Dead Wizards Design Log 03

Almost all my game designs include some form of "meta currency". Luck points. I got the idea originally from the TSR AD&D adventure module CB1: Conan Unchained. In that module, David "Zeb" Cook gives us a cool luck mechanic invented for the adventure to help mitigate the disparate outcomes of a typical AD&D game vs. what you see on the big screen (the module cover is literally a photo of Arnold in the Conan movie). In other words, Conan does amazing feats that are difficult to simulate if you're just playing the game straight.

Cook's idea was simple. Each PC has a set number of Luck Points that only the DM knows. You as a player have no idea who many points you have. Here's a screenshot of the text. 

I actually adore this. I've tried to use it a couple of times in one-shots with mixed results. Players need to embrace the idea and you gotta remind them to use it or they just keep playing normally.

Anyway, for Dead Wizards, there is Sand. Sand is the meta currency. Players know how much they have and they can spend it to auto-succeed in tasks or to take over narrative control of the game for a very short time (kinda like The Pool).

The auto-succeed is called a Sand Storm. The idea is the Judge rolls a secret d6 to see how many actions you can get away with. You start describing your actions. You stop when you feel like it, but once you exceed the number of actions rolled by the Judge... you're run out of luck. If you exceed it, your excess action not only fails but it fails in a terrible way. So it's a gamble.

Dead Wizards Design Log 02

Last post was about Cunning and Prowess, which are the stats PCs roll against to accomplish almost everything. But that's not the first part of character creation.

First, you come up with two Marks, or "specials". There's a list of 20 fleshed-out examples to build from. Here are a few to give you an idea what I'm talking about.

"2. You have a silver flute that was given to you “for luck” by an old woman on her deathbed. Playing it clears your mind and lets you focus. Sometimes playing the flute allows you to see solutions to problems or divine facts you could not otherwise have known."

"17. A vicious vulture plucked out one of your eyes. You know its name and nature. A desert devil, it is. A supernatural monster with part of your soul inside it. When you close your good eye and concentrate, you can see through the evil old vulture’s eyes. You can often make it fly where you like so you can see distant places. One day it may find you and try to finish the job."

Marks don't include game mechanics. The way they work is to be sorted out between player and Judge, but usually comes down a modifier to an Action Roll (Prowess or Cunning) or an Oracle (1d6)... the two mechanics used in the game.

I'm trying to keep this focused on the setting's theme, on characters, and the stuff that develops naturally through play. The mechanics underpin it, but I wouldn't call this a crunchy or fiddly system at all. 

Dead Wizards Design Log 01

Dead Wizards is a sword and sorcery RPG set in a sandy land. A bit of sand and sorcery, if you will.

The idea came up about ten years ago as an OD&D hack inspired by Corben, Howard, and Tanith Lee. Revamped it later and it changed into something completely different, becoming GOZR.

But now I'm back to the original concept. I started with GOZR mechanics as a base and I've been working from there. I stripped a few things away, added other things.

I'll try to do this as a series of posts over time, just talking about one aspect of the game or another. If you read this, feedback is greatly appreciated.

First up, the core character "stats": Prowess and Cunning. Prowess for all things physical and Cunning for everything else. Why just these two? Because in all the sword and sorcery tales I enjoy, characters deal with their world through only these two modes. I don't think any more are needed.

You roll for your stats. But like GOZR, lower is better because the stat is the target number to meet or beat on a 1d20 roll.

The roll to set the stat is 1d4+2 for each, so you can only get 3-6. A very narrow range, which is extremely on purpose and I spent a lot of time thinking about it, running simulations, and all that. It means the guy who gets a 3 and the guy who gets a 6 are still fully compatible in terms of skill.

The rolled target number is for a Basic level of difficulty. Then each level higher adds 3 to that target number. The difficulties are Basic, Arduous, Grueling, and Epic.

So if your Basic Prowess is 5, then you'd have a spread like this:

Basic 5
Arduous 8
Grueling 11
Epic 14

As with GOZR, this simply means you look at your sheet to see what your target number is. Quick and dirty. But here the Judge has options for increasing difficulty. The Judge can decide case-by-case how difficult a task is.

Bonuses to rolls are low. In most cases, you're not getting one. But you can get a +1 for some things and maybe even +2. That makes those target numbers more challenging, but not daunting. You are playing heroic, capable sword and sorcery characters... not farmers and zeroes.

Once your target numbers are set, they do not easily change. There's a way you can swap points between adventures, making Prowess 1 better and Cunning 1 worse, for example. But 3 is the hard limit. Nobody has a stat target lower than 3.

Characters are more differentiated by their histories and their special traits. More on that later. 

Setting Survey 1

It's hard to write a good setting. I'm working on Dead Wizards and when I hit a struggle point, I like to grab books off my shelf and take a peek at how other people handle setting.

Random pulls...

Fever Swamp by Luke Gearing and Melsonian Arts Council is a thin little hardback that reminds me of a kid's book in how it feels to hold. I remember assuming this was a Troika! book since it was Melsonian, but no... this is OSR. And nowhere in the book does it ever explain what it is. There's no "use this with x game" statement. No... the inside covers are tables and the book just kicks off and never stops until it runs out of pages.

Only because I know OSR shit and I know D&D do I know this is that kind of book. I see little short stat lines for monsters with AC, HD, ATK, etc. There are two new character classes and their HD, XP, and saves are based on other classes. They mention Specialist as one. The game this is probably originally written for is Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which has the Specialist instead of the Thief.

Anyway, the setting is presented in little bursts and in tables and hex descriptions. It is a hex crawl kind of thing. There are not walls of text explaining the history of the region. Little bit here, little bit there, mostly delivered through tables and hex descriptions.

Takeaway: Getting straight to the meat of it is pretty nice. 

Yoon-Suin by Noisms is a table-heavy setting. Most of the setting is implied through copious amounts of writing written from the perspectives of people in the world. And the rest is mostly random tables. But it's a lot. The book kicks off with The Journal of Laxmi Guptra Dahl, a 28 page affair written in first person as the author explored the region. Now... I'm not a fan of prose-heavy RPG books. The reason I haven't knocked myself out trying to collect all the D&D Gazetteer series is because they're just too god damn heavy handed on the writing (we went from the minimalist X1 setting info to the maximalist Gaz series!).

But Yoon-Suin is very special. I'll happily take notes from how it is arranged. Mainly the way it uses random tables to do most of the work... an approach I took with GOZR.

Takeaway: Random tables build setting more evocatively than descriptions, in my opinion.

Anomalous Subsurface Environment ASEI by Patrick Wetmore is a self-described "gonzo" adventure location set in a kind of future post-apocalypse with all the trappings of Mad Max meets Waterdeep. This sucker is at once weird and sci-fantasy and also OSR as all hell. It's set up and presented in the classic way that old TSR modules were done. You get an overview to explain what it is, then he just goes straight into a X1 Isle of Dread style Gazetteer-lite, 40 page setting description. It's a beefy but compact read. This is a whole ass setting laid out just so you can have a place for PCs to be before they go down into the megadungeon.

Takeaway: You can just tackle the setting bit by bit, with short descriptions of what is needed and whatever history is necessary. You don't have to avoid all that shit if you don't want to.

Yeah... so what have I learned tonight? That I have a lot of game books written for old school D&D type games.

Also, just do it. Dead Wizards isn't a D&D game, but it is an adventure fantasy game. At minimum, I have to explain the overall setting, then drill down into the specific elements that are super important, then I can hand wave a bit and use random tables to give the Judge the tools necessary to flesh out the rest. That's how I like to do it. 

 

Dead Wizards Ground Zero

Going on 10 years ago I got inspired by various sword and sorcery things to create a game called Dead Wizards. It's set in a sandy desert city. Very much a "sand and sorcery" idea inspired by mummy movies as well as Lankhmar and Conan and a bit of Al-Qadim.

My first pass at it was a hack of Swords & Wizardry where I think the main difference was that spells were cast by burning hit points. I ran that a couple of times.

A bit later I revised it and ran it again, briefly. Then I changed the whole system to be based on the image above, using the old to-hit matrix as the core mechanic of the game. Partly, this was a grognard response to anti-THAC0 folks. Just a bit of tongue in cheekiness.

I sometimes went hard to defend descending AC...

The idea shifted in 2020 and became a "let me see if I can make this a game based on those animalistic goons from the movie Heavy Metal." So I did. And it was called GOZR.

 

I say all this because I've been working on Dead Wizards again after a lot of years in limbo. I want back to the last and fullest draft of the game, which was pretty good, actually. The rules in that version are essentially GOZR.

 

I've abandoned the THAC0 matrix, mostly. But there is a small "to hit" matrix on the character sheet. Much simplified, it has 4 categories of difficulty (Basic, Arduous, Grueling, and Epic) with target numbers for each of them for only 2 basic skill areas (Cunning and Prowess).

 

I think this is a really nice amalgam of GOZR's simple target number system and the old to-hit matrices. It's easy on the eyes and intuitive. You're trying to do a daring leap to grab a sacred relic off the giant demon's head? Sounds like an Arduous task, at least. You roll 1d20 vs. your Arduous Prowess target.

 

Once set, the targets never change. But you can pick up various benefits here and there and acquire situational boosts. The idea here is to keep it player-facing and as math-less as possible. Target is 9, you need to roll a 9. You have an advantage? +1 to the roll. Oh, the demon takes notice and now is actively protecting the sacred relic from your grasp? It's now a Grueling task.

 

So those are just some thoughts about the game in development. Clever observers will note that I still haven't produced that space fantasy game, ZSF. Hell's bells, West... you already playtested it, you already have Troika! based books about the same setting. What's the hold up? Yeah, I'll get to it. Inspiration is fickle, you know. 

Before GOZR... Sand

For years, since ye olde G+ days, I had this idea called Dead Wizards. It was to be a pure sword and sorcery RPG filtered through my own personal S&S lens. It was a desert setting, borrowing from some of the same well of ideas that Al Qadim borrowed from... but not too explicitly. I didn't describe it as "Arabic" or anything like that. I got my inspirations from those sources, but also many others across the world and throughout fantasy fiction. Eventually I changed the name Dead Wizards to Sand in the Bone because (what a shitty reason) I didn't want the "DW" to be confused with Dungeon World. No shade on Dungeon World, just wanted to be distinct.

Anyhow... the development of that game stalled multiple times and eventually I hit on a basic system I liked and wanted to test out. But I didn't want to run it in the Dead Wizards/Sand in the Bone setting. So I got some inspiration from watching Heavy Metal again and one day I scribbled "GOZR" on some paper and the rest is history.

So GOZR basically looted the corpse of Dead Wizards for its system and even its map. The DNA of this game shifted from a gritty S&S pulp style RPG to a post-apoc sci-fantasy romp.

Lately I've been revisiting Dead Wizards in my mind, allowing my brain to wander over it and feel out what was magical about the idea to begin with. Maybe it'll lead to something I can publish. Who knows?

Here are some ancient posts talking about Dead Wizards. Much of this info is probably no longer applicable, but perhaps you'll enjoy it anyway. You've read this far.

Gad'Juth

Kanebok

Big Swords

Initiative (and the origin of Threat from GOZR)

Game Design is Hard

Reflection on Dead Wizards

Glimmer

This is a Sand in the Bone post.

I wanted to do something interesting with some of the basics of urban life in the game. Food, drink, substances, sleep, and money. Because this game is heavy focused on setting.

For money, I didn't want a simple coin system where you spend 10 coins to get a thing that is valued at 10 coins. That's a fine system, especially if you don't want commerce and haggling to be part of the play. But I want to experiment with making commerce and haggling a part of the play.

In Kanebok, the city of the game, there is coinage but it doesn't really matter. Because people value a more abstract thing called glimmer, or glim for short. Basically, the idea is that the people of this world value that which glimmers. And the extension of that is the shine of the person who has the glimmer. Meaning: you can "sell" your worth by roleplay. It kinda doesn't matter how many coins or baubles or silver hoops you actually possess. That stuff is very abstracted. Instead, you have a dice value of glimmer that you possess. When you want to trade glim for something, you don't just plop it down on the counter. You can, of course, and that's OK. But it won't win you any favors or discounts.

Instead, you present your glimmer with flair, if you can. One way to do that is to offer some kind of story along with the glim. Like "See this copper disc? It is etched with the head of a bear that swallowed three men whole. The bear slayer extracted the copper from the bear's own blood and forged this disc." And the person you're talking to, perhaps a person from whom you want to get a nice new pair of boots or sword, may find that story charming and accept your offer. This also boosts your social status as a person with good tales.

Mechanically, it is about rolling some number of dice from your glimmer pool and trying to match or beat the target that the Judge* has in mind for the vendor. The coolness of your haggling attempt will influence that target (the Judge becomes the NPC vendor, listening to your pitch).

Of course this is a sword and sorcery adventure game, so I don't want sessions to be all about haggling. There will be quick and dirty rules for abstracting through this process. You don't have to roleplay every vendor interaction. In fact, once you establish a rapport with an artisan maybe you do end up with a standard glim value that is spend when you need their shit. Only when your social status changes or something about the vendor changes would you need to revisit an interaction.

And so on.

Other posts about Sand in the Bone you might find interesting:

Sand and Something
A Reflection
Weapon Whoopin'
Marks and Risk


*I'm using "Judge" as my go-to for GM. This is not settled yet, I may change it. But it god damn sure won't be "referee" nor do I want to go with GM. Of course I'm tempted to go with Sandmaster, because sand is really central to the game. But the Nounmaster thing is probably played out. So maybe Judge is just what it will be. Personally, I don't care for arguments about the language of naming a GM and how it colors the play experience. I don't believe it does color the experience because honestly nobody at the table actually calls you by GM or DM or whatever. Mostly it's just "Becky" or "Jude" or whatever your dumb name is.

Sand in the Bone: Marks and Risk

In this post, I talked about weapons and weapon damage for Sand in the Bone. I said PCs would have "Mastery" they can spend on weapons. I've thought a little more about this and realized that I already have a thing called "Marks" which can easily cover weapon skills. So I'm folding the idea of mastery into Marks.

Characters begin with some number of Marks. A Mark is really just any special feature the Player wants to highlight about the character. Since this game doesn't have any traditional attributes, such as strength or intelligence, Marks allow you to customize however you like. So Mark could be a special skill, a relationship, a magical power, or even some kind of curse or negative trait.

Now, I do not want to go the positive vs. negative balance sheet route. In G.U.R.P.S., for example, you can gain points to buy skills and advantages by taking disadvantages. Need another 5 points? Give yourself a paralyzing fear of snakes. And so forth. This is a fine mechanic and I don't ever mean to give that game shit for what it does. It's solid. But I don't want that here.

So my idea is that there is a mix of creative and random elements to chargen. The random means you might get a negative Mark, such as a curse. That way we don't have to fuck around with making PCs that have intense coulrophobia in order to allow for extra perks. I want to be a better gymnast, so I'm making my dude a galaphobe!

Which leads to another concept I'm definitely working into the game: risk. Choices matter. So during chargen, Players have a baseline method for making a character and they can stick to the baseline and come up with something awesome. Or they can choose to take risks in the hopes of getting better results. This will manifest as multiple chargen tables you can choose to roll on. While there may be one basic table to roll on (A), you choose to roll on alternate table B or C, each of which have more potent results but also more drawbacks.

I want to carry that concept through the entire game. For example, the use of Sand, which I talk about here, is inherently risky. And not just in the random dice rolling way, but in the sense that you are making choices that increase or decrease risk.

ASIDE: I had flirted with the idea that you could play this game absolutely middle of the road. Making almost zero dice rolls, you could sort of coast through conflicts. But the tradeoff would be that you could never have amazing success or make incredible discoveries. You'd be living a boring life for a great adventurer. So I'm not sure if I want to include that or not.

Weapon Whoopin'

This is a post about my sword and sand game, Sand in the Bone - a work-in-progress.

There are many elements to this game that I wish to explore, such as the food and drink and how people in the city of Kanebok sleep. Not in a boring way, mind you. All of it is focused on play, not on me telling you all about my super-special world.

Weapons are one of the things I am focused on because I wanted to have a unique list and I wanted each item on that list to have it's own character. I had spoken before about how I disliked the idea of homogeneous weapon damage in old versions of D&D. Since this game started out as a bit of an OD&D hack, I very early-on started thinking about how to treat weapons in such a way that they weren't just interchangeable color.

The idea I settled on was to basically have two tiers of weapon skill. So tier one is just the base weapon. Anyone who picks up a sword and strikes you with it will have the same basic damage range. But Players will have the option of being Mastered with a type of weapon. So a PC who is Mastered with the sword will do the normal damage range plus they can access the sword's special properties, such as an additional damage die or long reach or whatever the case may be.

The resource that lets you become Mastered is probably just going to be called Mastery. Why complicate things? So at certain game increments you'll have the opportunity to allocate Mastery where you wish. Some will choose a weapon, others will chose something else. This is not going to be a class-and-level system, so PCs can be a mixed bag of skills and talents just like sword and sorcery heroes are always a mixed lot.

ASIDE: The basic weapon damage range is the d20 attack roll minus the target. So if your Prowess is 10 then you need to roll 10+ to strike a blow. A roll of 15 means you caused 5 points of damage. The target's armor absorbs that damage, with a minimum of 1 point getting through. That's the basic idea. Nothing new, nothing too fancy. I've seen this mechanic in a number of games over the years and it seems to work out pretty well.

Striding Warrior

This is art for my upcoming RPG, Sand in the Bone (formerly called Dead Wizards*).

I decided to lean pretty hard into the "sand" part of "sand and sorcery" on this project. I even re-tooled the setting map to eliminate some non-sandy environments as I found them to be utterly superfluous to the tone. I have this habit when I do setting maps to try to include all kinds of environments... like people will be disappointed if they can't do snowy north adventures in my sand and sorcery game.

This RPG will have an original system. It is not specifically OSR. It is not based on D&D. It also includes elements more akin to my old game The Pool. Specifically there is a risk element with a meta-game mechanic. And yet it is still a traditional RPG in the sense that there is a Judge and Players and they are separated at the table by a barb-wire wall of doom. I kid.

Sometime in the near future I will ask bribe my Monday Doomslakers friends to play this thing.

*If I can get some momentum on this I might do a supplement for the game using the Dead Wizards title. Hey... I can dream, can't I? Don't crush my dreams.

Sand and Something

I haven't been drawing much lately. Part of the reason is just lack of time and inspiration. Another part is that I've completed all of my outstanding paying gigs (exception for one or two I need to do). Another reason is that I'm more in a noodling phase than a doodling phase. I'm thinkin'. It's scary.

Mostly I'm thinking about Dead Wizards. I can't predict what I'll actually do this year but I truly hope that this game will see publication in 2020. I've definitely never been closer to settling on the core mechanics, theme, and all that important jazz than I am right now. This game has been through many changes over the past couple of years and none of the iterations have felt as right as this one.

So one big open question about this project is the title. I've been using Dead Wizards as the working title for a few years. And while I like that name quite a bit, it's abbreviation is DW... same as Dungeon World. And like it or not that bugs the shit out of me. I know it's a minor thing, but it's enough to put me off.

So the title I'm leaning into right now is Sand in the Bone.

It's still evocative and kind of metal, even though this setting isn't "metal", per se. It's definitely sword and sorcery and Sand in the Bone has a gritty feel that I like. Plus it gets some of the setting's feel right in the name, sand being a central theme to the game.

ASIDE

I had set myself some hard rules about naming this game. I said absolutely zero of any of this:

Noun & Noun
Word of the Thing
Black anything

Success!

A Reflection on Dead Wizards

EDIT: I changed the name from Dead Wizards to Sand in the Bone for various reasons. This post is talking about the same game.

What follows is a long-winded reflection on Dead Wizards* and where it is headed for the future.

This might be the first time I mention the game in the blog:

My good friend Cyd is running a Penny Hack for us on Mondays, which is probably wrapping up soon. At that point I will ask my cohorts to indulge me once again and dive into a campaign that is largely inspired by mixing up Tanith Lee, Robert E. Howard, Frank Frazetta, and Richard Corben. Some good ole S&S in a project I've been calling Dead Wizards (or Kanebok... not sure how it will appear yet). I ran this once before and it was nice but this is a totally revamped version. Trying some ideas. Breaking the old game down and working from its bones to make a new toy. If all goes well, this will be one of my 2017 publishing projects.

But that was 2017 and I know for a fact I ran a Dead Wizards playtest locally almost 4 years ago. Or something like that.

This all started when I looked at Swords & Wizardry White Box and fell in love with the simplicity of the single saving throw. Somehow that morphed into a desire to make a sword and sorcery RPG which somehow morphed into sand and sorcery.

Sand and Sorcery

(Which, BTW, might make a killer game title.)

I am not sure if this label has a distinct definition. If it does, I am unaware. But it is what I use to describe Dead Wizards. All I mean by it is that the genre is sword and sorcery and that the setting has

a desert sands flavor.

First, about sword and sorcery. To me, S&S is fantasy wherein magic is both uncommon (but not necessarily "rare") and dangerous. There are no high elf good witches here. The genre sometimes has a bleak view of humanity too. But all I'm really concerned about is that the magic is uncommon and the heroes are larger than life - but still all-too-human. If you are a person who turns into a cat, then  you are weird and dangerous to others, not special and magical.

The sand bit is a little harder to nail down. I am not interested in making fantasy Arabia, but I am interested in riffing on some of the fantasy Arabian tropes. I'm also borrowing heavily from various African cultures and even dipping a little bit into India and southeast Asia. But none of them are the model and this setting isn't a representation of any real world analog. It is fantasy, pure and simple, wherein the people are not white and the landscape is not European.

If that is confusing all I can say is I'm going to try really fucking hard to practice "show, don't tell" with the presentation of this game.

And on to that reflection stuff

So the game began its life as a S&W hack. I ran one or two sessions in that vein, which were fine. Then I broke away for a while to do Rabbits & Rangers and when I came back to it I tried to design an original system, but with lots of S&W bits. The system was kind of modeled on the old descending AC from D&D. You had three categories and for each you'd have a to-hit table. That playtest was short but went OK as well. I still wasn't feeling it, though. I ran a few sessions of it and then my mom got sick and I kind of fell away from running games for a bit.

The next stab I took at it was even more of a non-OSR system. This time no playtesting took place. And now I'm back at it with another redesign. This one feels more right than ever before. An important element fell into place recently where a piece of the setting kind of clicked with the system. Namely, sand.

Since sand is everywhere in the setting, I thought what a great way to express it - have a "sand" category on your character sheet. Sand is how much willpower you can exercise over the world in which you live. The powers-that-be express their will on the world, and sand is their blood. So characters can use sand to express narrative control in the game.

This takes me back, back in time to 2001 when I wrote The Pool. The same concept is at play here. There is a bit of a gamble to the use of sand and the payoff is narrative control. This idea is what I remember being the most powerful and prescient impression I got from The Forge. This simple notion that a player could do some of the work that a GM is normally doing. Of course that idea blew up after those days and now we have probably hundreds of games devoted passionately to narrative gaming. Back then, not so much.

To be clear, this is not a story game. It would be fine it if was, but it isn't. This is a traditional RPG in the sense that you have a GM and players and the GM is responsible for setting the stage, describing things, and adjudication. But, like The Pool, this game allows for some degree of narrative control to go to the players via the sand mechanic.

I'll speak more about sand later. I've yammered enough tonight.

*I decided it was preemptive to bold and italicize a game that doesn't yet exist. So until I actually have a manuscript, I won't bold and italicize Dead Wizards like I normally would. It doesn't matter, I know. Stop judging me. My blog, my rules.

More posts about this game over the last few years:

Playtest #3
A Bit of Dead Wizards
Drawing Gaj'Uth the Three Headed Elephant

Designing Games is Hard

There are a number of reasons why a lot of people, myself included, have leaned hard into designing game stuff based on the classic D&D chassis. One of those reasons is familiarity. I already know beyond the shadow of a doubt what this basic chassis does so it's relatively easy to hack it and bolt on new stuff. It's good that way.

But not everyone is into that. Not everyone likes D&D. And of course we don't get shiny new games by rehashing the old one endlessly*. And even an OSR-lover like myself sometimes wants to climb out of that sandbox and play somewhere else.

Anyway, this post is about how hard it is for me to write game mechanics. I can come up with them all day long but my problem is settling on something. This is yet another reason I often lean into D&D so much. I don't have to obsess over as many choices if I just go with the classics. But right now I'm writing a new game, Dead Wizards, which I've talked about many times before. And it's hard.

Here's the current struggle in a nutshell.

I'm having fun choosing and designing weapons because this setting will have a lot of fighting. I'm taking a cue from Chris McDowell's excellent Into the Odd by eliminating attack rolls prior to damage. You just roll damage, which is soaked by a defense (currently called AC... because this apple hasn't fallen far from the tree yet). So the roll is heavily informed by the weapon you're using in addition to your battle prowess. One PC might roll 1d6+x while another is rolling 2d4+x. Each player will know what to roll because it's in their weapon description.

But for all other actions, you just roll 2d6+attribute and the target is always 13. Simple, right?

And yet it bugs me that I have this "core mechanic" that is simple and well-known for everything except combat. This means combat is special, as it was in most older games. This is like nails on a chalkboard by modern standards, isn't it? (That's rhetorical, I know it is.)

So what's the solution? Some may say fuck combat being special, make everything the same. In some sense I realize this is good design because it is simpler and has fewer moving pieces. But I'm not designing a machine, I'm writing a game. The aesthetic is just as important as the function. And I want the weapon aesthetic to inform the combat mechanics. I am not a fan of games in which all weapons do the same damage, or everyone who is of this class does x damage. I want the weapons themselves to be integral components of play, not just window dressing. My choice to use a scimitar instead of a spear should have some kind of real impact beyond just description.

But I do not want a similar granularity for climbing walls and telling lies. I want most things to be simple, thus the 2d6+attribute vs. 13 target number. A huge part of me is ok with combat being a bit of a "sub-system". Maybe that's because I'm coming from an older age of gamers and I'm comfortable with this sort of thing. You young whipper-snappers and your ultra-light core mechanics just don't get it**.

I could sum up this entire post by saying that I'm designing a new game and I'm in the middle of making important mechanics choices that I wanted to talk about for a few minutes. Sharing is caring.

*Let me unpack that a bit. We absolutely do get cool, shiny new games even when we build them upon D&D (witness the glory of DCC RPG or the elegance of Into the Odd). It's just that we don't get as many new and innovative game mechanics and we risk failing to really crank a thing up to 11 because we're chained to some artifact of an older game. Case in point: Armor Class. I love AC and if I'm designing something that is the equivalent of AC, I wanna use that term. But maybe I'm limiting myself here. Maybe I should jettison that classic term and push into something else. Etc.

**Oh shit, I'm flashing back to making passionate arguments for descending AC. This is where my grognard nads dangle lowest.

Dead Wizards Initiative Idea

In the last post I was talking initiative and I mentioned the idea I was cooking up for Dead Wizards. Here's the idea a little more fleshed-out, along with a couple of alternates.

When there seems to be a fight on the horizon, the Judge* makes a threat roll. This is a d6 roll referencing the table below. Or, if you have a d3, you can throw it. Whatever.

1d6	Result
1-2	No enemies act
3-4	At least 1 enemy acts
5-6	More than 1 enemy acts

The results are self-explanatory. Since I can't predict how many enemies any given fight will feature, I am not going to put ranges of numbers. The Judge will use their best judgement based on the fiction. If the result is 3-4 and there are 3 enemies then maybe just 1 of them acts before the players. If the roll is a 6, maybe all of them act first. Only the Judge will know in a given situation what would be the most natural or most badass way to handle it.

After the threat roll and any resulting actions from the bad guys, the Judge chooses 1 player to go first. That player will take action or hold their action as they wish. Then they will choose the next player to go. They cannot choose a player who has already acted in the round. They can choose an enemy to go next.

But before that player goes, the Judge will make another threat roll. And that same process will repeat until all the players have taken a turn. So the order of events in a battle round would look like the table below.

1	Threat Roll
2	Judge chooses first player to act
3	Threat Roll
4	First player chooses next player to act
5	Threat Roll
6	Last player chooses next player to act
7	Repeat pattern until all players act
8	End of round

If all the enemies have acted, the Judge stops making threat rolls until all the players have acted. Then, if necessary, a new round begins with the Judge making a threat roll and selecting a player to

start the round.

In any event, after the last player acts, then it is time to start a new round by exactly the same process.

*I'm using the term Judge for the GM as a placeholder for now. It might stick, or I might invent something cooler.

Thoughts

I have played a lot more RPG sessions in the past 5 years than I did in my entire gaming life beforehand. I just didn't have a lot of friends to game with when I was young and we were too meandering to get our shit together for "regular" games. Playing a ton of Labyrinth Lord, in particular, has lead me to think of the standard D&D initiative systems as a little too clunky for the vibe I am going for in Dead Wizards. I want there to be combat, but I want it to be a little more fast-and-furious. So I am working on ways of handling initiative that I believe are faster and smoother.

I might be wrong, but this method feels like it would do the trick. It reduces the GM's load to a single d6 roll prior to each player's actions. And it reduces the players' load to just taking their action and picking someone else to go. There isn't much to keep track of except who has went so far.

Alternate #1

Same as above, but the Judge doesn't track which enemies have attacked and so they make the threat roll between every player turn until the end of the round. They select enemies each time purely based on the drama. In this method I would tweak the threat roll table a little bit so the enemies don't get action quite as often.

1d6	Result
1-3	No enemies act
4-6	Enemies act

Alternate #2

This one is kind of a totally different method and it eliminates all tracking, making initiative 100% random.

The Judge still makes a threat roll on 1d6, but they also make a PC roll at the same time. The PC's initiative die would be based on how many characters are in the group. So a group of 4 would just use a d4. A group of 5 would be a d5 (or d10 divided by 2 if you don't have an actual d5, which most people don't). And so on.

The Judge would roll both dice. If the threat die indicates the enemies may act, then they do. The PC die would indicate which of the PCs gets to take their action next.

This is probably an even faster method than the main one detailed in this post. But my thinking is that you'd always go with the dice, which means player 1 could potentially go 2 or 3 times before player 2. A single PC could end up taking a crazy number of actions before all the PCs have gone. Unless you want to re-roll the PC die each time it indicates someone who has already went.

Or perhaps after player 1 has taken action and the die is a 1 again, that means player 2 gets to go. Or something along those lines.

Afterthoughts

The side-based initiative, such as what we see in D&D (B/X 1981), is also quite fast and easy. I would even argue against myself here and say it's faster and easier than what I've outlined here. And maybe I'll just go with it in the end. It all depends if I feel like an alternate method better serves the vibe of game I'm going for.

Also wanted to say that the ideas herein are not altogether new. There are games that allow players to decide who goes next, especially outside the OSR sphere. There are probably games with highly random initiative. I know that the Troika! method is completely random, fast, and fun as hell to use. I use it when running that game. My only hesitation with adopting something similar here is that it loses some of its charm when gaming online. I do most of my gaming online so I'm writing my game with that in mind.

Taking the Initiative (or some other init joke)

Almost every RPG I have ever ran or played has some kind of initiative system. Such a system determines who gets to act first and next and since most RPGs are terribly concerned with the crunchy details of battles this proves to be an important feature.

So when people tell me you don't need any initiative system I give them the same look a parent gives their 14-yo when he says he doesn't know how those magazines got under his pillow*. I mean, I get it. You don't need initiative, really. A good gaming group will roll with the drama and it'll be great. A less-cohesive group may struggle. And while I don't ever try to write my game materials specifically for dysfunctional gaming groups, I do like to include tools that I want to use myself. And I do like having some kind of initiative system in my fighting-heavy games.

I have monkeyed with various methods. Issue #1 of Black Pudding features Quick Init. In this system you roll a die and subtract 1 and the result is how many PCs get to act before the enemies. The GM chooses who acts based on the fiction. I tried that method a few times and it works just fine, but isn't exactly what I was hoping for.

Another method I like is the one used in The Black Hack. Each PC makes a Dex check. Those who pass go first, those who fail go after the enemies. It's just about as quick and dirty as you can get and it lends a huge advantage to those with a good Dexterity score.

The method I'm noodling right now for my Dead Wizards RPG is as follows.

When battle is imminent, the Judge switches to combat mode, which is pretty bog standard for RPGs. It just signals to the GM and group that rules specific to action order are now in effect. So the Judge makes a threat roll, which is just a d6 roll that determines if enemies get to act before the PC and how many of them. Then the Judge selects the first player to act. After that player acts, the Judge rolls another threat roll and then the player picks the next player to act. And you just continue that same pattern until all PCs and enemies have acted in the round.

What I like about this method is that it embraces the narrative power of not really having initiative, allowing players to decide who goes next. But it maintains some randomness to the order of events via the 1d6 threat roll. It also grants the GM lots of leeway in deciding which enemies get to act next.

I haven't playtested this yet.

*OMG... does that date me? Nobody has "magazines" anymore. We have the world in our pockets, including nudie pics. Also... I'm not some sexually repressed asshole. I wouldn't necessarily be all "Junior, you know better" if I found a magazine stash. It's just a funny example. Get off my back!!

Kanebok, the City of Dead Wizards

Following up on this post, here is the original blurb about the cit of Kanebok, the setting of Dead Wizards. I wrote this blurb several years ago and it is presented here mostly as it was, unedited. This will not be the final introductory prose but very close to it as I am keen on keeping this vision as pure as possible. Comments follow the blurb... imagine it being read aloud by Mako Iwamatsu.

KANEBOK

From the cataclysms of wizard wars crawled Kanebok, the City of the Exalted Prince. It squats on the edge of a cliff over which spills the dark waters of the River Uth. It is flanked by a desert and perilous badlands. Many old roads converge at its gates and queer vessels from queer lands arrive on the waters.

The Moyirs run the city. Dozens of them compete with one another, cunning and dangerous, backstabbing and plotting, always looking for the angle that will put them in the Mojab’s favor… for the Mojab is the boss of the Moyirs and the de facto ruler of the city. From his Marble Tower of Time he rides a resplendent palanquin of gold and jewels carried by sinewy slaves. The Mojab is the mouthpiece of the Exalted Prince, who is himself a child of the gods. All must answer to the whims and decrees of the immortal Exalted Prince, Supreme Ruler of all the Land, high in his Palace of Glass. Though he is rarely seen, his merest gaze can strike a man dead and his desires are law. On the rare occasion the Exalted Prince enters the city streets he is carried in a glowing howdah on the back of an immense three-headed elephant called Gaj’Uth. A brigade of his arcane guards go before him to clear the path, crushing those who refuse to move and demolishing structures so that not even mighty Gaj’Uth is made to touch the dirty city and its dirty people.

They say to be crushed by the feet of that great beast is to ascend immediately to heaven and be done with this life.

Few are willing to risk it.

You have come by fortune or fate to the city gates, their grisly faces grinning as you enter. Inside are streets of dirt and stone, malodorous, cacophonous… at once a nightmare and a dream. The city is never asleep. It is never still. They say the foolish or brave can find paradise here, if they aren’t swallowed up first.

This is going to be an interesting night, at the very least.

/end blurb

So yeah. Kanebok is meant to be "exotic". I am aware that my whiteness and Westerness means that I am coming from a very particular perspective and that many or most people in the world will have different perspectives on what that means. It's the curse of being human.

Anyway, while not being a direct representation of any culture, this setting is inspired by Arabian Nights types of fantasies, Hollywood-filtered Egyptian fantasy, and various African and East Asian images and ideas I have sponged up over the years. It's a melting post of this stuff... along with a lot of Western baggage, of course. It's the kind of shit a pulp hack writer would slam into their typewriter.

Speaking of which... in my head, Kanebok is the hub for a series of pulp adventures. Each gaming group is like a hack writer crafting their yarns in a shared universe... not unlike the way many authors contributed to the shared universes of Thieves' World or the Cthulhu Mythos. I was chanelling a lot of The Black Company, Conan the Barbarian, and Tales From the Flat Earth when I came up with the idea. I'm not trying to pave new terrain, just running on a feeling here. I hope the end result is something evocative and deliciously pulpy... warts and all. We'll see.

More on the setting and system later.

Gaj'Uth the Three-Headed Elephant

Following up on this post, here's more of Gaj'Uth. Now, this piece is actually part of a larger piece of cover art for the Dead Wizards RPG I am writing (I don't know when I will be finished, but hopefully this year).

This whole project was born out of a desire to make a pulp sword and sorcery game. Not a narrative game in the strictest sense, but one with more narrative sensibilities than OSR games in general. The system started out as a pure riff on OD&D and I ran a playtest or two with that version a few years ago. But it has morphed quite a bit since then. The second iteration used the descending AC to-hit tables as the primary "core" mechanic, which I still believe is a really cool idea... but I ditched that idea for Dead Wizards and am now working toward an original system that bears some OSR artifacts (there is a saving throw, you use d20 rolls vs. a target).

But the whole point was to make a sword and sorcery game in which you "play through a pulp yarn". The basic unit of adventure role-playing is the adventure itself and in DW that unit is called a yarn. It's a story and it emerges from game play. It's really important to take in that sentence and understand what I mean. You would play this game as a game and whatever kind of lucid, weird, disjointed, harmonious, violent, beautiful, dreamy, or fucked up series of events that emerge from it would be the yarn, or story, that you created. I am not saying this is a "storytelling game" in the sense that many people mean that phrase. It is going to be a game with a game master (I use the term "Judge" because it's the best term - fight me if you want) and while the players do have a lot of impact on their world it is not a shared storytelling game in the strong narrative sense that you'd get from most story games. It's an adventure game with strong narrative flair, not a story game... just to be clear.

Once you complete your yarn by dealing with your characters' needs, you could continue playing more yarns with the same characters or not. I'm designing the system so that it isn't zero-to-hero. Like in most heroic fantasy stories, the "heroes" begin as larger-than-life figures. They are already better than most people. So there isn't any need for balancing or a sense of scale, mostly. This is the kind of game you could run fairly quickly with low prep, depending on how comfortable you are with being creative and judging on the fly. I cringe a little at using the term, but it's a fairly "rules lite" game.

I'll post more soon about the setting and the game system.

Drawing Gaj'Uth the Three Headed Elephant

I have circled back around to Dead Wizards, having taken the very long way to get here. For those who might not remember or care, Dead Wizards is a sword and sorcery tabletop RPG I have been "working on" for a long time now... how long? Let me just go and check...

The earliest post I can find on my blog is 01/22/2017. But I believe I was posting about this on G+ (long may it dance in the Happy Fields of Memory) before that time. I know I ran a playtest of a Swords & Wizardry version of the game at least 3 years ago.

So I have been in a bit of a creative slump lately. I haven't been getting streams of new ideas like I used to. I was beginning to worry that my idea well was dry or I was just so old and jaded I didn't give enough shits anymore to make the pump work. But I was driving home from Indiana on a work trip and I had this amazing 4 hour long brainstorm. Normally I listen to podcasts and audiobooks on journeys but on this one I just let some music play the whole time and I let my mind go nuts. Essentially, I wrote the core of the game on the road.

Because I didn't have a "game" yet. I had versions of a game and I had playtested a few of them, but wasn't really satisfied. That's why I kept thinking I might just make it an OSR game and stick with old D&D mechanics. But now I feel kind of liberated from that idea. The setting could work with those mechanics, but there's really no reason it should have to. I haven't written a standalone RPG of significance in years. Many years. The Questing Beast was probably the last one. It's high time I got back to the work.

Gaj'Uth is not amused by life

Which brings me to drawing Gaj'Uth the Three-Headed Elephant. I mention the elephant in the opening tone-setting for the game thus:

"On the rare occasion the Exalted Prince enters the city streets he is carried in a glowing howdah on the back of an immense three-headed elephant called Gaj’Uth. A brigade of his arcane guards go before him to clear the path, crushing those who refuse to move and demolishing structures so that not even mighty Gaj’Uth is made to touch the dirty city and its dirty people."

For context, the game is inspired by Arabian, Indian, and African mythologies and concepts. It is absolutely not a representation of any particular culture or people at all and is filled with all sorts of feverish fantasy flizbits from my brain that aren't even part of the three influences I mentioned. So it's kind of tricky to decide how to describe it, how to "market" it, and so forth. I'm doing it for my own pleasure and satisfaction, as I usually do everything for that purpose. I want to make something cool and wicked and evocative in the vein of pulp fantasy stories as filtered through my own head. So that means as much or more Tanith Lee as Robert E. Howard.

But I've said all this before. I even presented some mechanics from previous incarnations of the game on G+, generating some nice conversations and debates about how the game would work. I believe in those iterations I was enamored of using the descending AC to-hit matrix as a core mechanic for all game actions. While that's still a sexy idea in my book, I do not believe that's the way I'll go with this game. I have a pretty clear schema in my skullpan that I feel like makes some kind of sense. It's a theater of the mind approach for sure, with less emphasis on game tactics (such as blow by blow combat) and more emphasis on the bigger picture... the life's work of a character and the juicy way they fit snuggly into the game's setting.

And it does have a setting. I'm not shying away from that here. I have often tried to keep things loose in terms of setting so my work can be picked up and dropped into existing game campaigns. Not here. This is a very specific place with a specific ethos and way of existing with it. Not too complex, mind you. I don't like games with a huge wall of text or series of novels I have to read before I can "get it". I don't want to make that game.

Ah see now I ramble as is my wont. Stream of consciousness eat your heart out.

I will post again down the road a bit, probably discussing the mechanics. And I'll arrange some playtesting with my Monday night friends as soon as they will indulge me.

Until then, be kind and enjoy your moments.

A Bit of Dead Wizards

Every time I circle around to noodling about Dead Wizards, I focus on the setting.

The idea was to make this a standalone game, not a D&D-style game. But I really haven't thought of any interesting mechanics for it. It feels like hacking the core OSR rules platform will work just fine. This might even be a setting for an existing OSR rules set, such as Swords & Wizardry or Labyrinth Lord, with tweaks.

The first tweak is magic. In the first city of Kanebok, where the setting is centered, magic is simultaneously queer and yet woven into daily life. Magic isn't a single thing. There are different kinds of magic. But wizards - those who master otherworldly powers and ancient spells - are not trusted. They are not natural. And hanging over the entire city is the belief that the four greatest wizards from the time of the wizard war still linger in some kind of quasi-living state, subtly affecting the living world with their unending machinations against one another.

(See, that last paragraph was meant to be a discussion of how the magic rules differ from standard OSR rules and yet all I talked about was the mythos of the setting.)

Wizards in this setting would not be limited arbitrarily by spell slots and number of spells allowed per level. Instead, they would acquire their magic however they can. It's an organic process. Players would seek out magic and once they find a spell and figure out how it works, they can cast that spell as often as they like. The limiters would be in the cost of the spell. Each spell would be described in a bit more detail in terms of how it is cast so that spell components, casting time, and other costs are baked right in. There is no need for spell slots when you have to sacrifice blood, treasure, money, or soul to cast a spell.

(Frankly, this is how I'd like to run ALL my D&D style games.)

Another tweak was with weapons. I did a couple of pages of notes and screenshots of various archaic weapons from Egypt and other African regions as well as Persia and some stuff from Southeast Asia. My idea was that each weapon would have it's own perks and maybe a drawback. So your basic d8 sword is the scimitar, for example. A great scimitar would do a d10 or d12 and would require both hands to use. If a weapon has a hook on it, then you'd be able to hook targets, disarm, trap, etc. This is all really just being very specific with the classic weapons list more than anything. Giving the battle options more color as well as more mechanical bits and bobs.

The only other rules tweak I had in mind was to use the attack values table as a basic rule for all mechanics. I posted about it here. I still think that's a boss idea, but I just don't know if it's boss enough to justify using it here.

Dead Wizards: Playtest #3 in Session

A few years ago I started thinking about a sword & sorcery game and I called it Dead Wizards. It began as an OSR idea, specifically a Swords & Wizardry setting/variant. My idea was to get down and dirty with the idea of heroic fantasy as it existed in my own mind. It had a few elements:

-Characters are larger-than-life heroes.

-"Heroes" means characters that rise above the world in which they live.

-Magic is weird, not scientific.

-The only rule of magic is that magic is never free.

-The gods are not benevolent and life is not fair.

I ran a session wherein I had some S&W houserules in play, such as spending hit points to cast spells. It worked ok. But it wasn't what I really wanted.

Another playtest happened a few months ago but was interrupted by life stuff. So now I've revised the rules again, stripping away even more of the OD&D elements and leaving only the bits that I felt were necessary to convey the point.

This is a game about telling a yarn. The players create characters with needs and deeds and special traits that make them larger-than-life... like any good sword and sorcery hero. The yarn is the events in-game that lead to the fulfillment of the various quests that the PCs have. Their needs must be satisfied, or they must somehow fail to satisfy them. In other words, the play creates a story.

Now, this is not necessarily a good story. Good stories are told by authors speaking from a top down voice whereas most RPGs, including this one, produce "stories" that are bottom up, albeit with some top down pressure from the GM. A Dead Wizards yarn is not meant to be a publishable, compelling tale. it is simply the story that emerges from play - for better or worse.

In that sense, this game occupies a gray area between a classic RPG and a story-based RPG.

Tonight is session two of the playtest. The needs of the heroes should begin to be invoked and the links between their quests should start to be hinted at or revealed. That is the secret to Dead Wizards. Though each player may create disparate characters, the play and the cunning of the Judge and the players working together will weave the characters together in a fantastic yarn.

At least that's the plan.

For more on Dead Wizards, particularly the system, check out this post.