"Challenging Games"

For me, a challenging game requires that there is a chance for failure as well as a chance for success, and that the degree of failure or success is not an on/off switch. There has to be a palette of outcomes that depends upon the choices made by the players to determine just how much you win, or just how badly you lose.

It must be possible to obtain enough context to make rational decisions, and the consequences of those decisions must follow from the context and the choices made. NPCs should be mostly trustworthy, but follow the 10/80/10 rule, where 10% would never betray a trust, 80% could be motivated to do so if the right levers are found, and 10% are scum.

There should be lots of small-risk, small-reward jobs, quite a few high-risk high-reward jobs, and a few low-risk high-reward jobs.

There should be enough cleverly hidden rewards that all of "the treasure" will not always be found. Certainly, treasure does not teleport around behind you until you find it in convenient parcels that match your wish list.

Poor planning and/or bad luck sometimes means your cost in resources is greater than the benefits of an expedition. Conversely, good planning is rewarded, and good luck can bring you startling success.

There GM should be on the side of the players, but not sway his decisions or his die rolls on that basis.

Played by the book, any Gygax-era D&D will produce a challenging game. There is no need to "toughen up" anything; that was the expected play experience. Likewise, examine treasure placement in any of the original modules. A lot of treasure was not "intended" to be found - it was there to reward the odd bit of clever thinking or good fortune that might occur in play. Read in particular the advice in B1 about placing treasure, where it is made explicit that a good dungeon will have treasures that are not found.

(In fact, it is a critical failing of certain analyses of older modules that all treasure is assumed to be found, despite explicit statements to the contrary.)

To me, a challenging game is one where you take charge of, and ownership for, your victories or failures. Of course, a challenging game requires a fair GM who is as interested in meeting the challenges imposed by adjudicating the players' clever ideas as it does players who are interested in meeting the challenges of the GM's campaign milieu.

YMMV.

Now In Print.....

Mystic Bull has this puppy in print now at Lulu, and has reduced the pdf at RPGnow.

I have two adventures within, Icon of the Blood Goddess and Mermaids From Yuggoth, all as part of my fiendish plan to have more DCC RPG adventures available by me than by Harley Stroh.

(I kid of course.  The more DCC adventures by Harley Stroh, Joseph Goodman, Michael Curtis, Jon Marr, Paul Wolfe, etc., that are out there, the better it is for us all.)

But I still think you'll like the adventures in this book!

Condolences for John Adams

John Adams of Brave Halfling Publishing and his wife recently lost their baby daughter, who was due in July. As a parent of three, I can only imagine how devastating this must be.

In my contacts with John, he has always impressed me as a genuinely good person, someone who is passionate about what he does, and about the people around him.

I know that it would mean something to me that people cared enough to do something, even if it can't undo a loss.

So, on Sunday, at 9 pm Toronto time, I'm going to send something to John and his family.  The card will just be "We sympathize with your loss, and we want you to know that we are here for you.  From your friends in the DCC community."

Because, really, we are a community.  Or we should be.

If you want to contribute, great.  I'll be using PayPal, and what I send will be based on what I can afford.  You can add to that amount by sending a donation to ravencrowking at hotmail dot com.  Your donation will go to sending condolences, and no other purpose.  Cut-off time is 8 pm Eastern Daylight Time.  Any contribution, small or large, is welcome.  There will be no list of contributors, because it is better if it comes from all of us, even those of us living paycheck to paycheck or who don't use PayPal.

I don't have any better idea.  I feel the need to do something.

Spread the word.  Let's get this done.

$1 Off at Purple Duck Games

You can get $1 off on AL4 or AL5 right now, by gaining the secret code from the Purple Duck blog (http://purpleduckgames.blogspot.ca/2013/04/april-14th-20th-2013.html).

Feel free to let others know!

Have You Seen My Children?

Did you like The Thing in the Chimney, my unofficial DCC holiday adventure from last year?  Well, I'm giving away more.

On my birthday, August 4^th 2013, I am going to release another free unofficial product that I will email to anyone who posts to a blog, writes a review, or posts on Google+ or similar, about any of the following products:

AL1:  Bone Hoard of the Dancing Horror (Purple Duck Games)

AL3:  Through the Cotillion of Hours (Purple Duck Games)

AL5:  Stars in the Darkness (Purple Duck Games)
CE1:  The Falcate Idol (Purple Duck Games)
CE2:  The Black Goat (Purple Duck Games)
CE3:  The Folk of Osmon (Purple Duck Games)

Mermaids From Yuggoth (from In the Prison of the Squid Sorcerer by Mystic Bull Games)

Icon of the Blood Goddess (from In the Prison of the Squid Sorcerer by Mystic Bull Games)

Tomb of the Squonk (part of Pulp Weird Encounters #1 from Mystic Bull Games)

The Thing in the Chimney

Angels, Daemons, and Beings Between (Dragon’s Hoard Publishing)
The Revelation of Mulmo (Dragon’s Hoard Publishing)
The Imperishable Sorceress (Goodman Games, Free RPG Day)
Well of the Worm (Goodman Games, DCC rules conversion of Harley Stroh's adventure, DCC #76.5)

There will be other adventures published between now and then, and as they are published they will be added to the list.  Be on the lookout for:

The Arwich Grinder (Crawl! Fanzine) - This one keeps getting pushed back, so only Rev Dak and a few playtesters can actually comment on it......
CE4:  The Seven Deadly Skills of Sir Amoral the Bastard (Purple Duck Games)
Gifts of the Only (Brave Halfling Publishing)

Why am I doing this? 

First off, I love DCC and I want you to blog about it, write about it, and otherwise help to keep interest about it circulating in the InterWebs.

Second off, these brave publishers took a chance with my work, and I would really like to help them drum up sales for these products.  There should always be a DCC product in the Top 10 at RPGNow IMHO….whether it is the newest release from Goodman Games (and The Sea Queen Escapes is excellent, by the way!) or Purple Sorcerer (ditto Lair of the Mist Men) or Brave Halfling (ditto The Witch of Wydfield).

Third, writing is a lonely occupation, in which you throw your children out into the world, and they never let you know how they are doing.  If you have seen my children, I’d like to know.

Finally, taking a page from J.R.R. Tolkien’s hobbits, I’ve decided to give presents on my birthday.  If this is successful, I might even make it an annual tradition!

How do you qualify?  Follow these simple steps:

(1)  Write something about one of the above products.  Remember that the list will be updated as new products are released.  Love it, hate it, how it played for you, whatever.  What you say is up to you.

 

(2)  Comment on this post with a link to your new piece of writing.  If you’ve written on two or more of these adventures in the past – and I am looking at The Iron Tavern and Tenkar’s Tavern here, although there may be others – you can link to those posts.  If you’re using any of these adventures as a DCC World Tour stop, that would be really cool to hear about.

(3)  Send me an email at ravencrowking at hotmail dot com with your email address.

What’s the Prize?

Because of the low turnout, the prize is a single patron, but one which is fully fleshed out:  Hizzzgrad, Daemonic Lord of Crawling Things.

New Adventures!

http://www.rpgnow.com/product/113799/AL-5%3A-Stars-in-the-Darkness-%5BDCC%5D?filters=0_0_0_0_40050_31817

EDIT:  First review
EDIT:  Second review

AL 5: Stars in the Darkness is now live from Purple Duck Games.  I am very happy with this adventure, and hope you will be too.

In millennia past, the ancestors of the elves protected the stars as they followed their courses, for there are wolves in the outer dark.  Yet what manner of creature would dare to consume stars as though they were sheep in the field?  And what has become of the ancient starherds who once stopped such monsters?  

For such a monster is back - Urstah, the Star-Drinker.  Stars are disappearing from the night sky, and with the loss of those stars, luck is being drained from the world.  Your luck.  

Dare you enter the caverns, face the star-drinker, and release the stars in darkness?



Stars in the Darkness is a DCC adventure designed for four to eight, third level characters, that can easily be dropped into your campaign.  In it, characters seek to stop an ancient evil from arising, with possibly devastating effects should they fail.  

This is an epic adventure where the actions of the PCs affect the very cosmos.  To fail is almost unthinkable.......But can you succeed?

One of the things that I really like about the Dungeon Crawl Classics system is that it encourages adventures which, in other systems, wouldn't occur until characters were very high level indeed.  If I had been writing for other game systems, this module would have been designed for 12-15th level characters!

Although it is not yet out, The Revelation of Mulmo (Dragon's Hoard Publishing) is written, edited, playtested, and is in final art and layout.

This adventure contains 60 encounter areas (!) in and under an "abandoned" elf fortress that may well hold the key to bringing a dead comrade back to life.

Or it may contain grisly death.

This module comes complete with an appendix of extra patrons, completely developed except for patron spells, with which to delight or bedevil your players.

Linking the two modules?  Elves.  If you are tired of seeing elves merely through the lens of J.R.R. Tolkien, then these two modules will give you everything you need to present a race with a higher past and a darker present - and one well in keeping with the literature of Appendix N!

(Not that there are no nods to the Good Professor....but they are twisted nods.)

I worked very hard on writing these, and have had two great teams helping to bring these adventures from concept to (in one case, almost) finished products. 

I really hope you like them.

Some Basic Notes on Adventure Design

I have been doing this for a long, long time.  I started playing Christmas Day 1979, and developed my own adventures by early 1980.  A lot of the articles I found inspirational come from early Dragon magazine, and those are going to be hard to find.  But, feat not! 'cause the basics are not all that difficult.

(1) Brainstorm.  Take some paper, and write all the cool ideas down.  Find links between them.  Let the main ideas begin to percolate through your subconscious.

(2) Never base your adventure on expectations of what the players will do.  Players always do something else.  Make sure that they have meaningful choices.  Make complex maps, with multiple routes, unless there is some important reason not to.

(3) The goal of players in an adventure is to control the situation.  The more they control the situation, the less risk for their characters.  Also, though, this is boring, so the adventure writer must throw in enough situations where things can get out of control so the adventure is exciting.  That way, the GM never has to cheat.  If the animated wooden statues are defeated easily by wood wyrding, some fool will drink the enchanted wine, or get caught in the burning web of a daemonic spider.

(4) Likewise, it is a truism that, unless the GM cheats, no group of players will ever find everything.  Therefore, feel free to put all kinds of odd treasures in interesting places.  Seed enough potential "Woah! That's cool!" moments so that the players have a chance of stumbling into at least one or two of them.

(5) Be true to the setting, even if it means the PCs get hosed/get a huge reward.  Place what you think makes sense in the location, even if it seems out of keeping with a "level X module".  Allowing the setting to make logical sense, even if the players never discover the logic, is important for two reasons.  One, no matter how detailed your adventure, the GM is going to be forced to make a judgement call sooner or later, and the overarching logic is going to be of help here.  Two, the overarching logic is felt by the players in the presentation, even if they do not understand it.  They need to be able to trust that it is there.

(6) Context, context, context!  Once you know what is going on in the setting, and what creatures you are using, consider the clues and evidence that they leave behind.  The more the players have to guess with, the more engaged they will be.  If these clues make an encounter or two easier, that's okay.  That's great, actually.  That's the reward for paying attention.

(7) If you can, put in an area or two where new PCs can be logically introduced.  The larger the adventure, the more important this is.  Harley Stroh's 0-level DCC funnel adventure, Sailors on the Starless Sea, offers an excellent example of this principle.  Likewise Jon Marr's funnel adventures, Perils of the Sunken City and The Ooze Pits of Jonas Gralk.

(8) Try to remember that two things are happening - the PCs are exploring the adventure area, and the players are around the table playing the game.  If you can bridge the two in some way that makes logical sense, you should consider doing so.  For a really good example of this, see Tales of the Scarecrow from James Raggi.  Likewise, some effects in Death Frost Doom depend upon player seating around the table.  Finally, my own Bone Hoard of the Dancing Horror has a nasty knock-on effect when a PC is felled by the titular horror and the player then engages in table talk.

(9) Develop the material enough that any prospective GM can understand what you are trying to convey.  When writing fiction as a younger man, I produced many an unsaleable story simply because I failed to realize that I could not assume that the reader would "get" what I was trying to say unless I actually said it.  I could not simply assume that the reader knew some specific thing that I knew, and I could not assume that the reader would care enough to find out about it because my story felt unresolved.  That is not a fault in the reader; it was a fault in me as the writer.  When I learned this lesson, I started selling stories.  Adventure writing is not that different in this regard:  Be clear about what you are writing. Say what you are trying to say, and say it clearly.

(10) Finally, have fun!  Let your own unique voice and sense of humour come through.  If that means you disregard any or all of the above, so be it.  You should create adventures that you find satisfying.  If you don't feel satisfied, what are the odds anyone else will be?  And, if they are, what difference does it make?  Better faint praise for something you are proud of than overwhelming acclaim for something you find embarrassing!

Somethings Worth Reading

Here's a post worth reading from the Dungeon of Signs blog:  http://dungeonofsigns.blogspot.ca/2013/04/thoughts-regarding-character-mortality.html

The Only Way Out is Through

or, How it Becomes the Players' Game

In a response to a previous post, Vanguard said:

My major objection to all of this is the kind of false choice that the sandbox engenders. The players are thrust into a situation and while the focus of the game does become the thread they follow the most, you're still playing the GMs story, so to speak.

He goes on to say:

I would much rather (for the moment anyway) sit down with the players and talk about what kind of game we want to play and build the world, the setting, and the major conflict together before rolling our characters.

This is interesting, because it seems to suggest that in the first case (the sandbox), the players do not get to play the kind of game that they want.  It also suggests that building the milieu cooperatively results in a fuller experience than exploration of a milieu. That may be true.  Then again, it may not be.

To my mind, no matter what kind of game you are running, player buy-in is mandatory.  Which is another way of saying that, given the freedom to do so, players will always follow the threads that they find interesting, and avoid those they could care less about.  This does not just mean following threads that the GM intends them to follow, it means determining what they would like, determining what they need to do to get it, and laying down threads of their own.  Therefore, I am not at all certain what type of “false choice” Vanguard is referring to. 

Conversely, imagine that you sit down with the players before the game is devised, and discuss it with them thoroughly.  Taking their input into account, you then set to work on the game milieu.  Does this in any way suggest that the game cannot be a sandbox?

Moreover, if the game is intended to be linear, following the “major conflict”, isn’t it still going to be “playing the GM’s story, so to speak” if the GM determines the details and texture of that story?  I.e., if he writes the actual adventures to be used?  This seems to me, therefore, to be a false dilemma.

If the game is linear, and the players become less interested in the “major conflict”, are then given a choice to get off the rails at that point, or do they play through to the grim death?  Is the campaign milieu then still of use to the players and GM?  Or is that work then bundled away and forgotten?  Much of the value of a persistent milieu arises from its very persistence.  The changes wrought on the milieu matter, to a large degree, because they are lasting.

Ultimately, the only way the game ever becomes the players’ game is if they “follow through” – if they decide what they want to wrest from the material presented (at whatever stage of creation it is presented in), and then take charge of their own destinies.  And, no matter how focused a linear model game may seem, ultimately a linear model limits the degree to which you can make meaningful choices in the game.

In games I run, there are three types of adventures that occur:

(1) Persistent Adventure Locations:  Places the players know they can always go to find a little danger, and perhaps a little coin.  The Dungeon of Crows is always a place to go, barring any other pressing business.  Likewise, any old-school campaign megadungeon, such as the ruins of Castle Greyhawk, Barrowmaze, or Undermountain.  Note that wilderness exploration is the same sort of thing.  IMHO, a world cannot have too many persistent adventure locations.

(2) Adventures of Opportunity:  A ship founders on the rocks and is destroyed.  The PCs can attempt to become involved in the salvage, or not, as they desire.  The Ghost Tower of Inverness is making its regular appearance – you can explore it now, or wait another century.  A caravan is looking for guards on its trip to the Eastern Lands.  Princess Zelda was captured by a dragon.  A king offers a prize for the most interesting curiosity presented to his court at midsummer.  Etc.  These are adventures that the players are either interested in, or not, but they don’t get to go back to them if they let them slip by.  The wise GM gives notice for most long in advance, and only fleshes out his notes on these adventures if the players seem interested.

(3) Player-Driven Adventures:  The wizard seeks a new spell.  The warrior seeks a weapon-master who can grant him special knowledge.  The cleric wants to quest to cure those suffering from disease in order to undo divine disapproval.  The players set the basic parameters (“I would like to do this”) or even the exacting parameters (“I would like to do this, and I think it might be accomplished by doing that”) and the GM runs with it.

Lots of adventures actually combine these types, of course.  The wizard seeks a spell, thought to be contained in the Ghost Tower, for example.  The warrior seeks a sword thought to be lost in Undermountain.  The Thieves’ Carnival occurs in a persistent city location, but offers unique opportunities for the larcenous at heart.  Etc., etc.

Anyway, that’s how I do it.