• The Social Construction of R’yleh

    Among the great classics of 20th century social theory is Berger and Luckmann’s Social Construction of Reality. The book is brilliant and if you hate the phrase “social construction” it’s probably because you haven’t read the book itself but only gotten the ideas second hand from its less appealing fans who don’t take its ideas seriously enough to apply them in a temperate fashion. Social Construction of Reality is fundamentally about the issue of intersubjectivity, such that if I believe something that’s just me, but if we believe something, that’s in some sense real. For instance, there’s no real reason that 16 square inches of green high cotton paper should be worth much of anything, but we all agree that a dollar is valuable and so it is. As the book proceeds, it goes beyond mere intersubjectivity to discuss how culture becomes codified in social structure. For instance, consider this thought experiment about 2/3 of the way through the book.

    It is not difficult now to propose a specific “prescription” for alternation into any conceivable reality, however implausible from the standpoint of the outsider. It is possible to prescribe specific procedures for, say, convincing individuals that they can communicate with beings from outer space provided that and as long as they stay on a steady diet of raw fish. We can leave it to the imagination of the reader, if he is so inclined, to work out the details of such a sect of Ichthyosophists. The “prescription” would entail the construction of an Ichthyosophist plausibility structure, properly segregated from the outside world and equipped with the necessary socializing and therapeutic personnel; the elaboration of an Ichthyosophist body of knowledge, sufficiently sophisticated to explain why the self-evident nexus between raw fish and galactic telepathy had not been discovered before; and the necessary legitimations and nihilations to make sense of the individual’s journey towards this great truth. If these procedures are followed carefully, there will be a high probability of success once an individual has been lured or kidnapped into the Ichthyosophist brainwashing institute.

    By this point you should be thinking “what idiot gave these two Austrian-American sociologists Delta Green clearance and read them in on the Innsmouth raid after action reports?”

    Well, it’s pretty obvious why Berger and Luckmann were recruited if you scroll up and reread my sentence about “if I believe something that’s just me, but if we believe something that’s in some sense real.” From the perspective of MAJESTIC-12, that sounds a lot like a new mode of magic beyond hypergeometry with the possibility to reshape reality, just as in the Neal Stephenson novel Anathem “rhetors” are such masters of sophistry that they can reshape consensus reality, often as part of a veil out. Just imagine what uses that could be put to in the Cold War, everything from accelerating the Sino-Soviet split to giving new identities to Operation Paperclip recruits.

    You could work this into a Fall of Delta Green game by having your agents read the book (published in 1966) and “hey, wait a minute” at that passage then investigating leads them to see what grants the New School for Social Research was getting at the time and that starts the trail of clues to learning about MAJESTIC-12’s involvement in MK Ultra.

  • Tumor table

    Inspired by an r/osr typo. Roll 1d6.

    1. Crystoma. Small crystals erupt from 3d10 square inches of skin. Common in mining races and thought to be spread via exposure to xorn droppings. Crystals are most likely worthless but on a nat 20 the afflicted’s survivors can roll on the gems treasure table.
    2. Osteoma diabolica. Bony tumors of the skull. Found most often in tieflings but difficult to diagnosis as often mistaken for horns. Roll 1d6: 1-3 benign, 4-5 creates headaches or impedes hearing, reducing wisdom by 1, 6 time to buy a psionics supplement.
    3. Draconic Keratosis. Skin develops thick scaly structure. Thought to be caused by cellular damage from magical energies of dragon breath. Fatal in 2d4 months but in the meantime AC improves by 2.
    4. Invasive arcana carcinoma. Afflicts magic users and illusionists. Thought to be caused by imperfectly casting Vancian magic which leaves vestigial bits of the incantation in the body where they can multiply rapidly. Every year there is a charity 3 league race to raise money for a cure and lobby RPG publishers to avert this tragedy by switching to spell points.
    5. Necroma. Bits of flesh turn pale and translucent. 90% survival rate if treated with a dozen weekly applications of turn undead but most guild health plans don’t cover more than two sessions and the much vaunted Keoland single payer plan has a six month waiting list to see a cleric.
    6. Elven chondrosarcoma. The cartilage in the pointy part of an elf’s ears grows at an excessive rate until the elf resembles a bat. Can be easily treated by surgery but many post-surgery elves grow depressed after being mistaken for a human.

  • Waqf

    The economist Timur Kuran has written a lot about Islamic financial institutions. Long story short, he doesn’t like them. Nonetheless, they’re really interesting in ways that are potentially good for gaming.

    One in particular that could be useful for gaming purposes is the waqf. In secular American law, a waqf is like an NGO with incredibly strong donor intent. Kuran describes waqfs that were probably a good idea when created, but are still chugging along centuries later, long after changing circumstances have rendered their mission obsolete. For instance, a hostel for travelers along a trade route that no longer sees much traffic.

    Kuran ‘s argument is that waqfs led to a misallocation of capital, but it strikes me that this could be a world-building element for why there is a town in the middle of nowhere. An entrepreneur wouldn’t throw good money after bad by staying in a godsforsaken hellhole but a waqf has more resources than options on how to spend them. It could be that its location used to be bustling but the hereditary board of directors are legally unable to relocate in the face of changing climatic conditions, ogre raids, etc. And here is where it gets game-able. The waqf could be not just an improbably located safe haven, but a mission giver.

    Suppose great great grand pappy established a waqf with his descendants as the salaried board of directors bound by geas to operate what at the time was a crucially necessary buggy whip repair shop in an oasis. Fast forward a century and the oasis has nearly dried up, nobody uses that trade route any more because wyverns eat the camels, and WotC sensitivity readers have excised any reference to whips, buggy or otherwise. So a new forward-looking generation of the board decides to stretch the limits of their geas to send word to the thieves guild of Colorful Metropolis that there’s good money in it for any murder hobos willing to travel to the desert and work for the waqf doing gigs to destroy the wyvern nests, travel into the underdark to see what’s gone wrong with the oasis aquifer, and make sure that monsters seek better opportunities on the competing trade routes.

    That is, the waqf could be a mission giver who is attempting to restore a lost locale and willing to devote resources to doing so. In this respect it’s something like the premise of Arden Vul, where a restored empire delegates to murder hobos the hard work of restoring some recovered ruins. The difference being that the patron is much humbler than the Archontean Empire and indeed the waqf may even be on the outs with the political authority.

  • Roll Over vs Roll Under

    One of the basic differences between modern and old school D&D is whether ability checks are roll high (modern D&D) or roll under (old school D&D). I’m going to bracket various aesthetic issues of which mechanic is more elegant, simple, etc. and only look at the math of how swingy they are and in particular how much does the ability score matter to the roll. Whether swingy is desirable or not is itself a matter of taste or circumstance, but it seems to me that some tasks should be like arm wrestling, where strength matters way more than luck, and others should be more like looking for a lost set of keys, where luck should matter at least as much as wisdom (in the sense of how observant you are).

    My hunch is that the ability scores should matter more in the roll under mechanic than the roll high mechanic, but let’s see if I’m right. (Spoiler: I was right). It’s the kind of thing you could do with probability theory but it’s much easier to do via simulation and so that’s how I did it. You could probably do it in anydice, but I ran it in R.

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  • What kind of treasure?

    The module I’m writing is called “Treasure of the Satrap’s Army,” which implies the question … what exactly is the treasure and how much of it? More generally you can use these thoughts in your own game for whenever you want to make transporting the treasure as much of or more than a challenge than seizing it in the first place.

    But first, a digression. One of the first questions is what level to write the module for but that wouldn’t be interesting to read about so TL;DR, low level is more challenging resource management and I can just write my own encounter tables if the default ones are too harsh. So that being said, the big question is how much treasure should the characters get anyway? Remember, the premise of the adventure is they start by looting the army camp and then the bulk of the adventure is they need to get the treasure to a safe haven.

    How much treasure is really two questions, the monetary value and the bulk. Let’s do value first.

    Treasure by value

    This adventure assumes experience points for treasure (the GP=XP rule). So when I talk about how much treasure, really I’m placing XP pellets. GP=XP is not a great fit for every play style and I’m a big fan of Hyperborea‘s “all of the above” model for experience points, but GP=XP is a great fit with this adventure’s intended play style.

    I know I want this to be a one or two session adventure, so how much XP is reasonable for a one or two session adventure?

    Old School Essentials suggests 3/4 XP is from treasure, so take monster XP and multiply by 3 to get GP value of treasure. Similarly, ACKS gives a 4:1 ratio. But the problem with that is ideally the PCs will avoid all combat so that rule of thumb doesn’t really work.

    There’s also a general rule of thumb you hear around the OSR that a megadungeon should have enough treasure to level up once per level of the dungeon plus a healthy margin for treasure they miss. But how many sessions is that?

    If we look at the 5e DMG, page 261 gives the expectation that with the exception of the first few levels (which have trivial XP requirements in 5e), that further levels should take about 2 to 3 sessions per level. So if we assume this adventure will take one session, that implies 1/3 to 1/2 the XP you need. That’s a bit generous by OSR standards, but Lamentations of the Flame Princess (which has a strict silver = XP rule) suggests each session should provide 1/4 to 1/3 of the treasure needed to level, but with the expectation that they won’t get or keep all of it. That seems about right, so let’s go with the LotFP guideline of around 1/4 to 1/3 of the needed treasure to level on a GP=XP standard.

    If we assume the adventure is targeted for 3rd level characters and we take the fighter table as typical, that’s 4000 XP needed to advance from 3rd (4000) to 4th (8000). Let’s assume the typical party is 4 PCs. So that’s 16,000 XP for them all to level up. If we assume the adventure should provide 1/4 of that, that’s 4000 GP.

    By encumbrance

    So we have the total value of our treasure, now we need to figure out the form. It’s one thing to say the wealth is a sapphire called the Star of Eskiloth which is worth 4000 GP (and which in an emergency the thief can coat in lamp oil and, ahem, conceal). It’s yet another thing to say that the 4000 GP of treasure is a herd of 400 cattle or a thousand poorly sealed amphorae of kimchi or garum.

    I want to create a trade-off for how much wealth the characters can recover and how much risk they incur by doing so. I envision the PCs facing three options:

    1. stuff your pockets with liquid wealth. This will make it easy to hide from random encounters, take shortcuts that only work for humans (eg, climbing a rope up a steep hill), etc.
    2. load up pack animals with a moderate amount of wealth, but not so much that they can’t move at full speed or go off road.
    3. load up pack animals or vehicles with everything you can find, to the extent that the animals are slowed considerably or the vehicles can only travel on roads.

    The first time I ran a play test, I found my players could fit all their loot on the pack animals and still have the pack animals move at full speed. So not really much of a trade-off.

    Let’s say the fill your pockets option should be 1/8 a level’s worth of XP (2000 GP), the low-risk pack animal option 1/4 a level (4000 GP), and the high-risk pack animal option 1/2 a level (8000 GP). I’d say make the high risk option 1/3 a level, but nobody would sensibly choose much added risk for a small increment in reward, so let’s round it up to 1/2 and see if the player characters get greedy enough to overload the party’s mule with silver plated airhorns. Remember, part of the inspiration for this adventure is movies like Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Triple Frontier, or A Simple Plan where the characters get essentially infinite wealth with minimal effort but they get greedy and that’s their downfall.

    OK, so now that we have our wealth totals, we need to figure out what goods.

    The 2000 GP of liquid wealth is easy as that’s what the treasure table default to. The most obvious thing is to let the PCs discover one of the army treasurer’s chests with 2000 GP in it. Given D&D’s ridiculous assumption that gold pieces are 1.6oz each (about 10x the weight of a Roman solidus or Islamic dinar), that works out to 200lb or about 50lb each spread across 4 PCs. If the PCs carried nothing else — no armor, no weapons, no food, no water, no spellbooks, no ten foot poles, etc — that’s still enough to slow their movement a bit. So if we really want to give them the option to travel light, we need to take some of that cash and convert it into jewelry or gems. The median value for a gem in the OSE treasure table is 100gp and the mean value for jewelry is 1050gp. Jewelry is more fun, so let’s say the most high value treasure they can find is 1000gp cash plus a necklace with five rubies that is worth 1000gp. That works out to about 25lb each for four players.

    The medium and high difficulty treasure involves more creativity. There are really two questions: how many pack animals do we provide and what kind of wealth is available for those animals to carry. Let’s bracket the pack animals question for now. Both medium and high difficulty should involve something that’s less valuable than gold coins on a per pound basis. We could just say silver pieces, but that’s no fun.

    As described above, when I first thought about it, the high risk/ high reward treasure was just “overload the mules so they go slower so you hit more random encounters, find it harder to evade pursuit, etc.” But at the abstract level it doesn’t have to be heavy, it just has to be inconvenient to transport in a way that exposes the party to risk. Here are some possibilities:

    • The treasure could be so noisy (eg, a bunch of rare parrots), shiny (a highly polished bronze statue), or odorous (eg, spices or perfumes) that it attracts more random encounters. After writing the first draft of this post, I passed a basset hound on the street and there’s something hilarious to me about player characters herding a kennel of outlandish-looking but valuable rare breed dogs who attract extra random encounter rolls by their frequent barking or howling.
    • The treasure could make negative reaction rolls when dealing with human beings (eg, items that are strictly forbidden to lowly murder hobos under the kingdom’s sumptuary laws).
    • The PCs may have to choose between carrying treasure and carrying essential but economically worthless supplies, especially water (8lb/gallon, in the unlikely event the player characters are carrying it in plastic milk jugs). Economics talks about the diamond/water paradox. You can make that an actual gameplay choice.
    • High ransom hostages must be fed and can try to escape, scream for help, etc. Historically this was a huge source of wealth from the aftermath of battles, but I prefer to avoid this one as it creates a lot of not fun ethical issues as well as imposes a duty on the DM to role-play the NPC hostage.

    One advantage of cargo problems other than “high encumbrance means slower movement and hence more random encounters per mile” is that only works with hexcrawl, not pointcrwal. Another is that difficulties other than encumbrance will scale better to different party sizes. Perhaps the biggest advantage is that some forms of treasure may make some routes relatively appealing.

    • The satrap’s monogrammed silk bedsheets might incur shock in one cultural zone and indifference in another, so head through the territory where people either don’t care or think it’s hilarious to imagine how infuriated the foreigners over the ridge would be to learn that you stole that.
    • Maybe you’d have to prioritize water over treasure if you want to take the quick route through the desert but it’s ok to load up the mules with treasure and count on finding streams if you take the longer or more heavily patrolled route through the forest.
    • Maybe the treasure is so bulky that the only way to transport it is by wagon or barge so you have to stick to the road or the navigable river, which means facing a lot of army traffic, customs inspection points, etc.
    • Maybe some treasure is simply worth more at certain destinations because it’s less risky to fence, there’s more demand for it, or it’s harder to obtain there. Maybe basset hounds are ubiquitous in the satrapy but extremely rare and prestigious on Pirate Island.

    So with all that in mind, let’s think of some treasure, along with possible inconveniences it may imply.

    • Silks and furs. May be readily recognizable as the satrap’s property and from your nation. Will be much heavier if they get wet. Carpets have all these properties but are also extremely bulky and larger carpets will require a cart, not just a mule.
    • Art. Readily identifiable as coming from the satrap’s household. The art may be less valuable in more distant cultures with different taste. Some art (eg, bronze sculptures, crystal, etc) may have highly polished reflective surfaces that will be visible at a great distance and attract more encounters. A lot of art is brittle, vulnerable to being punctured, etc. There could be both a high value, low convenience option and a low value, high convenience option in that the art is difficult to transport without breaking it or attracting attention, but it is worth a lot more intact than just prying the gems out of it.
    • Medicinal or psychoactive herbs. Sword and sorcery fiction often talks about the drug “lotus,” usually prefaced by a color to code different effects. In antiquity the wild fennel variety silphium was a valued contraceptive. These drugs could be subject to local taboos or laws. You could also have each player secretly roll for whether their character is an addict who must make a wisdom savings throw every night to avoid smoking the party’s profits and being catatonic or deranged the next day.
    • Amphorae of fine wine. Liquids are extremely heavy. Let’s say 10 lb/gallon between the wine itself and the vessel it’s stored in.
    • Animals. Maybe the satrap traveled with his hunting falcons or hounds. Or the harim insisted on bringing their lap dogs in the seraglio-on-the-go. Or maybe the satrap brought a small menagerie to impress his officers. The animals could be noisy, difficult to feed, uncooperative, or even dangerous. In the Neal Stephenson novel Quicksilver, in the chaos of the failure of the siege of Vienna, Half-Cock Jack Shaftoe beheads the sultan’s pet ostrich to take its tail feathers as a trade good. Nobody wants to buy a corgi pelt, but colorful birds or big cats could provide a low value, high convenience option (kill it and take its plumage or pelt) or a high value, low convenience option (keep it alive for the exotic pets market).

  • Strange Rites

    One of my pet peeves about RPGs is that they reflect the ethnocentrism of a culture where we take for granted that religions are based on ethical monotheism with an essentially congregational structure. Sure, it’s a conceit of RPGs that religion is polytheistic, but look at the maps of any kind of temple in a module or collection of battle maps and you’ll see there are pews. Pews! As if the serpent cult are assembling to listen to sermons about the scaly transformation that awaits them.

    If you read history or anthropology, you quickly learn that real paganism is far more bizarre than anything you can imagine if your thought process is “start with Episcopalians, except they’re all dwarves and they worship Moradin and there’s an anvil where the altar should be.” You know the phrase “Viking funeral” and probably think it means pushing a rowboat as floating coffin out to sea then shooting a flaming arrow at it. This is an invention of pop culture. The truth, as we know from the Abbasid ambassador to the Rus, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, is like something out of a particularly gruesome horror movie.

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  • What’s the Treasure for Anyway?

    One of the conceits many OSR games inherited from TSR era D&D is that most experience points should be for treasure, sometimes called the GP=XP rule. Or, for people whose notions of realism can survive the premise of mighty thewed barbarians slaying serpent folk but not that it takes 8oz of gold to buy a head of garlic, a SP=XP rule. The advantage of this rule is that it encourages exploration and sneakiness over combat if you scatter gold XP pellets around the dungeon. The disadvantage is that it’s kind of stupid.

    With that in mind, here’s a table where each player can roll to see why exactly their PC is so desperate for loot as to routinely wander around haunted tombs by torchlight:

    1. to purchase the freedom of that girl who always flashes you a smile in the market 
    2. to honor your deceased matrilineal uncle with a funeral orgy that will make the earth shake with the envy of your ancestors in the underworld
    3. to bribe a genealogist of the royal court to fabricate a claim to noble blood before the next census
    4. to afford enough yellow lotus to get as high as you did before you built up a tolerance 
    5. to pay the debts of the orphanage where you grew up and/or where you deposit your bastards
    6. to hire mercenaries to destroy the camp of the bandits who sacked your childhood village
    7. to buy that kickass lateen-sailed pleasure boat you’ve wanted since you had a charcoal drawing of it on papyrus hung up in your childhood bedroom
    8. to travel beyond the horizon and see if the tales are true 
    9. to pay for initiation into the sacred mysteries of the Drowned Maiden 
    10. to go back to blacksmith school and get your anvil operator’s license
    11. to achieve a lifelong dream of opening a really nice hookah lounge, I mean really nice
    12. to carouse until the taverns are drained and the brothels exhausted 
    13. to flee a sorcerer who cast your horoscope and saw you would make the perfect sacrifice for summoning the Nameless Horror of the Outer Dark
    14. to pay off your debt to userers of the thieves’ guild
    15. to pay wergild and end the blood feud that has enmeshed your family for a generation 
    16. to provide a dowry big enough to get some schmuck to marry the dancing girl you impregnated several months ago
    17. to make a propitiatory offering to the gods of the underworld who you can feel calling you to enact an ancestral curse
    18. to get the seed money for the really big score you’ve been planning for months
    19. to buy a monkey who is trained to make obscene gestures for the entertainment of your dinner guests 
    20. everybody wants treasure – – that’s why they call it “treasure”

  • My First Module

    I’m a reasonably experienced GM but I’ve never written an adventure that other people could run. I’ve run D&D many times, but only with published modules and campaigns, some of which I kit-bashed. I also ran a homebrew Gumshoe campaign to completion, but it was play by post and also based on contemporary Earth, which means I could get away with my entire prep for the whole campaign being a few pages of notes and then wing it with Google Maps. But I’ve never written something in enough detail that someone else could run it.

    I’m calling the module I want to write “Treasure of the Satrap’s Army.” The idea is a hybrid of a hexcrawl and an “escape the dungeon” scenario. Let’s call it “escape the hexcrawl.” The players start out with all the treasure and their goal is to keep most of it as they cross a lot of hostile territory to reach one of several safe havens where they can cash in the treasure for XP. My key inspirations were Xenophon’s Anabasis and the movie Triple Frontier.

    The premise is that the players are with the camp or baggage train of an army when they learn the army is defeated and the enemy is closing in to pillage and massacre so they best grab what they can and get out. I want the tone to be sword and sorcery and the setting to be vaguely Silk Road, with the defeated army being a sort of fantasy Persia and the victorious army fantasy steppe nomads.

    I’ve already written 2/3 of a version of this module and ran it for some friends (thanks for playing guys). We had fun, but I noticed a few mistakes and issues. As inspired by Angry GM live tweeting his composition of a mega dungeon, I figure the best way to do it is to think carefully about all the various issues that are involved and writing about it. Notably, I can already see the following dilemmas:

    • What character level should it be written for?
    • What system should I write for? Should I assume GMs have access to that system’s bestiary?
    • How much treasure (and by extension, XP) should they get?
    • What form should the treasure take and how should the players suffer for weighing themselves down with too much treasure?
    • Should the treasure just be sitting there or should they have to role-play searching for it as the enemy approaches like a sword and sorcery version of Supermarket Sweep?
    • Hexcrawl or pointcrawl?
    • OSE style “control panel” or traditional paragraphs?

    Eventually we will get to questions beyond the actual writing of how best to package and circulate it, which will involve such issues as:

    • What price point?
    • What kind of art to source / commission?
    • Kickstarter or straight to DriveThruRPG?

  • Hi there

    I expect this blog to consist of:

    • my general thoughts on gaming (sometimes informed by my background as a social scientist)
    • reviews of gaming materials
    • thinking aloud as I write my first module, “Treasure of the Satrap’s Army.” More on that in the next post.

    My basic perspective is pretty typical for OSR: I prefer rules light and sword and sorcery.

    My gaming background is that I’ve been gaming off and on since I got the Mentzer red box. I graduated to AD&D 1e and 2e and also various Palladium games, but my interest trailed off when I realized I was a collector of closet drama rather than a player and I never got into 3e. Also, the dungeon punk art style seemed like a huge let down compared to the TSR greats like Larry Elmore and Clyde Caldwell. I got back into it 4 or 5 years ago when some friends invited me to play in a 5e campaign. Since then my group has played a few Gumshoe games and I’ve GM’d in both 5e and Gumshoe.

    I’m still in a 5e campaign, but I’ve soured a bit on the game. The 5e core books are masterful game design, but the published campaigns, the player culture, and the later splatbooks really grate on me. I think actual play podcasts staffed by improv actors have done as much to warp people’s sense of TTRPGs as porn has done to warp people’s sexuality. However I hope to spend more time talking about how I like a game where the player characters are all human mercenaries (and any sapient non-human NPCs are profoundly strange and generally bad news) rather than complaining about games where half a dozen tiefling bards work at Starbucks and the main XP mechanic is for reporting anti-orc racism to the wizard college bias response team.

    This blog is my explorations and musings on the kind of Appendix N inspired OSR gaming I increasingly prefer and hope to write for.