game takes from a player is time. In-game currencies can be acquired through play or purchased, but the investment of time a player has to make to play the game is what’s really being “spent.”

So, then, let’s say I have time to spend, but I don’t have it consistently or for long stretches. My solution, then, to play games with other people, becomes doing so asynchronously.

The computer games that have made the greatest breakthroughs and acquired the greatest migrations of players to them in the past three years have been asynchronously played games. Words with Friends. Farmville. Mafia Wars. Puzzle Pirates. In all of these, you drop in, play your piece, and then get back to what you’re doing. Your time in-game might be ten seconds or it might be two hours — but you dictate when and for how long you’re going to play. Whether the game is turn-based or real-time doesn’t matter. The fact that you play on your schedule is what makes them playable. You play them because they’re fun, but also because they’re convenient. Playing them dovetails with your lifestyle, and doesn’t put other things you’re doing on hold.

(It’s not just games that work like this. Lots of modern activities effectively work like “life apps.” Do them in between other things, or do them as low-intensity activities while you’re engaged in something else, whatever makes you happy. Swimming through Wikipedia is one of my favorite life apps.)

So, here’s this amazingly convenient way to play, and with a set of enjoyable systems that take advantage of the play pacing, could have tremendous application… so why haven’t traditional roleplaying games adapted to this model? De Profundis gave it a shot, but it for the most part actively eschewed “digital” play as unevocative of the original Lovecraft source material, favoring post-and-stationery letter-writing.

Asynchronous! Like this... electric spindle motor. Okay, smart guy, you come up with a good illustration for "asynchronous."

Asynchronous roleplay does occur, and is often found in various free-form forums scattered around the internet and somewhat in the MUDs that still operate. These suffer the same drawbacks as other attempts at bringing roleplaying into a digital medium, in that most attempts at campaigns and longevity collapse under pacing concerns, player absence, player disinterest, and the simple fact that they’re constructed to be synchronous (with an implicitly slower pace) rather than asynchronous. Many rely on turns or an egalitarianism of participation, instead of capitalizing on the punch-in, punch-out nature of convenience-driven play. MUDs, given their (potential) size, have the best records of longevity, but they’re not always accessible quickly or for pop-in, pop-out.

I’m reluctant to stand by the blanket statement at this point, but I’ll advance it as a theory: Sandbox or open-ended games seem to work better in this medium than narrative-driven or scripted campaign/ chronicle types, largely because they thrive when players are proactive rather than collectively reactive.

We're going to have to face this problem in shifts, sometimes together, often apart.

I’ve dinked around with the format a little bit. For a while, I ran a play-by-Wave game that was a bit like Ultima Online in its construction, but I made the error of running it at a structured period of time, like a table game only using Wave. It came apart within a few weeks. I’ve run forum games that quickly ground to a halt for the usual reasons. I’ve played-by-email with rapidly declining interest exacerbated by incongruities between my readiness to play and the game’s structure for allowing me.

Agency is one of the key points. Just like gathering around the computer (instead of the table) at a certain time didn’t work, throttling the experience through a GM-type player likewise doesn’t work, as it impedes the asynchronicity. If you check back in and the GM-player hasn’t moderated the last “turn,” well, you’re stuck. That suggests the necessity of each player to change or contribute to the environment via participation, rather than a reaction to another player’s impetus (though reaction to another player’s input is always an option).

You and I, we want to play, but we can’t match a schedule. We want a roleplaying-type campaign, but we also want enough rules so we’re not just improving a text story — we want to be playing, not just generating words or narrative. We want to play for an arbitrary duration, at irregular intervals. How do we accomplish this? And then, once we have the game established, how to we turn it into a business model?

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13 January 2011

Considering Barbarians

You know what’s a fantastic word? Barbarian.

In its original Greek form, “bárbaros” intends to make fun of the gibberish sound (to a Greek, at least) of anyone not speaking Greek. In a general sense, the original word means, “anyone who’s not Greek.” Laden as that usage is, it’s not unprecedented among we human creatures, who are given to such epithets, but it is intersting in that it both transcended its original meaning and became the base of words in non-Greek languages, and because its subsequent usage differs significantly from its original etymology.

Man, that’s getting academic.

You know. Like this.

When I think of “barbarians,” I most often do it in a game context, conjuring images of hairy savages, club-swinging primitives who may or may not be able to light a fire, but who can probably warp wood or entangle me, or maybe go on some hellish rampage. Or maybe they’re the time-honored of “barbarians at the gates,” like a pack of Sabbat lurking outside the city, ready to tear down the princedom and replace it with blood-rites and other deviltry. In either case, I’m lending the word a connotation of primitivism, something lesser than the society or civilization that I’m subjectively championing.

That’s not entirely accurate, however. A barbarian is an outsider, not necessarily a primitive. To the Greeks who coined the term, everyone else was “bárbaros,” whether a civilized Persian, a Baal-placating Carthaginian, or some kind of filthy German in a flapping loincloth. That’s also the root of the woman’s name Barbara, which is a nifty bit of trivia.

The difference between social outsiders and cultural or technological primitivism is one of the principles I try to observe in my Pagan Lands work. While certain events may seems barbarous, and a people might be savage, the only real outsiders are the PCs, since they’re the ones from an outside Empire dropped into a lawless wild.

Years ago, when I was drafting the shelved project Frostholm (which was a D&D 3.x setting supplement), I wanted to adjust the classic barbarian D&D class into a race. I’ve always seen races and classes in the same context as I built the clans and sects/ covenants in Vampire. Clan and race is something inherent, something that can’t be changed. It’s something you are. Sects, covenants, and classes are more like occupations, something you elect, something you choose to be. Thus, I wanted the setting’s barbarians to be of a true race outside the assumed perspective of the campaign. I still have this same outlook, in fact, though it’s less of a sticking point in both 4E and the vintage titles for me (albeit for different reasons with each).

 

 

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12 January 2011

Bring the Weather with You

I’ve always liked the weather and nature aspects of conflict in RPGs. I think it’s because of their larger-than-life function, and also because huge natural events have the secondary characteristic of emphasizing the setting or theme. You don’t have to get all high school English, man-versus-nature on your conflict chart to exercise something like this. 30 Days of Night for example, has nature contributing both an interesting premise (it’s dark all the time, so vampires come here) and environmental challenges (cold exposure, cold-weather tools and weapons, dangerous surfaces and locations). To this day, the monsoon event in the World of Darkness: Hong Kong title remains one of my favorite RPG plot devices.

All manner of trouble here, from the weather to whatever lurks in that creepy shed.

When you bring those elements into an RPG, however, they have to be handled carefully. If they’re a challenge, the system needs to handle “overcoming” them in whatever form, such as with survival skills, movement rules (“You are fast enough to outrun the tornado, but it’s going to pull you back one space per turn — where the enemy is waiting to attack you”) or other ways to let the event be overcome by something other than fiat. Note that this can be a non-system system. That is, an insightful idea, even without explicit rules support, can be all the gameplay required. That’s the thrust of the rules-light systems I’m currently enjoying, after all.

Using these environmental perils is part of the current project I have underway. Here’s an excerpt.

The Pagan Lands labor under the eternal yoke of chill. Its summers are cold and its winters are brutal. What this means to PCs is that they can’t take the welcoming comfort of the hearth for granted.The omnipresent cold presents a host of new considerations and complications, from the purely narrative to a situations that can be solved only by clever play.

  • Remind the characters that they can see their breath. Traipsing across the tundra or standing in the wales of a longboat, it’s cold outside, and PCs braving the environment have a visceral reminder of their presence in it when their breath tingles in their lungs.
  • Likewise, warmth is a treasure. A campfire that keeps the chill at bay is a luxury during an exploratory expedition. Even a humble yurt provides welcome respite from winter wind if it’s dry inside. Even a dungeon or inhospitable environment can provide minor succor. How warm is the inside of a dragon’s belly? Or the interior of a fungus cavern?
  • The cold can provide its own obstacles and challenges that force PCs to think creatively. It’s impossible to fight a blizzard, for example. A sheet of ice may turn a downward slope into a one-way passage. Finding an oasis in the tundra while snowblind is a test of survival. And that’s to say nothing of the creatures who are themselves adapted to snowy or cold environments….
  • Advanced challenges require a combination of seafaring and overland travel, requiring plenty of preparation, and providing plenty of opportunity to overcome a variety of obstacles. What of a ship’s supplies when the ship becomes ice-locked? What happens when the party’s travel rations are frozen solid? What happens when the gates to the castle have been frozen shut, and the party has limited time to gain access?

Good luck with this one.

From the GM’s perspective, a well-crafted environmental challenge has to not only be fun but interesting. “A hurricane whips through the area and everyone is dashed to the floor for three levels of lethal damage” isn’t very interesting. “The mage gestures brazenly above his head, and the skies seem to roil above him, preparing to disgorge a hellish gale” is more impactful, as it’s part of what the encounter had in store anyway and it gives the players a chance to react. A scenario that has players boarding a submarine or an icebreaker is bound to pose some associated threats, so explaining the scenario becomes a bit of foreshadowing.

That’s not to say that nature and weather can’t be purely narrative framing devices or background elements, of course. Shakespeare’s The Tempest is an example of this, after all.

Remember that even with natural threats and environmental challenges, player engagement remains one of the keys of the hobby, and that the intended pastime is game rather than a soliloquy. Participation is the whole point.

2 comments
11 January 2011

Music Mix: AM Inbetween

Click on the spider for the AM Inbetween mix. Be patient. It's 90 megs.

This one’s a bit of a digression for me. I usually put together a 4/4 dancefloor stomper, but on the cold, snowy winter night when I assembled this one, I specifically picked out songs that were, well, quite the opposite. Most of this mix is downtempo and everything on the list has an element of sadness, whether wistful, longing, desolate, alienated, or brooding. There’s also a lopsided balance of new to old music in here, with an almost nostalgic arrangement venerating the various eras in which these songs were originally recorded.

Once, when Brian and I were driving a 22-foot panel truck to some convention or another (Wizard World in Chicago, I think), we hit this “dead zone” of radio signal. Mind you, this was in the days before iPods, and the truck didn’t even have a CD player in it, so we had to rely on the radio. Anyway, it’s been dark for several hours and we were in the middle of some square-shaped state with lots of nothing on either side (or maybe it was cornfields) and all of the sudden the radio picks up some channel playing a then-brand-new BT track. Middle of nowhere, no city in sight, black as the literal night surrounding us and out of the ether came this completely incongruous dance track. While I’ve eschewed the dance arrangements this time, that’s the feeling I wanted to invoke here: a late-night trip somewhere with a litany of weird, almost diametrical musics pouring into the listener that provoke the question, “Man, whose radio station is this?” The name of the mix is AM Inbetween, because I wanted it to feel like an AM radio station in the who-knows-where, as the listener is between his point of origin and destination.It feels like a good mix for Changeling to me, but the beginning end and middle tracks also make this a fine fit for some peripheral Vampire tangents.

Here’s the playlist. Enjoy.

  • New Order, “Salvation Theme”
  • Dead Can Dance, “The Carnival Is Over”
  • Mott the Hoople, “All the Young Dudes”
  • U2, “I Will Follow”
  • Gogol Bordello, “Zina-Marina”
  • Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, “Home”
  • Danzig, “Pyre of Souls”
  • The Stooges, “Gimme Danger”
  • Shane MacGowan, “Danny Boy”
  • Wings, “Mull of Kintyre”
  • The The, “The Beaten Generation”
  • The Church, “Under the Milky Way”
  • Joy Division, “Atmosphere”
1 comment
10 January 2011

Katabasis

You know what MMO I want? I want a very specific MMO with three things.

I'm all up in ur phalanx, killing ur hoplites.

I want a game that takes place in Late Antiquity, after the death of Alexander the Great, when his generals were stealing his corpse and propping it up at their camps to show that they were the favored military/ political leader in the absence of a legitimate heir and that everyone else could go chase themselves — until someone else stole the corpse and became the hotshot general. But I don’t want to have to know piles upon piles of historical minutiae. I just want the period in broad strokes, and to be able to play it from there. I want to hurl an Iron Age javelin at a dude and wear a clunky breastplate and maybe stab a guy with a spathe, but I don’t want it to be in a generic Middle Ages environment.

My game also needs freeform unit composition, but with awesome matchmaking. That is, I want to make whatever kind of soldier I feel like at character creation, and then I want to be able to join any “guild” I feel like, and I want the game’s socialization tools to help me find the sort of army for my specific playstyle. That way, the individual player groupings can decide if they want to be focused groups specialized toward one specific tactic, or if they want to be generalists, who take all of the playable character types and adapt their own unique approaches.

Finally, I want persistence. I want character advancement, sure, but I also want to be able to acquire territory and win battles that affect the world and that actually mean something after I log out and log back on. We seized Bactria, you sons of bitches! Now, in gameplay, you have to take it away from us, and we have to defend it. But while we own it, we gain a benefit from it, or we have access to an asset otherwise not available, or we even get a special item available in shops. Whatever. But the point is that we took it, we own it, and it means something.

There. There’s my completely rational, totally doable, niche-market list of terms. Please create a game for me, or please point me toward a game like this that already exists.

2 comments
8 January 2011

Pagan Lands: Session One

Yesterday I ran the first playtest session of the Wintergris project I have in progress. It’s actually shaping up to be bigger than Wintergris proper, which is simply the name of one of the region’s noteworthy cities. In fact, I believe I’ll be changing the name of the campaign to reflect the larger territory itself — the Pagan Lands. It has a little more immediate satisfaction.

Frog God is Bill Webb of Necromancer Games, and since I love Necromancer's version of the Wilderlands of High Fantasy so much, is it any wonder that I love their treatment of S&W?

It’s a classic swords-and-sorcery hexcrawl, using Frog God Games’ compilation of Matthew Finch’s Swords & Wizardry rules. In it, the players take the roles of the ill-fated Thirteenth Legion, sent from the distant Empire to garrison at Fort Lorica, in the midst of the Pagan Lands. But when the PCs arrive, their legion is slaughtered by rampaging Kelts, and their PCs are the only survivors. Marooned in the middle of a hostile foreign land during a harsh winter, the PCs have to both survive and explore. Here’s part of the player information:

Your party is all that remains of General Markav’s Thirteenth Legion.

At the end of an ill-fated push by Emperor Kalasthes into the Pagan Lands, a horde of savages shattered the Thirteenth. Just one day outside the fort at Lorica, an overwhelming force of barbarian tribes united under the leadership of the druids ruined the Thirteenth Legion. Thinking they had annihilated the Imperial interlopers, the barbarians advanced past the battlefield, leaving your desperate party badly beaten but alive.

Your home in Carcosa is a thousand miles away. Between here and the Eternal City are the perils of the Pagan Lands, the tumultuous Mordant Channel, and no telling what obstacles on the mainland.

The fortress at Lorica seems your best immediate option. The barbarian tribes have advanced away from the direction of the stone fort, so you should be able to reprovision there and rejoin the Imperial Army.

The Pagan Lands are actually a large island unto themselves, so named because the greatest empire on the adjacent continent has yet to bring them under its cultural sway. This empire, ruled by a sovereign named Kalasthes, covets land that doesn’t belong to it, so occasionally sends garrisons and establishes forts upon this island frontier in hopes of one day conquering it. That day has yet to come, and if the people (and other denizens…) of the Pagan Lands have their way, it never will. PCs who are part of the Pagan Lands campaign are the survivors of one of these doomed forays into the island frontier, and now find themselves trapped on the island with no way home. In classic, old-school form, they now have the opportunity to explore the island and perhaps even claim a portion of it for themselves.

Last night’s game began well, with a handful of White Wolf crew willing to brave the savage frontier. Rich played Magnus Agrippa, cleric of the legion and bearer of the fallen standard. Ned played MacLee, a monk, skirmisher of the Thirteenth. Eddy played Belc, a legionnaire infantryman. Oscar played Salvador the ranger, the legion’s scout.

The party wasted little time in getting their salvaged supplies together and striking out for Lorica, which they knew was about a day away… in some direction. They followed the remnant of a road they assumed to be Imperial, but it was in very poor repair, and what business would the Empire have had building a road out here anyway? Maybe it had just been neglected for many years.

Heading along the ruined road toward the foothills of the mountains where they supposed the fort to be, they came across a group of inhuman leper-pilgrims with whom they had no ability to communicate. Rather than parley with the wretched creatures, the legionnaires set up a crossfire ambush and slew the three who wore any weapons. Whatever plague they bore had ravaged them, and their bodies burst like overripe fruit when struck. (Someone failed his saving throw to contract the disease — which I conducted without the players’ knowledge — but I won’t yet say whom.) The rest of the reeking lepers fled into the surrounding hills.

Welcome home!

Shortly thereafter, the PCs found what they could only assume was Fort Lorica, but it wasn’t what they expected. It certainly bore Imperial heraldry, but it looked to have been abandoned for decades at least. Trees growing in the courtyard had collapsed some of the walls and the sally gates had long been destroyed or rotted away. The immediate threat, however, was the carrion crawler that had taken up residence in the ruin. The party dispatched it with little difficulty, but the beastie did leave Belc in a state of paralysis for over an hour—

—which proved troublesome as an avalanche tumbled down the mountain and buried half of the fort. It was mostly snow, but that didn’t matter for the time being. WIth great effort, they hauled the disabled Belc into the usable portion of the fortress and Magnus Agrippa planted the standard on the parapet to reclaim the abandoned ruin in the name of the Thirteenth.

(This is one of the things the Pagan Lands campaign provides for the characters. The decimated PCs should find the fort in short order, which gives them a home base, if a shabby one, to call their own and to allow them a place to rest and replenish.)

During the night, a small band of tribesmen looking similar to those who slaughtered the legion approached the fort, but made gestures of peace. The remaining legionnaires weren’t having any of it. Magnus Agrippa cursed them for filthy heathens and MacLee menaced them face-to-face. Unable to communicate, as neither spoke the other’s language, the confused Kelts (not that the PCs discovered that they were such…) gave up and moved on.

The next night, after the legionnaires spent a day foraging, repairing the walls, and digging out the avalanche, a small flock of mephitic rodent parasites flew clumsily into the fort camp, taking MacLee and Salvador by surprise. One gorged itself on MacLee’s blood, killing the hapless monk. Another plunged its thirsty beak into Salvador’s neck before having its neck snapped like a massive tick. The last met its end at the swordsmanship of Belc.

When the legionnaires rose the next day, they gave MacLee a burial with proper honors, and met one of their number who had survive and pulled himself out of the carnage after they had left. This was Decimus, a true victim of random character generation. With an Intelligence of 3, a Wisdom of 4, and a Charisma of 8, Decimus probably isn’t long for this dire world, but he is strong and, it seems , a bit lucky.

Thus reinforced, the party ventured forth, exploring the forested lands around their mountain outpost, keeping as much as possible to the remnants of the road, which sometimes vanished for as much as a mile before another segment of it had survived. Progress was slow, given the winter weather, the horrible state of the road, and the surrounding wilderness. At one point, the party discovered a great cauldron, wrought from cold iron, that had been buried up to its lip in the earth. They left this well enough alone. They likewise let discretion play the better part to valor when they heard an ominous WHUMP-ing sound in the forest — which turned out to be a hairy, naked giant hurling boulders and screaming at something they couldn’t see. They even skirted a village of tribesmen, fearing that the people were of the same race as those who had run down their legion. The group spent a month making slow progress up the ruined road and creeping past the village when it became obvious the road stopped there.

If you found something bubbling here, would you drink it? And that's why you're not a PC with a Wisdom of 4.

As forest gave way to a wintry freshwater swamp, however, the party’s curiosity got the better of them, and they overturned a kettle of some mysterious liquid on the boil over an active fire (after cajoling Decimus into drinking some of the dubious brew). Sinister runestones lay scattered around the fire, and when the Imperials disturbed the site, a wicked shade manifested, chilling Belc to the bone and demanding that the party slay a witch and set it free to atone for befouling its site of binding. The party reluctantly agreed, and headed back to the village, where they believed the with to be staying.

They skulked around the perimeter of the peaceful settlement, watching the movements of the villagers and their hunters. When it became obvious that this was no military community, they left a few of the runestones that they had retrieved from the witch’s fire and left them within suspicious distance of a hunter’s path. Sure enough, a hunter discovered them and brought them to the attention of one of the other villagers, who then confronted a tribeswoman with them. She responded severely, which the lurking Imperials took as evidence of witchery, and they planned their response.

That night, under cover of darkness, they raided the suspected witch’s hut, which she shared with a dozen other villagers. In the shock of the invasion, they made a beeline for her and slew her on the spot. An elder shouted out — in the Imperial tongue! — for everyone to stop, but to no avail. The villagers responded to the assault and managed to pull Belc down and slay him with dagger-strikes, even after Magnus Agrippa used his holy powers to grant him vitality.

A witch almost certainly lives here.

With the witch dead, the legionnaires fled into the night, and we called the session there, on a semi-cliffhanger of them eluding the angry and bewildered villagers and regrouping… somewhere.

From the gamemaster’s seat, I was happy with how the session played out, both in the diversity of the character roles, and in the pacing of the session. It was interesting to rule that a month of exploration had occurred, and enough encounters happened so that the elapsing month didn’t just seem like handwaved, dead time. Normally, low-level characters usually acquire a few levels in a local dungeon, which would have been easy to accomplish in the location of Fort Lorica, but I wanted something that allowed the desperate characters to have something they could call their own right away, so that they wouldn’t feel completely overwhelmed by the situation.

I also really enjoy the on-the-fly judgments the players have to make while sussing out a situation. With the presentations of the creatures in the Pagan Lands as unique and monstrous entities rather than “You see six orcs,” the players never really know what they’re dealing with until the dice start falling. Avoiding a creature, coming up with experimental approaches, and undertaking problems without resorting to “proven” tactics is part of the appeal to me, and part of what I want to accomplish with the setting and project.

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