Campaign catch-up I: The temple in the sands

It has been a very long time since I first posted about my campaign.  Despite my absence from the blog, I'm happy to report that the game hasn't died - although one character did.  As I'm summarising a few months of play, these catch-up episodes will be a little sketchy.

Further investigations of the temple in the sands revealed a good many secrets and some fair share of treasure.  The riddle of the altar was finally revealed when the characters traced the path of the sun, opening up a hidden compartment filled with treasure. (1) Excavation showed that there was a great trap door before the altar, leading to a bizarre crypt.

Review: "The Forbidden Land" by RC Pinnell

The Forbidden Land by RC Pinnell is a free hex-crawl scenario hosted on Dragonsfoot.  The design is oriented towards Classic D&D (B/X, BECMI, or the Cyclopedia) but the work leans lightly enough on the statistical information that I think it would work well under any old school rules.  Indeed, it wouldn't be too hard to use The Forbidden Land with new school or non-D&D rules.  The scenario is recommended for somewhat seasoned characters, from about 4th level, but the actual difficulty will be determined in the process of preparing the work for play.

Review: "The Lair of Largash the Lurid" by Michael Mills

The Lair of Largash the Lurid is a free introductory module (released as Pay What You Want with a recommended price of nothing) by Michael Mills of Canister & Grape Wargames.  The scenario is intended for use with Classic D&D, specifically B/X, and would run very easily under Labyrinth Lord.  Other old school rules could be used with a little bit of conversion.

OneBookShelf to stop stocking Indie RPGs?

OneBookShelf (who run DriveThruRPG, RPGNow, among others) recently announced a new policy on rejecting "Offensive Content".  Here's the core of the policy:

Review: "The Craft Dungeon of Reynaldo Lazendry" by Jeremy Reaban

The Craft Dungeon of Reynaldo Lazendry is a pay what you want module designed by Jeremy Reaban.  For the sake of full disclosure: I don't know Jeremy but I do follow his very useful OSR News and Reviews blog, and I believe that he's a reader of War beneath the Earth.  If he decides to never read my blog again on the strength of what I say here, then I'll just have to live with that.

Impressions: Geoffrey C. Grabowski's "The Dreams of Ruin"

Earlier this year, Geoffrey C. Grabowski, writer of the Exalted RPG, released The Dreams of Ruin.  This free module is nominally as a Labyrinth Lord product but compatible with a great many retroclones and the games that inspired them.  At the time it first came out, I took a look with an eye to review and got bogged down in the text.  The recent publication of The Dreams of Ruin in print format inspired a second look.

Review: Night of the Mad Kobold by "Mad Dave" Olson

Cut to the Chase Games are giving away "Mad Dave" Olson's WK0 Night of the Mad Kobold until the 16th of September.  The adventure is aimed at six 1st-level adventurers and is written under Swords and Wizardry.  Converting to Original or Classic D&D, or to Retroclones based on these systems won't be a problem, but I think Cut to the Chase are a little quick to say the module can be run under OSRIC.  It can, but it will need some conversion along the way.

Review: "Ice Maidens of the Frozen Horn" by RC Pinnell

Back in May, I reviewed RC Pinnell's Cold Drake Canyon, a module with an engaging ambition but lacklustre achievement.  Pinnell's latest on Dragonsfoot, Ice Maidens of the Frozen Horn, is another module outside of the usual design parameters.  Styled as "X14-T", Ice Maidens is described as a tournament module for the 1981 B/X rules, but it would work very well under the other Classic lines or their clones.  There's a sensible note that running the module under AD&D would require conversion and - perhaps for my benefit - permission to modify the scenario is granted but not repeated too many times.  The scenario is a little unclear but it seems to be aimed at six to nine characters of 8th to 12th level.

Winning Dungeons and Dragons

It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game.

There's a long-standing view that role-playing games are not things that can be won or lost.  There's always more of the game to play, and in any case the players are mainly collaborating with one another so it doesn't make sense to talk about competition.  To make sense of this, let's consider a group of players - for simplicity's sake, we'll call them FCB.

FCB are a group with different ages and backgrounds, but they're united by their enjoyment of the game.  Every year, they'll be off to different locations, running the risk of defeat and injury in the hopes of winning fame and prizes.  Due to conflicting interests, schedules - not to mention the difficulty of wrangling a large group - many of the group won't be at a particular game.  In addition, some of their players are more skilled and more active, and these elite players tend to get the lion's share of the rewards.  On the other hand, the less skilled members of FCB often learn a great deal from the better players.

Examining Appendix B: Random Wilderness Terrain

I'm a big fan of the random tables in the DMG, because I feel that these charts make me less partisan to the development of the scenario.  If the difficulty is being generated more by dice throw than my hand, I don't feel that it's my fault if the PCs are too successful or not successful enough.  Rather, my job is to give the mechanical description some more life and excitement, and to act as a fairly impartial referee with regard to the rules.  Invariably I turn to Appendix A to provide a starting point for stocking my dungeons.  But recently I've been looking more closely at its less-fancied sibling, Appendix B: Random Wilderness Terrain.

The introduction to these tables includes the puzzling instruction that each space can be "1 mile, or larger".  Now, I'm not about to quibble on the shifts in terrain, because the DM is instructed to apply common sense.  My puzzlement stems from the population density generated by the Inhabitation Table - and what that will mean when the scale can be altered.  I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation for just the settlements (setting aside Castle population as too variable for now) and came up with an average of about 411 people per space.  If each space is a square mile, that's a population density slightly greater than that of modern China - hardly the howling emptiness of the World of Greyhawk.  One could massage that figure by saying that large settlements should be prohibited in marshes and mountains, but it's still quite a few people even before considering the land required for the upkeep of the game's monsters.

Taking the space as a 6 mile hex gets a population density of about 17 inhabitants per square mile, somewhat less than modern Russia.  That feels a bit better!  In fact, for most campaigns it's going to be about right once the DM starts applying "common sense" measures like prohibiting towns and cities in overly hostile terrain.  Of course, if you want that full-on post-Apocalyptic D&D style, then maybe try starting with 12 mile hexes and strictly limit settlements off the plain?