If there’s one thing I took away from running Old School Hack, it’s that less can be a lot more when it comes to character generation. I saw this in Gamma World, too, and while OSH isn’t nearly as random in its character generation as that game is, it still offers very little in the way of character customization.

For those who are unfamiliar (and really, the game is free, so you have no excuse) with the character generation system in OSH, it’s pretty simple. The basics are these: choose one of 7 classes, roll your attributes, choose one of 5 talents for your class, choose a weapon, choose some armor. There are some other choices that you make that amount to role-playing hooks, and have little to no impact on mechanics, but that’s basically it. At first blush, this seems limiting. A level 1 goblin isn’t going to look that different from another level 1 goblin, mechanically; that much is true. But there’s more there than is immediately apparent.

First of all, you can’t have two players with the same class. I actually like this limitation quite a bit, as it does allow for a lot more differentiation between PCs. The real genius is in how open-ended some of the mechanics are. Weapons and armor, for example, are simply generic categories: light armor, heavy armor, light weapon, reach weapon, etc. There are three kinds of armor to choose from, and there are five kinds of weapons. However, you’re encouraged to flavor these choices however you like.

This is an approach I really like: generic mechanics nearly devoid of flavor, so that the players can fill that flavor in, themselves. This is how you wind up with caber-wielding fighters and clerics who use their holy book as their primary weapon. It’s great fun, and leads to a lot of great role-playing situations (like when, isntead of using a torch, the party lit the figher’s caber on fire, which remained on fire for the rest of the session).

Another area where the minimalist approach works is in covering different situations. OSH does not try to come up with rules to cover every situation; it has a few simple rules that can be applied broadly, and some guidelines for coming up with rules for improvised actions. Players, when given this kind of freedom, tend to come up with crazy stuff. Rather than saying, “I attack the kobold”, you get, “I throw my caber at the kobold; after it hits him it ricochets off the wall and rolls back in front of my feet”.

This is reinforced by another simple yet elegant mechanic: awesome points. There’s a bowl of these in the middle of the table; players can reward each other awesome points from the bowl whenever another player does something they think is awesome. They can then spend those awesome points to do more awesome stuff. That’s pretty much it; specifics are not discussed. Instead, it’s left up to the players and the DM to determine what falls under the umbrealla of “awesome”.

Old School Hack is a very simple, streamlined, rules-light game. The whole thing is maybe thirty pages long. It never felt like there weren’t enough rules to handle things, though. And it always felt like people were using their mastery of the rules (which came quickly) to do all kinds of fantastic and interesting things. This is an approach to game design that I have grown to appreciate quite a bit.

The soft launch page for The Demolished Ones, a Kickstarter-funded patronage project on which I am the lead designer, can be found here. The Kickstarter isn’t up yet; that’s due to go up on September 1st. I will let you know when it’s up, and where to go. In the mean time, go take a look and get your pledges ready!

Last night I ran a game of Old School Hack, using a dungeon I had created with How to Host a Dungeon.

I’ll start with dungeon creation.

How to Host a Dungeon, for those who don’t know, is a solo activity (I hesitate to call it a game, though it is certainly fun) in which you use pens, paper, little glass beads, and random tables to generate a dungeon by simulating its creation and subsequent occupation by civilizations, monsters, adventurers, and evil villains. The game is played out in rounds representing seasons in which each faction currently on the map acts according to a script, and in some cases additional factions are introduced. These factions often have interesting rules interactions that force conflict with other factions, which is handled with a simple die roll.

I’ve only played it once, and I got some of the rules wrong (rules clarity in the game could be better), but I had a great time and I fully intend to play it some more. It’s a fun activity (again, not sure I’d call it a game, as there’s really no condition for winning or losing) that takes a couple of hours (probably faster once you’re familiar with the rules). Best of all, when you’re done you’ve got a fully populated dungeon with a backstory you can call upon.

My particular dungeon started with a devastating earthquake. A society of dwarves delved into the depths in search of gold, but soon stumbled upon a cavern that spelled their demise. Shortly afterward, monsters started inhabiting the dungeon. Among them were a one-headed ettin who preyed upon the villagers on the surface, a clan of duergar, some kobolds, some orcs, and a tomb of undead horrors.

Eventually all these monsters drew the attention of the Thought Lords, mind-controlling abominations from beneath the surface of the world. They slowly insinuated their tendrils of control into the nearby monster clans, as well as the bold adventurers who came to stop them. Eventually, they even took the surface world for their own.

Using the dungeon required a little bit of hand-waving. By the end of the game, there were three factions left: the Thought Lords, an adventuring party, and the surface kingdom. All of the monsters had been wiped out by adventurers, and the Thought Lords had taken control of everyone who remained. I repopulated the dungeon with the monsters that I felt would make for good gameplay, and prepped it for play.

That brings us to Old School Hack, which is a fantastic little dungeon crawling game that encourages off-the-wall awesomeness. Also, it’s free. The adventurers who ventured into the dungeon were a burly fighter who wielded a flaming caber, an evangelical cleric of Hubert the Happy, god of jokes (apparently), a “high class” magic user who could talk to doors, and a vicious goblin with a hatred of kobolds and rats. The party seemed to follow the goblin, whose quest was to find and slay the Ur-Rat.

This required a little bit of improvisation on my part (I didn’t have an Ur-Rat prepped!), but it worked out pretty well. There were some great moments; the fighter flung Grobnar the One-Headed (the ettin) off a cliff, the cleric used his preacherly ways to take control of a tribe of orcs, the wizard spoke to every door she encounters and provided valuable intel, and the goblin wound up riding the body of the Ur-Rat down a hole, Dr. Strangelove-style.

We were nearly out of time toward the end, so I reskinned the leader of the Thought Lords as the Ur-Rat, and made it into a giant, tentacled, psychic, mind-controlling rat-thing. It was pretty great.

First, some housekeeping. I feel like I’ve become somewhat satiated on D&D of late. I still enjoy going to Encounters (mainly because I like the people I get to hang out with), but I deliberately did not play any D&D at GenCon because I simply didn’t want to. As such, you’ll you’ll likely see a lot less D&D coverage on this site than you have in the past. Quite frankly, I’m a lot more excited at the moment by the things that are going on in the indie scene; there are a ton of games out there I want to play (some of which I now own, thanks to GenCon), and I’ll probably be talking about them.

Now, on a tangentially related note, I want to talk about something I saw on Twitter this morning. Angry DM, who generally gives some pretty solid advice, said something that I disagree with pretty vehemently. I’m having trouble finding the exact quote, but it boils down to “asking your players to participate in world-building is like asking a demolition crew to help you move your car.”

Now, before you say it, I know Angry DM’s schtick. I realize that his tongue is planted at least a little bit in his cheek. I’m not saying that this quote makes him a bad player or DM.

That does not, however, mean that it’s not worth discussing, because it does raise some interesting points.

First off, a lot of DMs/GMs out there are hesitant to approach collaborative world-building. Many probably feel a sense of ownership over the world, and fear the exact thing that Angry DM is satirizing here. A lot of DMs/GMs probably feel a very real sense of antagonism, maybe stemming from a sense of not being appreciated.

If this is you, take a breath. Player agency isn’t the enemy; it can help supercharge your game if you let it. There’s a lot of imagination in the room when you sit down to game, and if you can harness it you can make your game that much better.

It’s perfectly okay to start small. The next time your PCs enter a room and you tell them there’s a fresco on the wall, point to one of the PCs and ask, “What does it look like?” The next time some oracle murmurs a portentious prophecy about one of your PCs, ask, “What does she say?”

This is scary, and I understand that. Giving up control is very scary when you’re used to having it. But it’s their world, too, and coming to that realization can make the game better for everyone.

The second issue that the quote raises is the game being played: D&D. System matters when it comes to player agency and narrative control. It can be done in D&D, but one of the reasons it’s so scary is that there’s nothing in the system that supports it. There are no mechanics that speak to players gaining narrative control. There is no collaborative world-building mechanic.

A good way to learn to utilize these techniques if you’re not familiar with them is to read, and then play, a game that does support these kinds of concepts. I don’t mean just a game where those kinds of things are possible; I mean a game that explicitly grants players narrative control, a game that explicitly shares the world-building load. There are a ton of them out there: The Dresden Files, Mortal Coil, Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention Bulldogs! here, though you’re likely tired of hearing about it.

Branching out from D&D to try things that take more mechanical risks can help your D&D play when you return to it. Once you grow more comfortable with sharing the narrative load with your players through rules systems that encourage and even require it, you’ll find it that much easier to implement such techniques in games like D&D, which do not speak to those kinds of mechanics or techniques.

After reading through Zombie Cinema, I started getting ideas. I’d like to put one of them up here, because I really want to get it down on paper (so to speak), and I’d like to try it out sometime. If any of you wind up trying it, I’d like to hear about your experience.

The premise of this hack is to create a Zombie Cinema game that is similar in tone and feel to the movie The Thing, by John Carpenter. The Thing has themes of isolation and paranoia; you don’t know who you can trust, and you’re trapped in a secluded location with a dangerous creature that can look like any of your allies. Because Zombie Cinema focuses on intra-party conflict, it’s perfect for this kind of game.

It does need one or two small tweaks to get it working, though. In terms of physical items, you’ll need the following:

• A copy of Zombie Cinema (naturally)
• One copy of the game board for each player, plus the one that comes in the box. Photocopies would work just fine.
• A screen for each player, to keep each player’s private game board secret from the others.

To set up the game, put the main game board (the one that came with Zombie Cinema) in the middle of the table, and put the zombie pawn on it as per the normal rules. Instead of representing the pervasiveness of the zombie threat, this represents the threat of the Thing; how powerful it is, and how many people it’s infected. Then, each player puts his or her own pawn on his or her own copy of the game board, and keeps it secret behind his or her own screen. Optionally, you can also hide all but one of your player cards, making only the most obvious one visible.

Then, play the game as normal, with the flavor of The Thing (or something similar) rather than the flavor of a standard zombie movie. Keep your position on the board secret, and keep track of where you are in relation to the zombie pawn. If it catches you, it eats you as normal. When this happens, you have been infected by the Thing. Don’t tell anyone this. Continue to play as normal, but now it’s your job to subvert the group and try to make sure that other people get infected, too. This’ll be a bit of a guessing game, as you don’t know where they are on the board, but if you use the conflict system to keep pushing people back on the board, eventually they’ll be infected, too.

Something you can do with conflicts is call for blood tests. Doing so is like any other conflict, but if you successfully convince someone to take a blood test, they must reveal whether or not they are infected.

Finally, even after you are infected, you should keep track of your position on the board. Once infected, you cannot become uninfected again; however, you can still escape (the Thing wants to escape, to infect more people). The game ends when everyone escapes.

Today I’d like to talk about some awesome things, all of which (for me, to some extent or another) originated at GenCon this year.

Thing the first: The Awesome Die. The core of this idea was originally posited to me by frequent commenter mbeacom. I’m simplifying it a little bit here. I bought an Awesome Die (a d30) at GenCon, specifically so I could use this trick. The idea is, whenever a player does something really awesome at your table, that player can roll the Awesome Die instead of a plain old d20. Obviously, this works best with games that use a d20, like D&D. A couple of implications go along with using a d30 rather than a d20. First, success is considerably more probable; this is the intent. You want to encourage awesome things at your table, and making those awesome things more likely to succeed will do that. Another implication is that, if it’s an awesome attack, it’s much more likely to crit, since you can roll a natural 20-30 on this die. Assuming 4e D&D, your crit chance jumps from 5% to around 30% for that attack. That’s significant. As a result, you might want to limit how often you hand out the Awesome Die. This, in turn, will have the effect of players trying harder to get it, in all likelihood, provided you make it clear that it’s available and hand it out at least once early in the session.

Thing the second: How to Host a Dungeon is a fantastic game to read; I haven’t even played it yet, but I totally want to. On its own, it seems like a lot of fun to simulate the life cycle of a dungeon. But wait, there’s more! You can use that dungeon in a game if you want to. In a game like D&D, this can be a lot of work. That’s fine, if you don’t mind the prep, and it’s a great way to get a convincing dungeon with a lot of backstory for your game. But if you want to dive right into the dungeon with little to no prep, there’s another game you can use . . .

Thing the third: Old School Hack. I heard about this game at GenCon (it won an ENnie, even), and it is indeed awesome. OSH is an indie game inspired by the original D&D Red Box, but with much simpler and more modern rules that encourage a lot of crazy, off-the-wall actions and cool character concepts. It’s also free. And elf is a class. Awesome. At any rate, it goes with How to Host a Dungeon extremely well, so much so that I’m going to print it out on card stock and drop it in the same folder as HTHAD, and basically treat them as two linked games. I can’t wait to make a dungeon, then run some unsuspecting party through it. It’s going to rock.

My last day at GenCon was good, if short. I started by going back to Games on Demand to see what was on the menu. I got a chance to play TechNoir, a cyberpunk noir RPG with really elegant character generation and conflict resolution rules. The session was so-so; the GM hadn’t been planning on running anything and decided to at the last minute, so he wasn’t really prepared. I can’t really fault him for that. The session did sell me on the game, though. I’m definitely buying this one.

That was the only game I played. I did, however, go to the IPR booth and pick up a copy of Dread (a horror game that uses a Jenga tower as its primary resolution mechanic). There I ran into Amanda and Clark Valentine (Amanda edited Bulldogs!), and we got to talking (about games). Tracy Hurley (Sarah Darkmagic), Thadeus C., and Tracy Barnett (Troll in the Corner) also stopped by, and we had a nice conversation.

Shortly after I went to the airport, where I started killing time by reading some of my games.

Zombie Cinema is short to read (took 15 minutes or so, all told), but it seems like it’ll be a lot of fun, especially as a zero-prep pick-up game. How to Host a Dungeon looks like a great one-player game, and I have a hunch it’ll go well with a game that I heard about today called Old School Hack, which I’m going to research tomorrow. I’m halfway through Mortal Coil, and every freaking page is giving me ideas. It’s great.

So now GenCon is over, and I’m a little sad. Still, it’s nice to be back home, and it’s not like I won’t be gaming. I’ve got D&D Encounters this Wednesday (new season, new character), and I’m also planning on running at least one demo of Bulldogs! at my FLGS. I may run some other indie games, just to get a chance to play them. Huzzah!

I’m going to be documenting a couple of big upcoming events in my life over the next couple of months.

If you’re a gamer, you’ll be more interested in the first: I’m going to GenCon in a couple of weeks. I’ll bring a laptop with me so I can blog about my experiences, and I’ll also be updating my Twitter feed (@Zelgadas) with my experiences as well. I’ll be playing some D&D, some indie games (probably a lot of them), playing Conquest of Nerath and Pillars of the Earth, and I’ll be running some >Bulldogs! sessions. In between all of that, I’ll be doing other nerd things, which I’ll probably share.

The second is actually a much bigger deal for me, though I’ll understand if it’s of less interest to the general public: my wife is going bionic. That is, she’s getting her hip replaced in September. She’s young for it (we’re in our early 30s), but she’s got a degenerative hip condition that has resulted in 70% or so of her hip being necrotic. So, it has to go. The surgery is going to be an interesting experience to say the least, and it promises to improve her (and, by extension, my) quality of life considerably. I’ll be documenting this throughout the process, with pictures even. She’ll also be sharing her thoughts, which I’ll post here.

Although I won’t be liveblogging it, I’d also like to mention that, this weekend, I’ll finally be seeking therapy for whatever emotional/anxiety disorder I happen to suffer from. I’ve spoken about this before, but it’s finally happening this weekend. I’ll likely share my thoughts on the process, but in a less formal way.

At any rate, that’s what’s coming up next month and the following. I’ve got some other posts in the hopper (by which I mean “in my head”) that I plan on posting whenever I get around to it. Also, you can expect to hear more about The Demolished Ones as months progress.

A little while ago, I was contacted by Steve Russell of Rite Publishing to work on a project for him. After speaking to him about it, it sounded like the kind of thing I’d really enjoy working on, so I agreed. I’d like to share a couple of things about this project with you.

First, this project uses FATE 3.0. The rules are available for free online, so we won’t be reprinting them (the page count isn’t high enough to warrant that). I will, however, be making some modifications to core FATE to accommodate some of the story elements within the game. I don’t want to get into specifics, but I’m going to be playing around with how characters are created, and how aspects are handled.

Second, this is a patronage project. This means that we’ll be soliciting patrons at some point in the near future, asking people to contribute funds to the project. What you get in exchange for your contribution is creative control. I will be soliciting feedback from patrons at various points along development, and I will be incorporating patron feedback into the final product. If you decide that it sounds like the kind of project that you’re interested in, support it. Supporting it gets you input, and helps ensure that the final product sees the light of day. It’s a win-win!

Third, this being a patronage project, it’s not yet green-lit. As I’ve said, we’ll be soliciting patrons soon, and trying to hit a specific goal that we need to hit in order to publish. Until we hit that goal, the project is not green-lit. I really hope that it becomes green-lit, because I think this thing’s going to be awesome.

Finally, I’d like to leave you guys with a little teaser, something to get you interested. This teaser doesn’t necessarily represent the final product, but it’s the direction that I’m going in at the moment. We’re not soliciting patrons yet, but keep your eye on this blog; I’ll let you know when we are, and point you in the right direction.

Tom awoke on a cold floor, the taste of cotton in the back of his mouth. His tongue felt heavy, thick; his arms refused to push him up. He floundered for a few minutes there, trying to get his bearings, trying to gain stability, control. He took a breath and was hit with something metallic mixed with the scent of sweat and fear. He opened his eyes, cautiously, and pushed himself up.

The room was small, bare concrete walls and hard stone floor. That was the first thing he saw; the second was the body. It lay in the center of the room, face-down, sprawled, a crimson pool congealed around it. The man was dressed in formal attire, though the clothes were shabby and worn. His hair was dark, mussed, matted with blood.

Tom pushed himself back, away from the corpse, and looked around the room wildly, alert for danger. That was when he saw the others. Four of them, two men and two women, all around the room. Three were unconscious, prone, as he had been, unceremoniously left on the floor to wake. The Fourth, one of the women, was huddled in the corner, her eyes shut tight, rocking gently and muttering to herself.

Who were these people? Was one of them the killer? Were they all potential victims? What was this place, and why was he here?

Tome searched his memory for the answers, but found nothing. Nothing at all. That struck him as slightly odd at first, but the more he searched the more terrified he became. He knew his name. He knew how old he was. The more he searched, though, the more he became aware that nothing else was there. He could remember nothing of his life, nothing of the events that had led him here.

Something was very wrong.

Part One Part Two Part Three

The Story

The next day, PJ, Percy, Debra, and Boop-Boop all met in Bartram Gardens, Boop-Boop’s home. They each discussed what they had learned and compared notes, all coming to the same terrifying conclusion: that the Black Court vampires had to be stopped, and that they would have to do it. They needed help, though.

PJ called the nightclub Babylon and set up a meeting for that night with Gerhardt von Manschafft, the leader of the city’s White court vampires. Gerhardt was influential and often had valuable information, and PJ had a good working relationship with him.

The group decided that they’d leave and wait for the meeting time, then they’d all meet at Babylon. As they were leaving the Gardens, though, they were confronted by five men with guns in the parking lot. The men were a mis-matched lot; some wore business attire, others casual clothing, and one looked like a homeless man. They all, however, had expressions of vacant, incoherent rage on their faces, and they moved to attack.

Percy reacted quickly, darting for the car in the hopes of getting it closer to the group, so they could escape. PJ, wanting to protect Debra, ran for one of the thugs, wrested the gun from his hand, and knocked him out with the but of the gun. Debra followed Percy’s lead and ran for the car, running to the driver’s seat; she was the better driver of the two.

While this was happening, the thugs fired off a few rounds at Debra and PJ; both were grazed, but not seriously injured. Boop-Boop reacted by casting faerie magic, surrounding two of the thugs in an airless bubble that caused them to pass out.

PJ, enraged by the thug who had shot at Debra, turned and fired his newly acquired gun, killing the man. Debra and Percy, in the car, drove straight at the remaining thug, colliding with him and knocking him out cold.

The group started investigating their fallen foes, finding that most of them had identification and money, but that there didn’t seem to be any link between the two. They took the guns, bound the thugs, and dropped one of them in the trunk for later questioning. Then they got in the car and sped off as sirens approached.

The group split up after that. Debra went back to campus, accompanied by Boop-Boop, to get medical attention for her bullet graze. Percy and PJ drove the car to a warehouse owned by Maximillian so that they could question the thug.

In the warehouse, they discovered that the thug was unlikely to talk to them. He screamed in rage, but said nothing; it was likely that he was a Renfield, a thrall of the Black Court whose mind had been shattered so utterly that he was no longer capable of coherent thought. Percy put the man out of his misery, then asked Maximillian to dispose of the body. Maximillian agreed, telling Percy that he would owe a favor for it.

That night, the group went to Babylon to speak to Gerhardt. Gerhardt was very forthcoming and helpful, which was somewhat worrying to the group. He confirmed their theories about the Black Court, and told them how to disrupt the ritual that the vampires would no doubt be performing on midnight on Halloween. He also offered to lend the assistance of two of his associates, a pair of White Court twins, to help manage the Black Court’s mortal muscle.

In return, though, he asked the group for a favor. Papa Leroy, a houngan information broker working out of a bar called Wormdaddy’s, was manipulating the biker gang known as the Warlocks into taking territory from the Pagans motorcycle gang. This territory happened to have a high concentration of out-of-order phone booths, used to access random magical information. If the group could convince Leroy to back off of the turf war, Gerhardt would help them.

Having few options, the group agreed.

The Game

We had our first fight toward the end of the session, and it was educating. FATE combat is pretty fast-paced, and doesn’t take a long time; that fight took maybe ten minutes of real time to adjudicate. It is, however, potentially very deadly; guns are no joke in this game.

We also discovered that the magic system takes a little getting used to. Once we’ve used it a fair bit, I’m sure it’ll be come second nature; however, at the moment, it requires a lot of referring to charts and slowing the action down, which is unfortunate.

All in all, this session was a rousing success. It was fun for everyone, and required very little prep work on my part. I’m a big fan of DFRPG, and FATE in general.