tav_behemoth's page

What's the right place to talk about an old-school renaissance game I helped create, the Adventurer Conqueror King System?

I feel like 'somewhere at the Paizo boards' is an appropriate answer because one of the main wellsprings for ACKS' development was the Age of Worms and Savage Tide campaigns that co-author Greg Tito and I played with Mark Moreland and a bunch of other Paizo fans including John Spaulding, who went on to run the Kingmaker campaign that was a big influence on the thinking about domain-level play that also shaped ACKS. And I'm hoping to make our PDF available at the Paizo store, which I shoulda done sooner.

I'm posting here because ACKS is an OGL game, although most but not all of its inspiration predates 3.5. Is there a better subforum to discuss pet projects like combining the ACKS integrated economy with Pathfinder skills and feats?

When: Saturday, March 27th, noon until 5 pm

Where: Compleat Strategist, 11 E. 33rd St., Manhattan, NY

What: Celebrating Arneson's legacy by playing some of the roleplaying games inspired by his pioneering 1972 Blackmoor campaign (which is to say, all of them!)

Who: Players and GMs of all ages, experience levels, edition preferences, and degrees of old- or new-schoolness.

The big draw for Paizo fans is the Pallid Plague PFS scenario run by its author Mark Moreland, but even if you've already played it I hope to see you there if you're in the tri-state area! Drop me a line at arneson.gameday@gmail.com if you'd like to run a game, or just want more info.

This thread has a description of the games that folks ran last year and notes about my own experience playing, running, and talking to folks about the parts of Arneson's legacy like wilderness travel, clearing territory for strongholds, overseeing baronies, and leading armies that got largely left out of the branch of D&D that I grew up with (which did preserve things like dungeons, clerics, monks, and monsters, hurrah!)

If you're not able to make it, why not run a tribute game of your own in your local community? It's always a good time to get together with friends and celebrate the fun that's passed down to us from the giants of our hobby, but March 21st-27th is an especially good time: it's the International Traditional Gaming Week. By running an event then, you'll share the collective experience of re-entering whichever classic gateway to adventure you choose, and TARGA's publicity and organization for the ITGW may help you find players - what better way to remember Dave Arneson, after all, than making a new friend who'll stand by your side even when your henchmen flee the oncoming horrors?

On to the game listings:

Game Name: The Pallid Plague (Pathfinder)

Run By: Mark Moreland

Maximum Players: 6

Scenario: Reports from Andoran's Darkmoon Vale indicate that a new plague is causing the deaths of untold fey. The Pathfinder Society sends you there to aid the nymph queen in stopping the plague and finding and destroying its source. When the plague spreads to the human population of Falcon's Hollow, the need to find a cure grows more frantic. Can you save the many denizens of Darkmoon Vale from certain death?

Characters: Players are encouraged to create their own Pathfinder Society characters using the guide to Pathfinder Society organized play and the Pathfinder RPG, both of which are free online. Pregenerated characters will also be available.

Recommended For: Fans of Pathfinder and its world Golarion, which harkens back to the pulp novels that inspired Arneson, as well as folks who want to play Yoda8myhead's scenario as run by its author!

Game Name: Temple of the Frog(4e)

Run By: George Strayton

Maximum Players: 6

Scenario: For centuries, the tangled maze of sluggish watercourses, stagnant ponds, and festering marshes known as the Great Dismal Swamp has defended Blackmoor's southwestern frontier. Recently, both large armies and smaller parties have disappeared altogether inside its vast, dripping, claustrophobic corridors. But great treasures are said to lie hidden within a secret and weird temple at the heart of the morass and so you and your companions have decided to leave the comforts and safety of civilization behind. Deep into the fetid swamp you must go -- far from sunlight and sanity -- there to find...the TEMPLE OF THE FROG.

Characters: Bring your own 12th level PC or use one of the pregenerated characters provided at the table.

Recommended For: 4th Edition players who want to experience 1st edition feel or OD&D/1st edition players who want to see how 4e can be used as an old-school system.

- Game Name: Castle Zagyg: The Upper Works

- Run By: joethelawyer

- Maximum Players: 6

- Brief Blurb:
The curse has finally lifted! The most legendary and fabled castle of them all, Castle Zagyg materializes from a dread fog that has long held it enthralled and thus averting its many seekers. As your party emerges from the tangled brush, briers, and vines that fence the Old Castle Track, you observe the sprawling ruins of an enormous castle complex built upon a sloping bluff of rock. Crumbling, battlemented walls join towers square, round, and pentagonal. Gatehouses, courtyards, and craft shops lie in varying states of disrepair. High above the ruins, at the culmination of the bluff, rise two impressive towers: one round, the other hexagonal. The great east towers flank an enormous fortress of stone from which carved spires rise, piercing the very sky. This edifice can be none other than Castle Zagyg, the dwelling of the Mad Archmage.

- Recommended for: Folks who want to revisit (or experience for the first time) the glories of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1E and adventure in Gary Gygax's final contribution to the castle-and-dungeon genre pioneered by Arneson's Blackmoor.

My party is about to finish the climactic battle of Tides of Dread, and I'd like to open things up and let them decide what to do next. What are all the things going on later in the adventure path that I need to keep track of? They're likely to want to question some of the Crimson Fleet pirates; what are they going to learn about the Fleet's activity?

Here's what the PCs know already that's likely to shape their decisions:

- They know that Khala is the most powerful outsider on the Isle of Dread, and that he's at the central plateau, so there's a chance they'll go pick on him.

- They learned from the aranea that Thorgriff is an agent of the Crimson Fleet, and has been on the island for a while, so they may go seek him out.

- They also learned from the aranea that there are subterranean tunnels leading to Golismorga, although at the moment the fact that they're filled with water, and that I told them that the volcanic shaft beneath the city ultimately connects with the Abyss, will probably keep them from going there soon.

- I had Lavinia kidnapped, taken to Scuttlecove, and replaced by a doppleganger before the party left Sasserine (my version of the Diamondback/Kellani stowaway storyline) and they've recently discovered this and used circle dance to determine Lavinia's location and direction. So they might go in search of her.

I'm looking to get together a group of D&D players to explore the promised glories of the new school*!

Ultimately we'll be looking to meet 3-4 times a month, most likely on weeknights at a friend's apartment in Washington Heights, and collectively run a 4e campaign. I'll kick things off with Keep on the Shadowfell & its quickstart rules, which should tide us over until the books are released. After that I'll pass on the DM hat to the next of us who wants to give it a try.

The initial step will be to get together with interested folks and run a one-shot trial game using the fan-compiled pre-release rules. The idea will be for us to get a sense of whether we'd enjoy playing with one another, and for you to see whether the new rules seem like a good fit for the way you roll. If the answers to both are 'yes' we'll try to work out a schedule that suits everyone.

Post if you're interested or would like more info!

- Tavis

* My Paizo pride requires me to make the disclaimer that I'll also be grooving on another set of new glories as a player in yoda8myhead's Pathfinder playtest this summer, which is a proposition popular enough among our current gaming group that, unlike 4e, we don't need to look for more players...

I snapped these up this morning from Nick Logue's new venture Sinister Indulgences - a set of PDFs that "provides GMs everything they need to launch their high seas swashbuckling campaign," by many of the authors of the STAP - how could I resist? I'll post ideas about how I'll work them into the voyage to the Isle as I read.

Paizo adventures like Tides of Dread and the AoW festival of Zeech have used victory points as a mechanic to allow PCs to achieve varying degrees of success (or failure) in their strategic goals by accumulating points through a range of appropriate actions.

I think this is a great mechanic and I'd love to see it become part of the core Pathfinder RPG framework, instead of having to be reintroduced each time an adventure designer wants to use it. It'd be cool to have guidelines for using victory points to do a number of classic situations, like chase scenes, complex negotiations, and wilderness navigation, as well as design principles for GMs to create situations using VPs.

Quote from last night's session: "Avner is like the Burt Reynolds of Sasseine."

I knew I was going to have a good time roleplaying Avner, inspired by the great Flashman. But from everything I've read on these boards, I wasn't expecting the players to enjoy him as much as I do!

I certainly didn't skimp on his racism (I stayed away from any real-world epithets, but his anatomically-based shorthand for the islanders he expected to meet on the trip to Farshore was still pretty vile) or sexism (the players succeeded on a Knowledge: Local to know he'd been seen in the company of many of the city's most desirable women, but failed the Sense Motive to tell that his spare-no-details descriptions of these conquests were more than half BS). Nevertheless, most of the PCs were eager to accept his invitation to party down at the Meravanchi mansion. They take him to be a laid-back, fun-loving frat boy. So far they haven't seen the petulant, entitled, and snobbish aspects of his character. (Another set of Sense Motives they failed allowed Avner to conceal his reflexive snarl of disgust when players told him that some of their ancestors had been dragons, or worse yet, household servants).

The thing that particularly set Avner up to shine in the player's eyes was that I introduced him during a scene when Lavinia was chewing out the party. Several sessions ago, they captured Harliss Javell due to a phenomenally lucky sequence of initiative and grapple checks when she tried to exit stage left by swimming out the sea passage after they'd negotiated with her. Having wind walked out to Kraken's Cove, the party had no way to bring Harliss back with them, so they decided to put her in a crate and bury it. When they went back for Harliss and the Sea Wyvern four days later, they decided to strip its former captain naked and tie her to the prow as a living figurehead. Upon sailing back into the harbor and encountering all the ships that were leaving town after the Wormfall Festival, a 30+ Bluff check had the crowds jeering the hapless Crimson Fleet pirate and cheering the Heroes of Sasserine who had captured such an impressive prize & turned her over to the Dawn Council.

Although it hasn't come up before, I've always figured that Thenalar-educated Lavinia is a feminist in the mold of a Bryn Mawr or Smith College graduate. So she was livid that the PCs, who are firmly linked with the Vanderborens in the public mind (and some of whom have been jockeying to be linked to the family & its fortunes through marriage), would humiliate any woman so crudely & publicly. She launched into a speech about how, on their voyage to the Isle of Dread, it would be essential to maintain civilized standards of decency and not match savagery with savagery. Halfway through, I put Avner's mustachioed portrait on the projector: "Mind if I interrupt, Lavinny? Just wanted to offer my congrats to the heroes of the hour! I hear you were flying quite a saucy flag during your sail this afternoon! So sorry I missed it - maybe my father could arrange a private performance at our manor sometime? He's a very important man, you know, and never one to get in the way of a little fun."

All of these Lavinia / Avner interactions were improv rather than planned, but it's going to be interesting to see where things go from here as we begin SWW.

My group recently borrowed a digital projector and we're trying out implementing some of the ultimate gaming table goodness we've read about. Since we're running through Savage Tide (they just buried Captain Javell in a crate beneath Kraken's Cove, having beaten her with a seriously lucky bunch of grapple rolls), the online supplements are going to be the number one source of tactical maps for us.

I've seen people post on these boards that they use the online supplements for maps too, so I'd appreciate any help you can provide to get us started! Right now we've been trying to use a Mac to cut and paste images from the online supplement into Photoshop, which we were hoping to use to do some layers for lighting/fog-of-war. We ran into the problem that we couldn't paste into Photoshop; we were able to paste it into Powerpoint, and we did eventually get it into Photoshop by taking a screenshot. So our first question is just how do you work with the online supplement PDFs? But I'd be glad for any advice or discussion of how to achieve digital Paizonian nirvana.

I set up a Google group to allow us to share homemade maps and get into technical discussions: http://groups.google.com/group/paizonian-digital-projection

In Bullywug Gambit, we're told that Captain Javell picked up the pearl from someone who gave her orders to bring it to Kraken's Cove and look after it until someone else comes to take it from her. As written, she won't reveal the identities of these someones. Who are they, though?

I figure she got the pearl from the Crimson Fleet: in my campaign it'll have been directly from Captain Wyther, to foreshadow his later appearance. But I dunno who the Fleet would have used to bring the pearl into Sasserine and detonate it. Such a person would likely be the Fleet's most trusted local agent. For now I'm going to figure Harliss doesn't know who this will be either: all she knows is she'll recognize them because they'll be a lemorian. Since my group plans to keep running side adventures in Sasserine after the Sea Wyvern sails - we like the city too much to leave it behind altogether - I'd ultimately like to come with an explanation for what the Fleet would have planned if Vanthus hadn't screwed it up.

In my campaign, I added an action sequence to the initial meeting with Laviniaby having one of the guests be a freelance thief, hired to use the meeting as the pretext for a robbery of all the weird "easter egg" items in the Vanderboren mansion. The players have figured out that the senior Vanderborens were Seekers, that the items to be robbed were souveniers from their travels, and that the person most likely to hire someone to steal these specific items would be a rival Seeker.

I haven't yet decided on the identity of this rival Seeker, and would love ideas. The party is likely to pursue this thread a few sessions from now, after they wipe out the Lotus Dragons, so I can use it to introduce a side trek before Kraken's Cove. And to keep things topical, I'd like to have the rival be associated with something that'll be important elsewhere on the campaign.

One idea I had was to make the Meravanchis behind the robbery. I figure that of all the NPCs in Sasserine, they're among the most likely to be Seekers since we know they're co-investors in the Farshore project, which sure seems like a Seeker affair through and through.

Another idea is to tie this rival seeker to a demonic cult - the Monkey, represented in the campaign so far by a profane icon of a two-phallused girallon, or the Lizard, foreshadowed so far by Mr. Bones, a bone devil fallen to Chaos and implicated in the death of the Harbormaster.

Who in your Sasserine is a Seeker? What side-treks from other Dungeons or published sources might this lead into?

My PCs got cliffhangered into the Parrot Island tunnels last session, so I'm looking for ways to make the zombie jamboree memorable and scary.

Since Vanthus threw Shefton's body down there with our heroes, I'm planning to have him animate as a zombie as well, for the creep factor of seeing someone they knew get all ravenous, and also for the tactical scare of being trapped between a wave of zombies ahead and one attacking from the rear.

I'm also thinking about placing the zombies ahead of time, havong each roll Listen checks to hear the PCs, and then converge on them - with the huecuva coordinating their tactics to a degree (Int 4 instead of mindless).

What have y'all done or thought about with the Parrot Island scenes?

After I noticed that Norgorber is also a god of greed, I checked to see if the seven sins related to the alara'hai are also related to gods. What happened to the god of sloth?

Forgive the lack of formatting:

name Weapon Sin Deity
sword of lust longsword lust Calistria
Garvok greatsword wrath Rovagug
Shin–tari short sword sloth ???
Tannaris bastard sword envy Zon-Kuthon
Chellan scimitar greed Norgorber
Baraket rapier pride Asmodeus
Ungarato falchion gluttony Urgathoa

Here's another design idea:

The progress of the race should be obvious to the players. My Age of Worms party liked that there was a sense of urgency in the LoLR race, but not knowing whether we had minutes or days to work with meant that we couldn't make strategic decisions like whether to rest in-character and had to think about it in metagame terms instead. I thought of making the stolen item so big and/or shiny that PCs could always see how far it was and whether they were gaining or losing ground. It'd also be fun to give them some kind of divination item, with one of the obstacles being a ruse to throw the divination off-track.

Before beginning STAP, my group is running Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan (using the excellent conversion from these boards) as a try-out for potential players and for variant rules. I'm curious about what variants folks further along the path are using & how it's worked out.

We are considering:
- armor converts damage to non-lethal (from UA/d20srd.com)
- weapon groups (as above)
- rakasta and phanaton as PC races
- language groups (with each bonus language you're fluent in you can also speak haltingly in other languages that use the same alphabet)
- scale-independent turns and durations (at 5 ft per square scale, each turn lasts 6 seconds: at 500 ft per square, each turn lasts 10 minutes: regardless of scale, you get a move and standard action each turn, and spells last turns rather than rounds/minutes etc., so in playtest we had summoned monsters on the 500 ft./square wilderness map that lasted for 70 minutes 'cause we didn't drop down into combat rounds, where their 7 turns of summon would have flown by much faster)
- signature items (PCs can choose one weapon that they get to 'purchase' enhancements for by devoting gp up to 1/3rd character wealth to some roleplay-appropriate purpose: they can 'earmark' gold so it'll work even when they're out in the middle of the ocean).
- character creation using 4d6 in fixed order, plus a 7th roll that represents your choice of Attractiveness, Fame/Infamy, Largesse, or Social Standing, each with different skill synergies in appropriate situations: you can also bring up one of your other six stats to equal this 7th roll

Think that's it. The ones I'm most concerned about are nonlethal damage (which I want to reduce resting while the cleric respells, and to make it easier to capture the party instead of TPKing them) and universal duration (which I want because I hate rushing through dungeons trying to find the next encounter before your buffs drop, and because I like the OD&D idea of turns being a day or 10 minutes or one combat round, with everyone making one action/turn).

As far as I can tell, it's not specified whether Vanthus is Lavinia's younger or older brother. I was tempted to make them fraternal twins to extend the Demogorgon duality theme, but since both his heads are evil I decided that it'd be misleading to have a "light/dark" set of twins at the beginning.

Instead, I decided to have Vanthus be the older brother so that he'd expect to inherit upon murdering them. But, surprisingly, it turns out he was cut out of the will, which leaves Lavinia in charge of the estate (and forcing Vanthus to resort to the second-best expedient of robbing the family vaults). I reckon that Verik and Larissa might have suspected Vanthus's involvement in Khallum's death (who I decided was Verik's brother, as this also wasn't specified) and so disinherited him.

The setup I'm thinking about using to begin the adventure is that the PCs are either friends of Lavinia, or creditors of the estate, or folks with dirt on the family who are angling to blackmail the new heir. Lavinia calls them all together, hoping to negotiate a delayed repayment with all her creditors at once. During the meeting, it turns out that one of the NPC creditors is an impostor: when he is accidentally unmasked, he tries to fight his way out, giving the PCs a chance to prove themselves to Lavinia.

Afterwards, Lavinia confesses that the estate is in dire trouble: without the money in the vaults, she can't stay afloat. I'm considering having her make a desperate offer - in exchange for her help, she'll make the PCs partial owners of the estate.

The advantages I see to this vs. the Lavinia-hires-the-party approach are 1) players will care more about something they see as theirs 2) I like the idea of them moving into Vanderboren Mansion to get more mileage out of its maps & the cool Greyhawk relics in each room 3) it doesn't make sense to me that Lavinia has cash on hand to hire the PCs, or that Vanthus would stop short of cleaning out the vault.

I'm gearing up to DM the Savage Tide AP once the Age of Worms game I'm a player in winds down. For people who haven't read it in DUNGEON, I'm looking for a few new players who appreciate old-school flava. For those who have, I'll be running some prequels that riff on themes and characters from the STAP before it officially begins, and I'd also like to compare notes and maybe even think about doing some co-DMing with other locals who are or want to be running the AP. Reply here or drop me an email at tav (at) behemoth3 (dot) com!

Finished! Well, it's necessarily incomplete until issue #150 comes out, and the worksheet of deities could use some more work.

But nevertheless, it ought to have all the named NPCs from Dungeon 139 to 149 (including the War of the Wielded adventure), the Savage Tide Player's Guide, most of the Savage Tidings articles, the Isle of Dread backdrop and Torrents of Dread in #114, the Poryphery House horror in #95, and the original modules C1: Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan and X1: The Isle of Dread.

I'll be glad to link or share this file in whatever way is appropriate; for now you can email me at tav (at) behemoth3 (dot) com.