Here There Be Dragons!

Dragon! Perhaps the most evocative word in all of fantasy. Dragon, great, scaly, winged, fire-breathing, behemoth. Ancient, wise, treasure hoarding, mentor or nemesis. Big, overgrown lizard; kill it, take its treasure and move on. Wait! What was that last bit?

Sadly, dragons in T&T just don't quite seem to measure up. In J R R Tolkien's "The Hobbit" Smaug the great and terrible described himself thusly "My armour is like tenfold shields, my teeth are swords, my claws spears, the shock of my tail a thunderbolt, my wings a hurricane, and my breath death!" Compare this to a dragon (with flame) from T&T "MR 1760" at level 5. I will grant that 177d6+880 (an average of 1500 hits including 30 spite) on the first round is nothing to sneeze at, but it lacks a certain gravitas.

Traditionally in fantasy RPGs a dragon attacks with the standard Claw/Claw/Bite routine of so many monsters plus a breath weapon up to three times a day. Still rather plain vanilla for my tastes.

My dragons attack with claw/claw/bite/wing buffet/rear foot kick-stomp/tail slap if on the ground and fighting to all sides, bite/snatch/rend/drop if flying, or can opt to breathe/spit or cast spells if they know any. Breath type weapons may include fire, poison gas, cold or frost, lightning bolts, acid spittle, venomous fangs, paralyzing or petrifying gas, and more. Especially clever dragons may also employ magical items such as rings, amulets, wands, staves, potions, even weapons if the weapon is large enough or the dragon small enough. Stooping on a delver like a hawk on a mouse, carrying him to a great height and releasing him to plummet onto rocks below is a great way to crack even the toughest armour.

Speaking of armoured delvers, let us consider the typical dragon-slaying as portrayed in song and legend. The evil wyrm is threatening to devour a fair maiden, usually a princess, and the best and bravest knights in the land decide to rescue her. The first order of business is to hold a tournament to determine who is the strongest and most valorous knight among them. This important question having been decided, the champion polishes his armour until it is mirror bright, mounts his noble steed, usually a snow white stallion and rides off to confront the beast in its lair. Arriving at the mouth of the cave the knight reigns in and issues his challenge to the dragon to come out and face him. In due course the dragon emerges, it and the knight square off, they charge together with great force and the dragon is impaled on the knights lance. Should he lance blow not prove fatal, the knight dismounts and finishes off he wounded monster with his sword. Knight, Lady, and suitable dragon trophies then ride back to feast at the castle.

A pretty story, but what really happens?

The fair maiden in peril is usually just a symbolic stand-in for the economic dangers of having a dragon as a neighbor. Ruined crops, burned villages and devoured caravans are all very bad for business. The younger and brasher warriors likely do have a tournament of sorts, which mostly serves to dull swords, splinter lances, and tenderize, err, bruise bodies. The older and wiser warriors watch as the young hotheads boldly ride forth, sound the challenge and are invited to a barbecue dinner with the dragon. Eventually the older and wiser warriors, together with some wizard friends if they can manage them, get together an assortment of nets, pole axes, poisons and balistae. With these they set out to butcher the dragon. Heavy nets are strung across the entrance of the lair to entangle the emerging beast. Barbed spears and stakes are driven into the ground to curtail the creature's movements. Men are placed above and to the sides of the entrance with pole axes and harpoons, liberally smeared with poison, their job is to hack and pinion the wings, stab eyes, mount and any vulnerable parts they can and get as much toxin into the beast as possible. Spells like Slush-Yuck will be targeted on the stone around the dragon, again to impair its mobility and possible trap it. Take-That-You-Fiend! and other direct combat spells are likely to be of little use initially due to the resistance of the dragon's phenomenally high Kremm. Better to target the environment around the beast.

It as this point that everyone gasps and says "But! That's not a fair fight!" No, it isn't. But in a fair fight the dragon almost always wins, not much of an incentive for the dragonslayers to fight fair, is it?

It is usually a better option to try to talk to and negotiate with the dragon instead. Dragons are well known for their vanity and their love of riddles. Either or both of these can provide a conversational in. Bribery is not generally a recommended tactic. Most of what a dragon wants they are quite capable of taking by force. As for the rest, what king is going to be happy giving away his crown to a lizard?

Having a dragon as a peaceable neighbor or sovereign is not without its advantages. For one thing many of them prefer to spend the bulk of their time sleeping or contemplating weighty philosophical questions (like which weighs more good coins or gold bars?). When they are awake their chief concerns are likely to be eating, defending what is theirs, and increasing the size of their hoard. The first is likely to produce a large but happily infrequent burden for farmers and ranchers. The second coincides nicely with the desire of the people of the realm to live their lives in peace. The third is likely to result in annual taxes and tributes. Some portion of the taxes and tributes can doubtless be raised from tariffs and tolls imposed on foreigners. Another good source of ample gold and riches is taxing delvers. Dragons frequently lair in caverns or mines full of forgotten tunnels and passageways many of which attract undesirable tenants. A resident dragon will often quite happily allow parties of delvers to venture into these spaces as exterminators. To be certain, the delvers will have to pay a large portion of their recovered wealth to the dragon, but may be able to strike a deal for provision of healing magics or other aid in return for their services.

Dragons are more than just a combat encounter or potential ruler however. Lesser dragons are a preferred mount of wizards, sorcerers and powerful warriors. Greater dragons may serve as councilors, mentors to wizards or sages of great knowledge. Dragons are often in possession of spells known only to dragonkind and can work powerful magics when they choose.

Dragons cannot properly be numbered amongst either the "good" kindreds or the "monsters". The majority are neutral, concerned only with their own ends and affairs. Individuals may ally themselves with good or evil causes, sometimes both over their tremendously long lifespans.

Dragons have a tremendous variety of appearance. They may be large or small, serpentine or stocky. Most possess wings, commonly similar to those of a bat although fan-like or feathered wings are not unknown, some dragons fly without the use of wings. Dragons may have two legs or four, rarely six, in addition to wings. Their tails may be hooked, barbed, stinger-tipped, spade-ended or even prehensile. They may be decked with a variety of horns, frills, spines, crests, tendrils, manes, etc. Most are scaled. Scales may vary in texture from fine to coarse. They may be ridged, rough or polished. Some dragons have flat scutes on their bellies like snakes, others sport dermal denticals like sharks, or plates like crocodiles, some even have shelled carapace a like turtles. Occasional dragons will have fur or feathers either instead of or in addition to scales. They are found in a rainbow of colours and patterns. Most seem to be of a single predominant colour with a lighter colour on their underparts. Metallic scales and colours are not unknown. There are reports that the colour of a dragon's scales is determined by the type of breath weapon it employs, but these are not always accurate.

One last point about dragons ought to be touched on here. That is the subject of dragon curses. The treasure hoards of dragons are often protected by powerful curses, the severity of which tend to increase with the age and power of the dragon.

Every dragon seems to know the contents of its horde down to the last cup and coin. Taking so much as a single brass farthing may be enough to alert the beast that someone has been there. The response is often to seek vengeance far beyond the value of what was taken. Whole villages have been laid waste for the sake of a single cup.

Dragon-greed or "gold fever" is a common sickness contracted by those who pilfer a dragon's den. This is an unquenchable thirst for ever increasing amounts of gold. Eventually those stricken become so miserly that they will not part with a single copper and so greedy that they will stop at nothing to obtain more coin, even robbing beggars and stealing from the poor box.

The most terrible curse is that which befalls those who sleep on a bed of dragon's gold. They are transformed into dragons themselves. The transformation may be abrupt and sudden or gradual and subtle, but in the end the result is the same. The new dragon retains the knowledge and much the same personality it possessed before. It must learn to adapt to life in its new form, initially being even unable to speak or use draconic abilities such as flying or breath weapons. Although initially the personality is much he same as it was before the transformation over time it becomes more dragon-like. Desiring solitude, covetous of gold and wealth, arrogant and predatory.

I hope that this will allow for more depth in the presentation of dragons in the game. All of the above can be applied without a single change to the rules. Breath weapon and special attacks can be assumed to count as part of the dragon's MR and described narratively. Spite damage if used can occur in the normal way. If the GM prefers more rules crunch special damage effects, breath weapons, and spells can be triggered by spite damage thresholds as is standard under 7e rules.

Kickstarter and getting on the Map!

Tunnels and Trolls now has a Kickstarter for a deluxe edition! http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/994700393/deluxe-tunnels-and-trolls

In thirty-six and a half hours it reached funded status. T&T has some great fandom.

As part of my pledge I am getting H'rrrothgarrr's Hovel officially added to the map of Trollworld for the new edition. A vanity perk really, but it's very nice to become an official part of the game that I enjoy so much.

The crew have done a great job on this project so far and promise more to come. New art, new rules, new adventures, and the return of old favorites.

Watch the video to see Ken St Andre and Liz Danforth commenting on the project and what it means to them.

I think I'm turning Japanese!

For quite a while I have wanted to game in the worlds of Hideyuki Kikuchi. His blend of wscience fiction, horror, supernatural, action, and Japanese culture seems tailor made for great RPG action. The question of course is what sort of rules engine to use. I have looked at several of the anime RPGs available, as well as horror, sci-fi and fantasy. Palladium Books' Rifts certainly provides all the needed tools, magic, mecha, demons, supernatural beasties etc. The problem with it is that I really have drifted away from the power gamer style and find the rules overly complex. There are just too many options. The same pertains to the various d20 rules sets. These are fine if you like crunchy detailed rules sets. Indeed I could see the various stunts and prestige classes of D&D working very well to model Demon City or Vampire Hunter D. However, I vastly prefer playing looser, more freeform games. So, my thought is that there is another game whose rules mechanics very well suit the style of game I want. That is Tunnels and Trolls. T&T? I hear you ask, isn't that just a fantasy dungeon delving game? Well, yes and no. It works well for that, but it has been adapted to sci-fi quite succesfully. Far more than most people realize the differences between sci-fi and fantasy are often just special effects. A "light saber" and a "vorpal sword" are pretty much functionally the same. A blaster and a crossbow both do missile damage at range. Armour is armour. A "force field" at it's simplest can just be given an armor rating. Psychic powers? What about wizard's spells? A space demon and a balruck are both large, evil nasties bent on your destruction. For the ultimate low crunch version of this grab T&T5, M!M! or BEAN! and assign dice ratings. For a slightly chrunchier version use 7.5 with special spite damage effects, specialists, etc for more solidly defined mechanics. In future entries I will stat up some of the creatures and characters from these stories, just for fun. I may even throw in an illustration or two.

The best things in life are free!

Some of my current favorite RPGs are available free. T&T fans will instantly think of the quick start rules, the same ones from the double solo books, widely posted on the web and at RPGnow.com . This is however not the only great game out there for free.

Many of the TSR classics have been cloned and offered free. My favorite of these is Swords and Wizardry which clones the original edition of D&D. It goes farther than this though, offering supplements with new Classes, new magics and more.

Mutant Future also gets a nod. I love Post Apocalyptic gaming and MF does it very well. Fans of Gamma World will recognize the inspiration behind this one.

Great though these cloned games are, and there are many others as part of the Old School Renaissance, there are also some original designs that are well worth looking at and playing.

For Sword and Planet fans who grew up as I did on Edgar Rice Burroughs, H P Lovecraft, etc, there is the simply brilliant Under the Moons of Zoon. This game is set on a post apocalyptic world and features flying boats, psionics, weird science, mutants, swashbuckling, creatures from Beyond, and more. It has a simple d6 based system of game mechanics and just enough setting material to provide a spark to GM's creativity without shackling you to someone else's world. I love it. It has serpent-men as the main villains, one of my favorite pulp fantasy tropes.

The other great free game I want to call attention to is Olivier Legrand's Mazes&Minotaurs. M&M is a game from an alternate history of the RPG hobby. It posits that Gygax and Arneson based their first RPG not on medieval Europe but rather on mythic Greece. The result is two editions, four core rule books. Ten magazine supplements, plus adventure modules. All offered for free. The game is quite playable and a has a very enthusiastic following. I discovered it after I had written most of my Mythic Greek sourcebook for T&T (currently in preparation for publication by Peryton Publishing). Had I known about M&M I might never have written Sailing the Wine Dark Sea. M&M covers not only ancient Greece, but also analogues to Africa, the Middle and Near East, Europe, and the realms of the gods and monsters. It is not a strict recreation of Classical Mythology, but rather a fantasy game that draws its inspiration from myth and legend.

The Cleric Conundrum

In prowling the message boards relating to Old School gaming and D&D I have encountered the question of he Cleric class. People ask "What character or type in fantasy fiction is this supposed to emulate?". My guess is that the origins of the Cleric as a class come from he other half of D&D's heritage. The original game was billed as rules for "fantastic medieval" wargames. The Cleric class come from the medieval half of this, not the fantastic.

The Cleric is based on medieval stories of holy warriors, saints and miracle workers. Early D&D had a definite Christian gloss on much of the game world. Devils, demons, holy water, crosses (holy symbols came later), St. Cuthbert, etc. Clerical healing spells come from this tradition, as do spells such as Bless, Protection from Evil, Purify Food and Drink, et al. The Cleric's ability to turn and even destroy undead by presenting a holy symbol and exercising faith also comes from this. So to does the prohibition on shedding blood and therefor the restriction on using any but non-edged weapons. This was a Papal decree.

In non-Christian mythology, and also in most fantasy written before D&D, priests do not necessarily gain spell casting or other magical abilities from their worship of gods as marks of divine favor. Instead a priest may become a wizard or sorcerer like anybody else by study or making the appropriate pacts, but this is separate from their role as a priest. Priests may also freely wield sacrificial daggers and such. Indeed for many non-Christian priests the ban on edged weapons makes no sense. A priest of Apollo or Diana should favor the bow as this is the preferred weapon of their deity. Likewise priests following the Norse or Germanic gods might well be expected to favor the spear. Priests of Thor being an exception as they would likely use the hammer.

The forgoing is mostly an historical gloss on the Cleric class in RPGs.

In T&T a "priest" or "cleric" is a social status and profession, not a character Type or Class. You are a priest if you lead the worship of one or more deities. A holy warrior is a warrior (of any character type) in service of a deity or religious sect.

For those who want to construct a "Cleric" character in T&T I suggest the following. A Rogue Type (remembering that Rogue is short for Rogue Wizard, that is to say not trained by the Wizard's Guild), with a Talent for "Turning Undead". Being a Rogue he character is allowed to use any weapons and armor. The weapons chosen should be appropriate to the deity or religion the character is a follower of.nSpells would be those taught by the temple, again suited to the cult. The. talent for turning undead might be based on Charisma with the SR difficulty based on how high the MR of the undead in question is.

For those emulating the traditional D&D type Cleric weapons chosen would be blunt, and spells would focus on healing and protection.

I selected Charisma rather than Wizardry as the base attribute for turning undead as it is the character's force of personality and strength of Faith more than inherent magical power that is driving off the foe.

Trollworld's Got Talent

One of the nice ideas in T&T is Talents. Those little things that your character has a knack for. These can be quite broad reaching such as a talent for wilderness survival, or very narrow and focused, a talent for Five Card Stud Poker.

A character gains a new talent with each advance in level. This helps to make character levels meaningful in the game. However existing Talents do not automatically improve when a character improves in level. Currently the only way to improve a Talent is to improve he base attribute for that Talent. This doesn't really change the effectiveness of the talent, it remains fixed at the same. Bonus rolled when the character first gained the talent.

My proposal is to allow characters to purchase improvements to Talents in e exact same way they purchase improvements to Attributes. Thus for a cost of 10 AP times the current level of the Talent they can improve it by +1. Talents are recorded as Attribute+Talent, for example Climbing DEX+3. For 30 AP a character could improve this to Climbing DEX+4.

This allows talents to improve over time independent of their base attributes. It is for the player to judge whether it is cost effective to improve talents or if the AP would be better spent improving attributes. If a character has several talents tied to the same attribute it will probably be better to raise the attribute, thus raising the chance of success for SRs applicable to ALL the talents. This is especially so if the attribute is a prime attribute for the character as passing a level threshold allows he character to add their increased level to SRs as well.

This change does make Talents a bit more like skills and increases their effect on the game.

It's Alive! or at least undead.

This morning I was thinking about the Undead. Not Vampires, Liches, and Wraiths, or even Ghosts, but rather zombies and ghouls and skeletons, oh my!

With the exception of Dennis Hopper in Land of the Dead "Zombies man, they creep me out." no one seems to be much fazed by these lowly undead. They are common minions of necromancers, haunters of graveyards, and guardians of dungeons, but the seem so blah and boring.

I know that if I saw a corpse get up and start walking I would be running in the other direction. Dry bones with no flesh would make me run all the faster. Even these minor undead should be scary if not terrifying. I think most people would face a dozen orcs more calmly that even one walking corpse.

Part of the problem may lie in the mechanics of role playing games. These lesser undead are usually push overs in a fight. Low hit points, low damage,often slow, unintelligent, why fear them when a quick oil&torch or splash of Holy Water takes care of them?

I have tried to ease this problem by such means as having skeletons that take only a fraction of normal damage from cutting and piercing weapons, zombies that must be hacked to pieces before they stop and the like. These work for about the first encounter. Undead that slowly pull themselves back together if not burned can be effective. Hours later when the party stops to rest the relentless undead pursuers they thought they had put paid to show up again. RoleMaster made the undead scarier by giving all of them a draining effect on Constitution and hit points. Spending time around the undead literally sucked the life out of you. Of course any GM can also just make the undead tougher. More hit points, better armour, more damging attacks...

The terror can aslo be ramped up by non-mechanical means. Compare these two descriptions: "As you enter the room three skeletons in chain mail leap to attack with broadswords." "As you swing the door open and enter the chamber the scattered bones and rusted armour of fallen warriors lie before you on the floor. You hear a rustle and scrape, as of dry twigs on stone. With clicks and creaks the bones re-assemble themselves into the shapes they took in life. Three ancient warriors rise from the dust to confront you. Their tattered chainmail jingles, the rusty broadswords in their hands again raise to guard. Slowly at first they stagger towards you..." The second is much more evocative isn't it? Instead of simply saying "You hit the zombie with your spear for 5 hit points" try "Your spear sinks deep into the spongey side of your foe. No flicker or grimace of pain crosses it's face. It simply staggers forward, black ichor dripping from the wound."

The old Fiend Folio for AD&D offered yet another option for making the undead scary again. A vast horde of monstrous foes all shared the general description of "a skeletal figure in a cloak". This could be a mere skeleton, a crypt thing, a wight, a liche, or any of a number of other horrors. Each monster had different strengths and weaknesses, different motivations and would provide a very different encounter. the only way to know which you were facing was to get closer, and by then it might be too late...

Much of this is true for other monsters as well. One of the first lessons of effective gamemastering being to describe not name what the players see. It is in the case of the weaker undead however that the difference between what the players know and what the characters are experiencing becomes a vast gulf.