Game Maps and Notes From My First Adventure EVAR!

In my continued rummagings through my very first DM binder of 20 years ago, I came across the maps and notes I drew up for the very first adventure I ever ran.

The girl I was dating at the time (read getting caught making out on people's couches like the uber-jerk I was at that time in high school) had an interest in D&D I think largely due to her dad. The basement of their house was AWESOME. Wall to wall shelves of dad's fantasy paperbacks and game books.

Well, she and some of our other friends wanted to get a game up, but we had no DM... of course, I said I'd do it. What's the big deal? I thought. I had previously played and run a lot of HeroQuest and Dragon Quest games. I really liked THOSE. how hard could it be!?

Running Dreamland Adventures in D&D

After a month of conferences, illness and Halloween craziness, my regular game group finally managed get back to the table this past Monday. We ran through a session that accomplished something I had been wanting to run for a long time. The adventure we began on Monday took place in the dreams of one of the PCs.

I came up with a few custom mechanics for creating a dream-like feel to the adventure, and I will get to those in just a bit, but first a little back story to set the stage.

Three Ways to Make Your Locations Pop!

Nothing spices up a run-down witch's hut like a giant turtle!

In this gamemaster's opinion, there are few things more satisfying than having your players say, "hey remember that time when..." before spiraling off into wild tales of past adventures that exist only in your GM notes and now the memories of your players. When these things happen, you've done something right. You've spun memory and enjoyment out of nothing! But what is the recipe for those moments? What makes one thing stick in the minds of your players while others fade away?

During the month of September, Campaignmastery.com is hosting an RPG blog carnival all about location. In the spirit of these festivities, I would now like to offer up three easy to implement tips for making memory-sticking locations that your players will delightfully ruminate on for years to come like so much brain-cud. Mmm... delicious fantasy brain cud...

...ahem...

1. Give your location one unique feature and milk it for all its worth. This is a great way to reinforce the fantastic, and/or add a bit of history to your location. Perhaps the royal throne room has an enormous dragon skull mounted at one end. Perhaps an otherwise ordinary and dull tavern is decorated inside and out with giant crab claws. Perhaps a town is known for raising pigs that can sniff out magical reagents in the nearby swamps. I used all of these examples in my game to good effect. The wonderful thing about picking one unique element like the above examples, is that it immediately leads to questions like "why is it like that?" which can then quickly be developed into further detail about the setting or the NPCs associated with it. Even if left unanswered for the time being, such questions might spark your PCs to seek out the answers, or even offer up some of their own!

2. Add levels. Don't let your location be flat, let it rise! Nothing is duller than yet another 8x8 room no matter how interesting the monsters. Balconies, cliffsides, bridges and pits all present tactical opportunities during combat encounters. If your players are hesitant to seize on such opportunities, let your bad guys show them just how much of a tactical advantage these things present! A charging dire bear is frightening. A charging dire bear on an ice bridge over a windy chasm is something your players wont soon forget!

3. Link the location to the NPCs that use it! Ask yourself, who lives here? Why did they choose this place? What role did they have in it's construction or configuration? What do they know that nobody else does? In the tavern with the crab claws, the owner had a peg leg and collected all the claws. You can bet there's a story there! Linking the NPCs to a site can also be used to change up the normal rules of engagement. A blue dragon might live in a lair with an ornate metal inlay in the floor. Rather than firing his breath weapon in a straight line, he can pump it into the floor to the dismay of anyone touching the metal. The only thing more memorable than a great location is a great location with a great NPC that makes it even more dynamic.

These are certainly not the only things that can make a location pop, but if you are looking to create memorable encounters, keeping these three quick tips in mind can lead to locations that the players will come back to time and time again... at least in conversation.

Campaign Retrospective: Synthesis

Today, I want to talk about where inspiration comes from, and the little voice that tries to stifle it by pointing out how unoriginal your ideas are. I embarked on my first D&D campaign, in part, to prove to myself that I could sustain an interesting story over an extended arc. I like to think that the end result was a pretty unique tale and a unique experience for my players. However, my story was largely crafted by shamelessly ripping elements from existing stories, which I found inspiring.

Now that my first campaign is complete, I feel like I can discuss my inspiration in a bit more detail without spoiling things for my players. This post reveals, in very broad terms, the sources behind my campaign plot, and how I mixed them to suit my own ends.

The idea for the Westerlands began with a combination of two simple things. 1.) My infatuation with Muse's song, Knights of Cydonia, and 2.) My dissatisfaction with D&D's alignment system. I really wanted to create a campaign arc triggered by a Paladin's dilemma, which pit two essentially lawful good forces against each other.

As I began to flesh out the primary arc, I latched onto the rules for blight in the Heroes of Horror book. I decided to use these rules as a backdrop to a plot constructed by forcibly mashing elements from Hamlet into Macbeth. I added a wicked queen who kills a king and then uses her influence with her husband to hold onto control (Macbeth) In my story, she was actually plotting against the king while pushing him towards an evermore tyrannical rule, citing the need for order in a time of crisis. Meanwhile, the estranged brother of the king sets out to find what is causing the mysterious blight while simultaneously looking for the true murderer of the king (latter bit from Hamlet). The conflict builds through twists and turns until the brothers finally confront each other and the estranged prince summons his father's ghost to call out the true murderer (Hamlet). The queen is accused, forcing her to kill her husband to create confusion before making her escape.

With the country reunited, the players were left to deal with the blight. I turned to Conrad's Heart of Darkness to inspire the feel of the long journey into the blighted lands to the East. The players had to move past outposts where strange behavior was becoming more common as human needs ran up against scarcity, fueled by the influence of creeping evil.

Once the party reached the source of the blight in the mountains near an ancient, ruined capital, I turned to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for inspiration. I even had hobgoblin thugees, a corrupted ally and a minecart chase encounter planned. The cart chase never became necessary.

For the final battle, I didn't really draw from specific sources of inspiration, except to mine as many fantasy battle tropes as possible. The speech from Independence Day, an allied army of good vs. an army of evil nastiness, last minute reinforcements showing up to propel the protagonists through to the final confrontation. Flinging magic, squadrons of marauding skeletons, flying beasts… I basically just poured it all in before having the party confront the evil masterminds just as they were attempting to bring their grand plan to fruition.

That is the overall plot arc, but within that story, I drew inspiration from… to name a few:

• Blazing Saddles
• The Elenium
• Ghostbusters
• Harry Potter
• Henry IV
• Invader Zim
• The Legend of Zelda
• LOL Cats
• Mass Effect
• A Midsummer Night's Dream
• Naruto
• Night at the Museum
• Star Trek

As I progressed through the campaign, and in my personal life went from an unempolyed, single 20-something to a full-time employed, married 30-something, I felt any anxiety about co-opting existing stories begin to fall away. Now, I never copied an existing property in its entirety, but felt no qualms about mining them for good ideas. Not only did this spirit of borrowing lead to a richer story, but it also served as an excellent time-saver while prepping around a busy life.

If you are getting ready to create a fictional story, whether it is a book, a play or film script, or a game, I encourage you to push the harping little voice that accuses you of unoriginality aside, because just as each new child is born of generations of previously existant people, so too can a unique story arise from existing good ideas.

Spirit of the Century

I am a HUGE sucker for action-serial style pulp. I love the Indiana Jones films, as well as Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and the Mummy films. As a kid, I loved Disney's Tale Spin, and still would if the dang furries hadn't ruined Don Karnage for anyone who doesn't want to see a cartoon fox drawn anatomically correct. I chose a career in museums, in part because I could see myself winding up like Marcus Brodie in my later years, and getting lost in my own museum actually sounds appealing.

Also, remember that time when the Fiancee and I went as alt-history air pirates for Halloween?

Yes, that is Black Mario over my shoulder.

You get the picture.

Now that we have established my love for pulp, it should be no surprise that I jumped at the chance to pick up a copy of Spirit of the Century when I saw it on the shelf at Powell's last weekend. SotC bills itself as "A Pulp Pickup Roleplaying Game". It uses the FATE roleplaying system, which is highly customizable, dice light, and roleplaying heavy. This makes it simultaneously easy and quick to pick up and play, but likely not accessible for someone new to roleplaying games. While SotC provides a basic rules metric, it is on the players and the GM to come up with their own character types, skills and other unique characteristics. It is definitely not for someone hesitant about jumping into roleplay with both feet.

The framing premise behind SotC is that the PCs are all part of the Century Club, a group of extraordinary individuals born on January 1, 1901. Set in the roaring 20s after the PCs have come of age, the members of the Century Club attempt to better the world by seeking out new knowledge, defending the march of progress and battling the forces of darkness who would seek to disrupt it. They use Science! (complete with exclamation point) as their weapon of choice--whether it take the form of jet packs, ray guns, mechanical know-how, or a PC playing a talking gorilla, escaped from a research facility.

I presented the idea of dabbling in some SotC sessions to my regular D&D group on Monday night. We had just completed the final regular game night of our long-running campaign, and determined that it will be mid to late summer before we are all free to indulge in a weekend grand finale blowout. Since we all like gaming together, everyone seemed excited to try something that presents a change of pace, setting and mechanics. We have a character creation session scheduled for two weeks from now. I'll keep you posted on how it goes.

Sporkchop's Real-World Adventures: Italy Part 2

In this second installment about my adventures in Italy, we'll start to get into some of the specific escapades in which the Fiancee and I were involved. In the posts to come, I will recount a real world adventure and then offer up some ways it could act as inspiration for a game or fantasy story plot.

"Siate molto tranquilla, siamo funghi caccia."

(be very quiet, we're hunting mushrooms)

I had gone on mushroom hunts in my home state of Washington, so I thought I knew what I was getting into. Boy, was I mistaken. Mushroom hunting is serious business in the Italian countryside. One does not simply walk into mushrooms. No, in Italy, a mushroom hunt is a serious expedition, which involves clambering your way through underbrush clinging to steep wooded hillsides, usually far from any noticeable trail.

When mushroom hunting in Italy, it is best to go with a guide, and the best guides may be Italian doctors. Bit of trivia: All Italian doctors are trained to recognize edible funghi. They can tell you the difference between an edible bolete and "Satan's bolete". Fortunately, for us, our guide was Dr. Gaggi.

The Dottore was a compact pain in the butt who looked a bit like a cross between Elmer Fudd and Dr. Werner Klopek from the Burbs. Oh, and the only English he knew, he learned from watching Clint Eastwood and Chuck Norris movies.

The doctor just said something awkward,
though my brain has blocked it out.

Anyway, aside from learning that Italian mushroom hunting feels more like traveling in country than taking a vacation-time stroll, I found out that Italian mushroom hunters are EXTREMELY TERRITORIAL. When you go, you do not speak above a whisper and you sure as hell don't say things like, "Hey! look what I found!" All communication within the group is done by whistles and hand signals...unless, of course, your guide takes off on his own leaving a bunch of tourists stranded in the middle of woodsy nowhere. 

Dottoooooree!?

If you see or hear another group of hunters, you steer clear of them. You also make sure that all of your finds quickly make it into the basket held by the person with the foraging permit.

So, why is mushroom hunting in Italy such an adventure? Well, there's a really awesome selection to be found if you know where to look. I also think there are a lot more mushroom hunters, which bumps up the competition for the best hunting spots. Despite these challenges, the rewards are well worth the effort.

Now, how do I apply this to my nerd world?

For a creative, storytelling sort like myself, my Italian mushroom hunting experience has spawned several ideas for ways to translate and extrapolate it into a fantasy setting. Imagine a remote location known for its supply of some finite resource. It could be mushrooms, crystals, a fuzzy and delicious breed of hamster. Whatever it is, the competition over this resource is key to unlocking adventure. Perhaps there are rituals or regulations around how this resource can be gathered. The presence of an ambitious diviner or druid magically pointing out where things can be found might cause some tension among those who favor more traditional... and less effective methods. Perhaps one local is known for closely guarding the secret to his/her success in the foraging field. How far would that local go to keep the secret? Maybe an outside force, be it monster, weather or plague is depleting the supply. How would that reduced access affect the locals' behavior and well-being?

The potential plots arise like porcini poking through the loam.

Happy hunting.

Sporkchop's Real-World Adventures: Part 1

After setting out to write this blog post, things quickly became very long and cumbersome. As such, I have decided to split it into several separate posts that will appear in the days to come.

At the end of September, I took my first major vacation in over a decade and my first international trip with the Fiancee. We spent two weeks puttering around Italy, learning a great deal about the culture, ourselves and what we look for in a travel experience.

La Tavola Marche as seen from the road to mushrooms.

The best part of the trip was definitely the week we spent sitting on a farm in the Apennine Mountains. We stayed at La Tavola Marche, an agriturismo and cooking school housed in a 300 year-old farm house. It’s 4 km down a dirt road from the main highway and about 10 km from the nearest village and that is exactly how we like it. We made the mistake of booking four days in Florence for the week after we went to Marche. We thought, “Florence, birthplace of the Rennaissance... it’ll be a great cultural climax to the trip!” Boy were we wrong. After the week in Marche, Florence felt like Disneyland (in the fake touristy sense, not the fun rides sense).

Fine examples of Florentine "culture"

Full disclosure, one of the farm’s owners is a high school friend of mine, whom I hadn’t seen in over a decade, so the catching up certainly enhanced the experience. However, despite my admitted predisposition to like La Tavola Marche, our time there still exceeded my wildest expectations.

A Perfect Basecamp

The door to our apartment in Marche

The fiancee and I both use a similar strategy when we travel. We like to set up a base of operations and then set out for adventure from a position of strength. Marche was ideal for this sort of thing. Though the farm is certainly remote, it is a quick half-hour to hour drive out to diverse and fascinating locales. We made day trips to the seaside town of Fano on the Adriatic, the close and walled-in Urbino, the pottery-laden Gubbio, which clings to a rugged, pine-speckled mountainside, and even a ruined medieval village perched on a hilltop across from the farm. The combination of isolation and adjacency made La Tavola Marche the perfect jumping off point for experiencing the “real” Italy.

Gubbio

Fiancee in Urbania

Fano. Notice, the Speedo matches the umbrellas!

When we visited Florence and, to a lesser degree, Bologna, I didn’t feel like we were experiencing authentic Italian life. The everpresent tourist had oxidized it, eroded away the culture until the culture became a sort of caricature of itself. Yes, the duomo in Florence still holds services, but its primary role has become that of a tourist site. The leather school trains fine leather workers, but many of its rooms are dedicated to teasing open the pocketbooks of affluent foreigners. The culture and purpose of the city feels tarnished, lessened by the constant interaction with tourism. It is not longer the cradle of the rennaissance thought, it is a place to take pictures of the leftovers.

Stay classy, Florence

The tourist throngs on the steps of the Duomo

Out in Marche, however, things felt different. Though many of the places we visited get some tourists and contain shops with the usual tourist schlock, they are not primary destinations. They are not yet coated in an all-encompassing Americanized patina. Shopkeepers and restauranteurs don’t immediately switch to speaking English when they hear you speak in a lolcats-worthy Italian pidgin. The experiences I enjoyed the most were the ones where I was forced to struggle to understand, where I was being treated as a person, or a curious foreigner, and not a Tourist.

In my next post, I'll get into some of our specific adventures.

Creative Stumbling Blocks

I'm back from my business trip and have started looking ahead to my game session tomorrow, and with a bit more dread to the final act of my grand-mega campaign of doom. As I mentioned last month, many of the newbie mistakes I made two years ago while starting this campaign are now threatening to trip me up. The biggest challenge weighing on my mind at the moment is figuring out how to create a satisfying payoff for my players as they proceed into the third and final act of the current campaign structure. I wish I had known about Rob Donaghue's Underpants Gnome theory of adventure design when I first started DMing. The premise is Zen-like in its wisdom and simplicity. Having missed the underpants train, the myriad threads of my grandiose plot loom before me like the tangled arms of the mighty Kraken, threatening to pull me under. Deep breath... you can do it. Just tie them all together with lots of blood and explosions.

A is for: AAAAAAAAAAIYEEEE!!! GO GO GO!!!

The terrified scream in the title of this post is brought to you for two reasons...

Reason the first: After a morning coffee bender, I decided I did not have enough time-sensitive obligations in my life and decided to enter the April A to Z Blogging Challenge. How does this challenge work? you ask. Simply put, during the month of April, I shall attempt to post to this here blog every day except Sundays. Each blog post shall be brought to you by the letter for that day, beginning with A. In today's blog, "A" is for "AAAAAAAAAAIYEEEE!!!", which is, in part a cry of disbelief that I have decided to commit to this challenge... but I have.

However, "AAAAAAAAAAIYEEEE!!!" also has a less cop-outey meaning, which is actually relevant to the gaming subject matter included in this blog. For it is the sound my brain made yesterday morning when I decided to run a session of Gamma World on a whim, which began about 8 hours after the decision was made. Oh, and I had absolutely no prep time, because I was at work until about an hour before the game was scheduled to start.

Why would I do such a thing? Well, my regular D&D game night fell apart at the last minute, due to an unacceptable number of absences. When a number of my players who still wanted to do something brought up the snot green box that has been idling on my shelf since my birthday last fall, I thought... "Oh, sod it! who needs prep time? Let's play!" and so we would hurl ourselves into a world ruled by the cruel and capricious atom.

"A" is for "Atom."


While I have had my share of planning scrambles, I have never run a completely improvised session before. Fortunately, Gamma World is very easy to start up from an RPG standpoint and fairly straightforward to run, especially if you are familiar with the 4E D&D game mechanics. (I am only sort of familiar with 4E, but run a regular 3.5 game, so it wasn't a big stretch.)

Anyway, the minimal prep I had consisted of:

1. That time I walked one of my friends through character creation process back in November
2. That time I read through the introductory adventure... also in November

When it came down to it, the game played out really well. Honestly, the roughest part was getting the characters created. I didn't have time to prep pregens, so I had to walk 5 entirely new players through the creation process with only one rulebook shared between them. (NOTE to other GMs: If you find yourself in this situation, either walk all your players through each step simultaneously, or each player sequentially. I did a mishmash of the two and it left me feeling all higgledy-piggledy.) Nevertheless, given the considerably stumbling blocks, I was thoroughly impressed that we were ready to roll 40 minutes after the last player arrived. No way that would happen with D&D!

We only had a couple hours of play time for the evening, but we managed to get through a roleplaying introduction / investigation, a little intro flavor encounter and a combat encounter. Most importantly, however, everyone seemed to have fun! Now that I at least know the structure of the rulebook, I feel like I would have no trouble picking up the game where we left off... on a moment's notice. If I had to come up with my own adventure, it might be a different story. I might need a couple hours to lay things out, but Gamma World is definitely a lighter time investment than something like D&D.

Oh, P.S. Our amusing cast of characters:

Buckworth, hypercognitive electrokineticist
Chlorzak, the genetic amalgamation of cockroach and plant-matter
Dusty Two-Shoes, the Radioactive Doppelganger and his faithful Rifle Hound
Harvey Birdman, empathic hawkoid
Willard, the empathic rat swarm

This spunky Scooby Doo gang set out through the mountains of Cascadia to solve the mystery of the Steading of the Iron King! Zoiks!

Night at the Ancient Elven Museum

As I mentioned in a previous post I think it is fascinating to see peoples' real-world interests, jobs, hobbies reflected in the fantasy realms they create. Well, I went and crafted an entire adventure inspired by my own career path -in museums.

The Concept:
My PCs (Player Characters) have traveled to a research center and repository of knowledge (read: museum) built by a reclusive sect of ancient elves.


The Backstory:
10,000 years previous
A group of ancient elves who believed that a great apocalypse would soon befall the elven nations, headed for the hills and started squirreling away anything they thought was awesome or valuable, while simultaneously searching for a solution that could either prevent the apocalypse or simply allow them to not be there when it happened. They set up a structure built into a hillside (like Petra) for the purpose of storing their accumulated knowledge (like Alexandria or the caves at Qumran).

Sure enough, an apocalypse of sorts comes along in the form of an Orcish invasion (of course!) Well, the Elven lands were left a barren waste and the location of the museum was lost to legend. Fortunately, the elves who lived there managed to enact plan C before the snarling, teeth-gnashy wave hit, which was to flee for parts as yet unknown.

500 years previous
A Human king, wishing to prove his worth to an Elven princess (of course!), crusaded in search of the legendary museum, and found it... with a snarly horde of orcs right on his tail. The two armies fought and generally make a mess of the place. The orcs were driven back, and the few survivors of the king's army made their way home having stolen an important item from the museum and reportedly having left another important item behind.

100 years previous
A dragon shows up. Finds nobody is using the museum and decides to take up residence, gradually accumulating a bunch of luddite lizard-people as followers.

How it has Played Out (so far):
The PCs have rediscovered the ancient museum in their search for the item the human king left behind. In their explorations thus far, they have met the dragon, who promptly stole most of their stuff before magically locking them out of his room. They then decided to team up with a spectral librarian who has been tasked with looking after the museum for eternity and who is, therefore, irked at the dragon and his lizardy minions making a bigger mess of the place than it already is.

A hungry Lego T-rex about to get its nom on!

Well, the PCs have been sent to collect ingredients for making a set of magic paints that will allow them to bypass the dragon's locks by jumping through paintings Harry Potter-style. Last night, they recovered the first ingredient from the Hall of Animals -a bit of fur for the bristles of the paintbrush. Unfortunately, as they were attempting to turn off the magic barrier to a particular animal's stasis field/cage, the control panel malfunctioned and turned off ALL the cages releasing a T-rex and four deinonychus that hadn't eaten in 10,000 years -because how can you have a museum adventure without a dinosaur fight!?

Anyway, they managed to coax the dinos out of the museum without doing them harm and have now set about recovering the two other ingredients. One from the alchemical laboratories on the lower level and one from the orrery in the planar observatory.

The Point:
I am really enjoying my little foray into job-inspired D&D. Also, this is exactly what it is like to work in a museum.