Character: Vanir the Halfling Storm Sorcerer

I made this guy up for D&D 4e a little while ago, and just rediscovered him while updating another 4e character on the D&D Insider character builder. He's actually a response to a question I asked myself - "Now that I have a Pathfinder Elemental Sorceress, what would a similar 4e character look like?" I got kind of off the rails though, and Vanir shares little with Jinna aside from their elemental sorcery.

To borrow a trick from Numenera, you could describe him as a “Halfling Storm Sorcerer who Dances with Wolves”.

I imagine him as a nearly feral Chaotic Neutral character whose Dog sidekick (NEVER a mount!) is his closest friend. He was found in the wild as a youth, after an unnatural storm took his family from him. Whatever caused that storm left its mark on young Vanir, who has gained an intuitive grasp of the arcana of storms and air elementals. Being so charismatic, Vanir makes friendly acquaintances easily, though his storm-driven temper makes him a dangerous foe.

Vanir only recently came into his sorcerous birthright (typical "18th Birthday" type thing), and he adventures to push the limits of his powers and discover what his true limitations are.

Here's his Summary data. It's not as nice as the HeroLab Pathfinder data, but it will give you the idea.

====== Created Using Wizards of the Coast D&D Character Builder ======

Vanir, level 1

Halfling, Sorcerer

Build: Storm Sorcerer

Animal Master Starting Feature Option: Dog

Spell Source Option: Storm Magic

Found in the Wild (Heal class skill)

Theme: Animal Master

FINAL ABILITY SCORES

STR 12, CON 11, DEX 18, INT 11, WIS 8, CHA 18

STARTING ABILITY SCORES

STR 12, CON 11, DEX 16, INT 11, WIS 8, CHA 16

AC: 14 Fort: 11 Ref: 14 Will: 16

HP: 23 Surges: 6 Surge Value: 5

TRAINED SKILLS

Arcana +5, Athletics +6, Heal +4, Nature +4

UNTRAINED SKILLS

Acrobatics +6, Bluff +4, Diplomacy +4, Dungeoneering –1, Endurance +0, History +0, Insight –1, Intimidate +4, Perception –1, Religion +0, Stealth +4, Streetwise +4, Thievery +6

POWERS

Basic Attack: Melee Basic Attack

Basic Attack: Ranged Basic Attack

Animal Master Attack: Distracting Attack

Halfling Racial Power: Second Chance

Sorcerer Attack 1: Lightning Strike

Sorcerer Attack 1: Storm Walk

Sorcerer Attack 1: Whirlwind

Sorcerer Attack 1: Howling Tempest

FEATS

Level 1: Sorcerous Blade Channeling

ITEMS

Cloth Armor (Basic Clothing) x1

Adventurer's Kit

Staff Implement x1

Dagger x1

====== End ======

The SWords & SWizardry game continues....

I got in a session yesterday for "D&D's Birthday".  A week or so ago, the party had gone on a successful firebeetle hunt in the Delve, and gained enough XP to level up. The wizard's new access to 2nd level spells had him spending tons of GP on researching new spells and creating scrolls, not to mention using "Continual Light" (which in S&W, as in the older D&D's, is permanent) to upgrade party's lanterns.

Last night, the town's mayor invited the part up to his estate for dinner and of course to discuss some business. It seems that the local abby is hot to purify and reclaim the tomb of Saint Ulther (which the party had discovered in the Delve a few weeks ago), but are not happy about the idea that this Delve goes much deeper, and and probably contains increasingly dangerous foes who may wander up during a veneration service to eat some acolytes. So the Mayor and Abbot wish to retain the party as a "cleaning crew", officially sanctioning their activities (in other words, identifying them as friends, not rivals), and are willing to provide some "technical support" in the form of two magical staves - raise dead (8) and cure light wounds (50). The party quickly did the math on the equivalent cost in healing potions and raise dead spells, and decided that was a fair deal. They're on a timetable now though, and needs to get that Delve cleared out inside of 3 months, since that's when the pilgrims are coming.

The next day, the party descended to Level 4 of the Delve, wherein dwelled a huge and fearsome beast (the eventually determined it was a Manticore - really a bit outside their "comfort zone" to engage). The fighter used the Mage's new "Strength" spell to boost himself from a passable 13 up to an 18 strength, the bonuses of which came in handy over the course of the adventure.

As it turned out, there were also a number of goblins holed up down there. As many of their kin had become food for the beast, they were pretty scared, and they were willing to make a deal with the party to help defeat the beast. In reality, they hoped to loot the treasure room while the beast was chewing on the party, but it didn't work out that way for them. Though they took the brunt of the beast's attacks, the goblins and party actually made a fair dent in the beast's health, and only a few goblins died before the fighter critically hit with his battle axe. (The fighter wanted to chop off the Manticore's tail. I decided that if the fighter rolled a 20, he'd succeed. And wouldn't you know it, the next attack was a 20.) The Wizard plugged the beast with a magic missile to finish him off.

The party rushed in to the treasure room (having a fairly good idea what the goblins were up to), and the fighter slew two goblins in one stroke. (The advantages of being a fighter in S&W - you can take out low HD critters quickly) The remaining goblins fled, and the party carried as much of the treasure out as they could (thanks to the Fighter's temporary 18 strength, he just hoisted the treasure chest on his shoulder and carried it out).

And that was the end of that trip into the Delve. The party plans to go right back in, even though that means they won't be able to replace the Strength scroll in time. They want to prevent the Goblins from stealing the rest of the treasure.

However, there is a second Manticore, and it's not going to be happy that they killed its mate. And this time, they won't have a half dozen goblins to distract it.....

More Swords & Wizardry gaming, and a Way to Make Your M-U Spend All His Moneys

Over Thanksgiving, I broke out the S&W book, some dice, and "Dyson's Delve" (an old-school friendly dungeon system) for some impromptu gaming.

I had wife&kids roll up new characters on the spot, going hard core with "3d6 in order, swap two". Stats ranged from 7 to 14, with most in the 9-12 range, so no superheroes. My players chose very standard roles for themselves - Human Fighter, Elf Thief, Human Magic User. The setup was classic "Junior High" level D&D - the players are in a Tavern, when a guy named Dyson comes in, announces that after losing his party (again), he's had it with adventuring, and will give his treasure map to anyone willing to buy him a solid meal. The players fed him, got a few details about the dungeon from him, and set out the next morning.

I'll spare you the details this time, but everyone had fun and want to play more with these characters. My youngest player even told me she really enjoyed the game "even though we just rolled up characters and wrote them down on blank sheets of paper."

I think my success in this game was due to a number of factors.

First, we kept it VERY simple. We only had blank computer paper, dice and pencils. I sketched the parts of the map as they went along, describing the room and not worrying too much about scale. S&W's combat sequence is very simple, with per-side initiative and straight forward attack options. I didn't worry about movement rates and such, since the area was small enough.

Second, I tried to be more descriptive in my narrations. So instead of telling them that the passageway ends in a roughly 20x10 cave with a smooth floor, I'd outline out a rough region on the paper and say, "the passageway opens up before you to reveal a larger room. Some stalactites hang from the ceiling, but the floor is mostly smooth." I also tried to be less "there's a cave here with 10 giant rats" and more "down the passageway, you hear the squeaking of many creatures. As you approach, you can see that you've found a nest of giant rats, and their eyes glint hungrily as they turn from their scraps of food to face you."

(I'm not saying I didn't go for atmosphere before, but this time I completely disregarded any mechanical descriptions, like room sizes, etc. and relied on the sketched map to convey the rough size and shape of the room, and narration to describe the overall feeling and relevant details.)

And finally, I tried to keep some whimsey in the game to balance out the creepiness. For example, when the Fighter made his save against a ghoul's attack, I described the icy feeling of paralysis coming over the character, and his force of will to shake it off - "Not Today!" the player exclaimed. Later, when the M-U cast Sleep on a bunch of rats, he only got all but one of them. The little guy hunched over, shuddered in effort and with a baleful squeak, said something in rattish that probably means, "Not Today!" before he charged in to attack.


So, after the adventure, the players found themselves in possession of around 1000gp each. (In S&W as in all old-school D&Ds, gold is XP, so players tend to have a lot of it.) The M-U started asking about costs for making scrolls and stuff. Normally, Magic Users don't make scrolls at low level, but that ability is one of the things I really like about Pathfinder, so I came up with this:

An M-U can make a scroll of any spell he knows for 100gp + 100gp per spell level. So a 1st level scroll costs 200gp, 2nd 300gp, etc. This matches up (sort of) with S&W's treasure generation rules, and means that (as long as they keep finding gold), M-U players can bring the hurt. But a smart player won't blow a 400gp scroll to get less than 400gp of profit, unless death is on the line.

Also, I figured that an M-U can spend gp on researching spells. For any spell in the rule book that the M-U doesn't know, he can spend 100gp (double each level) to re-roll his "chance to learn" percentage. Twice that if he does not have access to either a spellbook or scroll containing that spell to work from. At high levels, this research is staggeringly expensive, and it's probably more cost effective to find high-level mages and steal their spell books. Even at moderate levels, it's worth throwing a few 1000gp at some adventurers to steal a book for you, if you know it contains spells you want. This works as motivation both for players and patrons.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

My work overtime schedule is over, and I'm about to have some time off. So naturally my thoughts return to gaming. :)

Not sure if my home campaign will resume our Pathfinder campaign, start a new Pathfinder campaign, do some Swords & Wizardry, or something else entirely. Either way, I think I'm going to steer the campaign back towards a more "old school" aesthetic. You know, "a wizard wants you to fetch some obscure spell component", "you find the map to an abandoned dungeon", "the mayor's daughter was kidnapped by <X>", that sort of thing. I'm going to try to put the mystery back into the setting.

I'll let you know how it goes.

A Curious Thought About Old vs. New School RPGs, and Player's Attitudes Towards Their Characters

Something about working late hours gets me philosophical, and I feel compelled to take that out on the rest of the web. (Or at least the few sturdy souls who read my blog, and all those search bots who are my loyal followers as well.)

Probably this is an epiphany only to me, but I think I finally get what the disconnect between Old School and New School gamers is with respect to their characters. I'm going to stick with D&D and Traveller as two examples of both Old School and New School games in their various editions. Plus, they're the games I'm most familiar with.

In an "Old School Game", your characters are very random. In both D&D and Traveller, players are admonished by the rules to "make do" with their characters, and only in truly hopeless cases do they get to roll up another before at least trying to play that character. (Traveller famously advises enrolling undesirable characters in the Scouts, because that is the service they're least likely to survive chargen in.)

In more "New School" games like D&D 3e and Mongoose Traveller, (and to a much greater extent games like GURPS or FateCore) you are encouraged to dream up a character concept and then "build" towards that concept through a combination of random and deterministic elements.

So where's the big revelation, you ask?

Well, it's this - in OSG, players are "dealt" characters, but in NSG, players create characters.

The difference has a profound effect on how players approach their games. "Dealt" characters are almost "pawns" or "hands" (as in poker) that give the player capabilities to use during the game, and some characteristics to aid in role playing (OSGs are still RPGs, after all). "Created" characters are drawn directly from the player's desires, and thus more closely represent the players' own alter-egoes.

In my case, I've generally viewed characters as being "dealt" - the challenge of dreaming up a way to play the stats and to employ the powers in a useful way is fun to me. Of course I also come to identify with my characters, since it's not really possible to play a role that does not contain your own personality to varying degrees. But a character's death isn't really any more disappointing to me than the death of a character in a TV show or book that I like.

Which I suppose puts me firmly in the OSG camp, though I think I enjoy the more elegant rule systems that the NSG camp generally has.

I can sympathize with those who view characters as a form of wish-fulfillment though, and given the preponderance of more NSG style games, it seems most people identify with their characters more than a little bit.

What Does Lovecraftian Gaming REALLY Mean?

I've been a fan of H.P. Lovecraft and his peers since I first discovered weird fiction and cosmic horror back in High School. I read everything I could get my hands on - Machen, Chambers, Bloch, etc. The Chaosium fiction collections came out in my early adulthood, and I found (and still find) them a great source for stories I hadn't read before. (Aside: I had to stop reading "A Season in Carcosa" recently, because even though the stories seem innocuous enough, I found them seeping into my dreams. I'll read more once the creeping dread fades.)

But I have never had a lot of interest in "Lovecraftian" gaming. You know, lots of deep ones going after people, ghouls, big, floppy tentacled monsters, etc. Essentially, the "August Derleth" version of Lovecraft - name dropping and cataloging, but adding anything new.

While I enjoy a good historical wargame as much as the next guy, it seems to me that the general approach to Lovecraftian horror is more like quoting Monty Python skits than writing weird fiction. As a geek, I memorized plenty of M.P. in my youth, but laughing about their comedy is not the same thing as creating "Pythonesque" comedy for people to laugh at.

So, how then does one do something "Lovecraftian" without resorting to name dropping (or re-skinning)? It's a tough question, and I don't claim that I have the skill to produce such a thing. But perhaps I can categorize what it might look like.

What made Lovecraft's stories compelling to me was the way he took things that we all take for granted (or at least took for granted back in the dawn of the last century) and turned them inside out. Jesus' resurrection and plan of salvation, horribly echoed in Cthulhu's return and subsequent scouring of the Earth (recall that HLP was raised Baptist, though he renounced that faith), the fear of finding out that your ancestors were not what you were lead to believe and that you can't choose your own fate, the shock of discovering that maybe a brilliant artist is not as imaginative as everyone believes. The list goes on.

So how do you do something like that in Pathfinder/D&D or Traveller, specifically without invoking Elder Gods and Non-euclidean dimensions?

I'm not sure, but here are some thoughts.

---

Traveller

Traveller's Third Imperium (The 3I) is in theory the easiest type of setting to convert to horror, since it rests in the conventions of the real world. However, it already has some "Elder Gods" (The Ancients - not godlike in stature, but certainly in power), hidden secrets (like who the Ancients were - spoiler alert from the 1980's: they were a mutation of a reclusive alien species found in enclaves throughout charted space), strange madness inducing phenomena (some people go mad seeing jumpspace) and hints that there was something more going on with how interstellar travel worked than anyone really knew.

These elements were not blatant expressed in the setting though. In fact, I suspect very few groups actually explored the darker side of the Traveller universe, preferring to focus on its decidedly humanistic and capitalistic themes. Mongoose Publishing's "Secrete of the Ancients" campaign did a good job of re-casting the Ancients as a living force within charted space, and had a nicely Lovecraft-y feel without invoking squid-headed super-beings. (Though there were some interesting ways that the Ancients achieved immortality.) But in the end, it was a Humanist's view of extradimensional horror seasoned with a dash of conspiracy theory, not something that contradicts your concepts of what reality is.

Clearly, something like Mass Effect's Reapers would work for Traveller, though they're more directly Cthuloid, not being "alive" as we know it, etc. But the Reapers are still re-skinned Elder Gods, returning when the stars are right to cleanse the galaxy for their own twisted reasons.

Where can we go in Traveller to reach the disturbing "We were SO WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING" state required by cosmic horror?

Maybe psionic powers are really a mental connection with higher-dimensional beings from "jump space", who can cause the familiar psionic effects, but at a terrible if not obvious price to the psionic. And maybe these beings have a plan? Maybe that's too obvious - science is wrong, mystics are right seems like a cop-out.

Maybe the dawning realization that the entire Nobility structure of the 3rd Imperium is in fact composed of "Manchurian Candidate" type Bioconstructs. And maybe they have been deliberately directing technological progress for the last thousand years, relentlessly pushing for higher and higher power jump drives. And now, misjumps seem to be happening more frequently than in the past. Recently, a long-missing ship has appeared in the outer system with only minimal power signatures on board. A local professor wants to hire a ship to investigate....

Better, even if it's a little "God Emperor of Dune" crossed with the Star Trek:TNG episode "Conspiracy". It undermines with the understanding of how society works, if not the structure of the universe itself. That fits well with Traveller's humanistic focus, which might be a drawback to the concept.

I suppose you could imagine some setting in which punching ships through jump space is disturbing some sleeping entity (reverse-Azathoth?), but then we're back to re-skinning.

Pathfinder

(Sorry, Pathfinder doesn't have an iconic title format like Traveller does, and the web doesn't have their font. But that's not a bad match for the color.)

Pathfinder is already rife with Lovecraft inspired nastiness, but none of it is truly creepy. (ok, maybe Aboleths....) Of course that's because once you catalog something, it's no longer surprising. Many write ups have great atmosphere when you first read them, or really stop to think about them though. But ultimately, it's just another kind of monster to defeat or flee from. Paizo does a good job with huge, world-shattering plots and clearly are fans of Lovecraft (almost too much so, I sometimes think), but I wonder if it would be possible to take a more subtle approach?

What does that cosmic horror even mean in a world with magic, demons, aberrant horrors and monsters? Can you add anything that would invoke actual horror for the players?

What we need is to take something simple and fundamental to the setting, and turn it inside out, changing the significance into something more horrible than you would expect. That's not as easy as it sounds, since countless authors before you have already pushed the envelope on this one.

To really up-end a D&D type fantasy setting, you would need to do something screwy like have the entire thing be happening inside The Matrix. That's right, not magic and gods, but a transhuman post-singularity setting, where reality was a simulation that could be hacked from the inside. The "twist" is that though reality appears infinitely diverse, full of life, magic and will, it is in fact only the shadow cast by cold data, interacting in complex but ultimately artificial ways. Fantasy lives because of the wonder and infinite potential of the fantastical realty. Showing all that to be merely an illusion would be soul-crushing to a denizen of such a reality.

But would that be cosmic horror for the players, or their characters? I imagine it would cause more than a few players to stop playing, though that's only a victory for horror in a meta sense....


As I mentioned at the start, I don't have any good answers. I'm curious if anyone reading has some ideas how to bring cosmic horror to RPGs without simply invoking Lovecraft's memory.

Who Owns the Narrative?

I come to that question after getting the chance to GM some FateCore on Sunday with my at-home group (Wife+kids).

The basic setup is simple - the players are the crew of a small "Space Ranger Cruiser" in a "24th Century: Outer Space!" setting. (No FTL, but tons of space flight.) They found out that someone has started manufacturing killbots in the asteroid belt when one attacked their base on Ceres. They managed to get into the hidden asteroid base with very little opposition (I let them try out some different types of skills and a handful of simple combats), and are poised to enter "Sector 8", which presumably is where all the killbots are being built. (In other words, I went for a straight-up dungeon crawl. At least in the classic games, that's usually a safe bet, though perhaps it was a poor choice for FateCore....)

Now here's the thing. We've mostly been playing traditional games like Pathfinder, and they're having a little trouble with the idea that THEY get to decide the details of a scene or setting. They are more used to the GM (me) laying it all out for them to explore and reacting instead of acting. I've tried to encourage them with questions like, "What do you think, DO these robots have homing beacons?" but like me, they're having some trouble adapting. So rather than a collaborative effort to make an epic story, this is turning into a plain-old "GM tells us what's happening, we react" game. I do like those kinds of games, but FateCore seems like it would work best with everyone creating the story and the GM just running the bad guys and making judgements about difficulty levels.

Maybe the stumbling block is that they don't have a significant buy-in in the setting. When I asked them what sort of setting they wanted to play, they were noncommittal, though interested to try FateCore. We already have a Fantasy game, so I proposed this "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet" type pulp setting as something different. It wasn't until I suggested to my son that he could play a Telepath "Psi-Corp Ranger" that he became more than passively interested in the setting, and my daughter was only interested in playing an "Anime School Girl Brat" whose dad is a Space Ranger officer. Both turned out to be pretty cool characters in the end, but I'm afraid that having a dungeon crawl be their first outing might have been a mistake, since none of them really wants to help "own" the story.

I've also found that it's not easy to work their individual Aspects into the game. As I mentioned, this is more or less a straight-up dungeon crawl, though the characters are more tuned for investigative work. Which is my fault - I fell back on the "tried & true" without regard for how their characters turned out. To their credit, they are taking guard uniforms for disguise and the telepath is lifting names out of peoples' heads to help deceive them.

I know that attempting to GM a game I've never played for a group that's never played the game, and isn't super-invested in the setting is rife with failure possibilities. (When I put it that way, it seems insane that I even tried.) I'm not judging FateCore (which is a very slick rule set), just my ability to employ it properly with the players I have.

It hasn't all been bad - we had some pretty serious laughs when the guards caught the party in the Hydroponics sector, and the School Girl ("I'm really not as young as I look!") used her considerable deception skill to trick the guards into believing that she and one of the other characters were "just being naughty, and please, please, please don't let my dad find out!" She distracted the guards with her Legendary Deception long enough for the "hitter" to slug one in the Jaw (lights out!) and the third character secured the second guard with zip ties and duct tape. (Because even in C24, duct tape is the answer.)

It might be best to, after we finish this scenario, say, "Ok, that's how FateCore works, more or less. Now what sort of game do you REALLY want to play?"

And I have to be OK with it if they say, "Pathfinder!"