Prince Charming, Reanimator!

Call it "Charles Perrault meets H.P. Lovecraft by way of Jack Vance" and you won't be too far off the mark.

Prince Charming, Reanimator, is now available as a free pdf at RPG Now.  You can choose to Pay What You Want, which will reward Purple Duck maestro Mark Gedak for the excellent art, cartography, and the work of formatting and assembling the product.  I make nothing either way, but Mark really does deserve a lot of credit for making this so cool.  Also, he paid the artist and cartographer out of pocket!

A POD version will be coming in the not-too-distant future.

Prince Hubert Charming, son of the Baron of Westlake, and heir to Westlake Manor, is well known as a cold man, whose watery blue eyes seem to betray no emotion at all. Yet he is a great lover of beauty, as all his wives have proven. The first he found working in the cinders of a woodsman’s cottage. Some say that the girl’s jealous stepsisters threw her down a well to prevent her from becoming the young prince’s bride, but even death did not bar Prince Charming, and she enchanted everyone at the wedding. Her stepsisters were placed in spiked barrels filled with hot coals and dragged through the town until they themselves died.

Whatever process Prince Charming used to revive his bride, it did not last forever. All too soon, the Princess Ella took ill and died.

Charming then found another bride, and there was no doubt in this case that she was dead. She was entombed in a glass coffin guarded by half a dozen or so dwarves. Yet,
when Prince Charming injected his magic elixir and kissed her upon the lips, her eyelids fluttered open and she breathed again! The story was told that the new Princess had been in but a deep coma, a sham of death, until a poisoned apple was dislodged by the Prince’s kiss. But folk began to whisper in dread, and none were surprised when it was announced that Princess Snow, like Princess Ella, succumbed to a fatal illness after only a few years of marital bliss.

In all kingdoms there are tales, and in the Barony of Westlake, it is said that the Grimmswood hides the ruins of a long-lost realm. The daughter of its final king, cursed by a malevolent faerie, pricked her finger on a spindle upon her sixteenth birthday, in the blossom of her youth, and died. With her death, the kingdom went to ruin. Few now dare to go far into the Grimmswood, although the riches of the lost kingdom are said to lie unclaimed within. Fear of dark fey magic and even greater evils keep men out.

Or they did so until now. For Prince Hubert Charming of Westlake has determined that the long-dead Princess Beauty is only cursed to sleep away the aeons, and he will have her for his bride. His men rounded up a stable of “volunteers” at the beginning of one early autumn morning, and here you are, with what makeshift arms and equipment you had upon you when you were “volunteered”.

Your mission, the Prince’s Bailiff explains, is to enter the ruined castle, find the place where the “Sleeping” Beauty lies, and bring her forth for Prince Charming to restore with a kiss. Those who choose not to go upon this quest must take their chances with the Prince’s Guard, twenty men strong, and be declared outlaw. Those who choose to hazard their lives within the ruined castle may keep what they find, apart from the sleeping princess, but dare not leave without her.

How Did We Get Here

This product comes about due to the confluence of several factors.

First, I had planned to do a series of fairy tale-based adventures for the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, titled Faerie Tales from Unlit Shores. The idea was to combine classic fairy tales with one or more strong Appendix N influences, to create something that accentuated the folkloric (and often dark) fey elements of the original tale and the adventurous energy of Appendix N fiction.

Second, my good friend Raechel Henderson, who was the first person to ever pay me for a piece of writing, had a Kickstarter project that was moving slowly. I asked my readers to help spread the word about Raechel’s project, in return for which I would write a free adventure. The adventure you are now reading is that free adventure. Her project, Spellbound and Spindles, is related to fairy tales too, making this a perfect tribute to those who contributed either with dollars or links. More information on her project can be found at http://eggplantproductions.com/spellbound-and-spindles/.

Finally, Mark Gedak of Purple Duck Games not only agreed to publish the follow up series of fairy talebased adventures, but also to publish the free adventure  professionally. You will be seeing at least five more adventure in this series, creating a full arc from 0-level to level 5. If they are popular, I (or others working with Purple Duck Games) might do more.

I hope you like them.

Back from the Trinity College Book Sale!

Trinity College's annual book sale is on until October 28th.

I've just come back, after having grabbed a bunch of works by the authors mentioned in Appendix N, as well as a few other works of interest.

For my collection of Appendix N authors, I managed to pick up:

Fantasy, by Poul Anderson
Image of the Beast by Philip José Farmer

Two Hawks from Earth by Philip José Farmer

The Champion of Garathorm by Michael Moorcock
The Dragon in the Sword by Michael Moorcock
Spell of the Witch World by Andre Norton
Swords Against Darkness IV, edited by Andrew J. Offutt
John the Balladeer by Manly Wade Wellman
Roadmarks by Roger Zelazny

Although I didn't grab them (having already purchased copies), deCamp's Lest Darkness Fall and Zelazny's Jack of Shadows were both there in the fantasy and science fiction section.  The first was marked at $2, and the second was a hardcover but probably not more than $5.  If you live in the Toronto area, and  you are interested in grabbing these books, I wish you the best of luck.  I am not sure how long they will be there.

There was also a copy of Philip José Farmer's The Wind-Whales of Ishmael, which is worth grabbing if you can get it.

Not Appendix N, but interesting/useful, I picked up:

Life in the Medieval University by R. S. Rait
The Medieval Castle by M. E. Reeves
Medieval Women by Eileen Power
Njal's Saga, Penguin Classics edition
Hecate's Cauldron, edited by Susan M. Schwartz
The Stone Book by Alan Garner

Overall, I spend under $40 Canadian to obtain all of these titles, and I am pretty happy with my purchases.  If you happen to live in Toronto, again, it is well worth your time to check it out.

Some Thoughts on the DCC Campaign Length

To answer a question posed on the Goodman Games forums, I did some calculation about how long it would take a group of PCs to go from 1^st to 10^th level.  If the average encounter per adventure is 2 XP, and the average adventure has 14 encounters which the PCs engage in/get XP for, then you can assume

1 adventure (28 XP vs 10 XP needed) = level 1.

2 adventures (56 XP vs 50 XP needed) = level 2.

4 adventures (112 XP vs 110 XP needed) = level 3.

7 adventures (196 XP vs 190 XP needed) = level 4.

11 adventures (308 XP vs 290 XP needed) = level 5.

15 adventures (420 XP vs 410 XP needed) = level 6.

20 adventures (560 XP vs 550 XP needed) = level 7.

26 adventures (728 vs 710 XP needed) = level 8.

32 adventures (896 vs 890 XP needed) = level 9.

39 adventures (1092 vs 1090 XP needed) = level 10.

The foregoing assumes, though, an average rate of XP per adventure, which may not be the case, and does not take setbacks such as character death or XP-draining un-dead into account. Adjusting XP given will produce faster or slower rates of advancement. Shorter adventures may not count for a full adventure using the foregoing formula. Your Mileage May Vary.

Now, to make things even more interesting, my group averages 3-4 sessions to complete an adventure.  In this case, if we assume that some 40+ adventures is about right (as you want the PCs to have at least one adventure with their cool new 10^th level characters!), with my group one would expect 120 to 160 sessions, if all things were equal, to reach such an exalted level.  Averaging one session per week would result in a period of just over two and a half years of play.

If one instead assumes a sandbox, one cannot assume that, especially as the characters grow in power, they will be equally challenged by every encounter.  In fact, some higher-level adventures may offer a paucity of XP-earning encounters in exchange for either a shorter play time or other tangible rewards (such as the world not ending).

In my experience, though, DCC campaigns (much like AD&D campaigns in a sandbox-type setting) are not about single heroes going from Point A to Point Z with no stops in-between.  In actual play, I have found that most players prefer to have multiple characters active within the setting, each of which has his or her own agenda.  In this way, my home DCC campaign consists of characters which have reached up to 3^rd level legitimately, plus a spattering of higher-level characters initially created for playtests under the agreement that they would then be usable in the gameworld.

The result is a system robust enough to show progression, but with a progression that demonstrably slows once the characters gain a bit of oomph.  In my experience, this allows game play to recall the adventures of Appendix N characters, which are often in the same power range with regards to their own worlds – powerful enough to make a difference, but not so powerful that they cannot be hurt.  To me, this is very satisfying.

Burned! (Spellburned, that is)

Spellburn Episode 12: Invoke Daniel Bishop

Freaking Cool Artwork

When I first proposed Prince Charming, Reanimator, to Mark Gedak at Purple Duck Games, I was imagining that we would use some of the classic fairy tale illustrations in the project.  After all, many of the really old images are now in the public domain.  As a reminder, I am personally making no money on the project, and the pdf version will be free.  So, under circumstances like these, keeping costs down is a logical step to take.  That Mark would have to turn my sketch map into something cool was a given…and I think you will agree that Kristian Richards did an excellent job on the cartography, even without being forced to see the scraps I gave her to work with!

Imagine my surprise this morning when I was “mentioned” by Mark on Google+, and I caught a glimpse of the artwork commissioned for the module!  Wow!  The immediate result of this is that I had to post, if only to share some of these wonderful illustrations. 

I was lucky enough to be asked onto the Spellburn podcast (and that has not been released yet, but I’ll drop a note here when it is), and we talked a bit about adventure creation.  In the case of the FT series (Faerie Tales from Unlit Shores), I went about the process by choosing a number of classic fairy tales, both known and less known, to draw from.  Then I mated them with a number of Appendix N stories, so that there is a synthesis between the classic material and nods toward the material that Dungeon Crawl Classics is based on.  Then I re-read all the original materials while making notes on images and themes I wished to use, considered encounters and locations, and started doing some basic relationship sketches that would later be turned into a sketch map. 

An homage to other work does not simply re-use the material, but rather re-imagines it in some fashion. While Prince Charming, Reanimator includes many nods to H.P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West, Reanimator and Charles Perrault’s version of Sleeping Beauty, it also uses other fairy tales for inspiration, as well as other Appendix N fiction, and a healthy dose of just making things up. 

Why should you plan on getting this adventure?

(1)  It’s free in pdf.

(2)  The artwork and cartography are amazing.

(3)  It is a 0-level funnel with a dragon.

(4)  It has a basic write-up for a new patron.

(6)  My older daughter refused to playtest it because the idea stepped all over her cherished childhood memories.  To paraphrase, “Prince Charming is supposed to be a nice guy, not somebody who marries dead people.”

(7)  Did I mention that it’s free in pdf?  A Print-on-demand option is also being planned for.

I’ll give a shout out when it is released, and hope you enjoy it.  For more H.P. Lovecraft-inspired fun, and 0-level funnel mayhem, look for The Arkham Grinder, coming soon from Crawl!Fanzine.

Dungeon Crawl Classics: Short Story or Novel?

One of the objections to the megadungeon concept in the Dungeon Crawl Classics role-playing game is that the source fiction of Appendix N is primarily short stories, and that the DCC rpg works best as a series of short stories in consequence.

Well, there is certainly some truth to the idea that many of the Appendix N authors wrote primarily short fiction, as they were writing for the pulps.  Robert E. Howard, for example, wrote primarily short stories.  There is only one Conan novel, The Hour of the Dragon, and his planetary adventure novel, Almuric, seems to make up the list of Howard's longer fantasy.  Fritz Leiber, of course, wrote short stories that sometimes strung together into longer plots.  H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth were also primarily short story writers.  For Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath are notable exceptions.  The Lurker at the Threshold was completed by August Derleth from a Lovecraft fragment.

In the case of Manly Wade Wellman, Howard, Lord Dunsany, Lovecraft, or Derleth, one story may very well be disconnected from other stories, even in the same series.  It matters little what order Wellman's Hok the Mighty or John the Balladeer stories are read, for instance.  In other cases, such as the stories of Gardner Fox or Leiber, the order matters quite a bit, because the stories resolve into larger plots.  These are not so much short stories, but serialized novels.

(Manly Wade Wellman went on to write five "John the Balladeer" novels, of which I have managed to obtain The Old Gods Waken and After Dark, the first two.  When one compares that to the short stories, which can be collected in a single book, one has to wonder in this case whether it is fair to say Wellman is writing primarily short stories or novels with this character.)

If we examine Appendix N, 22 specific books are recommended and 13 specific series.  Of the 22 books, 20 are novels and 2 are collections of short stories.  Of the 13 series, 4 may be considered series of short stories, although I would argue that the listed series of Gardner Fox are novels that were published serially, and that the "Fafhrd & Gray Mouser" series by Fritz Leiber in places comes close to being the same.

The megadungeon model does not require that each session revolve around the megadungeon, but merely that it always be part of the background in the event that the players are looking for something to have their PCs do.  It is a convenient resource to allow the players to choose their own course - if they absolutely refuse to follow rumours and plot hooks to Hirot, they can choose to explore westward into the Great Ruins of Thereitis.

While many believe that the megadungeon was invented by J.R.R.T.'s vast ruins of Moria, or the halls of Thror under the Lonely Mountain, one can discover vast underground tunnels and ruins in the writing of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Gardner Fox, Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and Margaret St. Clair.  Vast ruins (including underground ruins of many levels) also feature in Sterling Lanier's Hiero's Journey.

Like it or not, the vast ruin, and the network of underground tunnels, are as Appendix N as any other aspect of gaming.  Likewise, novels are at least as influential as short stories in Appendix N fiction.  As a consequence, the megadungeon is an apt fixture in many (but not all) Dungeon Crawl Classics campaigns.  It provides a place for the PCs to explore, it allows the players to make meaningful decisions about what quests to undertake, and it gives the judge a place to locate lost civilizations, forbidden magic, and all of that goodness that puts the "dungeon crawl" into "Dungeon Crawl Classics".

Your Dungeon Crawl Classics Monster Manual

Monsters should be unique, but creatures in the world are not always so.  In the Dungeon Crawl Classics game, Appendix L suggests strongly that certain creatures probably exist in most DCC worlds....their languages do.  Likewise, the descriptions of certain creatures imply as assumption of qualities both known and unknown.

In many of the works from which the game derives, that pantheon suggested by Appendix N of the original Dungeon Master's Guide, there are both unique and recurrent creatures.  Indeed, examining both the DCC rpg modules put out by Goodman Games and by third party publishers, one sees the same thing.  While every adventure has unique creatures, references to the Cyclopedia of Creatures in the core rules is not altogether unheard of.  And creatures devised for one adventure may very well appear in other adventures by the same author.

This is not to suggest that monsters should be "generic" - even the orcs of Middle Earth showed variety between the orcs of Moria, of Mordor, and of Saruman.  Different, too, were the goblins/orcs first encountered by Bilbo in The Hobbit.

A case in point, related to re-usability of monsters is the existence of opossumen in many of the Purple Sorcerer "Sunken City" series of modules.  One cannot imagine that crocodillos are found in only one location, either.  Certain monsters are clearly more far-ranging than a single adventure location.  And that is as it should be.  While Conan may have fought many unique monsters, it is difficult imagining Middle Earth without orcs and various giant spiders. Note that it is the blend of unique creatures (Tom Bombadil, the barrow wights, the ents of Fangorn Forest, the Guardian of the Pool) and the ubiquitous (orcs, elves, giant spiders, trolls) that makes Middle Earth seem both real and compelling.  In the Conan stories, natural animals and men take the part of JRRT's spiders and orcs (or goblins), but the effect is the same.

A DCC module can be considered not only a unique adventure location, but also a sourcebook for creatures that may be re-used.  Some modules are better for this than others, because some adventures use more truly unique creatures.  While Joseph Goodman's People of the Pit yields little that is not location-specific (although still recommended!), a module such as Michael Curtis' Emirikol Was Framed! or The Sea Queen Escapes offers several creatures that may appear elsewhere in your campaign world.

At the risk of being self-serving, my own CE4: Sir Amoral the Misbegotten has details about nine monsters. While the titular Sir Amoral's ghost is unlikely to be used elsewhere, seven of the other eight are certainly usable in other locations.  Even where a creature is listed as unique, it is not tied to the module's setting.  

For example the Satryx – a goat-horned humanoid creature whose skin is covered with tattoos denoting strength and power. She bears two short swords, which she can use ambidextrously, allowing her to make two attacks each round. Her skin is like iron. If disarmed, she can spend an Action Die to make one of her swords leap back into her hand with a 1 in 3 chance.

If both weapons are disarmed, she will surrender immediately, bowing and fading away. Her swords are left behind her as proof of victory, and they function for her victor only as if they had a +1 bonus to attack rolls and damage.

There is only one Satryx. She cannot be permanently slain – an attack that would do so simply causes her to fade away (in whatever gory state her body may be in), leaving her swords, to reform the next time she is summoned. Once slain, she cannot be summoned until after the next full moon.

The Satryx might have information about the correct ritual to use patron bond with the King of Elfland, and be sought out for her knowledge.

Satryx: Init +2; Atk short sword +2 melee (1d6); AC 18; HD 2d6; hp 12; MV 30’; Act 1d20 or 2d16; SP ambidexterity, return disarmed sword 1 in 3, cannot be permanently slain; SV Fort +2 , Ref +4, Will +2; AL N.

If you purchase pdfs, the copy & paste function on Adobe Acrobat and your word processing program of choice makes it especially easy to assemble an ever-growing Monster Manual for your home game.  If you purchase only hard-copy products, a few minutes typing can yield the same results with a bit more effort. You may find that copying location-specific creatures is a waste of your time and effort - the goal here is to create a compendium of creatures that can be used for random encounters, or introduced to a scenario of your own creation.  

If you are yourself a creator of published adventures, note the generous terms of usage on many 3pp DCC products.  In this case, creating such a Monster Manual (with attribution noted) allows you to have a quick & ready reference for creatures you can use in your published work.  For example, with Dragon's Hoard Publishing, there are a whole host of dinosaurs in Angels, Daemons, & Beings Between that can be used with correct attribution, and in The Revelation of Mulmo, there are lunar creatures just waiting to be used in a published adventure.  Explicitly.

Another good resource for DCC monsters is Appendix M.  My submission for the first issue of DCC Adventure Magazine & News (which really needs its own website so that I can link to it!) contains not one, not eight, not ten, but well over 20 monsters that a clever judge could make great use of...

OGL info for the Satryx:

Campaign Element: The Seven Deadly Skills of Sir Amoral the Misbegotten © 2013, Purple Duck Games; Author Daniel J. Bishop

Cheat Sheets, Elves, and Wizards

This weekend, Mark Gedak of Purple Duck Games is going to be running a playtest of Prince Charming, Reanimator, at the Great Falls Gaming Rendezvous.  Because I am a firm believer in the XP system devised by Joseph Goodman & co. for the Dungeon Crawl Classics role-playing game, the adventure is designed with the assumption that characters will “level up” to level 1 when they reach 10 XP.

In my experience, both running home games and games as part of the DCC World Tour, most groups can level their characters, even if unfamiliar with the system, in about 5-10 minutes.  However, I wanted to make things even easier for Mark, so I created a “cheat sheet” for every class, on a single page, that covers going from level 0 to level 1 only.  It briefly explains all pertinent class abilities.

Trying to distill down class abilities to a shorter form made me notice some interesting things.  First off, I had gotten into the habit of letting dwarves smell all precious metals.  They do not; they can smell gold and gems.  This is actually an important distinction, because it means that the dwarf does not eliminate all need to search.

More interesting, though, was the elf.  There is a bit in the Judge’s Rules section about how wizards gain spells, but I am not at all certain now that this should apply to an elf.  As the cleric knows spells based upon the agency of his deity, I am now going to allow elves to know spells from level 1 onward without study, based on the agency of their otherworldly cohorts.  However, the flip side of that is I am also no longer going to allow elves to burn Luck to avoid corruption.

The Glass Cage

If you happen to live in the Toronto area, my good friend Garett Oliver is currently appearing in The Glass Cage (a play by J.B. Priestly) with Snowdrop Productions.  Now I know that this doesn't fit with the standard RPG focus of this blog, but (1) Garett is a player in my home campaign, and (2) Garett is also one of the editorial minds behind DAMN....an upcoming outlet for more DCC goodness.

Not only is this a fantastic opportunity to support a fellow gamer, but it is your chance to put a face to a Silmarillius on the Goodman Games Forums.

Background, review, and review.


That's Garett in the picture to the right.  

He's the guy in the vest. 

He is also in the picture below.  The one who is not in the dress.

You can find the stage listings here.  How sweet it is to run games for such talented individuals!