Sword & Scoundrel: Now on DTRPG (and I couldn't be more thrilled)

This has been a long, long road traveled. Now it feels like it's starting to pay off. On Wednesday the 0.2.1 release of the S&S pdf was approved on drivethrurpg. That is a pretty major milestone for me, as it marks the first time something Ive designed is really out there. I've released pdfs on my own before, but it's different when the thing is actually swimming in the waters of actual games. As someone who struggles with recognizing the worth of their own work, it was a major feeling of accomplishment — even if I still have so much work to do.

Meanwhile, I've begun the (somewhat painful) process of trying to actually get the work seen. I've been blessed with a small but fairly devoted community throughout this journey. We've picked them up in ones and twos over the years by internet searches alone and they've sort of stuck with us ever since. Now I'm at the point in the development cycle where I need fresh eyes to look at the thing and that's a more difficult task. This is even worse when it comes to my personal dislike of marketing and pathological discomfort with self-promotion.

Still, I recognize that it has to be done. It's not enough to write and design if you can't get people to look at the thing. Ugh.

I've been going with the following pitch:

Sword & Scoundrel is a player-driven tabletop role-playing game of passion, violence, and general skullduggery. Set against a gritty renaissance backdrop, Sword & Scoundrel is a morality play presented as an HBO character drama, where players declare what is most important to their character and see it challenged through play. It's a blood opera of intrigue and swordplay, exploring how far you will go, what lines you will cross, and what — or who — you are willing to sacrifice for what you hold most dear.

The beta document is available at drivethrurpg, where it is and will remain free of charge. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/259404/Sword--Scoundrel-Open-Beta-Document

It currently contains everything you need for core game-play: the core mechanics, character creation, combat, and the weapon/armor customization rules. The GM material is being worked on as we speak, but if you have any familiarity with The Burning Wheel, The Riddle of Steel, or Apocalypse World, you can run this without missing a beat.

As the beta progresses, we also have plans on a fully-developed sorcery system, social combat, faction support, and a few other goodies.

Which seems to summarize things well enough. We won't talk about how many times I rewrote that first paragraph.

Along with that, I've been appending all of the follow-up links so that people can actually give feedback. The website, our forums, our surprisingly active discord server. The latter has been growing at a slow but steady rate, of late. I must be doing something right...ish.

To others out there in the design/writing space: how do you deal with all of this? Self-promotion, outreach, whatever. Is it like pulling teeth for anyone else?

OSR Project #2: The Danger of Skills

There's an argument floating around that will claim that skills expand what your character is capable of by letting you invest in a bunch of different things, rather than being confined to an archetype like a class. I'm here going to have to argue that the opposite is true.

Skills by definition impose limitations on what your character is capable of.

When OD&D was released, there were only three classes - Fighting Man, Cleric, and Magic User. All of these characters were assumed to be dungeon-delving adventurers and have all the skills and abilities appropriate of such. Later, Greyhawk was released as the first D&D supplement and it added Thief as a class. Suddenly, the dynamic of the game changed.

The thief is essentially a class based around having skills. Climb walls, hide in shadows, move silently, pick locks, disarm/detect traps, etc. The Thief as originally written is Dungeoneer: The Class. This creates a lot of weirdness compared to how the game was played before. If you listen to Arneson talk about his early D&D experiences, everyone acted like a thief before the thief showed up. Everyone was sneaking around, picking locks, hiding and setting up ambushes, disarming traps, etc. The creation of the thief changed the way the distribution of abilities was perceived. Because the thief has a mechanical means of doing these things on their sheet, suddenly those things became the domain of the thief. Worse, because the thief had a mechanical ruleset for doing these tasks, it gave the implication that because no one else had access to these mechanics the thief was the only one who could do it. (There is a very interesting argument to be made that the nature and wording of the thief's abilities was supposed to imply a slightly supernatural character to them, thus everyone could sneak but a thief could literally disappear in a shadow. I actually prefer that interpretation, but it is outside of what I want to discuss here.)

When there is no mechanic for a thing, it's in the common domain. Anyone can attempt it by navigating the fiction. When you introduce a mechanic for a thing, you codify it and ultimately limit it in some way. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's an inherent side-effect of having a mechanic for it.

Now to make this less esoteric, consider for a moment Aragorn as a Ranger. In OD&D or AD&D, I can stand on the wall at Helm's Deep and make an impassioned speech because there is no Oration or Speechcraft skill. I can get up there, do my thing and feel pretty damned heroic about it because of course I can do it. I'm a big deal adventurer. The GM might nod and approve. The GM might even let me roll something to see if it has a mechanical impact on the fight. Who knows.. But it's entirely within my wheelhouse. Because there is no mechanic for it, it's up for grabs.

Now pretend we're playing 3.5e instead. Now there's a Diplomacy skill (or whatever it's called in 3.5) that exists for trying to influence NPCs. The existence of this skill means that in order for my character to be good at the thing governed by the skill, I need to invest mechanical resources into making them do so (in this case, skill points). What was something that I might have done and could have done because I thought it was cool and might have made a memorable scene becomes an area of the game I can no longer meaningfully interact with unless I spec out my character specifically to do so. I have to buy back the thing I could have done before, had the skill not existed.

Worse, because there is now a mechanic attached, if I do give an impassioned speech at the walls of Helm's Deep, the GM might make me roll for it anyway and because I don't have the skill I've introduced a risk. I might botch the roll and the GM penalizes the troops for my good intention. The GM might decide that I get up there and somehow drop my speghetti because a lot of games are written with the assumption that a bad roll means the character fucked up.

Where before this was a fun and optional thing that at worst would have been neat to play and at best might have given me some kind of fun bonus from a GM trying to encourage such things, I now have to weigh the risks of even attempting a thing that the game says I'm mechanically bad at because I don't have skill points invested in it. At best, I look unheroic and dumb, at worst, I might accidentally penalize my troops for having tried.

In the 3.5 ranger's case this is even more punitive because I've spent all of my skill points buying the abilities that previous editions gave me just for being part of my class.. And we'll not even talk about how different classes in 3.5 don't have access to certain skills and thus you have to invest even more character resources if you want to do something like be a fighter who also knows how to talk to people.

If you want an even more banal example.. There is no AD&D, B/x, or OD&D character who can't ride a horse. And yet, in 3.0/3.5/pf, Ride is a skill. You can technically ride without it, but if you want to do anything with the horse or avoid any perils of said horse, you now need to drop points in ride.

Making something a skill inherently walls the thing off from the open domain of play. If there's no cooking skill and you want to cook something, you are generally assumed to be able to do it because it's beneath what the game cares to simulate. The moment you create a cooking skill, you are mechanically a shitty cook until you invest resources in being able to do something you otherwise would have been able to do for free.

OSR & TROS

In terms of role-playing preferences, I've always been in kind of a weird position. There's always been a weird undercurrent of animosity between the different camps of the role-playing community. Within the indie/nar/forge/story-game crowd there are certain elements that have a tendency to look down on D&D in any form as an unsophisticated and unsatisfying experience. This sentiment is often extended to the OSR movement, which can be seen as a nostalgia-fueled leap backwards in gaming. In turn, the certain elements of the OSR crowd have a tendency to look at the story-games people as elitist hipsters trying to pass off their game experiences off as high art.

This isn't universally true of all parties on each side — how often is anything universally true of a group of broad group of people? — but I've gotten in debates with people on both sides about the legitimacy of the other as a valid game choice. This brings me back to the first sentence: I've always been in a weird position between the two communities, with one foot on each side. I enjoy both kinds of games quite a bit, as they offer very different experiences that appeal to me for different reasons. The more I've thought about it, though, the more I've realized they have in common.

Intentional, Focused Design

The hallmark of both movements was a dissatisfaction with some element of the hobby that was so widespread as to spark the creation of new games meant to answer a specific question. For the forge/nar/story-games movement, it was largely a dissatisfaction with games on the market in terms of creating the kind of stories that people wanted to tell. For OSR, it was largely a reaction to the introduction of 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons that made a whole lot of people realize that the current official version of the game was no longer giving them the kind of experience they wanted to have. In both cases, this dissatisfaction lead to intense critique, analysis, and eventually the cultivation of a body of design philosophy.

DIY and the Indie Explosion

In both cases, fierce forum debates quickly became blog posts and ultimately an explosion of games designed to embody various elements of the design philosophy. The primary focus on both ends was on a specific way in which the game was meant to be played in order to deliver a very particular kind of experience. Both scenes have flourishing online communities where people are constantly churning out games and hacks and other content. Both scenes are to this day dominated by independent publishers, many of whom have turned their passions into a legitimate business. 

As I chewed on this subject, I realized that if I went a bit deeper I could actually draw far more parallels in my own journey through this. My gateway drug into the narrative scene was a now largely forgotten game called The Riddle of Steel. It was a formative game for me, in that it not only introduced me to a whole new way of playing, but ultimately changed how I played everything after that. The parallels between TROS and the OSR are striking, even beyond their amusingly similar abbreviation.

Red-Handed Pulp

The Riddle of Steel is a reference to the classic Conan the Barbarian movie, from 1982. Both TROS and the OSR ultimately take their origin from early pulp Sword & Sorcery as filtered through popular culture. Amusingly, both also then sort of obscure the human-centric and exotic pulp quality to do a Tolkienesq medieval fantasy with elves and dwarves.

Modular Mechanics

Like the overwhelming majority of OSR games, TROS had no single unifying mechanic. Instead, it had a handful of different self-contained systems the game leaned on for different situations. Much like with OSR games, this both told you rather explicitly the arenas in which the game wanted to focus but it also gave you a ton of room to add, remove, and tinker with the guts of the things. Almost as soon as the game was out, people began to customize and hack it to suit their campaigns much in the same way as even today people hack their OSR system of choice to customize it for whatever they are doing.

Gameable Gaps

Many OSR enthusiasts will argue that the lack of rules for certain situations is a feature, rather than a bug. TROS benefits from a similar gap in its rules set. While it features a rudimentary skill system, it was obvious that combat and sorcery were what the game was really interested in. Everything else was a simple test and you moved on. It gave the GM quite a bit of leeway and in practice I found playing TROS to have a lot in common with my memories of playing AD&D: you basically ignored the book most of the time until someone got in a fight or cast a spell, with the thief-type character usually being the one to do nearly all of the task-resolution kind of rolls.

Player Choices, Player Skill

Much like the OSR, TROS was not a game you could by any means just "roll play" your way through. TROS has one of the highest player-skill curves of any game I've played. You, the player, have to become very good at both engaging with the system to get XP (Spiritual Attributes, in this case) but the combat and magic mechanics require a huge amount of system mastery to play. What's awesome about this, though, is that the system mastery here means "picking strategies and making interesting choices in play" rather than something like 3.pf where system mastery means "knowing how to build your character in order to get the most amount of bonuses."

This, more than anything, is probably why I was so attracted to TROS back when.  The idea that you would win because of your choices rather than having the highest numbers or the biggest sword or whatever was enthralling. It gave me a taste for something that I've been chasing ever since.

Player-Driven Play

This may not be true for all of the OSR, but it is generally true for the parts of it I enjoy. I love sandboxes, huge, sprawling dungeons, and anything that lets the players have a significant say in the strategies and engagements they will attempt. Even if you've all agreed to the premise "we're going dungeon-delving" the gold-for-xp nature of so much OSR tends to mean that players are in charge of their own advancement. The OSR assumptions of balance mean that the players have to pick and choose their battles and are making decisions that ultimately puts their success and failure in their own hands. Contrast this with later D&D (or other games) where you are often a participant in a pre-written story and are rewarded for hitting milestones within that story.

TROS did this in a way that no other game I'd encountered had, with the PC's Spiritual Attributes making them masters of their own destiny in a massively compelling way.  The two camps take massively different approaches, but both games ultimately empower the players to make decisions that matter and let them drive the game onward in a compelling way. 

In hindsight, it's not surprising to me at all why Sword & Scoundrel inherited as much TROS DNA as it did or why we retained what we did after all of these revisions. By the same token, it's not surprising that I'm gravitating towards OSR even as I work on the former. In a lot of ways, they are the answer to the same kinds of desires taken in two different directions.

Absence Makes The Heart Grow Fonder

or so I am going to pretend. 2017 has been a very busy year for me and Grand Heresy as a whole, but a sad year for this little blog. It got pushed off to a back burner and I haven't bothered with it much, which is a shame.

I think I need to get back in the habit of using the blog as a kind of sounding board for role-playing game thoughts and ideas. I've gotten into this bad habit of not wanting to show anyone anything until it is fully-formed and polished, which is idiotic. That's not what a blog is for.

So instead, the future of this blog is going to be a lot of notes and ideas as I sort through them, along with whatever else I wind up with. Blogging in this manner serves a dual purpose, both in helping me solidify ideas but also in letting the people who follow me doing this kind of nonsense know what it is that I'm doing. This latter function is particularly good for the people who keep an eye on the role-playing game that shares this blog's name.

Until next time,

On Published Settings

I abhor published settings. Or at least, that's how I phrased it when the subject came up in conversation. This, of course, was bound to provoke a bit of controversy.

"I can't understand that mindset. Like. Have you READ Deadlands?"

Alright. 'Abhor' may be too strong of a word. I can actually enjoy published settings for their fluff. A lot of settings I quite enjoy, especially when they come from an actual work of fiction, rather a campaign book. If we want to make my initial statement more accurate, I abhor running published settings. There's a handful of reasons for this, some more practical than others.

1. I'm huge on communal setting creation. I want to create something in the broad strokes and then fill in the details through play.  This was how I grew up playing these games in my early teens. We sketched out a map or a came up with a setting and then it just got filled as we played with it. New locations and things were introduced as a natural outgrowth of play, rather than as a concerted world-developing effort or referenced from a gazetteer. As a natural consequence, these worlds were always ours, unique to the people who shaped them and often colored by our own mythologies. Funny enough, this style of world-building seems to be popular both with the OSR crowd and the Burning Wheel/Apocalypse World/Story-Game crowd.
2. I'm a history nerd. I spend a lot of time memorizing the details of various cultures and eras in the real-world's history. As a result, I can pretty handily fill in the gaps of whatever broad-stroke setting I was running with bits from history without missing a beat. Even something as small as just nailing the material culture of a society or setting is something that I really enjoy. It helps flavor the thing and makes it stand out. To bring that same level of loving detail and attention to a published setting, I'm effectively going to have to study a whole new culture and history while trying to parse how much it leans on this or that historical period/culture and where it deviates and the specific bits that make it worthwhile on its own. Even settings I legitimately enjoy and am familiar with from fiction (Middle Earth, Star Trek, Star Wars, Westeros) would require me to go back and study them for a while before I'd be comfortable trying to represent them. This could simply be a hangup based on unchecked perfectionism, on my part, but I'd rather spend my time studying earth history than Westerosi. The former is far more interesting than most people would believe.
3. I enjoy GMing as an act of creation. Writing stuff and creating fluff is half my fun of doing it. The more details that are published for a setting, the less room I have to carve my own niches into it. This actually creates a weird double-edged sword for me. A setting too tightly constrained will lose my interest because I want to create for it, but a setting too loose will make me question why I'm bothering with a published setting in the first place. Does a sweet spot between the two exist? I'm not sure.
4. I don't want my players to know more about a setting than I do. There are a handful of reasons for this by itself. The most immediate is that I don't want to introduce my players to the governor of Waterdeep only for someone to inform me that Waterdeep is actually governed by a council of retired adventurer-nobles or some nonsense. The more popular a setting is, and the more stuff has been produced for it, the more likely my players are to have read it and the less likely I am. I simply don't have the patience to go through three hundred forgotten realms novels. Before one cries "get players that won't be assholes," this isn't because I'm afraid my narrative authority would be challenged (I have good players, and it's easy enough to say "not in this setting.") but because...
5. I mentioned before that I'm a big history nerd. My favorite settings are the "viking age" — northern Europe around 900AD — and various places/times in ancient Greece, classical and mythological, alike. Being a visual creature, I am naturally a big fan of movies set in these periods as well. Unfortunately, movies are absolutely terrible at actually representing history in any appreciable way. I've never seen a sword and sandals movie that bore anything more than a passing resemblance to ancient Greece. Viking movies get a little better, but even the Vikings show on the HISTORY channel is nothing close to the actual period. To enjoy any of these, I have to actively turn my history brain off and pretend that what I'm watching is actually a fantasy universe set in the flavor of the thing being represented, with all likenesses to places and characters a complete coincidence. Otherwise I'm like to point out that "We shall not interfere with the lives of mortals," is not only a stupid plot (Lookin at you, Immortals) but that Greek mythology is literally nothing but the Gods interfering with mortals. I don't want my players knowing more than I do because the whole point of playing that setting is to give them the experience of that setting. Every time I get it wrong or diverge significantly from canon, it's detracting from the reason I was using it in the first place.
6. It removes some of the mystery. I don't want my players having a Word of God absolute knowledge of the history of the setting. I want them to know basically what their characters know. It makes the history that much more interesting when we can be uncertain of it and surprised by it. Likewise, you lose all dramatic impact of any kind of Lovecraftian plot when the players read on page 47 that the council that governs Kingdom Y is actually a dark cabal trying to summon Shub Nuggath, the Toothstorm. 
7. Finally, settings are meant to be destroyed. I tend to make my players protagonists in the literary sense of the word. Within a few months of play, they're going to have shaken up the setting enough one way or another that they've overturned the most of the original status quo's anyway. Why put all the work into memorizing an establish setting and getting all of someone else's details right when there's a goodly chance the players will have burnt it down within the first campaign arc or two anyway?

That's enough rambling for one afternoon. I don't have any problems with other people running published settings, nor would I particularly mind being a player in one. As a GM, though, the effort/reward ratio is way off and in some ways it actually runs contrary to what I actually enjoy about GMing.

Am I crazy? How do you feel about published settings?

Grand Heresy in 2017

Matt Easton posted a video recently entitled "Scholagladiatoria channel in 2017." It's a video of limited use to anyone who isn't already his subscriber (though, if you're at all interested in martial history, you should be) and chiefly details his plans for the coming year.

That's when I realized it was already February. How does that happen? Worse, I've written nothing on this blog this year. In an attempt to begin rectifying this mistake, I thought I'd post my own variant of the theme: Grand Heresy in 2017.

It's a very creative twist. 

GH2017

With luck, this will be the break-out year for Grand Heresy. 'Bastards (now bearing the more marketable title Sword & Scoundrel) is getting a major facelift and some key rewriting. As this draft gets close to completion, I'll be redoing the site to better show it off as well as redoing some of the marketing/fluff text. Plans are to launch the kickstarter in the very near future. I cannot tell you how excited I am for the thing to be in the wild and officially off my desk for a while.

We've kept track of the download counts of each edition of 'Bastards released. We've gotten anywhere from 400-1000 downloads on each. The last edition of the dueling kit alone has gotten about 1200 downloads. On the surface, this looks fairly promising but you never know what this will mean in terms of kickstarter support or sales down the line. On the other hand, we've also not gone out of our way to market the thing at all. We haven't reached out to rpg.net, storygames, or any of the other hub communities out there aside from a brief flirting with 4chan.

The level of interest we receive after launch will determine the next move. I have a number of things I'd love to develop out of the core rules as supplemental material for the game. Higgins and I have been wanting to develop the naval warfare rules since early in the project's development. A full pirate/age of sail book would let us treat the topic with the same kind of adoration we've spent on the HEMA nerd stuff in the book. I also have a number of setting-seed books I'd like to have the chance to develop for the game as well, all of which are basically toolkit modules for hacking the book to fit whatever you're trying to do with the main system. I've been keeping notes on this sort of stuff since just after the project began. If there were enough interest, I'd have material to write for this game for the next five years or more.

On the other hand, if it turns out to be an extremely niche interest with a limited following, I'm fine with that too. I have a half-dozen other projects I'd love to dev out. As anyone who reads this blog can attest, my gaming interests are eclectic as they are promiscuous.

All of that aside, I acquired a new mic today. It's a proper condenser mic I got relatively inexpensively. After some futzing around with Barbarossa on the audio we got it sounding pretty decent. Now properly equipped, we'll be doing a lot of youtube recording in the near future. Expect at least one actual play campaign of something. I'll probably record some AP material, explanations, and play aids for 'Bastards Sword & Scoundrel as well.

2017 is going to be a big year. Here's to it.

An update

Triage. It seems to be the theme of my life. There is always some fire that needs put out and too often it demands my attention be somewhere other than here. This, of course, is a shame as this is one of the things I really enjoy doing in life.

Rather than talk about why I'm not here (no one reads this blog to hear me whinge), I'll just update where I am with the various irons I have in the fire.

The Tyrant's Fear

The campaign is still going, though we've missed as many weeks as we've played. Session 2 is mostly written up, I just need to finish said writing. I've got three more sessions with notes on them that need to be written. We may actually be playing one tonight, depending on who shows up. In addition to the Actual Play stuff, I've got some other commentary and musings I want to ramble on involving the thing, so plenty of content there coming down the pipe. A lot of people seemed to enjoy the first write-up, so with luck they will be so happy about the future content that they will overlook my delay in publishing it.

Band of Bastards

The Wounds and Healing chapter is written up and just needs to be formatted, along with incorporating the edits I have from our last release. It's moving along and with the release of this chapter we technically have everything you need to actually play the game properly. Well, maybe prices. We have those written up somewhere. It'll be fine.

To Henri's horror, I've been contemplating some major revisions to the system. I'm not satisfied with the shape of the present incarnation. I have a whole spiel I'll be writing on that before long, so that when/if that happens people will at least know why. However, I'm going to make sure that the necessary bits get put out to play the current game before I launch into another revision project. Our fans have been incredibly patient with my bullshit, a fact for which I am grateful. I have a play-by-post campaign I need to start up as well. 

Other Blog Shit

Troll Gods has some articles sitting on it. I've got some stuff to add. I'll eventually sit down and get it ironed out. In the meantime, if anyone still has stuff to submit by all means do so. I have a couple things I'm going to be writing reviews on, including a couple indie OSR bits from other amateur creators.

Going forward, I'm going to try to keep up at least a post per week, and hopefully get caught up on some of this nonsense.

Until then, 

Waxing on Gaming Autobiographica

I first started playing RPGs by hacking together a functional game out of just what I could glean from the AD&D1e DMG. I later moved into Alternity, Cyberpunk, and then I was all over the place. Back then, I played games the way most people did—or maybe still do—without a hell of a lot of thought about design, "creative agendas" or any of that.

My big shift came when I discovered The Riddle of Steel. It was in many ways, unlike anything I'd ever seen. It completely challenged my ideas of what role-playing was or could be, how games should be run. The combat system was like nothing I'd ever seen. I had already been a major history nerd, but it was through TROS that I'd developed a love of HEMA and all that was entailed. I was too late to the party to be around when The Forge was kicking hornet's nests, but damned if I didn't pursue The Riddle.

The next big shift came for me in discovering Burning Wheel. This was nowhere near the paradigm shift that TROS was, but it was perhaps the clearest demonstration I've ever had of the idea that "system matters." In both my own Burning Wheel experiments and those I've watched/listened to (I have a weird fascination with actual play recordings) I've gained a huge appreciation for how the system influences and informs play.

At that point in my life, I don't think you would've been able to convince me to play D&D if you paid me. My few attempts to experiment with it again were... painful. My experiences with 3.x and pathfinder were abysmal. When 4th edition came out, I couldn't even finish my read of the player's handbook. Striker? Defender? Controller? Ugh. I couldn't get past the terminology. In my mind, it immediately left me thinking about MMOs. Would we be drawing aggro and baiting spawn points next? This is without touching that the game designated which classes were "leaders" of the party (we'll decide who leads our party among ourselves, thank you). Making this impression even worse, I watched Chris Perkins DM a 4e game on youtube. It was a four-hour session which took place entirely on a battle map. It started with the party in the dungeon with some exposition to put them there, followed by three or four combats interspersed with a couple skill challenges. Read: someone had to throw some dice at something. It took them four hours to run four fights. I wouldn't be playing 4th edition. (Later, I did actually come to appreciate it as a kind of combat-based dungeon crawling board game, I just wouldn't want to run it as a D&D game.)

The next weird step in my gaming evolution was encountering the practically unheard of Chronica Feudalis. This was a system I found so interesting and hackable that it actually prompted me to start blogging about it. The original blog those took place on has long-since been abandoned, though I've migrated several of the most interesting posts here. Oddly enough, one of which is in my "Popular nonsense" stuff on the sidebar, making it my number 2 most all-time viewed post. I guess someone out there has heard of this stuff after all.

What struck me most about CF was just how flexible it actually was. The structure of the wounds and maneuvers system gave me nearly as cinematic and bloody combat as I was getting from TROS (or, by this time, Song of Steel -- the game that would eventually be rebranded as Band of Bastards). Was it meant to be used in such a bloody faction? I have no idea, but some of the most bloody and cinematic combats I've ever played were in a hacked version of Chronica Feudalis.

Perhaps the most radical departure for me in this was just how simple it actually was, by comparison. How quickly it played and how little effort as a GM it took to run. I can safely blame Higgins for introducing the game to me. I had previously been playing a great deal of Savage Worlds specifically because it was relatively simple for players to wrap their head around. When I'd argued for SW to be a relatively rules-light game (how naive I was!) Higgins scoffed and rightly put me in my place. He may have been nicer than that, but I certainly remember there was scoffing.

This is when I bumped into the OSR movement for the first time. I had already had a lot of fond memories of AD&D as a kid. For whatever reason, I never really mentally categorized those experience into the same box as my encounters with 3.5 or 4e D&D. They seemed like completely different kinds of games. It wasn't until I started getting into the OSR scene that I understood why.  They were  fundamentally different types of games. Whatever one might say about indie games and The Forge, the whole culture will get you thinking about how games are designed and played, even if you disagree with their conclusions.

I was hooked pretty quickly. I'm not sure if it was my newfound craving for simplicity, a touch of nostalgia, or that the games so openly embraced a lot of things that I'd sort of lost sight of from in
Somewhere between my newfound craving for simplicity, a touch of nostalgia, and an open embrace of a lot of things I'd lost sight of somewhere along the way. Likely, all of the above.

I have to really credit the OSR scene for bringing a lot of balance back to my gaming tastes. There's a lot of people out there who like to try to pit indie/nar/forge types as being in one camp and OSR as being two opposite and non-overlapping things, each vying to be the One True Way and the other being badwrongfun. I've gained a lot from both communities and I greatly enjoy both kinds of games. They provide radically different experiences, and in a lot of ways follow the same "system matters" ethos. In a curious way, they even both seem to be a response to the same thing - dissatisfaction with "Adventure path" (read: railroad) style of GMing and systems that are bad at what they are supposed to be doing.

I actually had a reason for going into all of this besides my own nostalgia. I have a handful of topics that have been digging at me for a while now, but I thought they could use some context before I began. Unfortunately, this post is far too long already. So those will wait until next time.

Why I don't Fudge Rolls

Echoing a post I made in a thread the other day, I figured it would be worth it to clean up and post here.

The initial question was a good one:
DMs, do you fudge dice rolls? Why or why not?

It can be very tempting to save players from themselves, but in the long run I think it hurts the overall dynamic of the game. I read once that a good GM should be a like a coach on a sports team. They are there to help advise, encourage, support, and cheer for the players as best they can, but it's still up to them to play the game.

OSR can be brutal in a lot of ways. One of the tropes people tend to attribute to OSR play in particular is the high lethality. For some people, the Fantasy Vietnam thing is actually part of the draw. Even when you're not intentionally aiming for that style, things happen. Old-school play has a lot of save-vs-terrible things moments. The level 1 "wandering encounters" table for B/x has a whole bunch of results that could easily TPK a group. Because OSR has so much randomness and so much of it can be absolute murder, it's very important that the players and the GM are on the same page. The GM should be seen as an impartial arbiter of these results, rather than the cause of them. You need the culture at the table to be "that's just what the dice said."

Once you start fudging dice and the players know that this is a precedent, the GM is now culpable for every result the dice show. At best, whenever something bad happens to a player's character, they know you could have prevented it. When a character dies, it's because you let them die. "But we fudged the roll last time!"

More insidious than this though can be the rolls they don't see at all. The villainous NPC making a difficult or important saving throw, or landing a critical blow in combat can be seen as you cheating to save your BBEG. A bad wandering encounter result or similar random-chart-result situation could simply be seen as you trying to screw the players. Even if you know you aren't trying to, and the players know you aren't trying to, it can still look terrible.

For me at least, it's way better for it to be firmly established that the dice have the final say and that I'm not going to fudge things one way or another. I do this for the same reason I want a GM looking when I roll ability scores for a character. Sometimes crazy results occur, and I don't want someone going "yeah, I'm sure you totally rolled two 18s."

Up until now, I've spoken almost exclusively about OSR style games, but I think the same principle applies in more story-oriented games as well. You want the results to appear impartial.The counter is often something along the lines of "I don't want a single bad roll to derail the story," but fortunately story-based games make this even easier than OSR games do. If it's not something you're willing to risk the PCs failing don't ask them to make a roll. Narrative games are pretty great that way. 

Statistics in the OSR market

My OSR house rules have slowly evolved into a game of their own, and I've been kicking around the idea of publishing them after 'Bastards is all grown up and finding its own way in the world. To this end, I've done some amateur market research by way of straw polls. I'm sure none of these are statistically significant by way of sample size, but here they are.

Screencaps are here from the time at writing, but if you want to weigh in, I'll leave links to each below the poll itself.

http://strawpoll.me/7025086/

This poll had the most results, and it confirms to what I predicted. The most popular edition chosen was Moldvay Basic, but nearly twice as many people weighed in and said that they didn't care one way or another about the specific edition. What did surprise me was that OD&D beat out BECMI/RC and AD&D by a decent margin. I can't be sure if this is because OD&D is more popular than I thought, or because more people thought it was underrepresented than the other editions.

Since the leading result didn't care what edition it was, that leads to the next question: how much do we care about faithfulness to the core material?

http://strawpoll.me/7044557/

The results here are more definitive than the first question, but we have an even smaller sample size. That said, it completely conforms to my expectations. Because OSR stuff is so broadly compatible, the overwhelming majority seem more interested in seeing innovation than faithfulness to the old rules.

http://strawpoll.me/7139460/

This last one I've been kicking around for a while. Book formatting is something I've written about before and it's an interesting topic for OSR. Depending on the edition and game, we've seen it done a number of ways. The results here surprised me.

I've never gotten to experience LBB OD&D, but I've always loved the physical presentation of it. The amateurish doodles give it a naive charm, and the nostalgia factor is high. The actual booklets themselves have a kind of versatility that you lose in single-volume sets, as they allow you to have multiple people looking different things up simultaneously. If you can acquire them separately, it also means you can have multiple copies of the character creation section if you need it to speed up the process. I think it may also be less intimidating to initiate a new player into the game with a half-sized 30-page booklet than handing them the 300-page player's guide from certain other editions of the game.

For the first day or so that I monitored this poll, all four options were at a dead heat, with at most a vote or two between them. I assumed that the single volume 8.5x11 would ultimately win out, as it is the most common form RPG books take. I was pleasantly surprised that the 6x9 took the lead. I've written about how much I love this format ever since I picked up the Burning Wheel Gold book.

Even if the above changes significantly after the time of posting, I think I will stick with the 6x9 as the target size for a new book. This is not just because I genuinely enjoy the form factor for it, but because it creates a secondary possibility as well. It's easy to lay out the book at 5.5x8.5 (half-page LBB size) first and create the game in such a way as it can stand as multiple booklets and then just slightly upscale the same layout to fit a single-volume 6x9 without changing page numbers. Print on demand being what it is, it would be easy to offer both for people to pick at their preference. I can easily see someone using the single-volume hardback and a couple extra character-creation booklets at the table.

Under/Over

Continuing my LotFP tinkerfest:
My biggest bugbear with the current setup is that some rolls are roll-over, others are roll-under. This bothers me, as players get confused as to which way the rolls should go.

As it stands, attack rolls and saves are roll-over. Ability rolls and skills are roll-under. I'd like to align them all in the same direction:

Option A: Roll Over

Move everything to a roll-over system. Attack rolls can stay the same (d20+AB vs AC). Saves would be the same (equal to or greater than your save number).

Ability Score would have to be roll 1d20+Ability. 21+ is success.
Skills would have to be 1d6+skill. 7 is success.

Benefits:

• Rolling high is by virtue of language and conditioning intuitively good. "Natural 20" automatically triggers something in most gamers.
• Ability Scores can be directly opposed, with each side rolling d20+Ability to determine the winner.

Drawbacks:

• Double digit+double digit math is something that will produce an "uhhhh" every time it is rolled.
• Defeats the point of recording skills in pips, as part of the charm was the visual representation on the sheet actually looking like the d6, and needing that or under.
• 21 and 7 sound arbitrary (even if they aren't), and begin to stray into TN/DC territory, which I'm not a fan of for this kind of game. The simplicity of roll-under is that what you see is what you need.
• Save numbers go down to improve instead of going up, which is slightly counter-intuitive. 

Option B: Roll Under

Attribute and Skill rolls remain as they are now. Saves are easily converted to roll-under: you just take what they are now and subtract them from 20. A sheet could have the updated saves and no one would notice the difference.

Attack Bonus would need renamed (it's no longer a bonus), but is functionally the same. If you had +2 before, it would now just be a roll-under of 2. AC would go back to TSR era "lower is better."

Your attack roll would then be a d20  with the goal of rolling under your Attack Score+EnemyAC. 

Bonuses can universally be assumed to apply to the score itself, rather than the roll, so a +1 bonus is still good.

Benefits:

• No math required anywhere except the attack roll, but that always needs math unless you want to make a chart (Note to self: consider chart). What you see is what you need.
• Pips on dice retain their charm.
• All Stats go up to improve - except for AC? Hrm.
• AC listed in other retroclones/TSR material can be used more or less as-is. 

Drawbacks:

• "Roll low to succeed" is inherently less intuitive. "Natural 1" doesn't hit the brain the same way as "Natural 20."
• Enemy AC now modifies your roll, instead of being the target you need to meet. Not sure if this is less intuitive. Could be fixed through a THAC0 style table, but that goes back into "is this more or less intuitive than the alternative? If you did go that route though, AC could be positive as well.

At present, I'm liking B more than anything, but debating whether a return to a THAC0 style chart is better or worse than weird AC mechanics.

Time Flies

Has it been a month already? Man. Right. Updates:

Grand Heresy now has two youtube channels. Barbarossa has outdone himself with setting things up and getting our whole AV situation sorted. Grand Heresy Press is going to be our core channel, and we'll be uploading things on there as we get them recorded. We'll be throwing some updates on as we get closer to 'bastards release, but it for now primarily be the home of the Grand Heresy AP Podcast. More on that in a moment. Our secondary channel is Grand Heresy Presents, which will be a place we upload stuff that isn't directly related to role-playing games, but involves us or our interests. Barbarossa already has some footage about grilling, of all things. Neither channel has proper content up yet, but Barbarossa did an excellent job on the intros. 

The Grand Heresy AP Podcast recorded some test footage. We just started a Lamentations of the Flame Princess one-shot and are basically recording our normal game footage. When we get it all situated, we'll be uploading the footage to youtube and ripping the audio as a downloadable podcast. Links to everything will eventually be up on our website.

If you didn't already know, because the group is so spread out, we're using Tabletop Simulator for our gaming. It is a huge improvement over Roll20. The mood and atmosphere are a lot better with TTS. It feels a lot more personal than the more clinical interface of Roll20, and having physical space with moving cameras lets you do a lot of things that are hard to do otherwise - using tokens to keep track of gameplay, having multiple maps or sheets out at the same time, etc. Most of all though, the dice. Roll20 has a terrible random number generator system. I have vivid memories of using it for Mordheim and deciding that it actually didn't matter what the stats of the characters were. Most d6 results were either 1 or 6, auto-fail or auto-succeed. TTS treats them as objects with a physics engine, so they roll as they should and produce the results you would expect. Even better? They make extremely satisfying noise when you shake them or clatter them across the table. I've been doing so much online gaming that I forgot how great that noise was, even through simulation.

If I had any criticisms of TTS, it's not particularly well-optimized for complex operations. It will start to tank when you have a high number of objects on the table, but for the most part it hasn't bothered me. It's also relatively early in its life-cycle, so future updates may improve this.

I've also started trying to force myself to piddle with art again. I make no claims towards professional talent, but I like to play with it. It's decent enough to render a character portrait now and then (like the above, from our LotFP group). If you're interested, I keep a tumblr for that purpose. Fair warning: I'm studying anatomy. There are naked people.

I've got some more stuff to post shortly, but that's enough for now.

Until next time,

Still Alive

Hello internet. It's been a while.

I'm still alive, fortunately. Our orc-based campaign got sidelines when the GM had his work-schedule change, and my own writing time has been compromised by my day-job, the sad reality of adulthood.

So what's new:

• Bastards is hopping along. We got out another couple teasers on the GH site, and discussions on our forums. Progress is being made on the core book for beta, but not nearly as much as I would have liked.
• Our site admin decided to start designing a game of his own, which will be later revealed under the GH brand. I won't get into details here, but it looks to be very cool. I've been consulting, but I won't be sitting down and putting words to paper until 'Bastards has gotten to publish.
• OrcQuest picked back up last week, hopefully to be a regular occurrence again.  I'll have an AP report again before long. 
• We're considering an AP podcast with our next campaign, in case you have a dire urge to listen to us ramble for hours. We'll need to figure out how we want to do it, but it sounds like a good idea on the face of it. 

That's where we're at for now. I'll have the next OrcQuest installment before long.

Carry on.

Waagh Upon the Risers

I haven't actually caught up my OrcQuest recaps yet, we're about two episodes behind, but last night something happened that I thought I should share.

At some point during the game, a song began and it caught on. It is now our official orc-tribe marching song. I present to you: Waagh Upon the Risers. Feel free to sing along.

Waagh Upon the Risers

He was just a yellow greenboy and he surely shook with fright
He checked out all his wargear and was gripping his axe tight
He had t'sit and listen to those awful elveses roar
"He ain't gonna raid no more!"

Orky, Orky, What a helluva way to Waagh
Orky, Orky, what a helluva way to waagh
Orky, Orky, what a helluva way to waagh
He ain't gonna raid no more.

"Are all a'you shits ready?" cried the Warboss lookin grim
The greenboy squeeked an answer, and he nodded back at him
He charged into the elven lines, his axehead comin' loose
He ain't gonna raid no more

Orky, Orky What a helluva way to Waagh
Orky, Orky, what a helluva way to waagh
Orky, Orky, what a helluva way to waagh
He ain't gonna raid no more.

He shouted out, his choppa swung, its axehead flew away
He felt the weight, it sealed his fate, unarmed into the fray
The bowstring twang, the impact sang and punctured through his helm
He ain't gonna raid no more

Orky, Orky What a helluva way to Waagh
Orky, Orky, what a helluva way to waagh
Orky, Orky, what a helluva way to waagh
He ain't gonna raid no more.

Da boyz were there on the spot, the warboss runnin wild
The clerics jumped and screamed with glee, the necromancer smiled
For it had been a week or more since last a boy had died
He ain't gonna raid no more

Orky, Orky What a helluva way to Waagh
Orky, Orky, what a helluva way to waagh
Orky, Orky, what a helluva way to waagh
He ain't gonna raid no more.

The arrow struck true and split straight through the backplate of his dome
Right through his eye, his gore did fly, Gruumsh had called him home
His brains splattered all around, his skull was split in twain
He ain't gonna raid no more

Orky, Orky What a helluva way to Waagh
Orky, Orky, what a helluva way to waagh
Orky, Orky, what a helluva way to waagh
He ain't gonna raid no more.

My thief is going to have to start taking bard levels.
RPGs are a hell of a drug.

Organizing Campaign Materials

How do you organize your campaign materials? This is a topic that I have always found somewhat frustrating, but particularly so in D&D / OSR games. Over the course of a campaign, you wind up with maps, charts, random tables, dozens of NPCs and monsters, random items and more. The amount of book-keeping here goes up exponentially if you plan something like a sandbox hex-crawl as well. For even a single location, you wind up with a map.

A lot of stuff goes into running a smooth campaign. You know the stuff I'm talking about. As a DM, you wind up with a ton of notes on everything from maps to monsters, NPCs, locations, traps, items and more. If you have something as ambitious as a sandbox hex-crawl, the amount of stuff you wind up taking notes on can go even higher. For a single hex location, you can easily wind up with:

• The location itself, description and hooks
• A random encounter table for the area
• Stats for any monsters / NPCs that are liable to be encountered in the general area.
• A dungeon or other maps to have pre-sketched out for the encounter(s)
• A wandering monster chart for that dungeon
• Notes on each of the traps in that dungeon
• Special items listed for any of the NPCs or monsters in the area, in the dungeon, or to be found as loot

And it's not unusual to go even further, with weather tables or other random tables for magical nonsense or effects, particularly when those effects are attached to a some form of wondrous character-sheet-altering item in the way of so many old D&D modules.

Now multiply this over even a dozen hexes and you wind up with a huge amount of book-keeping even if many of the tables overlap, and this is without broader more general notes on things like NPC interactions, any kind of developing metaplots, and so forth.

So the question becomes: What do you do with all of this data?

The traditional method often involves a massive DM notebook. It's a tried and true method, granted. It's what DMs have been doing since the hobby began. On the other hand, it does not scale with volume of information at all and I always find myself resenting page-flipping during play. So what are the alternatives?

I've had someone suggest Evernote to me for this purpose. It's a good program, and I use it fairly often already in my personal / professional life. In a lot of ways it will beat a notepad and pen for this kind of thing, but it has some drawbacks as well. I've not found a good way to cross-reference information within the program, which is unfortunate, though it does support the ability to tag entries for later searching.

My chief problem with Evernote is simply that the notebooks lack the ability to sub-divide them well. You only have two organizational layers: a single notepad, or a stack of notepads. This may not be a problem if you are using Evernote exclusively as a DM tool. Unfortunately, as someone who is already using Evernote for an organizational tool, I simply don't have enough subfolder capacity to structure all of my notes in a meaningful fashion.

I've heard some good things about Scrivener as well, but haven't had the chance to play with it much. As it's supposed to be writer's software, I'm hopeful and probably need to get it just for my day job. Unfortunately, I am cheap so that's a dream for another day.

Malloy's Ultimate DM Client
If I were going to design a custom DM client for this nonsense, what would I want out of it? Consider this a DM's wet-dream checklist of features to make me love you forever. I lack the programming skills to create this myself, but if someone does, somewhere out there, you will make a killing.

•  Modular entries / Inboxing: the entire system boils down to an extremely versatile list manager and note card system. I need to be able to open a new note card on the fly and have it automatically drop into an inbox where I can sort it at my leisure, thus keeping the system flexible enough that I can use it during the game itself. These note cards would be the heart of the whole program.
• Searchable Tags: I need to be able to tag each note card with whatever I want it to be, and have a method of searching those tags. If I write down the data for a thing and call it "Monster," "Forest," "Shapeshifter," I should be able to search any of those tags and bring up every entry containing that specific tag. This would make having to wing elements mid-session so much easier, for cases when you just don't have something prepared.
• Playlists: In many ways, it helps to imagine the system something like iTunes - well, how iTunes was a few years ago, these days it's just frustrating. Like songs in iTunes, the individual note card lives somewhere in the file system of the program, but you can access it by pulling up a tag, accessing it alphabetically, or by creating specific Lists of things. One could simply have a playlist that is "NPCs in Region X." Or whatever else. The ability to organize these playlists into folders would make this extremely useful.
• Extremely good cross referencing: Likewise, the ultimate use of this nonsense would be to be able to link to other notes within a given note. If I have an NPC who has Item of Wondrous Property+2, I want to be able to click that item in the notes for that NPC and bring up its associated note. Once you have this included, the entire system becomes extremely useful. Your notes themselves can simply be links to other notes, creating the beautiful situation where I can have a note called "Random Encounters for the North Woods" and have an ordered table where each of the results link to the note in question. 

If the above were produced in a way that was user-friendly enough for the average person to be able to populate and run without tearing their hair out, you would already convince a great many people to love you forever. However, if you want to really win the prize of Ultimate DM Client, consider the following features to implement:

• Virtual Dice: A lot of programs have a virtual dice roller built in, but if you're going to make a DM client, you might as well add this. This isn't so much because DMs will want to use these over physical dice on the table, but because it allows for other useful things such as...
• Integrated Random Tables: If a note is tagged as a random table, you can hit a button and it will automatically roll the table and highlight the result. If the result is a linked note, it can be set to automatically open it for you.
• Combat Tracker: Allows Monster / NPC notes to be "activated" and placed on a tracker that is simply a vertical stack of some kind that can be arranged in order of initiative. Activating 4 of the "bugbear" note card would simply stick 4 tokens labeled Bugbear on the initiative tracker, with a space beside them that will have their default HP listed, and HP remaining. Add your PCs and their hirelings to the combat tracker, and keeping track of initiative becomes silly easy.
• Hit Die Generator: Allow notes tagged Monster or NPC to be listed with random HP. When you activate them as above, it will use the virtual dice to properly generate random HP for them.
• Random Name Generator: exactly what it says on the tin. By default, should offer "generic fantasy" names, and then specific lists for Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, and maybe by theme: Norse, Greek, African, etc. Make these lists editable so DMs can add in their own entries, and make it so they can make entirely new lists if they choose. Pro Tier? Let these random names auto-populate randomly generated monsters activated in the Combat Tracker.
• XP calculator: If an NPC or monster is tagged as giving XP when killed, the Combat Tracker will automatically tally how much killing it is worth over the course of the battle. If you've got 5 orcs worth 30xp each, as you click "defeated" on each one, the Combat Tracker will keep an updated count of how much XP was earned.  
• Hexcrawl Organization: Load a map image and set it as a hex map. Will automatically apply hexes overtop of the map.  Each hex is now a clickable, and will open the relevant note or playlist associated with it.  Thus, I can click hex A21 and it will open my playlist of notes I have associated with it. When my players go to A21, with one click I have access to my random encounter tables, relevant NPCs in the area, any maps or encounters I had planned for the place, and so on. I can populate an entire sandbox with information only have to deal with what I need when I need it. Seriously, do this. 

I envision the glorious experience of sitting down to a session with my rulebooks, a laptop, and this program opened. My players veer off-course and explore some area I hadn't planned on today, but that's fine. I've already set up the map for it.

They arrive at a section of woods and I click on my hex map, bringing it up. It launches the playlist of notes for the area. I have my wandering encounter table, weather tables, important locations in the area, maps, NPCs, the works. They decide to poke at some ruins there, so I bring up the ruins notecard. I've got important details and descriptions, all of the associated random tables. I have the map of the ruins themselves, with internally linked references to the notes for each of the traps, monsters, treasures and salvagables within the ruins themselves. After some time, I decide to check for a wandering encounter. I pull up the integrated wandering encounter table specific to the ruins and click auto-roll. It brings up the entry for an NPC warband I had planned on introducing at some point. I throw them into the combat tracker and notice one of them has a magical sword whose properties I can't remember off-hand. Click. Got it. I roll to see if either side was surprised, and begin. 

In 2-3 clicks, I have everything at my fingertips for anything I could possibly want for the session. If the party goes completely off the menu for some reason and gets to an area I had completely forgotten to prepare for? They are in the woods. I'm just going to search for the Forest tag and see what all I have laying around.

And even better: when preparing for these things in the first place, I can literally just import any NPC/Monster/Item/Spell/whatever I find interesting and keep it all in a growing database. When I'm setting up a new cave/dungeon/whatever, I have literally everything at my fingertips, just a search away.

It would be the ultimate setup.

Now, where do I find an ambitious programmer when I need one?

Until next time,

Lars Andersen and Historical Archery

There is a video floating around that has gotten a good deal of attention lately. In addition to 22 million views, I've gotten a couple questions about it myself. One of which on the Grand Heresy Forums. I responded some there, but I thought I would elaborate and provide a more thoughtful answer here.

I'll start off with the same disclaimer I've made before. The video is very interesting to watch. Lars Andersen is an extremely talented archer, and nothing I say here is to discredit that skill. The issue I take is passing off extremely impressive trick shooting as battlefield archery. He can do some very cool things, but not necessarily things that are of practical martial application.

I'll say up front that I'm not a fan of the tone the video takes. The thing pitches itself like an infomercial, making sensationalist claims about "uncovered secrets" and playing along the "myths debunked! everything you know is wrong!!!@!1" kind of nonsense. This is complete with the exaggerated incompetence you expect from a 4am infomercial. I half expected a transition to black and white film wherein a woman would unsuccessfully try to cut a banana by mashing it with the flat of a kitchen knife. With dramatic music, a voice-over would shout "BANANAS GOT YOU DOWN?"

"WELL WORRY NO MORE! WITH THE BANAMATIC™ HOME BANANA SLICING SYSTEM, YOUR BANANA SLICING TROUBLES ARE OVER!"

There some important things to realize when dealing with the claims made in the video. First, despite the imagery used, archery is no more monolithic and uniform an art than is swordsmanship. Every culture has developed its own weapons and means to use them, and this includes archery. The Egyptians were using different bows and techniques than the mounted Huns were, or the Mary Rose era longbow archers. This is no different than the way the Norse broadsword, Japanese katana, and Italian rapier were each different in their use. They were different weapons, with different purposes, taught by different cultures for use in overcoming the different challenges they would face.

Much of what he is demonstrating is out of the Arabic tradition, which used the smaller bows that were used throughout the east, developing out of horseback archery. Horseback archery in the east had a very specific character, often riding into relatively close ranges, launching a series of arrows and getting back out. Their bows were compact, nimble, and relatively moderate draw weight. The opponents they fought were usually very lightly armored.

In the west, military archery is a long range affair with thousands of archers in block formation firing on other block formations at 300 yards or more with heavy powered bows. Mike Loades has credited the Mary Rose era bows as being 100-120lbs or more. I believe one gentleman on Weapons that Made Britain was actually demonstrated loosing a massive 150lbs draw weight bow. This is no small feat. These were weapons firing heavy projectiles at extremely long range to overcome thick maille and plate armor. The bows were often too long to comfortably use on horseback, and the higher poundage bows required a full-body exertion to draw properly.

Seriously. We can identify the bodies of English longbowman by their deformed spines and enlarged left arms.

This isn't to say that western archers never fought while mobile or skirmished. Robin Hood has a lot of basis in fact, as it turns out. Mounted archers of a sort also existed in the west, but in the manner of later mounted infantry, not fighting mounted but instead using the horse only for mobility to get into (and retreat from) a position.

We are talking about different weapons systems, different purposes, with different methods of deployment.


Aside from the historical issues, there is a secondary claim that is a theme throughout the video. Much is made about the speed with which he looses his arrows, even going so far as to show footage of his drawing juxtaposed to the drawing of other archers. What he fails to mention is that he achieves this speed by not drawing the bow back more than a few inches. If you watch closely, he very rarely draws the bow back more than a quarter of the way at any point in the video. This makes for impressive speed, and can probably put a lot of arrows on target, but you make major sacrifices in range and power in doing so.

He does some really cool stuff with it, but I would be extremely surprised if it would deliver anything approaching the kind of force you would need to put someone down through even a padded jack at 50 yards.

I'll state it again. It's an awesome video, and he does some really impressive trick shooting. You could even argue that the trick shots have some basis in history, in that professional archers even then probably developed the ability to do similar feats to show off to their friends. Some things never change. But the claims he can make and apply to his trick shooting don't really apply to any kind of martial archery.

Until next time, 

Now Back to Your Regularly Scheduled Programming

The last couple months have been rather crazy. November lead to a much-needed break, and as is often the case, December found me busy with familial obligations. The beginning of January saw me with a 103 degree fever and a Nyquil-induced-coma, but once again I am here and doing what I do.

Future plans of the blog are to put out a post per week, with several more or less worked out and waiting in the wings at the moment. Lately, my attention has been diverted heavily into Grand Heresy business, with very exciting things going on. My fever-addled delirium brought about a handful of new ideas and solutions to some long-standing bugs for Band of Bastards. Writing, re-writing and editing continues to be an all-consuming task, but we are making our way through. This is the hour when discipline for the subject becomes of utmost importance. Meanwhile, my list of "one day" projects sits a mile long, tempting me with their puppy-eyed promises of fun and creativity. I must resist. I will resist.

We will see this book finished.

In other news, the first drafts of some cover ideas have been floating around recently including one mock-up that I'm rather proud of. Whether it is the direction we will go in is yet to be scene, but I rather like it regardless. More on that later.

For now, we are back to our regularly scheduled programming of rambling insights and RPG related dev commentary and development.

Until next time,

Home Stretch

November has been rough, but I can safely say that we're almost there. Almost. Editing is nearly done, I've got a side-business launched, blog maintained, and I'm 10k words away from finishing NaNoWriMo. I may simply hibernate through December.

A wise man once said, never half-ass two things, whole ass one thing. Remind me in the future to take on just one major project at a time.

On that note, I've got work to do.

Until next time,

Material Culture in your Campaign

An interesting article floated across my Facebook feed the other day, with the ridiculously lengthy title of: The Truth about Vikings: Not the smelly barbarians of legend but silk-clad, blinged-up culture vultures. The article is interesting itself, though nothing particularly new to me. It's been one of my favorite quirks of history that the Norse actually did seem to go around dressed as metal-heads and goth rockers.

As always, it got me thinking on the subject of gaming. One of the things I think most frequently neglected in world-building and setting creation is the material culture present. In anthropology, material culture refers to the stuff of a culture or civilization. In broadest application, it applies from the kinds of buildings and architecture, the way settlements are laid out and the functionality of the same. More interestingly (for me, anyway) it also applies to the way the society adorns itself, both the decorations in the home, the manner of dress, the way classes distinguish themselves, the design of jewelry and adornment of weapons and tools.

I'm a very visual person, so for me these little details play a big part in conveying the feel of the world. It's part of the pageantry and immersion process. It is a huge part in what forms cultural identity and how one group distinguishes itself from another. That another culture dresses in ways foreign to ours, that another tribe marks itself differently, is an inherent and instinctual part of the way we perceive the other.

Of course, because it is very much a visual medium it is often the first thing to get ignored by people when they are writing a setting. This is especially true when the setting is in some analogue of medieval Europe, which is a shame as the material culture in the medieval period is extremely diverse and can be played up to great effect when talking about the difference between, say, the French and English. The further away you get from the "default" setting, the more interesting and important these descriptions can be in painting the color, flavor, and character of the society you are trying to portray.

We can tell a Greek design at a glance by its signature repeating waves patterns, or a Norse or Celtic piece by its knot-work and designs. Arabic geometric designs are easily recognized, and most of us can spot traditional Japanese artwork and patterns, or at least identify them as "Asian." African or Native American tribes have distinctive patterns of their own.

Take some time to think on the material culture in your setting. What do they look like? What clothes do they wear? How do they adorn themselves? What motifs are popularly repeated? What do their buildings look like? Their architecture? Their food?

And most importantly: how can you work these details into your game?

Until next time,

On World Building

World building in role playing games is a strange beast, with about as many approaches as there are people who do it. I tend to do a lot of it, myself. I rarely get particularly into pre-written campaign settings, for a variety of reasons. Being really into history, religion, and mythology, I tend to find things in published settings that will strike me as silly or unnecessarily complicated. I also tend to dislike the idea that one of my players may have the same book at home and have spent as much time with it as I have. Given my natural love of tinkering, by the time I've made the adjustments to taste, fixed glaring inconsistencies, and then rewritten parts of it so the players don't already know all of the setting's secrets, I might as well have written my own setting anyway. 

Once the decision to write a setting is made, the questions are "how?" and "for what purpose?" The latter will largely determine the former.

When I was younger, I took a lot of time in writing extremely long-winded backgrounds, deep and detailed settings, wrote cultural notes and all kinds of nonsense. I could start a campaign by handing out a fifty page primer to the setting. Pro tip: Don't do this.

The problem with creating that sheer volume of information is that your players are never going to read it all. Once in a rare cosmic alignment, your vision for what you wanted a setting to be will so line up with the tastes of a single player who just happens to also love reading setting material that they will, at some point during the weeks or months you spend in that campaign, actually finish your handouts, but this is such a rare occurrence as to be unworthy of mention.

If you absolutely must write a fifty page world bible on your campaign, then be prepared to handle that information the way a novelist does. A writer knows that you simply can't info-dump on your readers, whether we're talking about a prologue of exposition written in the beginning of the book, or pages scattered throughout. Any time you spend more than a paragraph or two outside of the flow of narration, you are in danger of losing your audience. Instead, you have to sprinkle tidbits throughout and show through the characters actions and reactions how thing go. This latter part can be tricky in a role-playing game, where you can't control everyone's actions, but you have an additional advantage. While readers can pick up on a hint and simply have to wait to find out more about it, a player who is curious about a piece of information can actually ask you to expand upon a subject. You should encourage the behavior.

If you're very into the world-bible style of world building, check out this article by Writer's Digest. It has a lot of interesting tips for this kind of project.

As for myself, what do I actually wind up doing these days?

Ultimately, every setting I create for gaming falls somewhere between two extremes.

On the one hand is traditional sand box, hex-crawl style preparation. I create a list of relevant elements and then populate an area with NPCs, factions, things that can happen, hooks to roll with, and so on.

On the other end, I've taken to embracing shared setting creation. If you're unfamiliar with the term, the idea is that rather than the GM having sole narrative discretion over the world, the players can invent elements and introduce them on their own. Depending on how far you want to go with this, it can mean anything from allowing the players to introduce details through their character's background and mannerisms, to sitting down and making the "lets make up a setting" the first session of the campaign.

In practice, what usually happens for me is some combination of the two. I will very often create a specific piece of a setting, often a single city or town, and through creating it establish the broadest strokes of the setting itself - general technological era, the kind of country / region it is in, etc. I'll usually expand on this, creating a very small sandbox at the beginning of the game, but inviting the players to create additional details about the world, its setting, its history and cultures, etc through their background and the player's mannerisms.

This approach has a bunch of advantages. The GM's investment up front is relatively minimal, but I can still plant mysteries and hooks as needed or desired. The players also find themselves more invested in the world as they establish facts about it. It ceases to be "my" world, and becomes "our" world, and the longer the game goes on the more true this is.

Most importantly, rather than writing 50 pages up front about the world and setting that may never be seen, the story played out will add its own details as they become relevant, and the longer you play the more rich the setting becomes.

Try it sometime, you might be pleasantly surprised.

Until next time,