New on Desk #32 — A Coup Update

My artistically ineffective summer routine continued this week in the main. The only project that sees any progress this summer, it seems, is our Coup de Main D&D campaign, which proceeds swimmingly. Given that I don’t really have anything else going this week, I’ll just chat about that a bit. This is a good time for a quick summary of achievements.

Actual Play Review

The decaton celebration of the Coup campaign is coming up tomorrow, so it’s a good time for a quick review of how we’re doing. In the spirit of celebration, I created a logo for the campaign earlier this week. It’s a clever pastiche, for those who aren’t familiar with the Greyhawk product family.

Over the first nine sessions of the campaign we’ve established a routine of playing for 3–5 hours each Monday evening local time. We’ve had some international guests playing, but the regular core consists of all Finns. The most active regular players are my old gaming friends from around Finland. The typical session has involved 4–6 players, which is pretty ideal. It’s been fun playing regularly with people I haven’t seen of much over the last few years.

The first leg of the campaign has been all about the Ysgrame chateau, which the party has clearly designated as their level-up gourd; we’re going to keep digging here until the party gets comfortably to 2nd level and has some resources-leeway for more complex things. The party has been very successful by my historical measure: we already have two characters on 2nd level, which has never before happened in just a handful of sessions. The responsibility lies half with the party lucking out in the initial adventure choice (the adventure module we’re playing is frankly relatively limp-wristed, basically a modern hybrid piece more than old school hardcore) and half with the party consisting of seasoned players with plenty of prior experience in low-level dungeoneering. There are no guarantees, but right now the party’s position seems pretty good in that they’re firmly attached to a source of treasure (and XP), and they seem rather motivated to not let go in the immediate future.

I feel like we’ve gotten good stuff out of the Greyhawk setting here in the early days of the campaign: the hexcrawl environment is reasonably seeded, and the story of the Mad Archmage Zagyg Ysgrame makes for a pretty compelling base of a campaign arc that the players might follow up on to pretty high levels in the future, provided nothing shinier comes up. I’ve been slowly reading up on Greyhawk lore and adapting it for my own purposes, so every session I’m armed with more and more stuff to throw into the pot.

Game-mechanically we’re progressing relatively slowly, partially because I’ve been spending my time working on higher-order concepts like logos and epic level god-slaying rules systems instead of figuring out how to do saving throws in the campaign. The consequence is that we’ve been playing with pretty minimal mechanical arrays. Not a problem for low-level play, certainly, but I’ll need to gear up my mechanics production in the mid-term to not bottleneck campaign development with the lack of mechanical innovation.

Some key campaign statistics:
Play Group: ~2 alpha, ~4 regular, ~5 irregular players
Character Stable: 13 living PCs
Roll of the Dead: 3 dead PCs
Reigning High Score: 1467 XP, Phun Eral the Foil Mint Devotee of Wee Jass
Runner-Up: 1294 XP, Rob Banks the Foil Made Mint Person
Honorary Ringer: 3841 XP, Sven Torsson the Mint Reaver
The ringer needs to level up in-campaign before I acknowledge him as a high score holder. The XP is legit, but you don’t get to come in from out of campaign with your past victories and lord it over us before bloodying your beak here first!

All in all I’m excited about the campaign, and think it’s going well. The weekly pace works for me, and feels like a comfortable and well-familiar routine to slip into. I hope we’ll have many more sessions ahead, either frustrating defeats or an ever-more glorious rise to the lofty heights of Name Level and the game of thrones it implies.

Monday: Coup de Main #9

The veteran core of the play group continues leading the party towards the stars in a deliberate way. The surrounding cosmos attempts to trip them up with the primary strategic foes of the conservative campaigner: enemies seizing strategic initiative and random friction. The basic theory of sandbox warcraft is that you can improve your odds of success by being slower, more careful and more methodical, but you also risk random encounters and active enemy operations ruining it all.

The specific ways in which the loss of strategic initiative showed this time around were two; the friction of war, on the other hand, was in how both of these dangers accidentally manifested simultaneously. Like so:

The competing adventuring party has been set up by an agent of the City’s Guild of Magicians to investigate the Ysgrame chateau and discover any secrets of Zagyg Lore (as in, old papers of the Mad Archmage or whatever they might find — the related lore skill is called “Zagyg Lore” in the campaign) that might be found. The affair is clearly rather sensitive, and the party has heard rumours of how the Mad Archmage had a falling-out of some sort with the guild before his disappearance, so the guild may be approaching the matter relatively covertly.

The goblin war party, led by a couple of orcs, had arrived to investigate and seize the manorial grounds a few weeks after the party first drove them away. They’re part of a goblin tribe that has some interests in the area, and now they’re slowly coming to the realization that if they want to keep the manor, they have some manlings willing to contest it! The war party had pretty serious numbers, with like 16 goblins and two orcs on top.

The players were on the ball with the developing cluster-fuck, though, thanks to solid scouting and quick action in forting up: the party spotted the competing adventurers early on and avoided them altogether, only to stumble upon the goblins in the manor yard. While the goblins milled about in confusion at the surprise, the party got into the manor, blocked doors and just basically prepared to wait the situation out in a defensible position: the competing party would be arriving within a half hour or so anyway, so perhaps they could distract the goblins.

Things went down in an anticlimatic way (as they often do in fairly refereed play; this is modeled, not dramatically coordinated!) as after a bit of missile dueling the goblins opted to retreat into the wilderness instead of continuing to contest the affair. When the competing adventurer party arrived the PCs learned that they were a highly incompetent crew of amateurs scraped together at Yggsburg, a town known for its low quality adventurer stock. The PCs had no difficulty whatsoever scaring the bumbling idiots into escaping the manor altogether — at least for now.

While those encounters didn’t come to much in terms of consequences, the detailed maneuvering involved did eat up some play time. We continued with the giant rat slaughter in the manor basement, resulting in some vigorous dice-rolling and close calls (in an alternate world we would actually now mourn several dead PCs; it was that close), but ultimately the party triumphed and managed what seems like either a small lull in the vermintide, or perhaps it receding altogether. For all we know, the party can now investigate the basement freely.

Club Hannilus Minutes

There’s been a fair bit of D&D talk in discord lately. It’s basically overtaken everything else, in fact. Probably something to do with the Coup campaign encouraging discussion. Some of the best bits:

• A contributor is co-GMing an old school D&D campaign, and they asked about scoring quest XP rewards, which led to a pretty thorough discussion on the topic. My theory on the matter has become pleasantly clear and logical, such that I believe I’m nowadays capable of scoring how much XP an arbitrary quest “should” gain in a given campaign. This goes far beyond just “1 GP equals 1 XP” and such in applicability, as you can have all kinds of quests that have nothing to do with gaining treasure.
• We spent quite a while statting up Iuz the Old One, a prominent dark lord of the Greyhawk setting. A contributor’s running Iuz as part of their Mystara game, using my high-level rules that I’ve been developing over the summer, so we’ve done some considerate Iuz-statting while figuring out the particulars of the rules. I think Iuz has ended up as Level 12, with Power Pool ~250 points; respectable Hero-Divinity numbers, but definitely not very CharOpped. Iuz is more of an example of how a stupid and conceited man with more strength than good sense goes about developing their heroic figure. I’ve actually grown pretty fond of the psychological profile we’ve developed for him, more so than the canonical “generic lord of evil”.
• We got inspired to establish some basic rules-concepts for dealing with very small (Lilliputian) and very large (Brobdingnag) creatures in D&D. The basic idea is stolen from Rifts, of course: mega-damage is damage caused by Brobdingnag creatures using ordinary hit point damage rules, except normal-sized targets have to save or die, only suffering the indicated HP damage on a successful save. Mini-damage likewise only causes a single point of HP damage to a normal-sized creature on a failed save, being ignored otherwise. That’s pretty interesting, and the Gulliver’s Travels are generally a potential source of D&D wackery — I’m already considering adding Houyhnims, talking Lawful Neutral horses with some wacky qualities, into our campaign.
• Are demon lords (Orcus and such) gods in D&D? Sources fluctuate. After we went over some options and their metaphysical implications, I ended up with a pretty pleasant fit for my version of the Great Wheel cosmology: demon lords are generally potent Demi-God rank beings that are being actively prevented from forming a true divine domain by the pre-existing divine hierarchy. Demon lords are therefore basically prevented from leveling beyond Level 14; any excess Power (XP) they gain slowly leaches out of them into the environment, causing them to have a vast aura for their Level, and many minions born of their Power. The nature of being a demon is, of course, a consequence of being so constrained: the divine choice of preventing the ascension of some is the cause of devilry.
• We’ve talked a lot about the cultural transition from old school style D&D to middle school D&D in the early ’80s. It’s interesting to imagine what might have been in a corporate culture more appreciative of what D&D was, and less eager to change it into something new. A contributor had the fun idea of the allohistorical timeline where Gygaxian AD&D had been discarded in favour of publishing a “Heroic Dungeons & Dragons” rules set around the same time period, with the specific design intent of being the ideal vehicle for things like Dragonlance. Where AD&D was not a good old school rules set, and only became mediocre as a middle-school vehicle in the 2nd edition, a more focused design could have made both the Basic and its sister product line more definite in their time.
• Speaking of TSR office politics, entertaining ourselves by complaining about the historical corporate mismanagement practices and related studio malpractice at TSR has been in the vogue recently. I guess it’s natural when you’re actively playing a game that relies on incorporating and building on material that is really exceptionally hacky for the most part. I know I’ve myself come to conclude that over 90% (by page count) of everything published for Greyhawk ever is pretty much worthless. You don’t get this level of incompetence without some talent at it.
• As a more specific example of the theme, we had an interesting discussion about the creative similarities between Burning Wheel and AD&D earlier. There was wide agreement on the idea that the games are structurally somewhat similar, relying on GM system mastery and willingness to adapt the system to the campaign. However, the really amusing part was when I ended up arguing for Luke Crane’s superior literary qualities compared to Gary Gygax by citing the key parts of the Monster Manual description of “Elf” in an attempt to prove that Gygax did not actually understand what an “elf” is as a cultural idea. Whatever one thinks of BW overall, you have to admit that Luke at least knows an elf when he sees one!
• An interesting observation was made about how vivacious “dungeon fantasy”, the genre of fantasy defined by D&D, seems to be in Japanese geek culture. Even those contributors who tend to dislike the thematically empty elfdwarf porridge will often tolerate Japanese things like Dungeon Meshi or Final Fantasy or whatnot. We speculated that at least part of the creative equation might lie in the alien nature of the D&D fantasy tropes for the Japanese: it’s probably easier to take things at face value and use them for fresh bricolage if the individual tropes themselves aren’t burdened by history for you. In other words, Japanese dungeon fantasy doesn’t let the heritages of pulp fantasy and Tolkien bother itself; for the Japanese the elf is just a pretty girl with pointy ears (which is actually more thematic import than D&D proper often begets with elves — they’re not even pretty).
• A contributor caught a rather interesting project just today out there in the Internets — somebody’s been creating a Blood Bowl rpg with the WHFRPG rules! Ballers by name apparently. I didn’t have time to look into it in depth, but the regular reader might remember how I have my own Blood Bowl rpg ideas, and WHFRPG is an ambitious and challenging game in itself, so the combination seems rife with potential. We’ll need to look into this in more detail next week.

State of the Productive Facilities

As if. A bit of forestry, a bit of gardening, a bit of playing computer support for the local elderly, and that’s the week. Who has time to write, and more importantly, who can write in this heat anyway? It’s like living in a frying pan.

Actually, I did also start practicing my Gradius (PC Engine version) a few nights back, I guess that’s if not creative, then at least sports. I’m thinking of playing a round every day for a while and seeing how far I can get. It’d be pretty cool to get through the entire game, but I’m no shoot’em up master so I’ll probably stall around stage 5 or something; we’ll see.