An Amazing Moment

It is also not often that a campaign lasts for a decade. It's not often that a campaign reaches its conclusion. Yet, this past weekend we had a final session of Slaying Solomon, a game which had run with the same core players for over ten years.

Slaying Solomon was a Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG campaign that took place in Solomon, Massachusetts in the years immediately preceding Buffy Summers becoming the Slayer. Thus, at the outset there was a time limit. But for six game years to be played out over ten real years is remarkable.

Now, I have to note that I am a newcomer to this campaign. I joined up with this group a mere three years ago. BTVS follows the convention of dividing the story into episodes and seasons. My first session in Slaying Solomon was four episodes into the final season (Episode 6.4), which pretty much makes my character the Cousin Oliver of this Buffy prequel.

Still, three years is long enough to form a bond with the group, even if my character had not been around for very long. And I think that is what made the moment so special. When the campaign came to its climax, I and another newbie had a few rolls to make, but the drama belonged to the core players. We were able to sit back and watch 10 years of drama unfold among a group that was uniquely attuned to one another. This was plain in the way that the end came about in a way that no one had foreseen, but that everyone worked with seamlessly.

I must say that it was an evening that I will probably never witness the likes of again, but I am honored to have been a part of.

R.I.P. Sam Kessler. She saved the world. A lot. First.

The Kreekou

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I recently stumbled across another cool source for bestiary art: the speculative evolution community. Here scientists and artists team up to imagine what future species might be like or what species could have evolved in an alternative evolutionary history. It's cool stuff. The first pic that caught my attention was the moora, which is imagined as an arctic-dwelling bird.  So, I gave it some D6 stats and a story. Thus, I give you... 

The Kreekou

The kreekou: Because your campaign needs a vicious bird to roam the tundra. (Osmatar)

The kreekou is an extraordinarily large, flightless bird that inhabits the tundra and permafrost. It is uniquely adapted to the frozen lands. Its greasy and matted feathers keep it warm, while the fatty hump on its back allows it to survive for weeks at a time between feedings. The kreekou prowls the tundra, feeding on whatever it can find: animal or vegetable, living or dead. While it is primarily a scavenger, it can also be a ferocious hunter, especially when hungry.

I had been without food for three nights before the blizzard finally abated. The morning sun brought hope and relative warmth. But when I suddenly heard that hungry call – kaaarrreeekooo! – I knew one of us would eat that day.

        – From Tales of The Frozen Wastes

The kreekou itself is not a particularly bold creature. Under normal circumstances, it would just as well avoid a fight in favor of a meal that won’t fight back. Yet it can be persistent when sufficiently hungry. When forced to fight, it will close as quickly as possible, using its massive body to its benefit. Its bony, claw-like wings are normally used to prod frozen carrion, but they are equally good at pinning prey to the ice while its sharp break snaps away large chunks of living flesh.

Agility: 2D: dodge 3D, fighting 6D

Coordination: 1D

Physique: 6D, stamina 5D

Acumen: 4D: search 5D, tracking 5D

Charisma: 1D: intimidation 6D, mettle 1D+2, persistence 5D

Strength Damage 2D

Hit points: 30

Slam – 1D a successful attack has a chance of knocking the target to the ground

Stab – 1D+2 the kreekou will attempt to stab any prone target and pin it to the ground. Any attack that does X damage to a prone target

Bite – 2D while it will first try to eat anything it has pinned down, the bite can be directed at any target

Wild Spaces in Civilization

Several nights ago, we were driving home through the Park when we were forced to detour. A half dozen police cars with lights blazing had converged, closing the road and diverting all traffic through another neighborhood. It was obviously not a fender-bender or a kitten stuck in a tree; something serious had gone down. All of this happened just a few hundred meters from our home, which got me thinking about the juxtaposition of Civilization and Wild Spaces.

This is about as Jungian as an archetype can be: Civilization is the safe place and Wild Spaces are where bad things live. This has been done a million ways, and there are a million new and interesting ways to do it. Hill Cantons, for example, has a dramatic and interesting take on it.

What the detour got me thinking about is how close these worlds can be while being completely distinct. There are borders between these realms, and the Wild can live right there in the middle of Civilization. It could be a matter of leaving the city walls, or passing the last light in the park. Crossing those borders means one world bleeds into the other. And when the words collide, adventure happens.

So here are some Wild Spaces to inject into your Civilization without the need for players to travel for days to some remote Lost World crater.

Park

A beautiful park, where no one can hear you scream. (Beteabondieu)

Cemetery

Even in the day, it's still filled with dead things. (Trey Ratcliff)

Sewer

Sometimes, the wild comes for you. (Sunpig)

Abandoned building

Trespassers welcome! We're hungry! (Jan Bommes)

Other side of the tracks

Sometimes you just end up pretty far from your turf.

Under the bridge

Under the bridge downtown, that's where I drew some blood. (BriYYZ)

Alley

Yeah. Don't go there. (lordlucan)

Random Encounter Montage

Here's a mechanic for determining random encounters.

I've always hated giving the DM sole responsibility for accidentally running into a wandering monster. And when I ran lots of dungeon crawls, I'd always forget to roll. On the other end of the spectrum is one DM I played with who would dramatically roll a d12 for each hour of travel. His encounters were terrible, too. They typically involved an epic battle that completely distracted the party from the main story.

Anyhow, this method puts the chance of encounter in the hands of the PCs. It's a spin off of the 4e Skill Challenge mechanic, and will work well if you want to give your travel a montage feel. For every significant leg of the journey, each player must make a skill check. The DM should determine an appropriate DC/target roll that is consistent for the whole party. The player can choose the skill she wants to employ, as long as she describes how that skill is helping the party along. This is her moment in the montage to detail however she wants. Depending on the size of the group and the pace of the evening, going around the table once or twice should be enough.

Success means the party makes unimpeded progress. Failure means the player gets to play the lead role in a random encounter. Perhaps she is attacked first. Maybe she sets off the trip wire. Maybe she finds the mysterious ring of invisibility.

Alternately, if multiple players fail their checks, the DM could wait until the end of the montage sequence and present an encounter that encompasses the collective failure. That is, Sven's failure means the party will encounter a patrol of goblins, but since Maude also failed, the goblins will have a troll.

They Have a Cave Troll by Otis Frampton

The trick is in finding the balance. You don't want to have too many random encounters turning your evening into a suckfest, like aforementioned bad DM did. On the other hand, the risk of failure is what makes it fun, and putting that risk in the hands of the players makes it all the better.

Encounter Lanscape Chart

So, the dice have been rolled, and it's time to fight a wandering monster! Quick, bust out the big dry erase map or chart paper and sketch out the battle field... wait, where are we?

Here's a chart I came up with for random encounters in Kimatarthi. Since it's a pretty arid and hilly land, I wanted elevation and terrain to play a role in each encounter. It makes it easy to give a little extra flavor to each random encounter, and can also be used to give penalties and bonuses to movement, missile attacks, etc.

To use this chart, assume that the map is oriented so that the party is at the center, traveling from right to left - cardinal directions don't matter at the tactical level.

Then roll a d12 to determine the kind of landscape and its position relative to the party (e.g. they could be traveling along the top of a ridge or the bottom of it) and a d8 to determine the position of the enemy (1 is the top of the map, 2 the upper right corner, etc.)

Borrowing a page from +Zak S., roll the dice on the map to determine the position of any obstacles. Throw a few more unique dice if you want a busier tactical map. Draw these in as shrubs, rocks, ancient pillars, whatever you like.

Encounter Landscape Chart
Terrain	Party is traveling…	d12
Flat		1
Ridge	Along the top	2
Ridge	Along the bottom	3
Slope	upward	4
Slope	downward	5
Slope	across	6
Gradual Draw	up	7
Gradual Draw	down	8
Steep draw	Up	9
Steep draw	down	10
Wadi/Arroyo	Along the top	11
Wadi/Arroyo	In	12

Thus, if the dice are cast and bring up a 2 (d12) and 4 (d8), then the party is traveling along the top a ridge, and the monsters appear ahead of them and below the ridge (unless it's a flying enemy...). On a roll of 10 (d12) and 3 (d8), the party is heading down a steep draw and the enemy appears directly ahead.

Win, lose, or gradual draw. (Doronenko)

Real Overland Movement

A friend of mine has been working on a series or articles on the role of beasts of burden in war. First up the camel, and now the mule. They are short and fascinating pieces, not least of all because of the game ideas they can churn up. Take, for example, this excellent chart that has been reproduced from a 19th century British military handbook.

	Animal Speed (Miles per Hour)	Pack Load (Pounds)	Draught Load (Pounds)	Work Day (Distance in Miles)
Camel	2.5	300-600	1,000	20
Elephant	3.5	800-1,200	8,000	15-20
Horse	4.0	250-400	350	15-16
Human	2.5	40-80	120-150	4-8
Mule	4.0	150-300	500	15-16
Ox	2.2	160-200	300-500	4-6
Reindeer	18~90	300	300	50-100 by sleigh

The original source for these figures is The Soldier's Pocket-Book for Field Service by Field Marshal Garnet Wolseley (a Modern Major General with an amazing bio of his own).

One thing that strikes me about this table is how different the numbers are from those given for overland movement in gaming. Take the d20 SRD for example. The mule numbers match up pretty well, but the gaming horses are way faster than the real horses, covering 40 or 48 miles in a day. Of course, Wolseley's numbers have to consider the movement of these animals as part of a large force, but I do wonder how various gaming systems came up with their overland movement rates. There's much more to be explored in this regard.

In general, gaming needs more rules for reindeer. (New York Public Library)

How's the Weather?

Any ongoing campaign inevitably has to deal with the weather. From day to day rain or shine decisions to the changing of seasons, the GM has to put some thought into a reliable system.

One basic trick is to base the weather on a particular location in the real world. Our Slaying Solomon campaign does this by referencing the historical weather in Massachusetts on the dates that the episode takes place. But what to do if your campaign isn't actually set in a real place? Recently, I came across some cool science that can help out: the Koppen climate classification. (Sorry, I can't get Blogger to do the umlaut.)

Courtesy of the University of Melbourne via Wikipedia.

As you can see on the chart, the system has 29 categories of climate, broken into various groups, based on annual temperature and precipitation averages. What's cool about it is that it groups regions from around the world into the same category, so you can see that Mexico City, Johannesburg, and Addis Ababa, for example, are all in the same category.

So let's take Markaz, the city at the center of my world. Roughly, I imagine the climate to be like Amman, Jordan. By consulting the Koppen system, I can see that Amman falls into the same category as Denver, Boise, Kabul, and Samarkand. Holy crap. Now I have not just one city to model my weather on, but an entire host of them. Maybe it would be easier to borrow Denver's weather than Amman's for a campaign.

Drawing parallels across different regions of the world can also help in developing descriptions and characteristics of locations. Maybe I'll find inspiration for something in the Samarkand countryside. I surely wouldn't have looked there before.