Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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about

An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

  • On Japan

    Further to my post on role-playing in Japan, I thought I would put up a few links and vague details about my time in Japan. 

    My partner had always wanted to live in Japan, and she moved there in August 2005, living in Hiroshima for a year and a half and working for the now-defunct English language  conversation school, Nova, before she moved to Matsue and became a University lecturer. My partner’s blog is here, though perhaps now mostly defunct on account of our having left Japan.

    Hiroshima is a wonderful city, and some sense of how cool it is can be obtained from a visit to the get hiroshima website. I strongly recommend that town to anyone who visits.

    I spent a year in Australia after my partner moved to Japan, scoring myself a Japan Government Scholarship to study a PhD in statistics. (This scholarship is available for nationals of every country; I got mine in Australia, hence the Australian website). The Japan Government scholarship is worth its weight in gold, because it provides a 4 month full-time Japanese language course before you start studies, and follows this with lots of exposure to Japanese people in the study environment. I had never studied Japanese before so this was a boon for me and my partner. 

    I studied Japanese in the small rural town of Tottori, where I made some very good friends, before moving to Matsue to take up my studies. Unfortunately, after a year and a half I gave up on my PhD, for a variety of reasons – mostly to do with being too old to study, being in a backward rural university, and having a few … differences of opinion … with my supervisor, who was (amongst other things) a bully. My adventures in these towns are described on my other blog, which is now mostly in Japanese (but the earlier entries are in English), and some photos are attached here (this is a slideshow).

    I left to come to England and work in a damn fine job in London, and my partner followed in August to look for a damn fine job. This means I was in Japan for 2 full years and my partner for 3. I came to London with a whole bunch of misconceptions about how easy readjustment to the West would be, and I think my view of the West has been permanently changed. We both miss Japan horribly and there is at least some chance we will return there for the long term, particularly if we can improve our Japanese. It is a cruel irony of life in Japan, but it is actually really difficult to  study Japanese properly in Japan, and we had hoped to improve our Japanese through formal study after we returned to the West, which is what we are doing now.

    About Japan itself I can only say that it is a wonderful place, and everything you have heard about it is, most likely, not true. To me it is a world of forests and mountains and kind, friendly, welcoming people, with an ease of lifestyle that one cannot imagine living in the West (and certainly not in London!) Japanese people are less sexist, less racist, less kooky and less heirarchically inclined than you have been led to believe; Japan itself is cleaner, less polluted, more environmentally friendly and much cheaper than you have heard (and than the West, or at least those parts of the West which I know). Japanese people are very much closer to nature than most people in Australia or England, and Japan has retained its essential uniqueness very well. In many ways Japanese society provides a model for how we should behave and interact in our daily lives. Of course, Japan has many problems, social, economic and political, but it is no more beset by these than we are, and its social cohesion and calm are admirable.

    And, of course, Japan is the only remaining Western society which is spiritually pagan on a national and practical level. It is a terrible shame to me that most westerners know it only through the few unpleasant stereotypes the Western media allow to filter through, and I recommend everyone visit it to find out the joys of the place for themselves.

  • Fantasy role-playing in Japan

    I am not really in a position to say too much about role-playing in Japan because I didn’t get much chance to do any. This is because, like in Australia, role-playing just isn’t a very well-known phenomenon there. The Japanese computer game market is heavily crowded with some very role-playing-oriented computer games (like the Final Fantasy series) and there really is a lot to keep a young nerd occupied just with them.

    Of course most of the foreign games would have to be translated, which is also something of a problem. D&D has been, and there is a native game called Sword World which is popular with players, but there isn’t actually a big role-playing scene. Since I lived in the country I wasn’t exactly in a position to pursue it. I wanted to play in a Japanese group before I left, in the Japanese language, but since I left 2 years before I was meant to, I wasn’t quite ready for the experience language wise and I never got a chance to meet anyone. I certainly knew lots of nerds, but many of them had never heard of fantasy role-playing (even using the Japanese name, “Table talk role-playing” they still hadn’t heard of  it).

    When she was teaching my partner occasionally mentioned my hobby to some of her more mature, more nerdy students, but she reported that most of them hadn’t heard of it either. Those that had thought it sounded too difficult, but none of them reported any kind of disapproval. The general level of shyness Japanese people have, and their unwillingness to draw attention to themselves or their ideas, means that they don’t respond warmly to the kind of environment role-playing represents – in that sense I think it’s a very western kind of activity. However, there are a lot of stereotypes about Japanese people’s lack of initiative  and imagination which get bandied about in connection with their unwillingness to present ideas publicly, and I think those stereotypes are quite shallow and untrue, so one shouldn’t confuse a Japanese person’s unwillingness to join such a group environment with any such stereotype.

    Certainly, though, I do think that the traits of diffidence and humility are strongly admired and treasured in Japanese society, and they aren’t compatible with a gaming environment where drunk nerds yell their actions in an imaginary world before an audience of their peers.

    Given these combined factors – console game dominance, translation costs and shyness – it’s no surprise that role-playing is not so popular here. But if I go back (not such a big if) I will go to a major city, and then I shall have a better chance of finding out what Japanese RPGs and their players are all about.

  • Role-playing for schoolchildren

    The Chatty DM recently had a post about planning adventures for children, and his post reminded me that, while I was teaching English part-time at Matsue College of Technology in Matsue, Japan, I ran a short role-playing adventure in my Special English Class, as a kind of English practice task.

    For completeness and because it was a fun adventure I thought I’d give a brief outline here. 

    The setting was Matsue College of Technology, and our 4 characters were:

     

     

     

     

    • kenichi, a Ninja, an 18 year old boy, member of the Kendo club
    • midori, an 18 year old girl who is a witch, member of the shooting club
    • shouhei, an 18 year old boy who is a type of high-school Shugenja, a member of the baseball club 
    • yuki, an 18 year old girl, who is a thief, and a member of the Kenpo club

    All four characters were also members of the magic club, whose senior member is an 18 year old girl called Sayako (pictured at the top of this post). 

    (By way of background: I had 8 students in this class, all 16 years old; they played 2 to a character so as to avoid embarrassment when they couldn’t think what to do, or got confused about the English; club life is a very important part of Japanese school life; the drinking age in Japan is 20 years old; Matsue is one of only a small number of Japanese towns to have its original castle still intact, and also has a very fine old section of town, and a lake. Also, to ensure no confusion about the task and the goals, all background material was handed out in Japanese as well as English).

    So, the adventure began at Matsue College of Technology, after Midori and Sayako had an argument about black magic. Midori gathered her companions and they burst into the magic club rooms, which were empty, but contained these two notes:

     

    Fellow members!

    This is the moment we have waited a year for! Tonight we will go to Matsue Castle and summon a Demon on the top floor! Once we have summoned the Demon, we can take control of Matsue, and people will give us everything we want! 

    To summon the Demon we need to collect some things: 

    •       The bones of a Samurai child
    •       10 people to feed to the Demon
    •       A lot of sake 

    If we go now, we can have everything ready before midnight. It is best to summon the Demon at midnight on Halloween! Meet me at Matsue Castle when you have collected these things! We have planned for this for a whole year, so please do it correctly!!!!!!!!!!!!!

     Your evil master

     Sayako

    The second note they found gave more detail about what had to be done:

  • Samurai House
  • Naked Space bar
  • Bar EAD

    •  

    was all it said.

    So the characters rushed off to rescue Matsue from the Demon-summoning boss of their school magic club. Amusingly, there  was some debate about the best way to get into town (the College is a way out of town) and eventually they settled on… the bus!

    Unfortunately, as they were running down the hallways towards the main gate, they heard a gunshot behind them. Turning around, they saw the head of the English Department, Professor Takahashi, shambling towards them, clearly enchanted, waving a gun. (At this point my students worked out how to say “A spell has been cast on him” in English, clearly an essential part of their education!)

    Because Takahashi Sensei is very popular at Matsue College of Technology, they did not want to hurt him. So Midori cast a sleep spell on him and stole his gun, and they ran off to the bus.

    The bus goes directly past the Samurai house, so they hopped off at the bus stop and wandered over to the house. Yuki crept in ahead, and found an undead Samurai warrior in the courtyard. They attacked this warrior and, after some difficulty, managed to defeat him. Scouting some more around the courtyard, they found to their horror that the Samurai had been buried in the garden with his child many centuries ago, and now his child’s body had been disinterred and stolen! (I didn’t bother teaching my students “disinterred”). So, they realised, they had missed the first stage of Sayako’s plan and must rush to Naked Space!

    Fortunately, Naked Space and Bar EAD are only a short distance from the Samurai House, and all Japanese school students can run a marathon, so off they jogged. They reached Naked Space quickly, but were disappointed to discover, when they walked up the stairs and through the little foyer into the nightclub proper, that the club was empty. Shohei heard the sound of sobbing and, wandering through to the bathroom, found Sayako’s boyfriend (who owns naked space) sobbing in the toilet. There was some initial confusion in which Shohei tried to kill him, but then everyone calmed down and learnt that Sayako and her acolytes had burst into the Naked Space bar, and abducted all 10 of its customers (Naked Space is very small), who were guests at a halloween party. So, the characters had failed again!

    Despairing of their speed (perhaps a cab would have been a good idea), the characters dashed around the corner to Bar EAD and charged up to the third floor, to find it in a state of disarray. The door had been smashed in, chairs torn apart, all of the pretty ornaments scattered around the room, and the collage of French movie posters torn and wrecked. Behind the rubbish-scattered counter, the waitress sat hunched over, trying to hide. Upon interrogation, she revealed that Sayako had charged into the bar, trashed it with her magical powers, and then run away with all the sake, liquour bottles and wine to be found in the building.

    So, again the characters were late! (Perhaps they shouldn’t have jogged). There was only one place left to go – Matsue Castle! Off they went, back the way they had come from the bars by the lake and over to the car park at the front of the castle. However, as they approached the Castle they were attacked by a group of Kappa, of whom they made fantastically short (and gruesome) work. From there it was in through the broad swathe of gardens inside the main gate, and up into the inner citadel. The castle was strangely empty and a strange, evil light was glowing above its keep as thick stormclouds gathered.

    Once inside the Keep, the characters found themselves facing a strange sight.  A couple of goblins, a witch, a Harry Potter, a Football player, a Hobbit, a soldier, an Oni, Yuki Onna, and 2 maids, all stood in a circle on the ground floor. After a moment’s confusion they realised these were the halloween party guests from Naked Space, still in their costumes, and held in stasis within columns of light stretching up to the ceiling of the room. As Midori considered how to break this magic, Sayako’s acolytes attacked them, and the characters had to do battle again, this time against wizards.

    They survived this battle too, but not quickly enough to prevent the entrapped halloween guests from dying. “Oh well”, said Kenichi, and I taught them the phrase “If you want to make an omelette…” They ran up the stairs to attack Sayako, but found a demon between them and her. Battle was joined, but they realised that Sayako had to concentrate hard to control the demon – she had conjured more than she could control! Yuki ambushed Sayako, breaking her concentration, and the demon ate her whole. Then it thanked them all for aiding it, and disappeared with a loud bang.

    I ran this game in a kind of simplified AD&D 3.5, with very few skills, a few simple attack and magic rules, and limited magic items – these guys were playing this out of their own language, so bewildering character sheets and extensive language for rules were definitely out. It worked though, and I recommend it as a fun way to pass two lessons. I’m not so sure that it actually helped anyone learn any English. But then, none of my other classes did either…

  • The history of the Essential Compromise

    As the Age of Enlightment drew to a close the Great Houses and Monarchies of Europe had begun to stifle under the pall of their own histories. A small circle of authors and scientists, many  of great repute in the salons of Europe, had begun to plot a revolutionary and terrifying new path for European history. In 1588,  amidst much debate about the rectitude of their vision, Cristopher Marlowe wrote his famous Tragical History of Dr. Faustus. Marlowe intended this as a warning to his friends and colleagues about the danger of their proud new ideas, but it was taken across Europe as a balanced description of the power and the dangers of his friends’ new vision. For he and his friends had raised Infernal Powers to Earth, and from them had begun to gain great powers. Their vision for the future was a Europe whose power waxed upon the strengths of Demonic magic.

     The people of England, Marlowe’s home nation, looked across the Ocean to the New World of the Americas, where their brave vision of a new land from which they could plunder their way to greatness had been stymied by a frightening and sinister local shamanism, which the Native American peoples practised freely. In Europe the Austrian Empire looked nervously Southward, to the growing Ottoman Empire whose Djinn and Alchemists gave the Ottoman army incomparable power. The great power which Marlowe’s circle of friends offered the Europeans promised not just a renewal of their stagnating culture, but an opportunity to hold back the seemingly inexorable march of the Turks towards Southern Europe, perhaps the only way of ensuring the survival of a free Europe into the 17th Century.

     In the 10 years following Marlowe’s publication many more scientists and philosophers across Europe flocked to the homes of his friends to study the Infernal powers they had discovered. The group became known informally as The Hamburg Circle, from the city at which they were based. As they continued to develop new and more exciting branches of the Science of Infernalism, Marlowe led debate on its dangers, holding forth his great play as a warning of the inevitable end to which such Conjuring would surely lead it’s practitioners. However, in 1600 his English contemporary, William Shakespeare, published his great play Hamlet, and with it a Deliberation upon the Tragedy of the Flaw’d Conjuror. In this essay Shakespeare discussed the Tragedies he had already written, noting that the heroes in many of his texts were undone by their own fatal flaws. He compared his latest tragic protagonist, Hamlet, with Dr. Faustus, and observed that neither would have come undone had they not surrendered to their fatal character flaws. In Dr. Faustus’s case, Shakespeare argued, his flaws were arrogance, greed and deceptiveness. Had he been able to practise his Infernal arts openly, and had he been less bent on worldly gain and self-aggrandisement he would have been able to control Mephistopheles and use the Infernal powers he was offered for good. In short, Shakespeare concluded, had Faustus been a good Christian summoning under the supervision of the Christian church he would have been able to avoid the apparently inevitable trap so eloquently described at the end of the play. Shakespeare recommended that Infernalism and the Hamburg Circle be placed under the supervision of the Church, and suggested that good Christian men from the ruling classes would surely only be able to use their powers for good under these conditions.

    The salons of Europe were set aflame by this argument, and the following year an anonymous pamphlet was distributed throughout Europe. This pamphlet, The Divine Puropses of Hell, described a Europe transformed by Demonic power. These Demonic powers, the pamphlet argued, could be easily controlled by good Christians and would have many benefits. In four chapters devoted separately to Civic Life, the Arts, War and Industry, the anonymous author described the transformative and liberating effects of harnessing Infernal powers. The people of Europe were captivated by the images contained therein, and for the next 50 years the Hamburg Circle developed their skills and powers, teaching novices from all over Europe. Shakespeare’s initial admonition that Infernalists should be supervised by the Church was forgotten in the rush to spread their teachings, and the original meaning of Marlowe’s text was reinterpreted as a warning against allowing ones own desires and flaws to interfere with the pure task of conjuring Demons for the good of Christendom.

    The military academies of Europe and England, and both Churches, were at the forefront of development of Infernalism as a tool for everyday life. In 1681 the Ottomans were stalemated in a mighty battle at Saloniki, the first victory against the Turkish forces for nearly 100 years. With the signing of the temporary Constantinople Peace in 1682 the people of Europe realised the importance of Infernal forces in battle, and the final objections to their use in everyday life were swept away on a tide of euphoria. There might be no peace in Europe herself, and Demons might have transformed Europe’s internal conflicts to a new state of bloodthirstiness, but Europe herself would survive, and there was hope that perhaps the infidel would be defeated in the future.

    The science of infernalism continued to spread across Europe through the rest of the 17th Century and the first half of the 18th Century. However, in 1739 a bizarre series of horrific murders, and the destruction of the entire village of Collona in Northern Lombardy at the hands of a mad conjuror, led the people of Europe to question their decision to so freely embrace their new science. In 1751 the first Convocation of Thaumaturges met in Hamburg, and under the auspices of both Churches, the Emperor of Prussia and the Kings of England, the Netherlands and France, it was decided that only practitioners from several strict schools of magic would be able to conjure Demons. These schools were the Hamburg, the Regency, the Trajectors, and the Order of Hermes, and only the most powerful and skilled of the Hamburg School’s practitioners would be able to conjure great Demons. Over the next 100 years the Inquisition worked throughout Europe to hunt down Demonologists and offer them a stark choice: the School or the Stake. The Hamburg School led the way to the formalisation of magic in schools, and it also coined the great phrase which described the rule of Infernalism in modern Europe: the Essential Compromise.

  • Compromise and Conceit adventures: further details

    Further details and background support for the Compromise and Conceit campaign I am currently running are located at the website of the role-playing group where I run it, the Dragons on the Hill (in London). There are session reports, some resources, and a thread for the players. Much of the information going up there will also be posted here, but I may not always cross-post.

  • Infernal weaponry: The Autonomous Sentinel Cannon

     

    An autonomous cannon, and a French Harlequin Mercenary
    An autonomous cannon, and a French Harlequin Mercenary

    The most grotesque gun available in Europe, the Autonomous Sentinel Cannon (or Infernal Sentinel) is actually a semi-intelligent construct, consisting (in crude terms) of a gun built into a thinking, perceptory demon construct on stilt-like legs. The gun cannot move much under its own volition, but is capable of swivelling and stepping in place to aim at targets. In the picture here the Gun is seen in the foreground, with a mercenary wielding an Infernal Cannon to the rear. The gun can see, and has limited target selection abilities (though it is easily confused). It can be stunned by Confustor Field Rods. The most alarming aspect of the Infernal Sentinel, however, is its fuel source – regardless of who builds them, Infernal Sentinels are always powered by human blood, usually a quart per 50 shots. Their handlers are also called corpse grinders for their habit of draining the blood of their victims to fuel their gun.

     

  • Compromise & Conceit Session 1: The mesmerist

    In which our heroes meet, and learn of the perfidy of the French…

    Our five doughty heroes met in Albany, New York State, on 31st October 1753, to attend jointly a summons to the Estate of the Lieutenant Governor, James deLancey. The American colonies were in somewhat of a state of tension, as the French had laid claim to the lands around the Ohio river and had begun skirmishes with the natives who lived there, perhaps preparatory to moving into the colony of Pennsylvania, should they so wish it. It is at times like this that people of dubious heritage and brave demeanour gain the chance to make their fortunes, and for this our heroes attended upon the Lt. Governor himself.

    Approaching the Governor’s house, the heroes found themselves witness to a most unusual sight. An Indian brave – the first of that noble but savage race which they had chanced upon – burst from the front door of that splendid white house, stormed across the lawn and turned to vent furious words in French at the guards on the verandah. He shook his fist, within which he held the famous “Covenant Chain” by which the fates of the Iroquois and the British are intertwined. In truth it is not much to look upon, being merely a typical native belt of woven cloth and beads, with a part of a British general’s gold braid woven through it. But the natives put great stock in these symbols, and so he flourished it in the direction of the mansion, yelling his wrath, before turning to leave. As he did so, the characters were horrified to see a group of 8 Indian braves emerge from the shadows at the edge of the lawn, stepping into the waning evening light as if they had been resting there all along, though but a moment before they had been as invisible as the wind through the trees behind them. The 9 braves turned and marched into the cover of the forest, watched in their departure by the Lt. Governor himself, and 2 of his guards.

    The Lt. Governor revealed that this brave’s anger was the cause of his need for the characters’ assistance. The French had begun attacking the far western reaches of the Iroquois nation and, the Iroquois being these last 100 years allied to the British, their messengers had naturally come to the British for aid. Unfortunately the British army is hard pressed in Europe fighting the war against the French, and can ill afford to antagonise them into opening another front here in America; so the Iroquois were declined the aid they believed rightfully theirs, and were sore over the affront. The Lt. Governor fears trouble between natives and British settlers which might provoke a war with the Iroquois that he can ill afford to fight. Most of the British soldiers are in forts in Pennsylvania and around Philadelphia, fearing a major French strike from that direction, and he can ill afford to spare soldiers for punitive missions against the natives. For this reason he wishes to send instructions to the Forts of the Northwest frontier, giving strict instructions on how to handle the natives:

    1. do not treat them rudely, or under any circumstances allow oneself to be drawn into conflict with them. Even a small conflict could spark a regional war which would distract the British from their main task of containing the French
    2. allow no one to trade with them for alcohol, drugs, potions, magic items or infernal weapons. The Indians have a strong objection to alcohol, and were the French to discover that the British were arming natives (even a single scrawny brave) they would have the excuse they need to demand concessions or wage war.

    It is not, the Lt. Governor assures our Heroes, that Britain is weak; rather, that she aims to defeat the French in Europe, the central theatre of the war, and press them out of America as a concession, with little risk to men or materiel.

    Also, the French King has asked the Lt. Governor to provide an escort for a French botanist who has come to America to study the fauna and flora of the Great Lakes. The governments being officially still under truce in America, the Lt. Governor must ensure this botanist’s survival, but does not wish to spare soldiers to the task. The characters are to deliver him to the town of Schuyler, which is a day’s journey from Fort Stanwix. Their path should take them from Albany to Cherry Valley, thence to Fort Stanwix, to Schuyler to deliver the French scholar; then to Fort Oswego on the Eastern edge of Lake Ontario and finally to Fort Niagara at the far end.

    So the following morning, so early the mists were still gathering and the sun barely up, the characters met one Albert duPlessis, an annoying and foppish waif of a Frenchie, and set off along the Albany Road towards Cherry Valley. Riding upon Battle Thumbs, they passed for 2 days along a road nestled amongst the New York hills, their red- and gold-leafed forests stretching thick down to the valley floor where they rode.

    Sadly, on the second day these forests disgorged horrors of the foulest kind. A strange witch, lately from the Caribbean, had set an ambush by the roadside. Amongst drifting smoke from the ritual fire she had started, enslaved zombie Indian braves came staggering from the forest, reaching and clawing for the characters. They fought back viciously, Lord Merton and his batman Russell forming a vicious killing team while the Dervish consumed undead foes in holy fire, and the Priest laid about him with gleeful abandon. Anna Labrousse caught sight of the Witch shrouded in smoke and paralysed her, before riding forward to kill her. Unfortunately Anna is a most incapable combatant, and failed to lay a good blow. The witch regained her powers of movement and lashed out with bolts of purest shadow, before being laid low by Anna’s comrades. Their first battle together had been completed with some success, and they were able to loot the Witch’s cave, confirming as they did that she was merely a lone, crazy hag in the wilderness, no part of any greater scheme.

    They continued their journey, soon being greeted by Indian braves amazed at the power of the white strangers to lay low such a wicked adversary, and offering a gift – the coup-belt of one of her victims, which grants its wearer resistance to damage.

    Before they reached Cherry Valley they had the first incident which made them think perhaps Mr. duPlessis was not what he claimed to be. As they were crossing a small stream, he slipped and fell in, and a book fell from his coat into the water. Father David recovered the book for Mr. duPlessis, but upon opening it discovered it was written entirely in latin, and contained a mesmeric spell of great power. Why would this be in the possession of a botanist? When confronted, Mr. duPlessis claimed the book an heir loom of his father’s, and demanded no more be said of it…

    They continued to Cherry Valley, and on without incident to Fort Stanwix. Daily Mr. duPlessis drank more and more brandy, becoming inebriated by midday and ofttimes near unconscious by evening. Suspecting his plans, our heroes subtly ruined his mesmeric spellbook while he lay in a drunken stupor, and thus ruined his most duplicitous scheme. Now it merely remained to find out exactly what that scheme might be, and with whom it was to be enacted.

    At Schuyler, having passed uneventfully through Fort Stanwix, the characters were horrified to discover that Mr. duPlessis had come to meet a squad of 6 English soldiers! Clearly some belligerent faction in the British army intended to use this French fop to mesmerise a band of Indians, and unleash them upon the French, starting a war the British would be forced to join! Despicable French treachery! In order to be sure, Lord Merton followed Mr. duPlessis that night to a secret meeting with the English sergeant, and there discovered that the sergeant was, in fact, a Frenchman in disguise! Who could imagine such deviltry afoot in civilised lands?!

    The game was up. Once duPlessis had returned to his room, they confronted him with their knowledge of his activities, and he revealed the whole plan:

    The following night, 5 of the soldiers would take their wagon to a nearby Indian village, where they would get the indians very drunk and prepare the ground for the mesmeric ritual. Once the natives were drunk, duPlessis would begin his ritual, mesmerising them all and ordering them to attack the town of Schuyler. At the same time the soldiers would prepare a signal fire on a nearby hill, and a fleet of 30 French ships – currently cloaked and laying just offshore in the nearby lake – would land and pour forth French troops. Once the natives had laid waste to Schuyler the British would sally forth from Stanwix to attack, and be ambushed by a vastly superior force of Frenchies. Stanwix would be taken without damage, and the Iroquois, thinking themselves attacked by the British, would join the French in war. Simultaneously, some of the cloaked ships would drop troops near Fort Oswego, and a major attack would commence on Fort Niagara. War, across and down the entire English colony! And if French plans succeeded, major gains would be made immediately. Mr. duPlessis was none too happy about this, revealing he had been forced to play this role by a wicked harridan in Albany… a French spy, no less.

    The characters then decided on a simple course of action: slay the soldiers, explain the situation to the nearby Indians, and lay a vicious trap for the French waiting in the bay…

    Once the trap has been laid, all that remains is to answer a few questions:

    1. who was the spy in Albany?
    2. How did the soldiers know that this Indian tribe would be willing to drink their alcohol?
    3. What was the mysterious infernal weapon in the wagon the soldiers possessed, and did it signify a special use?
    4. Is there a similar plan afoot at Fort Oswego?
    5. Did the Lt. Governor suspect all this, and send them into the wilderness gambling on their discovering an attack?

  • Reconfiguring AD&D: Play-testing

    This week at the Pub where I role-play I will start a series of sessions testing my ideas for changing the AD&D rule system. Starting depends on whether there will be players – everyone else seems to be intent on drifting off to some Call of Cthulhu madness – but I currently have at least 2 players guaranteed, and hope for 4.

    The first adventure will not use the full details of my reconfiguring scheme. Magic will use some spells I pulled out of my arse, or spells based on conversions of existing spells in the Players Handbook. Everything else will  run on the skill and combat system I have (partially) laid out here.

    There will be 0-3 adventures, depending on interest. They will be set in the world of Compromise and Conceit, just before the outbreak of the French and Indian War in America in 1753. The characters will be entrusted with the responsibility of delivering instructions regarding the treatment of Iroquois natives to a chain of forts from Albany to lake Ontario. Things will, of course, go wrong. The characters available at the start are:

    • Anna Labrousse, an enchantress from the Regency school of magic, from a somewhat down-at-heel background (daughter of an industrialist), but able to enter the Regency school through cunning application of her enchanting talents. Being somewhat disapproved of in her School, she has had to resort to adventuring to better her lot in life
    • Lord Merton of Epsom-St. Hilliers, a shiftless and irresponsible junior Earl, who possibly has syphilis or TB, discharged dishonourably from the Trajectors (a division of military engineers and wizards), and wandering the world looking for trouble in the company of his batman and Infernal Engineer. Lord Merton is armed with “the Earl of Epsom’s blurters”, a pair of rather well-enhanced pistols, and has a few other semi-magical tricks on the side. He is not of redoubtable constitution, however…
    • Russell Ganymede, Lord Merton’s batman and the Infernal Engineer of his old division of Trajectors, also discharged dishonourably alongside Merton. Infernal Engineers summon Infernal essence to enhance the power of cannon and small arms, and usually also use heavy-weaponry. Ganymede has some powers of demon-conjuring and infernal enhancement, and is also a melee combatant
    • Father David Cantrus, a Jesuit priest and sometime friend of Labrousse, who has been struck with wanderlust and a certain disregard for his old order. Or so he says…
    • Umit Dilmen, a Whirling Dervish, a type of Turkish mystic, who has come to America to try his hand at the Great Game and been introduced to the group through the General who commands the fort at Albany.
    In AD&D terms, the PCs are respectively a Wizard, Rogue, Fighter, Priest and Druid/Wizard. In this adventure,  however, all have some magic skills and the Rogue particularly has a more limited set of Rogueish skills (he is probably more of an assassin). The first adventure is going to revolve heavily around combat, stealth and then some quick thinking, so the Enchantress may be a bit out of place.
    But first people have to turn up…

  • AD&D 4e first impressions

    For the past few weeks I have been playing AD&D 4th edition at the pub, first with an excellent group of players who were actually nice, and then with the same group of players but a different DM. The first few sessions I played a first level rogue, followed by a first level warlock. The last session I played a 7th level Orc rogue. My first impressions are:

    4th edition AD&D is really, really boring.

    Everything which makes fantasy role-playing interesting has been stripped away, leaving a bunch of tired computer game characters. It’s like playing Dungeon Siege. One player introduced 4e to me as “turning AD&D into a MMO”, and that is undoubtedly the long and short of it. But MMOs have pretty pictures. Fantasy role-playing relies on imagination for its spark, and imagination is killed by having every character the same. In the 4e rules, every character just has a different way of rolling damage. It’s designed for rolling through battles, and it doesn’t even do that efficiently – last night’s session was an orc raid on a human village and it took an awfully long time. There is no sense to it of a game system designed for the diversity and breadth of experience which fantasy role-playing demands, just for lots of fighting. 

    On top of that, it’s even more rules heavy than before. In AD&D 2nd edition, you could still say things like “I duck past the wagon and strike the Human in the face with my axe.” Now this simple interaction goes something like this:

    Orc: Does the Human have partial cover? I have Killer Eye, so I can ignore it if he does.

    DM: No, you have a full line of sight.

    Orc: okay, so I can use my at-will melee power. I’ll use my minor to give a verbal command to my minion, then make a move action into an adjacent square, and for my attack I’ll use [insert meaningless action here]. Does that provoke an attack of opportunity?

    DM: Yeah, this guy here can do an attack of opportunity.

    Orc: Okay, well that’s no good. For my minor I’ll shift to the other side of the wagon, then I’ll make a move action and strike as my standard.

    DM: That’ll give you combat advantage. Will you mark him if you hit?

    None of this makes any sense to me. It also doesn’t read or sound like adventuring. To me it sounds like… programming, or something. And all the quibbling over shifts, slides, pushes, moves and minors takes a lot of game time. I mean really, who invents a “rule” which says that, if someone hits you in the face with a great axe, diverting your attention to attack someone else is a bad idea which will probably make your life harder? I thought this was what DM’s were there to do…

    Mages in the new rules also seem to be awesomely bad. We had a newbie 2 weeks ago, a woman called Julie who had drifted in off the street to give role-playing a go for the first time in her life. That’s brave! She was playing a wizard that never hit anything, and when it did it got 1d6+2 damage. That was pretty much it for her powers, though she could maybe reel off a sleep once, and do a burst on the odd occasion. Meanwhile my rogue was doing 1d6+2d8+7 damage every round, never missing, and laying the bad guys out like they were wet towels. Hardly encouraging. This week, we were super-scared of the possibility of mages so my rogue scouted ahead, identified the two mages and gave a signal to the other orcs. They charged in to overpower the mages, with our minions doing 1d12+3 damage and hitting half the time. What did our super-scary mage opponents have? 1d6+2 that hit 1/3 of the time. 

    woooooo, scary.

    So now we have a new version of AD&D where everyone has roughly the same number of powers and abilities, but for some reason wizard powers are eternally useless, and rogue powers are super-super-nasty. At least in v3.5 wizards are interesting but weak. Now they’re boring but weak. And don’t even get me started on healing surges, warlocks or the fact that one of my fellow players managed to put a flesh golem to sleep.

    So far I don’t think I like it. And I don’t think it’s going to win the battle against World of Warcraft.

  • Reconfiguring AD&D: A note on skill DCs

    Linnaeus takes on the task of defining what a skill DC should be, as part of a revision of the AD&D 4th edition skill system. I actually think the underlying skill system in AD&D is a good idea, it just needs some rejigging to work smoothly, and the system can be changed so that every task can be handled consistently with skills. I think it can be further adjusted so that the degree of success above a skill DC defines the result – e.g. spells cast as a skill check, and every point of success indicates the duration and/or power  of  the effect. But at the core of the system is a relationship between numerical DCs and a sense of how difficult an action “should” be. This isn’t well defined in the original D&D 3.5 rules.

    It’s not something I have ever paid much attention to, but obviously attaching numbers to the difficulty of actions is an essential task, and helps define the flavour of a campaign – heroic campaigns would have different DCs to grotty, realist campaigns. As much as possible I think DCs should be set by opposed skill checks, since this takes the task away from the DM and makes it less arbitrary. But ultimately this is the heart of the DM’s technical responsibilities, and doing it well is an important part of the job. It’s good to see someone taking it on!