OK. We are nearly there.
I would like to get some feedback on the layout of Manse on Murder Hill, which can be found, for the time being, here.
I cannot say that LibreOffice is the most flexible of layout tools, but I hope that I can produce some not entirely off-putting.
Please leave your commons here or, if you wish for more privacy, email to joe.johnston@gmail.com
I will live the file on dropbox for a little while and then it is on to RPGNow.
Thank you.
I have read much about "Appendix N," which refers to bibliographic section of the 70s DMG that lists inspirational works and authors. Appendix N has become a short-hand in the OSR community for inspirational material.
My dirty secret: I glossed over this section and forgot it actually existed until I checked the index in the DMG tonight. As I re-read it, I see no great surprises other than its brevity. But more importantly, I noticed its placement: toward the back sandwiched in between two rather boring, table-heavy sections. The appendix is a rather mechanical listing of random works with a desultory, if enthusiastic preamble which contains no less than five instances of "I".
You would need to make a successful secret doors check to have noticed it.
Compare this to the Moldvay edition of the B/X rules. On page B62, a large header set in bold Souvenir font stands athwart the top of the page reading "INSPIRATIONAL SOURCE MATERIAL." As this is the penultimate page, it is often seen. At least that has been the case in my experience.
But a good location and a fancy header aren't the only draws to Moldvay's picks. The works cited are bolded and categorized in helpful sections: Fiction: Young Adult Fantasy; Non-Fiction: Young Adult; Short Story Collections; Non-fiction. There are 30-40 works selected from dozens of wonderful authors. Moldvay's preamble is shorter than EGG's and frankly more helpful about how one would use the list he is about to present.
It is to this bibliography of Moldvay's that I most frequently return.
I have always found the DMG and Gygax's writing to be at times remote and inaccessible. The anachronistic phrases that litter the DMG were, perhaps, a little too pleasing to the author himself. That is not to say that DMG isn't EGG's opus magnum, nor am I implying that the copious material found in that volume is not worth of repeated readings. However Moldvay's work, in contrast, has aged better for me. It is more approachable, more fun and less arrogant that EGG's AD&D hardcovers. It has been that Erol Otus illumed work that has kept me in the orbit of D&D for 30 years.
It may not seem like much, but a lot of hand-wringing went into this design. I opted for a minimalist look. It helps that I do not need a lot of legalese on the cover, unlike TSR.
Again, thank you to Stuart Robertson for artwork. I had to crop the full cover he gave me, which is a little death in itself. I may put together a t-shirt with the full graphic.
Sadly, just having a decent cover helps propel me to get the rest of the layout done.
You comments are appreciated.
Executive summary: D&D needs a real digital platform.
As I work on the last stages of publishing my own module Manse on Murder Hill, I have been thinking a lot about layout details. How should I format the PDF of the module to be the most useful to readers? I have the examples of TSR's own modules from the 70s and 80s which can easily be translated into a digital layout. I have also looked at contemporary OSR efforts at layout, which offer some innovations too.
Then I had one of those "monolith moments."
You will remember that in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, a mysterious black monolith appears at key moments in history to prod the evolution of man. That happened to me and now I understand what the OSR community and Hasbro/WotC have been doing wrong with the hobby. It is as obvious as the title of this blog.
Move the tabletop to the cloud.
Commit to this vision and a whole bunch of obvious consequences manifest. To an extent, the community and Hasbro is moving in these directions already, but not fast enough.
Leverage the cloud for communication.
Video conferencing technologies like Google Hangouts and Skype bring low-cost video conferencing to everyone with a high-speed Internet connection. These technologies are already being leverage to create "virtual tabletops" where players can get their RPG on. What is needed is additional software to make these platforms customized for the RPG experience. Some projects have already been started, but I think there is room for much larger investment in this area and, yes, larger returns.
How large am I talking? Think of a massively multiplayer online realm like World of Warcraft, but for PnP players. Do I think that D&D can be that popular again? With the right implementation, I think this is possible. We see human on human interactions now on that scale with platforms like twitter, facebook and WoW. The hobby still appeals to creative young (and young at heart) people, but getting facetime with each other is harder now for some reason. Computers can fix that.
Leverage the digital devices for content.
The problem I have been facing with layout is really about thinking in analog terms. Why am I thinking about conventions and restrictions that applied to paper? Sure, PDF is meant to be printed and I will produce a layout amenable to that. But most RPG players these days have computers and use them during play. Rulebooks and modules need to take advantage of 20 year old web technology and move to well-designed hypertextual layouts.
To this end, I will be producing a prototype of this for Manse that will be free available. It will look best on iPad, but should be usable on any device.
What I am talking about is not merely using the existing ePub or mobibook format. I mean is that we need use web technologies to radically change the way module content is presented. Modules need to be more like mobile apps, not PDF documents. And WotC if you are reading this and see dollar signs in your head, call me.
Leverage social media to enable the hobby.
D&D has always had a problem: bring players together. I have pointed to early Dragon magazines in which Dungeon Masters were listed with their addresses. The hobby still has this issue. One attempt to solve this is ConstantCon, which is a good first step. Blogger has also become a sort of standard for OSR blogs.
What if Facebook were RPGbook?
A social network of players has the potential to re-ignite this hobby like it was 1979. Google+ is a proto-version of this. Whether the solution to the social networking aspect comes in the form of building apps for existing platforms or building a new platform, I can't tell. However, it is an obvious area of expansion.
So rather than futzing with rule changes or inventing new monsters or even figuring out new polyhedron dice, I want to the community to think BIG. Any hobby that inspires 40 years of creativity and community is special. There is something profoundly different about the experience of traditional PnP RPG to CRPGs and MMORPGs.
What has been holding the hobby back is not message but the medium. Luckily, the hobby is perfectly adaptable to the new medium of the Internet. That work simply has not yet been done.
I may be crazy, but someone is going print money executing on this idea.
There has been a lot of talk about "megadungeons" in the OSR community this past year. From Stonehell, Barrowmaze and Dwimmermount to those many creations that the public never will see, dungeon crawling is often the primary setting for D&D. So it isn't surprising that players want to continuing delving into the deepening mysteries of chthonic chaos. TSR understood this urge and tried to address this desire with, as has been noted before me, modules like B4: The Lost City. But I think that an overlooked gem in this vein is In Search of Adventure(ISOA), which is part clip show and part mega-adventure.
For those that missed it, ISOA was published in what Grognardia would call the Silver Age of role playing (1987). I certainly was not playing much at all by that time, being drawn into the fantasy world of rock and roll (which is like LARPing, but with no dice). However, this publication caught my eye since it seemed to package all of the B-series modules into one cheap package.
And cheap is the operative word. The paper is extremely light weight and easily torn. It is perfect bound, so that it does not lie up particularly well. The maps appear at the end of the manuscript on perforated paper for easy tear up, I mean, out. So the production value is pretty low, at least by my lights. Sure, the manuscript was typeset according to the "modern" standards of TSR in late 80s (i.e. boxed texts, gray background sections, garamond-ish font). I favored the crazier layouts of the late seventies, which used font faces like Souvenir and Futura to great effect.
Note that all nine modules (B1-B9) are not presented in their entirety. Key encounters were extracted from each and presented as isolated nuggets of adventure woven together with a broad adventure flow chart that suggests a few ways a DM can seamlessly move his party from one venue to the next.
Again, the analog of this product to a TV clip show is a close one.
I want to give the talented Jeff Grubb props for making a solid attempt to make the reader forget that all this material is a rehash. His prefatory remarks introduce the land of Karameikos and the major location of Threshold in a way that is more brief that Gazetteer 1 and more detailed than the Expert rulebook. For this alone, I would recommend this product to those who want to run an adventure in Karameikos over the gazetteer.
After the introduction, each module is presented in its own section with enough setup information for the DM to run it. At the end of each module section is a few paragraph that details the fallout of the previous adventure and sets up a connector to the next adventure.
There are a few new illustrations. The manuscript is densely committed to text. Illustrations cost money and cause page bloat. They also really help to set the atmosphere for the players. The cover does present a trio of fierce, warpainted hobgoblins, which is very welcome. That picture alone piques my interest in creating a hobgoblin-centric adventure!
I have never run a party through an entire adventure flow, but I would like to. The adventures in this product (it's not module, is it?) really do help bring Threshold to life and will help to springboard the party into further adventures in Mystara.
Get this module if you really want to explore Threshold and bring it to life.
However, if you are interested in running the individual adventures in a standalone fashion, B1-9 is likely to disappoint.
WARNING: This review contains spoilers. The module is thirty years old, so I imagine the word has already gotten out about most of what I am about to write about.
Sometime between 1982 and 1984, I bought this fine module written by Douglas Niles. From notes in my copy, I can see that I used the NPCs listed in the back for other adventures. However, I never ran my party through it.
N1 is explicitly designed to be used for a game involving 4-7 novice adventures and a DM. The is a lot of great pulp action and tropes in this stuffed module: a troubled town fearful of strangers, an evil cult with deranged clerics, a mad hermit and a showdown in the moors.
The play consists of these bits: exploration of the Orlane village and the interrogation of its inhabitants, followed by a fairly contained wilderness exploration that concludes in an assault on the fortified lair of a very powerful, spell-wielding naga.
An interesting mechanism found in this module is that the players may be kidnapped at some point. Frankly, I don't think I could pull this off with my players. There isn't much chance of escape or rescue, so this seems like a total party kill. Perhaps readers will chime in with different experiences. However, the mechanism of kidnapping NPCs is will established and serves as a great plot mover.
In contrast to T1, the town of Orlane has many "feint" encounters that should be straight forward to DM and which are fun for the players. Hey, who doesn't like to bash troglodytes?
The final showdown with the Naga Explicatica Defilus (a faux latin name that perhaps might mean "the cause of filth") seems crazy hard for even 7 well-armed first level PCs. She is a 9 HD creature with serious fire power. Of course, the module hopes that the PCs befriend the mad hermit Ramne, a level seven mage who should provide enough cover for the PCs to contribute something to the demise of this Big Bad. Niles uses the old saw of rumors to set up player expectations in Orlane, which may be hokey, but it works.
The NPCs are particularly well drawn and engaging. I enjoy the bad crazy of Ambramo who scrawls on his bed room walls "snake mother" and "a crocodile has many teeth." Now that's what I call "pulp atmosphere."
This module has a fine selection of monsters from both the Monster Manual and Fiend Folio. The monsters are well integrated for me, but others might find the collection of beasties in the Naga's lair a little forced.
All told, I really like this module. It balances "community theatre" RPG stuff with solid combat situations. The final assault should prove challenging even for parties with some third level PCs. The motivations of the villagers is clear and easy for a DM to extrapolate.
Is it a little "railroady"? Perhaps. The party is mostly dumped on Orlane and expected to lend a hand. I am OK with this, but I know others want a more compelling backstory. The final showdown with the Naga is the most problematic for me. If the PCs do not have Ramne with them, this fight is going to be really short. However, if they win, they win big. The treasure is a small fortune and includes the excellent bag of holding, a boat load of spells and a few rings.
You and your party of PCs fight have fought through countless dank dungeons, mysterious mazes and creepy castles. Every time, you fought against NPCs controlled by the DM. Perhaps you had some inter-party dust-ups, but generally, your DM enforced a peace for the sake of gameplay.
But two inventions present an opportunity to marry the hard work of building a PC with the fun of killing another PC in a SAFE environment.
Flailsnails, that anything-goes style of RPG adventuring in which players from different RPG system co-exist is a great way to spice up your tabletop and get more play time in with different groups of people.
Google Hangouts and the web in-general, allow instant and free teleconferencing and information sharing.
Combine this two with a bit of custom glue I'll describe in a bit and you get Flailsnails Realms, in which guilds of PCs battle each for ranking and in-world booty.
It's a kind of megadungeon where YOU are the monster.
Imagine conducting raids on rival guilds, battling *real* PCs under the watchful eye of a human DM. The prize? Rankings, gold and other in-world booty that can help fortify your own guild keep. And XP that travels with you to your other games.
The trick to making the work is to crack a few technical problems:
The first problem is perhaps the most interesting to me. Online communities often have trouble with this. Tracking player victories and defeats is straight-forward as these can be recorded by the DM (who is then rated by the players).
The key mechanic is that PCs don't actually die in the realm. That would be too cruel. But being defeated does have consequences (i.e. PC can't raid for awhile, guild ranking is dropped, etc.).
I am only getting started with this idea.
Does this sound interesting to you? Have you already seen this done?