The Following Thing (DCC Halloween monster)

The Following Thing: Init +2; Atk bite +4 melee (1d3 plus DC 13 paralyzing venom); AC 15; HD 3d8+10; hp 30; MV 30’ or climb 30’; Act 1d20; SP venom, pursue, impossible to kill, one night only; SV Fort +4, Ref +4, Will +18; AL C.

It looks like a well-dressed man in a long black suit with tails, but its face is a stag skull with dead white eyes. It does not walk, but crawls on all surfaces with equal ease. Once it selects a victim, it will pursue that victim relentlessly, attempting to paralyze it with its venomous bite (Fort DC 13 or paralyzed 1d3 rounds) in order to remove and eat its victim’s eyes. It can remove and devour one eye each round from a helpless victim.

Once a victim is selected, the Following Thing can always follow it, appearing 1d6 x 10’ away in a random direction each time an insurmountable barrier is placed between it and its prey. (The judge may wait to have the Following Thing appear so as to build up tension.) If successfully Turned or slain, its body fades away with a high-pitched giggling noise, and it is forced to wait 3d6 turns (30 to 180 minutes) to reform and pursue. It is impossible to kill.

The Following Thing is only active against its selected victim for one night; once dawn arrives the victim is no longer followed. How it chooses its victims is unknown, but some have speculated that miscast spells or the gods’ great disapproval might draw it. In some tales, the Following Thing appears as a punishment, sent by forsworn patrons. Few people are ever selected by the Following Thing more than once, and the Wise believe that there is only one such monster in all the multiverse.

(The wise may, of course, be wrong.)

Throw this monster into your Halloween adventure!

Tough Love

Here is a little bit of GMing philosophy - when you play in my game, I am on your side. I really hope that you do well. I just won't do anything to ensure that you do well. Want to attempt something unusual? I will entertain what seem to be reasonable arguments. I will assign what seems like a fair chance, to me. The odds are good that, if I make a ruling, that ruling is skewed in the players' favour.

But the dice still fall where they may, and I will fudge neither rolls nor statistics nor monster behaviour to ensure either your success or your survival. I want you to succeed - I really do - but I want you to succeed in a meaningful way. That means giving your opponents the brains that they should have, and it means allowing bad things to happen as well as good. That means allowing a TPK to happen. And happen again. And happen again after that. Unless you do something to make it not happen.

When I brought this up on DragonsFoot, I was told that this was smoke and mirrors - the GM cannot both be on the players' side and act as an impartial referee. Let me rephrase that, because what I am saying is that the GM can be on the players' side and still understand the importance of refereeing impartially. Just as a player can advocate for his character fairly, without cheating. Hoping for a good outcome does not mean you screw the game in order to ensure it occurs.

If I was acting against the players, or even creating a completely impartial scenario, it would be all too easy to create situations where TPKs were inescapable. I would have a thick folder filled with the dead, and no players at the table, because, really, what would be the point? Even a "killer" dungeon like Death Frost Doom or The Tomb of Horrors is more player-friendly than a similar situation would "realistically" be.

And I play games with people I like. I feel for them when they lose a beloved character. I am happy for them when they succeed beyond hope.

I am on their side.

But I won't do anything to make them win. And the dice may not be.

And it is not always obvious to the players that I am on their side, either. It's fun when the going gets tough, and I am grinning like a hyena waiting for a wildebeest to fall. Even though I hope they find a way out, I relish the tight spot for what it is. 

These are not contradictory positions to take. Any player worth his salt relishes the dangerous moments as well. Although she might not be able to focus on her enjoyment of those moments at the time (being busy with trying to find a way to survive, or mourning the loss of a character), but those are the moments that are relived through gamer chatter days, months, and years later. 

A good GM is on the side of the players, and wants them to do well and have fun, but is not on the side of the characters. A good GM knows that pulling punches removes the value of choice from the players, just as a good GM ensures that context is available for choices, but doesn't force context on the players if they choose to ignore it/not look for it. A good GM allows the players to make choices, and allows the characters to live or die by the quality of those choices.


A GM who punishes characters when the players make good choices, or coddles the characters when the players make poor choices, is undesirable. Both remove the greatest value that the tabletop game offers over other forms of entertainment.

Some players may think they want easy victories, or even guaranteed victories, but handing crap like that out is not what someone on your side does.

Call it tough love.

Updates

I’ve been a bit quiet on the blogging front because I have been busy elsewhere. The earlier part of 2014 was slow going for me, and I suffered massively from writer’s block. It is tough to be prolific when you feel the words you are penning just don’t convey what you want them to. It isn’t that I got nothing done, but everything I managed to complete was a lot more difficult than it should have been.

The material I composed for Goodman Games’ Peril on the Purple Planet kickstarter seems to have gotten that out of my system, and I am firing on all cylinders again. That stuff was just easy and fun to write, and it seems to have gotten me back into the groove. The end result is that I have a lot of projects piled up at the end of the year, which means you’ll be seeing more Daniel J. Bishop titles in 2015 than you did in 2014.

The initial text for FT 2: The Portsmouth Mermaid (Purple Duck Games) has been playtested, and was well received. I was a bit concerned about how easy the text would be to follow – I have run this sort of adventure before, where the PCs can literally change the whole course of the game by their decisions – but this is the first time I have tried to make sure that my notes were as useful to another GM as they would be to me.

In a typical dungeon, descriptions of what is where, and how it interacts, are adequate for play. In a town, you need to describe the players and the factions, the town itself, what events will occur if the PCs don’t change things, what events are likely, and supply a slew of material for when the game curves unexpectedly. You’ll be getting all of that and more with The Portsmouth Mermaid.

The next two CE Series campaign elements for Purple Duck Games are nearly complete. In addition, there is a nifty project Perry Fehr and I will be working on for Purple Duck.

I have some other work for Goodman Games (see the Gen Con program guide) and Purple Duck to get off my plate as the year closes, but everything is progressing smoothly there. Going into 2015, there are some secret projects in the works; I have been asked to help with something near and dear to my heart, and which I think the DCC community will be rightly excited about. It’ll be my first time writing for the company involved.

In my home game this Thursday, I expect more exploration of the Anomalous Subsurface Environment, which I am using with Dungeon Crawl Classics. The PCs have explored most of the Gatehouse, and have opened the way to the dungeon proper. They just began to explore the first level when the game ended last week. I cannot praise Patrick Wetmore’s work on ASE enough.

The Judge Js on Spellburn disagreed with me regarding The Wizardarium of Calabraxis, which I continue to rate as a Critical Hit and regard as the #1 “must own” adventure for DCC. YMMV.  But you should absolutely also pick up Prayers of the Forgotten and Stronghold of the Wood Giant Shaman, also recently reviewed on Spellburn. Very, very good stuff there.

They Came to Umerica

Three weeks ago I picked up a new player via the Dungeon Crawl Classics World Tour 2014 program and running games at Fan Expo Toronto. Combines with some of my existing players expressing a wish to get their hands on firearms, or playing mutant characters, and the appearance of a funnel adventure in Crawling Under a Broken Moon #3, I embarked a new set of adventurers upon the path to glory, gold, and an untimely death.

Two weeks ago, I ran the first part of The Mall Maul from CUaBM#3, a bit of awesome sauce that, frankly, I mangled in the translation. This was due to a lack of prep on my part; although I read the adventure thoroughly, I should have prepared some flavour text ahead of time. Perhaps I should also have photocopied the map onto graph paper, and used coloured pencils to indicate main thoroughfares (mall walkways), service walkways, etc. I don’t spend enough time in malls to have done the setting justice.

For those of you not getting Crawling Under a Broken Moon, the setting is post-Apocalyptic Umerica – think Thundarr the Barbarian meets Mad Max meets Gamma World meets Dungeon Crawl Classics and you won’t be that far off. In the funnel adventure, the PCs are filling a tribute truck to buy off some raiders – when they hit 200 “tribute truck” points, they get 10 XP and level up.

There was some bitching about this from some quarters. I have been running the game where, when the 0-level PCs hit 10 XP, they level. This led to overly cautious play, where every item to PCs started with had to be considered as to whether or not it could count as tribute, and the players simply refused to explore the stranger areas of the mall until they were absolutely sure that there was nothing left in the mall proper. Each step of the way was handled with the sort of mind-numbing thoroughness that only comes with not having made driven home a time limit before the raiders arrive.

By the second week, for part 2 of The Maul Maul, I was a little better prepared. One thing that helped was a list of random items, effectively dungeon dressing for the mall. We had ended with the defeat of the main Malllock nest, and the tribute truck still not close to full. The second half of the mall is cooler than the first, but it is also harder to describe. Again, better prep in this area would have served me well. In any event, they hit the food court, filled the truck, levelled, and we ended it there.

Some notes:

• If I was doing this over, I would prep descriptions better, and perhaps scour the Internet for applicable visuals.
• Instead of dealing with TT values, I would simply have granted 1 XP per 20 TT found, and give the players a rough idea of how full the truck seemed to be.
• I would have copied and coloured the map to give me visual cues as an aid in describing places.
• A list of random junk on the first session, to aid in descriptions, would have helped.
• I had to make calls about leveling using Crawling Under a Broken Moon. Are mutants a race class? Can they take another class? I ruled that they could use half-levels, or they could use race-as-class. There was some pretty vocal bitching about this. Tough. When options are added, if you don’t like them, don’t use them, but don’t drag the game into a bitching match about the options you would use if you were running the game, unless you are actually prepared to do so.

Part 3 got off to a better start, as the players determined that they had cleared out the mall. There was a lot of talk about them keeping the stuff they had gotten for the tribute truck, or just keeping the tribute truck, but in the end the fact that they liked the local priest of Kizz got them to take his advice and leave their Podunk little town and head east towards Denethix….the raiders work for the wizard Dundee the Crocodile Lord, and in this part of Umerica, known as the Land of One Thousand Towers, the best you can hope for from any wizard is that they ignore you.

Along the way to Denethix, they meet two caravan guards, and go to rescue a merchant in the lair of several sick lion-like humanoids known as Moktars. This leads them to a cave atop a nearby mountain, which promises the possibility of loot. They decide to go to the closest (very poor) village and get some help – a new batch of 0-levels for everyone. All have a group of 4 PCs (mixed 1^st and 0-level), and head back up the mountain.

When last we left off, Suicidal Steve the 0-level Elf was hit in the head with a trap made of a swinging pipe. So far, no inhabitants of the newly-opened dungeon have reared their head, but the signs (literal signs on doors) indicate that there may be some useful technology around somewhere.

And that is where we pick up tonight……

(In case it is unclear, I am adapting Patrick Wetmore's excellent Anomalous Subsurface Environment to Dungeon Crawl Classics. This is a good fit, especially for the post-Apocalyptic environment of Crawling Under a Broken Moon. ASE also contains the means, via Michael Curtis, to connect the world of CUaBM with one's regular game, so that this new chapter is just the long way 'round to going "home" to where the regular PCs are. I think that's cool.)