Dungeon Dioramas - Secrets Under Stone & Azag

I'm going to try something new this time and compare two similar game books. Both are descendants of the Advanced Fighting Fantasy game rules, or what, these days, we might call troikalike games.

 

 

Secrets Under Stone, written by N Weaver with a print edition by Soul Muppet, is listed as the first issue of a recurring zine called Deep Under Stone, although no second issue has been released yet, and the proposed structure of the zine series suggests that Weaver intends Secrets to stand alone as a complete game book. As proposed, future issues will apply the same mechanics to different settings. The art is from the public domain, including the cover collage.

 

Secrets Under Stone is set in a general British Gothic milieu, sometime in the Long Nineteenth Century. The setting is a departure from the other troika-likes, but it should seem familiar to anyone who has encountered Gothic tropes before. The primary innovations that separate Secrets from its sister games are mechanical, so those will get the majority of my attention. 

 

One of the most common complaints I've heard about Troika is the random starting Skill score. In Troika, you roll 2d6+12 to determine Stamina, 1d6+6 to determine Luck, and 1d3+3 to determine Skill. These roughly correspond to Hit Points, Saving Throws, and Skills, respectively, in D&D. This looks really elegant when written out, but it means that about a third of characters have Skill 4, and thus only a 16.67% chance - the same as 1-in-6 - to accomplish any task that they don't specifically have an Advanced Skill in. You may recall me mentioning before that Old School designers love giving 1-in-6 and 2-in-6 chances for starting characters to accomplish things they are ostensibly good at, and that Old School players love to complain about how miserly and miserable they find these chances. Elegance on paper is not the same thing as a mechanic that players will enjoy using at the table. 

 

So it was a pleasant surprise for me to see that Secret Under Stone's primary mechanical innovation is to change the Skill mechanic by splitting it in three. Players roll to determine six Advanced Skills from across three categories - Brawn, Knack, and Knowledge. Each of those acts as a base Skill score for those areas of character ability, and each is 4 plus half the number of Advanced Skills. So scores as low as 4 and as high as 7 are possible but unlikely - most scores will be 5 or 6 - but low scores in one area will be automatically offset by higher scores in the others. Instead of the colorful Backgrounds from Troika, the nature of your character is determined by the mix of these skills. 

 

To transplant the basic skill mechanic introduced here to another rules system besides those derived from Advanced Fighting Fantasy would take a bit tinkering, but it would be far from impossible. The basic mechanic is randomly selecting special skills and then using the total number of each type of those skills as the basis to generate ability scores. The first thing I was reminded of was Empire of the Petal Throne, where player rolled to generate ability scores and then received skills in order from a list based on how high their score is. That mechanic is essentially the inverse of Secret Under Stone's, and it's easy to imagine a contemporary take on Tekumel that used the mechanic introduced here. Another possibility is Numenera, which has pre-set ability scores by character class, and player-selected special skills that draw on those abilities. Once again, reversing and randomizing to use Secret's mechanic is easy to envision.

 

The other aspect of the Skill mechanic here that I really like is that each skill comes with a piece of starting equipment that uses it. I've mentioned on my own blog that skills in D&D and most other tabletop roleplaying games require a kind of two-factor authentication - you need both the skill and the equipment to actually do something. Thieves need lockpicks, bards need music instruments, clerics need holy symbols, etc. (There are some counter-examples, where you need just one or the other but not both, but for this review the trend is more important than the exceptions.) Depending on the version of the game you're playing, characters might be gifted these tools automatically upon picking their class, or the rules might rely on player skill to buy the right starting equipment. Here there are no character classes, only skills, but if you're good at climbing, you get a rope; if you know how to swordfight, you start with a sword. Combine this with something similar to the weapon-specific abilities I praised in my review of Root, and I think you could really have something interesting, something I'd like to see more of in other games.

 

An example character in Secrets Under Stone might start with Axe Fighting, Sword Fighting, Crossbow Shooting, Navigation, Astrology, and Spiritualism, Brawn 5, Knack 5, Knowledge 5, and own an axe, a sword, a crossbow with 20 bolts, a compass, an astrolabe, and a spirit board. Despite the lack of a named Background, it's relatively easy to imagine this character within a broadly Victorian milieu - an explorer perhaps, equally attuned to the practical and supernatural properties of the night sky, and ready to hack through underbrush and opposing forces alike.

 

The magic system and bestiary of Secrets both feel incomplete, and there is essentially no worldbuilding beyond what is implied by character creation, and no real advice about how to run an adventure using these rules, either in general or with an eye toward distinguishing it from its sister games. Astrology and Spiritualism, for example, are both skills that grant your character the ability to use magic, and there are about a half-dozen others that do the same. Weaver suggests that instead of Troika's spells, Secrets characters with the correct skills should be able to learn Rituals. The key differences appear to be that rituals are intended to seem more low fantasy than spells; they each have success, critical success, failure, and critical failure results; and there is no indication in the text how, or even if, the number of rituals a character might learn from each skill should be limited. Weaver has written two rituals for each spellcasting skill, and left the rest of the hard work of developing setting-appropriate magical effects with four levels of efficacy each to the referees who volunteer to use this new system. 

 

Magic can also be acquired by bonding with a Patron. These work quite similarly to patrons in Dungeon Crawl Classics. There is a well described ritual for forming a bond, with the Secret-standard four levels of effect. Each patron grants a Boon, a situational bonus that depends on the character's skill level, and knowledge of three Powers, which function exactly like normal spells in Troika, including the variable Stamina costs, and which mirror the three Patron Spells in DCC. Each patron also has a 1d6 table of Curses, which also mirror the Patron Taint effects in DCC. The levels of effectiveness are another similarity, now that I think of it. For the nine spellcasting skills, Weaver has provided two example patrons, leaving the other seven for interested referees to invent for themselves. I would be more forgiving if the anticipated second issue of the zine were intended to complete these rules rather than provide a palette swap into another new setting. I am interested in seeing the new setting, but this one still feels incomplete in certain key respects. 

 

The bestiary is primarily made up of creatures referenced in other parts of the book. The mundane animals you might receive as "equipment" if you have the animal handling skill are here, as are the various servitors and familiars you can create with one of the listed magic rituals, and the mercenaries of varying quality you can hire to accompany you. I am gratified that there are no creatures referenced earlier that don't get an entry, but the lack of other entries feels like a missed opportunity to me. First because of the lost chance to expand the Secrets world, and second because Weaver has chosen to alter the math of Troika's combat by reducing weapon damage, dropping Stamina by half - from 2d6+12 to 2d3+6 - and replacing "playing card initiative" with the standard D&D style alternating combat. Taken all together, I'm not certain what effect all those changes have on the pace of combat, but I am sure that you can't simply drop a monster from Troika into a Secrets Under Stone game without it tearing through the weaker characters like a wrecking ball. So some additional sample opponents would be helpful for preparing an appropriate adventure. The one saving grace is the addition of a kind of Luck check - another transplant from DCC! - that possibly allows surviving a fall to 0 Stamina. 

 

Weaver concludes with a page and a half of advice about how to run adventures that incorporate investigation and the learning of new magical Rituals, and a couple pages of advice and encouragement for altering the rules to fit another setting. The most cryptic advice is from a page on the possible rewards characters might receive from adventuring - Luxury, Prestige, and Conscience. Weaver provides a list of milestone achievements, and the reward, in points, for meeting each milestone. These points don't interact with any system of experience or advancement. As Weaver explains: "This page allows you to quantify your achievements, which provides no reward beyond the pleasure of doing so. Think of it like a High Score table or ignore it entirely." 

 

art by Logan Stahl

 
Azag is described as a complete game book, although as I understand it, a print edition with more art might eventually be forthcoming. It's published by Dank Dungeons with a print edition by LF OSR, and written primarily be Lex Mandrake, with additional text by Chris Boudreau, Diogo Nogueira, Safia Aldulaijan, and Mahar Mangahas. The cover art is by Luis Melo, with interior art by Logan Stahl, and maps by Daniel Walthall. The additional authors supplied short fiction about the setting; I'm not certain if they wrote any of the game material. 

 

Azag makes some minor mechanical departures from the other troik-alikes, but here the majority of the authors' effort has been poured into creating an original setting, so again, I'm going to put most of my attention where the action is. 

 

The opening sections of Azag start with a short story; an overview of the rules for skills, combat, and traveling; a second short story; the rules for character creation and advancement; a third short story; a section on Talents - which are Azag's version of Troika's Advanced Skills - and spells; a fourth short story; lists of equipment and tables for generating magic items; a fifth short story; and then we enter the much longer second half of the books, which is all about the unique setting of the game. 

 

I will leave it to someone more qualified to comment on the style and content of the short stories, but I will note that each is only a page long and is accompanied by a full-page piece of art. They effectively act as section breaks between the steps of character creation. My one critique of this organization is that the sections are placed in the reverse of the order that they're listed as steps of character construction. Azag also declines to list character Backgrounds, and instead asks players to generate characters by combining the results from several lists. Following the instructions, you're supposed to start with a magic item, then receive mundane equipment, then pick Talents and spells, and finally write three unique Traits. In keeping with the reverse order of the other sections, the advice for that last step are right below the instructions for the character creation process.

 

Like Secrets Under Stone, the Talents in Azag are closer to D&D's skill list than to the more outre options found in Troika. You Talents might include Reflexes or Willpower; Ranged Weapons or Armor Specialist; or something like Awareness, Stealth, Lockpicking, or Wayfinding. Weapon damage is also based on different sizes of dice, like D&D and unlike Troika's bespoke damage tables that transform the effects of rolling a d6. 

 

Magic items are the one element of character creation that's random instead of chosen by the player. To create one you roll 2d12 three times to determine the Item Type, Prefix, and Suffix. So you might end up with the Bronze Gemstone of Might, which increases your Skill and makes Tests of Strength easier, or the Silver Sword of Luck, which increases your Stamina and causes you to gain and lose Luck points when you pass and fail Luck Tests, amplifying their swingy-ness. It's clear that Mandrake has considered the distribution of possible results, and has pushed both the rarer sounding names and the more impressive looking powers away from the center and toward the edges of the probability curve. 

 

The second half of Azag is devoted to describing its game world. The organization of this section is very nice. First, a page listing the four regions of the world, with a one-sentence description of each, and a list of a half-dozen or so important locations in that region. There are the Coin Roads, a desert crossed by trade routes, the Crescent Sea, a Mediterranean coastline, the Shadow of the Great Glacier, a wintry northern region, and the Verdant Basin, a tropical jungle. 

 

Next, two to a page, each evocatively named location gets a paragraph description and a d6 table of possible encounters. These act more like storytelling prompts than like traditional D&D encounters. This section, if used as written, probably plays out much more like a storygame than like any other version of Advanced Fighting Fantasy, they contain both a setup and a conclusion and ask the reader to decide how the characters got from one to the other. The prompts could also be used differently than suggested, by a referee preparing ahead of time, as the starting point for more traditional roleplaying. One prompt in the Alabaster Maze in the Coin Roads region suggests "You became hopelessly lost in the labyrinth with no chance of escape. A being in the form of an albino bat offered to guide you out of the maze for a price. What did the bat ask of you?" Another, from the Invisible Library of Malazar along the Crescent Sea tells "Warlocks from distant lands offered you riches for escort through the library. When they found the text they sought you were betrayed and had to fight your way out. What knowledge had driven them to kill and how did you best them?" 

 

Used as written, these encounters presume a conclusion that might otherwise take an entire game session to achieve, if it could be won at all, and invite the players and referee together to retroactively decide how this was accomplished. I can imagine relying on the character's Talents and Spells and magic items to tell the story of how they escaped the maze or defeated the warlocks, but it doesn't seem like any of the previous mechanics of rolling dice should be involved. The dice help us decide the success or failure of something we attempt. Here the success is already decided, only the method used to achieve it has yet to be played out. Ryuutama uses similar mechanics, though on a much smaller scale, rolling the dice first, then asking, for example, how you got injured along the trail, or what happened in the night to disturb you sleep so. 

 

After another short story, the next section is devoted to the NPCs you might meet while adventuring. There is a table for each region to generate NPCs. Roll a d6 three times to discover their Background, Motivation, and Unique Trait, though with only six traits per region, they aren't really so unique, and then consult the table of Plot Hooks. There are 36 possible plot hooks in each region, each determined by the NPC's background and motivation. For example, in the Great Glaciers, you might meet a mammoth herder who is obsessed with getting their deity to the best shrine in Barbasdu, you might discover that "Haunted by dreams of a mammoth-headed deity taller than the Great Glacier, they now believe the shrines of Barbasdu to be the rightful grazing ground of the magnificent beasts. These woolly giants will be mounted and ridden to the gates of the city to take their rightful home." Or in the Verdant Basin, you might find a basking cultist who wants to prove their innocence before their people, about whom you learn that "This cultist's jilted ex-lover has accused them of worshiping the Moon King. To prove their loyalty, they must climb to the top of smouldering Mt. Kirmak in the Frostfire Peaks and retrieve a perfect sunbleached opal."

 

The plot hooks are really what make these characters unique, and I think that Mandrake has given each an agenda that goes beyond, in both richness and specificity, what most referees might be able invent for themselves just from looking at the backgrounds and motivations. Each NPC holds the seed to an adventure, complete with locations, items, other NPCs. These seeds are the primary source of inspiration for running adventures in the world of Azag. Most adventures then, are likely to start with the players meeting someone with their own agenda, and deciding whether to assist them, thwart them, or otherwise take advantage of the conditions that agenda will create.

 

he final section, separated by a last short story, offers roughly 20 new monsters, each with a pair of abilities or interesting details. The creatures Mandrake has chosen seem consistent with his stated goal of building a game world similar to the stories of Clark Ashton Smith, and they seem appropriate to a world of harsh desert and dense jungle. There are several varieties of undead, giant insects, dinosaurs, and mechanical servitors. Ironically, what's missing here is a few examples of mundane or human opponents to provide a baseline chassis for the sorts of cultists, nomads, and magicians that show up in the encounter tables and NPC plot hooks. 

 

 

This post originally appeared on Bones of Contention.  

My First 6 Months with Bones of Contention

About six months ago, I announced that I was joining the Bones of Contention blog. Although this has been one of my least productive blogging years, I did manage to get a few posts in.

 

 
 

Dungeon Dioramas - In the Light of a Ghost Star & Earth Expedition One

 

For my first post, I decided to review one of the first adventures put out by the prolific minimalist Nate Treme. In addition to a careful reading of the gamebook, I was able to base my review on some actual play experience with my regular Friday night game group. This one also features something that I hope I can still make a somewhat regular feature of the column, a section where I put the procedural adventure generators in the book to work and run them through their paces by generating an entire setting.

 

 

Cryptic Signals - Mausritter, Anomalous Subsurface Environment, Honey in the Rafters, Doodle Champion Island Games

 

One of the interesting things about Bones as a blog is that we have multiple authors. The Cryptic Signals series of posts tries to use that to offer a series of short vignette reviews of several different game books. I went ahead and organized this one, and wrote two of the reviews, including for the Pokemon-like browser game Google released to celebrate the 2020 Summer Olympics. My review of Mausritter included another test of adventure generation procedures.

 

  

Dungeon Dioramas - Night Land

 

When I wrote my Ghost Star review, I mentioned that I had been hoping for a setting like William Hope Hodgson's Night Land, which led Trey from From the Sorcerer's Skull to recommend this Night Land to me. Aside from the name and the basic premise of a weird, futuristic land stuck in eternal darkness, this adventure doesn't borrow much from Hodgson, but I'm still glad I read it. 

I feel like mentioning the book in my first two columns makes it seem like I'm obsessed with Night Land, and I'm sure I'll review more science fantasy in the future, but I promise that every column won't be about how another game designer has failed to sufficiently remind me of Hodgson.

Cryptic Signals - Dissident Whispers

This was our most thematic Cryptic Signals so far, and to be honest, I liked that so much I hope more of them will have some sort of unifying theme. I picked my second favorite review from the book. I didn't review my favorite - yet - because I don't want to pigeonhole myself as only writing about Mausritter. I'm hopeful that we'll do another batch of reviews from Dissident Whispers though, and if we do, I'll be sure to review it then. The process of writing my three "mini reviews" so far makes me wonder if I'm constitutionally incapable of writing an actually short review, but it is good practice reining in my tendency to wordiness.

Dungeon Dioramas - Root Quickstart & Pellenicky Glade

My last review of the year looks at the free, public materials for the upcoming Root roleplaying game. I backed the Kickstarter, so I have the pdfs for the full game, but I wanted to base what I wrote on the parts that people can actually play. I wished I could have included this year's Free RPG Day adventure, but I didn't pick it up in person, and the pdf still isn't publicly available. 

I'm glad there was an adventure to review though. It could be tempting to fall into a trap of just reviewing rulesets, but I think the most interesting part of this project is looking at the more actionable advice that shows up in adventures. I want to note that Root actually has a small system for procedurally generating the campaign area, but I didn't bother testing it out, precisely because the availability of pre-written villages makes the random generator to create them less important.

Index of Reviews by Title

My final contribution to Bones for the year was to make an index of the reviews so far. For next year, I hope to use my Cryptic Signals entries to highlight some zines that I think have done something interesting, but that maybe don't rise to full review status. I also hope to try out the Folie a Deux format that Gus and WFS pioneered. I think they're another good way to use our numbers, and I have a couple already tentatively lined up. I just need to come out of my shell enough to get them written.

Dungeon Dioramas - Root Quickstart & Pellenicky Glade

In fall 2019, Magpie Games ran a successful Kickstarter for a roleplaying game based on the Root board game published by Leder Games. In support of the Kickstarter, Magpie released a free Quickstart version of the rpg. In 2020, on Free RPG Day, Magpie released a free quickstart adventure, Pellenicky Glade. 

This year in 2021, Magpie released another quickstart adventure for Free RPG Day, and plans to release the final versions of the full Root roleplaying game. At the time of writing, the second adventure is only available to people who picked up a copy in person, and the full game is only available as a pdf to Kickstarter backers.

 

  

 
 

First Impressions 

 

There's a certain sleight of hand that Root pulls off, in both its board game and roleplaying game formats. It's a trick that draws you in with lovely digital art showing adorable woodland animals, and delivers a game of conquering factions engaged in a brutal war. 
 
The board game hands you cute little screen-printed, critter-shaped meeples, then sets up a conflict between a corrupt aristocracy, an invading imperialist, locals who are by turns apathetic and divided by ethnicity, a burgeoning multi-racial democracy, and opportunistic types who live outside the law and subsist on a mix of odd jobs, charity, and grift no matter who's currently in charge.
 
The roleplaying game casts you as the ne'er-do-wells, and drops you into a fantasy roleplaying game where all the fantasy is supplied by casting talking animals in all the speaking roles, where there is no magic at all. Your characters are weak and vulnerable, supplies are scarce and costly, the numbers are small and unforgiving, and unlike even the lowest of low-fantasy roleplaying games, you have nothing more fantastical than a well-forged sword to help keep you alive.
 
Want to play a game where Robin Hood faces off against the Sheriff of Nottingham, rather than one where Hawkeye and Green Arrow go after Doctor Doom and his army of Chthuloid monstrosities? Although the art shows you something that looks more like Disney's foxy Robin Hood than any dour, "realistic" live-action king of thieves, Root will get you closer to your goal than any version of D&D, or any other fantasy roleplaying game I've seen. None of that necessarily speaks to the quality of the game design, but I want to be clear about what you can expect from the setting. 

  

 

Basic Mechanics
 
The mechanics are organized into "moves" that require rolling 2d6 and adding an ability bonus, with rolls of 7-9 representing partial success, and rolls of 10 or more representing a greater success, a system that should be intimately familiar to players of other PBTA rulesets. The basic moves involve persuading an NPC, tricking an NPC, asking the referee questions about an NPC or about a situation, recklessly breaking something, recklessly trusting to chance, attempting a "roguish feat" like lock-picking or trap-disarming, or attempting a "weapon feat" like disarming a weapon or cleaving through armor. There are also three different moves for attacking an enemy - either by grappling, attacking with a melee weapon, or attacking with a missile weapon. 

 

I want to call out the weapon feats as being particularly interesting. To perform a weapon feat, you need to know that particular feat, and you need a weapon that is "tagged" as being able to perform it. This is loads more interesting that weapon proficiency in D&D, and something that people should seriously consider importing. Some older editions of D&D toyed with the idea of characters learning specific weapons, like axes or polearms or what have you, but since the only difference between weapons is how much damage they deal, and that's determined by size rather than type, there was kind of no point, and those rules have mostly fallen out of fashion, in favor of just learning "simple" or "martial" weapons that are mostly distinguished by damage amount. But the weapon feats seem great, because it actually matters which ones you know, and it actually gives you a reason to use one weapon type over another! 

 

Resources are tracked in a few ways. Each character has an "exhaustion" track and a "wounds" track. Exhaustion is acquired pretty easily, and in fact many character abilities require you to take a point of exhaustion in order to use them. Exhaustion is also the easiest to recover, both by resting, and by taking actions especially related to your character's motivation. Wounds mostly come from combat. 

 

There's a third resource called "decay" here and "depletion" in the finished rules. Each major piece of equipment also has its own depletion track. You deplete your equipment by using it, although you can substitute your own personal depletion track for the equipment's instead of letting it run out or break. You can also draw on your personal depletion track to produce small items of generic adventuring equipment. "Decay" is a terrible name and "depletion" isn't much better. I would have gone with use personally, but I also recognize that the designers were a bit hemmed in by the choice to name each track for a deficiency - for "wounds" instead of health, for example. 

 

Each character has 3-4 points of each major resource to start off with, although you can increase them by "advancing", which is sort of a piecemeal leveling up. With so few of these intrinsic resources, and so many opportunities to lose them, I do kind of wonder how much adventuring, in practice, can actually be accomplished before the characters run out of steam. That's a question I can't answer without playing the game though, which I haven't had the chance to yet. I suspect there's a bit of a learning curve for new players and new referees alike to set an appropriate pace. 

 

There are 6 character types included in the quickstart rules, plus 3 more in the full rules, and another 10 in the Travelers & Outsiders expansion. The ones included here are the Arbiter, a mercenary who follows a personal code of justice, the Ranger, the Scoundrel, who's maybe closer to the Joker than to Han Solo than the name would imply, the Thief, the Tinker, more of a blacksmith than a mad scientist, and the Vagrant, who is some sort of charming grifter. All these character types have some martial ability and some felicity with thieving skills, along with special abilities related to their archetype. 

 

This is a PBTA game, with all that that implies, both good and bad. The good, from my perspective, which may tell you more about me and my preferences than about the quality of the game, has to do with the comprehensiveness of the rules. While I don't really care for heavy rulesets with fiddly bonuses and penalties and situational modifiers that only crop up under special circumstances, I can't honestly claim that I like rules light either, with barely-there mechanics that provide so little guidance you wonder what the putative game designer's contribution was at all. Instead of rules light, I like rules simple, rules consistent, and rules clear. Flexible rules that can be easily applied to similar-but-not-identical situations, like 5e's table for Improvising Damage from the environment, I personally find far more useful than a rules heavy, somehow-still-incomplete list of hundreds of possible damage sources and their very minor variations, or a rules light exhortation that I'm the referee, and I should decide whatever damage is right for myself and apply it as I see fit. 

 

So I like that Root includes rules and advise for the most obvious things that players might try to do, not just in combat, but also traveling, socially interacting with individuals, and crucially for a game set against a backdrop of war, for dealing with the major factions. Though minimal in the quickstart, little more than just a reputation tracker, the full rules have much clearer advise for the magnitude of favors players could request, or the retaliation they might provoke, by interacting with factions based on their current level of notoriety or prestige. The travel moves especially please me - there's one mechanic for traveling along a path, and a second for going off into the trackless woods.

 

The bad, in my view, comes from a legacy of trying to distinguish PBTA games from D&D by changing up the vocabulary. I generally like the idea that players describe what they want their characters to do, and then the referee either tells them the result or asks them to roll the dice to find out. But start throwing slogans like "fiction first" and "to do it, do it" and "moves are triggered" at me, and even though I agree with what you're saying, something about the passive voice and the implied relationship between the players and the referee really bothers me. I recognize this is a basically irrational complaint, but I feel it anew each time I read that text. I'm also not a big fan of special abilities that basically say "when you perform X move, add this ability bonus instead of that ability bonus like everyone else uses". There appears to be at least one special ability like that per character type, but fortunately no more than one per type.

 

Playbooks I consider a bit of a mixed blessing. They're great for getting started quickly, and for having all your abilities already written out with no need to hand-copy anything. Just make a few decisions, check a few boxes, and you can begin the game. But there's hardly any room to write on these things, and as you go, your character should acquire equipment and abilities that aren't pre-printed on the original playbook. Having an actual character sheet as a backup, something you could fill out once you've advanced to the point of outgrowing your first playbook, would be a really great inclusion. 

 

  

 
 

Worldbuilding and Adventure Advice 

 

Arguably the biggest selling point for the Root rpg, (okay, besides its connection to the board game ... okay okay, and also besides the cute art), is the campaign setting. Yes Dungeon World isn't as popular as it used to be, and yes the complete Freebooters on the Frontier is still forthcoming, leaving a bit of a hole in the fantasy offerings among PBTA games, but probably if you're looking at the free rules and adventure, it's because you're interested in what it's like to run a campaign in a forest that's at war all around you. 

 

The quickstart rules are rounded out with advice for setting up a map with a dozen linked communities and for running a first adventure session. Your campaign map will be a large-scale point crawl with 12 "clearings", which represent villages and their immediate surroundings. Each clearing is controlled by a faction, either the invading Marquis de Cat, the moribund Eyrie Dynasties, or just the local Denizens. The denizens are a mix of rabbits, mice, foxes, and birds, although each village has a predominant species. Each clearing also has: two "landscape features", two "important inhabitants", two "important buildings", and two "problems", which strikes me as a pretty good starting point, not far off the setting creation tables you see in Stars Without Number and its sister games. 

 

There are only 6 landscape features, and 3 of them are water, so I imagine that gets old much too quickly. There are 36 entries on the other tables though, so you might find a clearing has "a farmer and a smith" and "a market and a bakehouse" and is troubled by "poisoned supplies and a strange mystery". As a writing prompt, that does provide a starting point, but it will still take a lot of work on the referee's part to turn that into something that's ready for players to interact with it. 

 

The generator for creating a starting adventure is more detailed. You get a starting location, a goal, the person who hired you, objects related to your goal, threats and groups related to your goal, and possible complications. So you might start out en media res "in a forest between clearings", there to "destroy an item", sent by "Local Help, a leader of a neighboring clearing". The item you're there to destroy might be "a strange device or relic", you might be threatened by "an overzealous guard captain", while your goal might require the involvement of "a metalworker's guild" in some way, and the whole thing might be complicated by "a usurpation in progress" in that neighboring clearing. This would take more work to bring to the table too, but it strikes me as more interesting than the clearing generator results. There's the inherent dynamism of having a goal and things standing in the way of completing it of course, but I think the adjectives are doing some heavy lifting here too. If we didn't know that the relic was "strange" or the guard captain "overzealous", the prompt would probably seem flatter and duller.

 

There's a page of advice for creating NPCs, complete with a list of sample names, and (importantly!) a half dozen sample combat statistics for different types of opponents. This too reminds me of Stars Without Number - the different enemies your players' characters might fight will be distinguished by things like faction membership, role, and motivation, but not so much by mechanical differences. One thing I like here is the recommendations for treating mobs of civilians as single, powerful opponents, with three different size options based on the size of the crowd. 

 

The final touch here is advice for having the war pass through clearings between player visits. In between one session and the next, you could find that an army had been through and ransacked the place. Obviously the war shouldn't intrude in that way in between every pair of sessions, but the possibility of one side slowly winning or losing in the background makes the war a source of change and instability within the campaign, which seems appropriate. And although the player characters are assumed to be outsiders with no particular stake in the local conflict, the fact that the war's not just a perpetual stalemate might also give them some incentive to get involved, and have an impact. 

 

 

Pellenicky Glade

 

The glade is the first pre-made clearing that Magpie released in support of Root. As I mentioned, they also put out another free one this year, although I haven't seen it yet, and the complete rules include a book of four more clearings. I'm really glad to see that, because I find it frustrating to a new ruleset or campaign setting come out, but no supporting materials offering any clear idea of how to play it.  

 

I mean this in two ways. First, every ruleset is good at some things and bad at others - presumably things the designers want you to be able to do more of, and things they don't think you should bother with, respectively - but it's not always easy to tell all the cool things the designer thinks you're supposed to be able to do, or how to assemble those tasks into a coherent adventure. Second, every unique or interesting campaign setting seems like it should host adventures unlike those you could have anywhere else. But again, if the only set-ups you already know are from other settings, it can be challenging to develop something that's both a good fit for the setting, and good full-stop. 

 

Rulebooks can and should offer advice for adventure writing, but to be frank, these almost always suffer from what we might call the "draw the rest of the fucking owl" problem. The gap between what the advice in the book says and what a good, complete adventure ought to look like might be almost insurmountable for novice referees, and even experienced refs might benefit from help writing adventures that are specific to the setting, not just whatever they're used to running, regardless of how well it works with the new game. And the best kind of help is probably a good example. 

 

All of which is to say that I'm glad to see Pellenicky Glade and the other pre-written clearings. I haven't read the adventure writing advice in the complete rules, but the gap between the quickstart advice and what's actually in Pellenicky is absolutely a "draw the rest of the fucking owl" situation. 

 

Pellenicky Glade is a clearing dominated by birds, but mice make up a numerical majority. They were formerly allies of the Eyrie, but are now functionally independent. There are four major conflicts ongoing at the time the player characters arrive, and a brief summary of how each conflict will resolve itself if the players decide not to get involved in it. I love the idea of this, because it provides a baseline for deciding what effect the players actions have, and it helps you create the feeling of a living world where at least some things happen without the players making them happen. 

 

The Eyrie is demanding that Pellenicky rejoin them; everyone in town has an opinion about whether to try to remain independent or submit to vassalage, and the Dynasties might invade regardless of what the townspeople decide. Also there's a mayoral election coming up with three main candidates, two mice and a young member of the Goshawk family. Also also someone has killed the patriarch of the Goshawks family, and three possible heirs are vying for succession. Also ALSO also, a notorious cat burglar is in the area, and no one knows what she might be trying to steal, or how to stop her.

 

There are about a dozen named and statted NPCs involved in all this drama and a half dozen locations are briefly described. In addition to recommended resolutions if the players don't get involved, there are also tips for escalating each situation in response if they do intervene. There are a 6 pre-generated characters to use, and tips for giving each of them ties to the community. What you have here is not so much an adventure as it is a sandbox with at least a half-dozen possible patrons who might want the player characters' help, and who might offer up various adventuring tasks as ways to provide that help. 

 

The parallel problems of picking a leader for the town and for the richest family, and the tie-in to the setting-wide problem of aligning with the warring factions both strike me as good ways to introduce the players to the themes of the setting. The mysterious cat thief isn't directly tied to the Marquisate faction, but I guess she serves as a reminder that there are cats in this game too? I'm less certain about her inclusion, but it does make sense to have at least one problem that's not of the locals' own making, which is maybe not something I would have thought of if I were developing a clearing without an example to reference. Pellenicky is also ostensibly a prime place to resupply and repair equipment, which ties directly to the unique rules of this game, which again seems good, although this seems like almost an afterthought compared to the political maneuvering. 

 

 

This post originally appeared on Bones of Contention. 

Cryptic Signals - Dust Remains

  

  

A few years ago, I was running a weird west Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign where I went searching for mine-themed adventures to reskin and convert to DCC. I used Melancholies & Mirth’s Abandoned Mines Above the Caverns procedural generator, reskinned Into the Odd’s Iron Coral as “The Irontown Corral,” and even started in on Goodberry Monthly’s Goldsoul Mines before my play group moved on to other things. If I had known about Dust Remains at that time, it definitely would have made my list to try, and might have beaten out one of the others.
 
Christian Kessler pushes the two-page format to probably its absolute limit, giving us a mini-setting on one page and SIX mini dungeons on the other. In the extra space, Christian finds room to give us a table of encounters, four new monsters, a list of ghosts, a random table of minor treasures, and 11 unique magic items and spells, all written up for Troika and other descendants of Fighting Fantasy.
 

Dust Remains presents us with a series of ancient tombs, left over from an empire of cruel wizard kings, carved into the cliff faces of a winding canyon. The area is still haunted by elemental spirits who escaped from their long-ago enslavement, and by the zebra riding nomads who claim to be the empire’s only survivors. Some of these details, along with the names of the tombs - “Vault of Enuliki” or “Vault of Mazzolamus” for example - make me think the setting is meant to be fantasy Africa. There’s a tent city of wannabe tomb robbers and the various merchants and traders that accompany any gold rush, and a second camp of “rich fucks desiring ancient artifacts as status symbols” who provide an immediate market.
 
The flavor of the various treasures and the activities of the ghosts (which show typical actions of the long-dead imperials) help to communicate the distant culture of the ancient empire. The dungeon keys consist mostly of traps and puzzles, plus a list of treasures behind the final door at the back of each vault. The variety Christian presents is impressive, although the referee will likely want to add a bit more to each dungeon to bring them to life and give them a true sense of exploration. The referee will also need to create NPCs to populate the groups described in the setting introduction. Given all that Christian manages to fit into the available space though, I think these limitations are understandable.
 
The greatest flaw in Dust Remains is the maps, which are almost unreadable. The region contains two different encampments plus all six dungeons. I’m not sure which camp is shown or where the second one is located. The dungeon maps are reproduced in slightly smaller form on the second page, where a handful of the rooms are keyed. At that size, and with the very thin font used on the key, it’s very difficult to make out where anything is supposed to be. Christian’s instructions for randomly stocking any unkeyed rooms also ask the referee to differentiate between “accessible” and “inaccessible” rooms, a distinction I’m not sure I can make quickly at a glance. 
 
If I had a second quibble, it would be that the anticipated time frame of the “Events & Encounters” table isn’t specified and seems unclear. I would guess you’re meant to check daily, because that’s the only way certain results make sense, but others seem a better fit for checking on expedition time.

 

  

 

(Dissident Whispers is an anthology of 58 TTRPG adventures, produced by Tuesday Knight Games in collaboration with the Whisper Collective, made possible through the collaboration of over 90 artists, writers, editors and designers.) 

 

 

This post originally appeared on Bones of Contention. 

Dungeon Dioramas - Night Land

After recently reviewing In the Light of a Ghost Star, it seems my antennae were up for other games inspired by William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land. So I was pleasantly surprised by the coincidence of Singing Flame's summer release of Night Land, written by Vasili Kaliman, illustrated by Andrew Walter, and with a map by Benjamin Marra.

 

Night Land is a sandbox setting compatible with Necrotic Gnome's Old-School Essentials rules, although travel and NPC reactions have their own rules built into the setting. Night Land is rendered as a self-contained pointcrawl with a defined entrance in the west and exit in the east, and it is consciously inspired by Weird fiction ... although notably missing from Vasili's list of inspirations is Hodgson's The Night Land. I think that's accurate. The mood here is maybe closer to the nihilism of Clark Ashton Smith's Xothique stories, refracted through the lens of Jack Vance's faux serious absurdity, and Adventure Time's full-on gonzo. 

  

 
 

The Sandbox

 

Night Land is a mini setting with 17 sites. The sites are roughly laid out into two loops with a single connection between them, a bit like a pair of eyeglasses. There is an entrance in the west and an exit in the east, each represented by a deep hole in the group occupied by an eccentric spellcaster.
 
The titular Night Land is a snow-covered plain of eternal night, lit by an unsettling moon and a surprisingly small number of stars. Vasili recommends that the player characters enter the Night Land unexpectedly and by accident while traveling at night, and leave it like waking from a dream. 
  
Distances along the paths between site are given in hours to travel, and travelers have a 1-in-6 chance of a random encounter per hour on a path, and the same with lengthy site visits. There's a single list of encounters with different numbering for adventurers on a path or inside a site, although certain types of encounters can only happen on paths and others only within sites. There are encounters with NPCs and monsters, sights and weather, and complicating events that are generally negative. It's clear from this table that the Night Land is meant to be a dangerous place, only barely habitable by humanity.

 

 

 

Factions, NPCs, and Monsters
 
Vasili poured a lot of his effort into filling the Night Land with people to talk to. There are several named factions with philosophies that mostly revolve around how to think about the darkness and light. Nearly every site on the map has a list of named NPCs who are singled out for a more detailed individual description. And random encounter table includes significant chances to encounter "cultists" who have non-sun-related philosophies and "residents" who are essentially civilians. 
 
The three factions most concerned with light and darkness appear at the beginning of Night Land, and locating their write-ups there helps Vasili drive home the importance of the endless night to the people of the setting. The Sun Mourners are sort of guilt-driven Catholic types holding an endless funeral for the dead sun, the Necro Divas are narcissists who want to be worshiped and are casually violent, and the Void Engineers are addicted to hallucinogens that give them visions of the perfecting the science needed to reignite the sun.
 
Of the three, the Sun Mourners and Necro Divas show up the most. They both have individual entries on the encounter tables, and each control one site on the map. The Void Engineers appear in the "conflict" encounter entry, but are otherwise much less present in the setting. The Chaos Messiahs, found near the exit, seem like they should be counted among these factions, since they have a plan to relocate the planet to orbit a still-active star. Both the general absence of the Void Engineers, and the last-minute appearance of the otherwise-unmentioned Chaos Messiahs feel like slight missteps in the creation of the web of competing solar factions.

 

Cultists get a couple spark tables to generate a name, which can then serve as the basis for the referee to improvise. Residents get a bit more spice. They have names, skills, motivations, possessions, and personality quirks. There's also a spark table for generating names for NPC character classes. The philosophy behind these tables is a kind of baroque minimalism. You get an evocative turn of phrase to spark the referee's creativity, a cult called "The Flesh Dawners" for example, or an "Overworld Visionist" character class, or an NPC who's a "insane scholar, convinced they are cursed" who owns a telescope. Vasili's writing is at the opposite end of a spectrum from the encyclopedic entries for organizations in D&D and Pathfinder. Somewhere in the middle, perhaps, are the terse but still defined factions Jack Shear wrote for his Krevborna and Umberwell settings.
 

Aside from the guardians of the entrance and exit to the Night Land, the NPCs you can meet all have between 1 and 3 Hit Dice, so even for low-level characters, talking instead of fighting is a choice rather than a necessity. Vasili wrote his NPCs to facilitate talking. As I said, most locations have named NPCs who are willing to converse and negotiate. And each is written with enough detail to help the referee portray them as a unique person. 
 
If there is a flaw in Vasili's writing here, it's that the NPCs feel really random, perhaps too much so. There are a lot of details to work with, but the different facts listed don't necessarily easily cohere into a personality, and I don't see any running themes that make the named individuals in one faction seem consistently different from those in another. On the other hand, these strange people are certainly genre appropriate, and the randomness is probably less noticeable to the players, who might see 5, than to the referee who reads 30. Here's an example, a Sunmourner from one of the first sites the players might enter: 

 

"TAHAN - Former map maker. Absurdly tall. Easily embarrassed.
No memory of the past. Can chop off a finger to become invisible for an hour. Hates everyone.
Possessions: Key to a family crypt. Lyrics and music to a song. Power: Eye carved into forehead, can read a creature's thoughts for one minute per day."

 

The otherwise excellent presentation of information (more on that in a moment) kind of breaks down for the NPCs as well. What makes "easily embarrassed" more important than "hates everyone"? Why is telepathy called out as a bolded "power" while invisibility receives no special emphasis? There's nothing exactly wrong with this, but it also gives Night Land's NPCs a strange kind of same-ness in their oddity. They are all unique in similar ways, a bit like the procedurally-generated monsters from Island of the Unknown.
 
The bestiary at the back of Night Land contains only a half dozen creatures - all the other adversaries in the Land are human. They range from ½ to 20 HD, but mostly fall into the same low, limited range as the NPCs, and the biggest monsters are also the rarest. Twilight Vermin are procedurally-generated and seem to fill the niche of representing the Night Land's far-future wildlife. Winged Beheaders - which fly around on dragonfly wings, wearing the severed human heads of their most recent victims like masks, and slicing throats with their wicked scorpion tails - are perhaps the most memorable of Vasili's monsters.
 
Instead of a universal reaction roll, Vasili has written a mini-table of specific reaction for each major faction, for cultists, for residents, and for the intelligent monsters. The monsters are mostly violent and hostile, but all the people are much more likely to want to talk than to fight. This is a nice touch that I think probably encourages non-combat interaction. The different tables also help establish the personality of each group. It's clear that residents are less dangerous than cultists, for example. And even if you get a positive result, knowing that the Necro Divas are "hostile" half the time shapes how you think about their typical behavior. 

 

 
  
The Sites
 
The sites on the pointcrawl map are a nice mix of types. There are the entrance and exit, a pair controlled by the Sunmourners and Necrodivas, and a few others with human or near-human inhabitants. There are also a handful of buildings that, although there are no dungeon maps provided, could conceivably be explored if the referee and players were interested. The others are locations where the players will encounter unusual phenomena, like a vista of the strange stars in the Night Land's sky, or perpetual weather systems with supernatural effects.
 
The layout of the map is such that players who are focused on passing from entrance to exit as quickly as possible will see about half the possible locations, while players who want to explore should be able to loop about without backtracking or too much revisiting.
 
Vasili has front-loaded the earliest sites with the safest and most interactive NPCs, and with plenty of rumors, plot hooks, and quests to ease the players into the setting and provide them with reasons to go forward into the more dangerous parts. It's another area where his care to encourage exploration and negotiation really shines through. 
 
The real heart of this setting are its opportunities to interact with the strange people who live there, to learn their bizarre philosophies and venomous rivalries. The map and its sites are less a maze to explore and more a stage for all the weird personal dramas to play out. Players can likely navigate the map by  asking questions and listening to rumors, but traveling in the Night Land is less about what you want to see and more about who you want to meet.
 
 
Presentation of Information
 
One final aspect of Night Land stands out to me as deserving of special mention, which is the excellent and efficient presentation of information to the referee. Night Land uses the standard "good layout" tricks of not allowing sections to cross page breaks and co-locating useful information onto two-page spreads. But it goes beyond that. 
 
We start with a "prelude" to give an overview of the setting and its few unique rules. We get write-ups of the key factions. We get a random encounter table with separate dice-result columns for those encounters that happen while traveling and those that happen within map locations. The key for each location includes reminders of which other sites it's linked to. The map is in the center page-spread where it can be easily turned to at any time due to the staples. There's a smaller unlabeled map on the inside of the front cover. After the last location we get a table of rumors. We get tables to generate cultists, residents, and other NPCs. 
 
And at the very back, we get a pair of tables that help to summarize the relationships between the various inhabitants. One is a matrix that lists the 3 factions and 6 monsters both horizontally and vertically, then uses the two intersection to explain the two sides of their relationship. So looking at the Necrodivas and the Quantum Blinkers, for example, we see that "Divas GLORIFY Blinkers" and "Blinkers SPY for Divas". It's a very quick way to tell how the players' alliance with one group might affect their interactions with another - or how to decide what happens next when a random encounter causes two groups to interact unexpectedly. 
 
The second matrix uses the intersections to show the singular connection between each of 7 key map sites. If I want to know the relationship between the Children of the Rain and the Tea Gardens, for example, I can see that "Children of Rain are ADDICTED to a variety of tea found in the Gardens". This is another tool that seems useful for a referee wanting to know how the NPCs at specific locations feel about each other, and what sort of missions they might try to persuade the player characters to go on.
 
Presenting information this way does place limits on the scope of the adventure. If you are determined that your reader should never turn a page to continue something, but only to move on to a new thing after the old thing is finished, you're required to limit the number of things you can talk about, and to describe them fairly tersely. If you want an encounter table that fits on two zine-sized pages, or a relationship matrix that fits on one, then you're limited in the number of monsters and factions you can include. In Night Land's case, I think that working creatively within those limits has produced a setting that is relatively small, but still complex enough to be interesting.

 

 

This post originally appeared on Bones of Contention. 

Crytpic Signals - Doodle Chapmion Island Games

  

Doodle Champion Island Games

 

This review is a bit of a departure, since the Doodle Champion Island Games is a video game, rather than a tabletop RPG. It's a free-to-play in-browser game made in a collaboration between Google and Studio 4°C. The release of the game coincided with the start of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, and the game itself casts the player as an aspiring athlete who travels to an island of champions to test her prowess. The game art reminds me of the 16-bit pixel art from the SNES era, and features very brief cut scenes with anime-style animation at key moments. The reason I've chosen this to review though is that it's a fun little sandbox, and there are some elements to it that I think are worth pointing out.

 

The setting of the game is the eponymous Champion Island, which has a vaguely asterisk-shaped eight-legged map. The first "leg" is the dock where the player character, Lucky the Cat, arrives on her boat. Each of the other seven legs is home to one of the island's seven champions and others who live in that area. There are rugby-playing oni, a tengu who loves table tennis, a skateboarding tanuki, and an owl sitting atop the climbing mountain. There are beaches, a volcanic peninsula, and a bamboo forest, and the cosmopolitan Tanooki City which has the largest and most diverse group of residents on the island. At the center of the island are statues depicting the champions and trails - marked by signs and helpful NPCs - that lead to each leg of the island.

 

The ostensible goal of the game is to challenge each of the seven champions in their chosen sport and best them, winning a scroll and your likeness on the appropriate statue at the center of the island. But the arenas, marked by red gates, are all right at the entrance to their respective legs. You have to go only a little further in to each leg to find the dojo for that sport, where you can meet the champion and get advice about how to play. If all you do is go to the seven arenas and win the seven sports, the game is quite quick, and a little disappointing. There's an animated cut-scene the first time you challenge the champion, showing off their prowess, that reminds me of the animations in Mega Man. There's another after you win the match to show them graciously passing you the scroll of victory. Although they're not combat, these are boss fights, but these contests are much less than half the game. 

 

The real pleasures here are exploration and interaction. The island is beautifully drawn, and it has secrets to discover. Not every place can be accessed initially. There are four teams with clubhouses hidden on the island. If you join one, you can get inside their clubhouse, but you can only choose one. The NPCs vary greatly in terms of their dialogue. Some basically serve as signposts to tell you where you are or where a path leads. Some give you a glimpse of their inner lives. All over the island are kappas who just say "Kappa!", but there's one intelligent kappa who gives you a little speech about loneliness. And some NPCs can give you quests. 

 

The way they do this is by telling you about a problem they're having. If you want, you can volunteer to help, and they'll tell you how. Some quests are fairly simple, like the royal arrow collector who wants help picking up arrows, or the grandfather who wants help catching up to his granddaughter who keeps jogging ahead. Other quests require you to go visit a specific other person - maybe you met them once already, remember them, and can go back, or maybe the quest gives you a reason to go meet them. In a few cases, you'll go back and forth several times before you're done. Some quests unlock new parts of the island, in particular, more difficult versions of the sports, with matches that are longer or have higher scoring requirements and opponents who play harder. And interestingly, some quests are nested. Finding enough driftwood to help the artist make a statue, for example, requires you to find the hidden beach, the bakery, and the hot springs, along with several others. You can earn trophies, kept in a trophy house near the center of the island, for helping people, but the real incentive is the satisfaction of figuring something out and putting it right. If I could make one change to the game, I'd remove the trophies, though I suppose they are a staple of contemporary video games.

 

I made a comparison to Mega Man earlier, but unlike that game, where you can visit the levels in any order, but they're much easier if you find and complete the secret correct order, nothing in Champion Island pushes you to visit the legs in any particular order, or to finish everything in one before visiting another. In fact the nature of the quests encourages you to wander, explore, and revisit. In both video game terms and in D&D terms, the game is level-less. Nothing is too hard to try it first, and nothing gets easier simply because you've been playing for awhile. You the player might get better, especially at the sports, but Lucky the Cat never gets faster or stronger. It creates a radical openness that I'm not sure you can really replicate in any D&D-like game where characters level up and get stronger over time. 

 

The other difference between Champion Island and other sandbox adventuring sites is that there's no combat. You never have to fight anyone - there are no guard blocking off certain areas, no guardians protecting treasure, no dragons to slay, no wandering monsters harrying you just for existing within the space. I'm not sure the game could remain so open if you did have to fight. The closest analog to combat are the sport-matches where compete against the champions. But like everything else, these are totally optional. I called them boss fights earlier, and perhaps it would be fair to say that these are the closest things to dragons to slay - you want to win the scroll and earn your face on the statues, I guess, but the main reason to play the sports is for the enjoyment of the activity itself, the excitement of competition. In certain versions and editions of D&D, combat is like this, a kind of mini-game, the way the sports are. It may advance a goal, but players also seek it out and spend time on it because they find it enjoyable. It's a contest with clear conditions of victory and loss, it has its own distinct rhythm, and it uses rules that aren't necessarily part of the rest of the game. In most versions of D&D, combat is really the only mini-game, while Champion Island has seven. 

 

The quests are one area where the game could be made more complex and more interesting, although probably at the cost of its generous, forgiving tone. There's no real way to fail a quest in this game. Some NPCs need to be convinced of this or there, but there's no way to accidentally or intentionally turn them against the thing you're supposed to convince them of. You can always try again. Quests might be uncompleted, but they'll never be uncompletable. The tabletop setting doesn't really lend itself to unlimited tries though, or to NPCs who'll happily repeat your last conversation every time you leave the room and reenter it. Although it contradicts the tone of this game, consequences for failure would make succeeding at the quests feel more meaningful.

 

 

This post originally appeared on Bones of Contention. 

Cryptic Signals - Mausritter

  

Mausritter

 

Both WFS and I have written favorably about Isaac Williams' Mausritter in the past, especially its mechanics, so this will be a brief review of Mausritter's adventure generating tool, found on the last few pages of the book. 

 

The recommended campaign structure for an ongoing Mausritter campaign is a hexcrawl sandbox, where each hex contains a landmark and a complication that potentially makes interacting with the landmark more interesting. The recommended hexcrawl map is 19-hex region formed by a central hex with two rings around it. It's the same map structure as in In the Light of a Ghost Star, the same structure as a Hex Flower, and as Dungeon of the Brain Jar notes, it's a structure that's become a popular template for hexcrawling recently, sort of a wilderness analog to the jewelbox dungeon.
 

Mausritter's hex flower sandboxes are centered on a peaceful settlement, and each contains two main adventure sites. The player character mice don't start in the settlement though - they start in a hex with an adventure site. Getting to town is your second goal. Surviving the adventure is your first. The example hexcrawl in the Mausritter book actually only details 11 hexes our of the 19, but referees are encouraged to fill them all.
 

The first roll in each hex determines the terrain - countryside, forest, river, or human town. A second roll generates a landmark specific to the terrain type. These are mostly geographical features. The kinds of landmarks you might navigate by, but not necessarily anything to invite further interaction quite yet. The final roll generates what Isaac calls a "complication". These are mostly additional sites within the hex, places where mice live, and thus places where the player character mice can interact with NPCs. Example complications include religious sites, places where a lone mouse lives, even settlements. There are also ruins, abandoned places, and various naturally occurring locations. Each complication includes both a prompt and a leading question to encourage the referee to develop it further. There are also a few tables to begin generating the central settlement. 

 

As I said, Isaac suggests placing two primary adventuring sites in each hex flower sandbox. There's one set of tables for generating the adventure sites, and another for generating what Isaac calls the "adventure seeds" - the client, their problem, and a complication. So you could pick your adventure sites by looking at the map so far and deciding where you think the two most promising locales are, or you could start by generating the sites and then deciding afterward where to place them. However you decide where to put them, you then pick one to serve as the starting point for the campaign.

 

 I think these tables probably work best if the referee mixes some random results, some results chosen using the tables as a menu of options, and some of their own creation. There are 20 landmarks for each terrain type and a total of 20 complications - so repeated across 19 hexes, pure random generation might look a little strange, especially in a setting that's intended to be less gonzo and more naturalistic. Besides, even if you trust the dice to the maximum extent, you'll still have to make choices, turn the complications from starter ideas to actual locations and place the two adventuring sites. So my sense remains that these tables work better as sparks for the referee's creativity than as full-on stand-alone procedural generators.

 

Blackpond Manor and Waterland Environs - click here to view

   

I used the tables to generate a hex flower sandbox. It ended up being very heavy on rivers and human towns. Let's call it Waterland. It's centered on the fallen mouse aristocratic manor of Blackpond. The two adventuring sites are both home to rival cat lords, one of whom obviously believes the other is their star-crossed lover, and the other who is just as obviously a faerie disguised as a cat. Since I generated this map for a review, I didn't exercise any of my own choice or creativity in placing the hexes or developing any of the prompts. This is the start of a sandbox, but it won't be ready to play without a little more work from the referee. 

  

 

This post originally appeared on Bones of Contention.