The Karnagi Rider: A Class for OSR Games

This is part of a slow-moving project I'm working on, Warlords of Karnag-Tor, which will be out who knows when, but I brainstormed this player/NPC class while at work today, so here it is!

The Karnagi Rider:

From Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind

A mounted fighter from the steppes of Karnag-Tor, the Karnagi Rider is a variation of Fighter/Warrior classes, specializing in ranged/mounted combat and survival. In Karnagi culture, these fighters serve as the main troops of any Citadel's militia, serving as both mounted infantry and cavalry. They are skilled sharpshooters, and typically engage enemies from a distance. They are also skilled pathfinders and trackers, and can live off the land nearly indefinitely on long campaigns.

The Karnagi Rider class requires a Dexterity of 14 or above and a Strength and Constitution of at least 9,and saves as a Fighter/equivalent class. Hit dice are a six-sided die. Lower-level Riders are not effective fighters from horseback, and suffer a -4 penalty to-hit when using ranged weapons while mounted and moving.

At first level, the Rider may select from the following gear, and all are issued with a Horseclaw, riding tack, a canteen, 3 days rations and a bedroll.

The options are as follows:
a. A single-shot cavalry carbine (1d10 dmg, 1/1 rate of fire, 15 rounds of ammunition) or b. A bundle of 8 javelins (1d6 dmg)

a. A nearly-unbreakable ceramic dirk (1d6 dmg) or b. A cavalry lance (1d12 damage while mounted, 1d10 when dismounted)

a. A ceramic scale mail shirt (AC 6) or b. 20 additional rounds of ammuniton or c. A steel longsword

Abilities:
At first level, Karnagi Riders have a 3-in-6 base chance to successfully forage for a days' food and water.

At third level, Riders are able to fight effectively from horseback and no longer suffer a to-hit penalty. Third level riders may also attempt Suicidal Maneuvers, in which Riders may choose to take 1d4 damage to themselves to add an additional +1 to to-hit rolls or saving throws made in combat. Additional damage/bonuses may be taken, up to a number equal to the character's level minus one- for example, a level 3 Rider may take up to 2d4 damage for +2 on a to-hit roll.

At fifth level, Riders are considered worthy of leadership, and will attract 1d4 0-level Riders per following level.

At ninth level, a Karnagi Rider is able to attain the title of Warlord, and may begin attaining followers and constructing a Citadel. Additional rules for Citadel construction will probably be in Warlords of Karnag-Tor.

The Long Dark: An Exercise in Brutal, Bitter Futility

I have a lot of memories associated with snow, especially at night. Walks through the frozen woods with my family, the thrilling and deadly experience of night-sledding in our horse pastures, and later plowing our driveway with my dad on our old Romanian tractor, taking a shift every half hour before returning to the safety of our house to watch Terminator 2. These are fond, comfortable memories. Things I cherish and will try to hold with me forever.

The Long Dark takes the comforting imagery of winter landscapes and cozy fireside lethargy and distorts them, juxtaposing familiar sources of comfort with a bitter, hateful sense of coldness and isolation.

Initially released in 2014 as part of Steam's early access program, The Long Dark is, ostensibly, a fairly standard survival/crafting game, set on a small island off the coast of Canada after a meteorological event that renders all electronics and combustion engines nonfunctional. While this alone is a bit of a pickle, the region already being locked in the cold grasp of Winter does little to help the situation. The trappings of the genre are all present- there is only one save file per game, death is permanent, and resource management is crucial to survival.While it has an episodic story mode, I haven't really touched that as of writing, so I can't speak to what it adds to the experience. One could easily compare it to the other big names in the field- Rust, DayZ, Seven Days to Die, and the many others that seem to flood the Steam storefront at any given time. 

However, this game in particular stands apart as its own unique experience, and while it is heavily influenced by other survival/crafting experiences, it delivers a uniquely atmospheric take on the genre. The Long Dark has become one of my favorite games, and is an experience like no other.

What really makes The Long Dark unique is its atmosphere, and the ability of nearly every aspect of the game to come together and create a consistent vibe throughout play. Moment-to-moment play is focused on keeping the player-character's meters- temperature, fatigue, thirst, hunger, and overall wellbeing- full, or as close to full as possible. Long-term, however, the game necessitates and emphasizes planning and tactical resource use. While going from house to house looting canned goods and other man-made supplies is initially effective, these will not last forever, and on higher difficulties the pickings are often scarce. The player character begins play with moderately warm clothing, but usually nothing fit for long-term exposure to the cold temperatures. This means that by the time one makes any meaningful progress in their attempts at self-preservation, the player character is usually already at risk of developing hypothermia, or at the very least soon to get there. The early hours are thus spent scrambling for anything to make life a little easier, and often the player is running around in a motley of sweatshirts, patched jeans, and running shoes until winter jackets, snow pants, and Mukluks make themselves apparent. While there's a bit of a laugh to be had at the onset, this does create a sense of desperation from the get-go, especially in some of the game's less forgiving environments, where human habitation (and thus opportunities for good loot) are few and far between. This is a cruel, hostile world you are entering.

The need to keep your meters fill often leads to compromise and sacrifice. You can keep on going for a while, even if you're freezing, starving, or dehydrated, and sometimes the need for one resource necessitates the waste of another. I've found myself venturing out from shelter and a warm fire to harvest cattails and scrap the last remaining meat from a frozen animal carcass more times than I can count. I once spent a week at the bottom of a ravine with a broken rib, living off meat from one moose carcass and spending my days gathering twigs so I could stave off the ice-cold winds that came through every night, presenting the looming threat of hypothermia, frostbite, and a slow, agonizing death. Every second you play, you cling bitterly to life, defying the world around you, and challenging it to come and take you.

Despite the looming terror associated with much of The Long Dark, there's a lot of beauty to be found in its world. There were a lot of little moments in that sat with me. The first time I stepped outside to look at the Aurora Borealis overhead struck me with awe. Walking around at night, with the crunch of snow underneath my feet and the snow shimmering with the light from above was a truly beautiful experience, and the sense of majesty never fails to return on repeat sightings. Notes found throughout the game tell short, one-page stories about the world you're occupying, from the point of view of other survivors who came before you. These can be as simple as a recipe for bread, instructions for properly sharpening knives using found objects, but can also be so much more. One note, found in a lonely lighthouse overlooking the ocean, brings me nearly to tears every time I read it.

The music that accompanies your travels does wonders to complement the experience of playing the game. The barren, minimalist soundtrack, loaded with heavy subsonics that bring to mind Ennio Morricone's score for The Thing, or Wolves in the Throne Room's more ambient work, creates a sense of dread and isolation, making the experience something more akin to survival horror than an open-world exploration game.

Survival mode carries on until your eventual demise, whether it's five minutes in or after two months of careful scavenging and crafting. No matter how long you survive, how many supplies you gather, and how much equipment you carry, every wolf attack, fall through thin ice, or tumble down a hundred-foot cliff can be your last, and no matter your fate, you are given the message "You have faded into the long dark." Like the other frozen corpses you find throughout your travels, no one will remember you. Your name and memories will be no more. There will be nothing left. Only the long dark.

I Made a Dungeon!

I made a dungeon! I've been meaning to try and make something properly formatted and shareable for a while now, and I have done it! It's the first floor/secret entrance to a larger keep/fortress occupied by the forces of Chaos. The mapping was done with Mipui, and all the formatting was done in MS Word.

You can download it here!

Metro! Basic Rules

Here's a basic strategy game I developed as a class project for a study abroad program in Paris I did during the summer of 2017. It's theoretically supposed to be edutainment of some sort but I've never actually playtested it. Here it is in all its glory!

The rules in PDF form

Feel free to do with these as you will!

Power Objects and the Bullshit that is Monetary Treasure

When I was six, maybe seven, I won a costume contest at my elementary school's not-Halloween event. I didn't make the costume -it was a giant robot costume re-purposed from a previous year's cardboard and Duct Tape X-Wing, built by my mom from Costco boxes- but I won. I got a $15 Toys-R-Us gift card, and some old dude immediately tried to buy it off me for a larger sum. Maybe he was trying to comfort a grandchild that knew their costume was bullshit and was crying over it. Maybe he was trying to teach me about capitalism at a ripe and tender age. I did not let go of that gift card. I earned it.

See, objects have Power. I think that's the reason babies love remotes so much. They don't know what they do, or that you can buy a dozen for five dollars at Goodwill, but they know they have power, and that they do something. Players in role-playing games think the same way, I've noticed. You can load a party up with coins and gems and they'll be pleased but unimpressed. You show them a laser rifle or a sword that glows in the dark that they can't get? They'll freak out and immediately start scheming over how to get it. Even a mundane object with neat engravings or a name will immediately be someone's new favorite toy.

I don't think there's anything wrong with monetary treasure, per se. I think it's great, and if you're doing your job right as Dungeon Master there should be plenty of ways for your characters to spend it. I do think, however, that if you want to promote creative play, you need to include non-monetary incentives and rewards for player action. This doesn't have to be magic items, even. Have you seen medieval treasure?

People will put gold on anything. A lot of the stuff I've posted here is of religious significance, too. When the church has most of the gold, most of the gold goes on things the church owns. Also, different things have different value to different people. Kings and lords and churches have money, but the common people don't always have that luxury. The villagers with bandit trouble won't always have a big pile of cash for the PCs when their job is done. In Seven Samurai, all the townspeople can promise is that the samurai will be able to eat their fill. Sometimes that's all it takes.

Likewise, I think players can learn to look beyond a sack of gold or a gold cross for what they can take back to town. The bandits might not have any cash, either. That's probably why they're bandits. They might, however, have a big pile of swords and axes and mostly-intact armor that someone is going to have a use for.

I've been thinking about how I can apply all these ideas to my home games. I run 1981 Basic/Expert as my primary ruleset, and it handles money in a kind of frustrating way. All the equipment available to the player characters is priced in gold pieces. Weapons, food, iron spikes, everything. You can take this as a simplification, or a holdover from the original D&D, and just roll with it. You can get different equipment tables, maybe from AD&D, but then you have to have an entirely different book at the table and you could just be playing AD&D.

My idea is different. Everything retains its value. The equipment tables stay the same. However, after character creation, there's much less liquid cash to go around. Those axes and swords you grabbed from the bandits? You better grab them all because they're what the bandits put their money into, and I bet the peasants sure would be grateful for the stuff. The treasure the bandits stole? It's a bunch of gold crosses and tapestries and silver plates they've been trying to fence for months and now that's your job. I don't plan on taking away treasure or making the game harder, but I want to put less of an emphasis on just giving out coinage willy-nilly. I think there's a better way. Maybe it'll work. Maybe I should just go play Flame Princess and use equipment tables that make more sense.

TridentCon 2017

This last weekend, I was fortunate enough to throw dice at TridentCon, up in Parkville, MD. It's a small, non-profit convention that's largely OSR-focused, but also draws in the Pathfinder and 5e crowds, as well as the myriad of other games people play these days.

I played in two of Rich McKee's incredible Stonehell games, both Saturday and Sunday. These were great old-school dungeon crawls, and a group of third-level adventurers managed to survive a small war against the local goblin tribe with zero deaths (besides the near complete loss of our small group of henchmen), and through some careful (read: a show of pure force) politicking, our party's Fighter became the tentative Goblin King.

The second session was a little more focused on room-clearing and treasure-nabbing than political maneuvers, but was still a blast. Two players joined in at the last minute and had to leave early, but we still managed to make it steal from a dragon, make it down to the third floor of Stonehell, and encounter some Thouls (so old-school!) and fight a pair of weightlifting ogres. This angered the rest of the ogre presence on the third level, so we beat a hasty retreat and just made it out of the dungeon alive.

Eric Hoffman's Eaters of the Dead/The 13th Warrior adaptation was our 1:00 PM game Saturday, and as it turns out, I absolutely do not have the head for miniatures wargaming. The game was focused on recreating the three major battles from The 13th Warrior, and was a great look at the combat systems found in Chainmail and OD&D, but was relatively slow-paced compared to what I'm used to, and the loss of most of my units early-on meant I had to do a lot of sitting and waiting during most of the combat.
Despite this, it was a lot of fun to see old-school wargames in action and to hang out with some truly devoted guys. Eric's games are always an absolute joy to play.

My one viking held the line through two battles, and then he fell down a pit.

Our last game Saturday night was a 5e D&D Greyhawk Reborn trainwreck.
Now, I don't like telling people how to play their games. There's something for everyone out there and you can enjoy what you want if that's your thing. That's cool. But this was so absolutely joyless and bland that I can't help but tear into it.

The game was a straightforward "You're all drawn to this town on separate errands that just might all be tied together by some kind of central plot element!"
This is fine. It's almost as standard as "You all meet in a tavern" but sometimes it just works. However, my read-aloud motivation from the DM absolutely blasted me with more information than I could handle. Something about an heiress searching for a missing piece of property? I honestly can't remember, but it was way too much. Good on a DM who wants to have a lot of backstory, but that's not why I'm playing a game at a con.

Then, to find the damn macguffin I had to look around for information. I rolled up to the village tavern and threw some money around on drinks for the crowd, and schmoozed the villagers for information on the clearing in the forest I was looking for.
Then I had to roll a History check.

See, I like 5e a lot as a game. It's probably the most absolutely standard RPG in all of history, but it works and it's got a fair amount of depth for people who care about that. It's also pretty easy to teach to people. This was absurd, though. I shouldn't have to roll a History check to learn facts from people. Maybe a Persuasion check to coax information out of them, sure, but it's a goddamn role-playing game and I'm going to fucking roleplay. I don't want to just sit around and roll dice and cheer when they mean something good.

Good news is the DM was a good sport and was clearly passionate about the game he was running. He let me talk to monsters, and did a GREAT Kobold impression. He seems like a good guy doing his best to run games. I don't like his style but I can respect him a lot as a person.

Bad news was the entire game played out like my search for information. Some searching in the woods and talking our way through some kobolds found us in a linear puzzle dungeon that came down to a series of consequence-free dice checks.

Raiders of the Lost Ark-style spinning death blades! Roll a check to get through! The next trap room heals you!
You're shot with arrows! They just make you kind of wet!

Some more of this, some combat with some dopey mummies and a simple puzzle, and then a lame boss fight with a powered-down Lich-type dude. He dies, we're all winners! Now we fill out a math worksheet for the wack-ass Greyhawk Reborn persistent game world.

Now, there were good ideas here. I like talking to Kobolds and Goblins a whole lot. They're fun and it's nice to see a DM who can roleplay. Me and him also shared some laughs over me swashbuckling a floating sword Ray Harryhausen-style during the end fight. It was almost a great time, even with some lackluster adventure design, but it was really brought down by the other players. I'm not going to waste my time shitting on anyone here, but saying "of course I'm popular with the ladies" and then yelling across the room at some poor woman from your last game is not going to make me want to play games with you.

There was some DCC Sunday afternoon, as run by my friend Kyle, but that really deserves its own post.

All in all, a great TridentCon! There's some tenuousness about the status of the con next year, but hopefully we'll all be back in 2018.

Generic Fantasy Campaign Seed #458472

Your party is exiting the settled lands of the south for fortune and glory in the untamed wilderness of Hyperborea;
On your way to the most remote outpost of the Acadian Empire, you make camp one night in a small grove beside the rough path you've been following for the past few days.

An old man wanders in from the cold, windswept night to sit by your fire, clad in rags and leaning heavily on a crooked staff.
He offers up what little knowledge he possesses in exchange for his place and a share of the meal.

After he wolfs down what food he's offered, he regales you with this tale-

"Shrouded in a sunless forest, at the foot of the Daggerfall mountains, there lies a keep, built in a forgotten age.

Hidden in its endless subterranean chambers are vaults containing treasure beyond your imagination.

If one could conquer its hordes of guardians, both human and bestial, they would attain an array of unspeakable powers and artifacts, and wealth the likes of which no god has ever seen.

All this and more lie within the Castle of Sorrows!"