Tsathoggua Awakens From His Slumber

"They’ve been inside the earth, too — there are openings which human beings know nothing of — some of them are in these very Vermont hills — and great worlds of unknown life down there; blue-litten K’n-yan, red-litten Yoth, and black, lightless N'kai. It’s from N’kai that frightful Tsathoggua came — you know, the amorphous, toad-like god-creature mentioned in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon and the Commoriom myth-cycle preserved by the Atlantean high-priest Klarkash-Ton."

—H. P. Lovecraft, "The Whisperer in Darkness"

Experimenting with Experience Points Awards

Perhaps one of the most well-traveled topics on old school D&D blog and forums is the awarding of experience points. It's a topic that seemingly no single GM likes to do in the same way as the next guy--and least of all completely by the book. To be sure there is a good deal of buy-in on the need to keep gold for experience as a standard objective marker and spur to exploration, but there seems to be a persistent need to tinker around this standard.

I am no exception. I like the feel of good for experience, but could never really see a way around to what to do with all the player-accumulated swag. At first I fell back on my old simple stand-by, handing out either incredibly stingy amounts of treasure or finding creative ways to make it difficult to convert back into hard cash. The players were progressing at painfully slow rates though and it seem to undermine rather than spur the whole exploration impulse.

Moving from there I began to be won more and more to the “pay to progress” school of thought. Not the unsatisfying AD&D first edition of route of demanding high sums each time that level light bulb went off, but the old player-tailored ways of Arneson and company. What follows are the house rule system we've been using in our Labyrinth Lord tabletop campaign.

Experience Points

Players will receive small bonuses for each real-time hour spent in active exploration of a dungeon, wilderness or other dangerous environ. The baseline rate is 100 exp per hour, adjusted by the GM for the relative rigor of the hour.

Instead of simply earning experience for treasure, PCs gain experience from spending the treasure they have acquired. The rate of experience points to gold pieces spent varies by how a player opts to cash in his loot.

Ways to burn gold for experience:

1. Carousing. PCs can receive 2 exp for each 1 gp of treasure spent in sword-and-sorcery-hero style debauched spending sprees (food, drink, romantic partners, fancy personal accoutrements, etc). Only 100 gp/per level can be spent this way. Obviously, no mentor or training down time is necessary, but there is a 1 in 6 chance that a “complication” may follow (mammoth hangovers, duels, hostile constabulary, angry spouses, etc). Roll on Jeff Rient's Carousing Table for results.
   
   
2. Training/research. PCs receive 1.5 exp for each gp worth of treasure spent on training or research. The PC must find and recruit a mentor of the same class that is at least three levels higher than their current. Game time spent on training sessions will be determined by the GM. There is a 5% percent chance per 500 gp spent in such a way that a player will discover an “object of note” (a well-balanced sword, scroll, treasure map, or the like)
   
   
3. Gear. Finally PCs can receive .5 exp for 1 gp spent on any other possessions mundane or otherwise.

Example: The Swordsman With No Name is a 2nd level fighter returning to the town of Marlankh flush with loot after a sojourn in the Slumbering Ursine Dunes. His share of the treasure amounts to 633 gp. He promptly spends the maximum amount he can, 200 gp, on a drunken rampage and receives 400 exp. Fortunately he rolls a 5 and is free and clear of the worst aspects of said rampage.

Sobering up he enlists the help of a crazy old coot of a dwarf on the outskirts of town to help train him in the delicate art of sword-play. He spends 300 gp on this and nets 300 exp. Before the party's next outing to the dunes, he decides to buy 100 gp worth of gear, a new shield, iron spikes, an ungodly number of oil flasks, etc for which he gets 50 exp.

By the time of the next adventure into the Weird he has squeezed a total of 750 exp from the 600 gold he contributed to stimulating the fantasy economy.

Tekumel and the Use of the Weird in Campaign Settings

An often-heard complaint about the Empire of the Petal Throne setting is that the thing is just too damn exotic: too many strange names; too many details on obscure religions and culture; too many odd beasts; too many damned diacritical marks, etc. These objections are just as often met (at least in the written and online material I have seen) by the hardcore fans of the setting with a dismissal of small-minded role players not able to cope with a more imaginatively robust non-faux medieval European (or Tolkien-esque) setting.

Both sides get it a little wrong--and a little right--in this.

The problem with the wider accessibility of Tekumel, beyond ill-fitting game systems or canonical behavior, is not that it is too weird, but perhaps that it's weirdness doesn't get sufficient enough contrast with the everyday (our everyday that is, not that of the Tsolyani clan house obsessed about it in later game editions).

The thrill of D&D at it's very best was the sense of sheer mystery and thrill of exploration at it's visceral core. You felt the fear and excitement in your gut as your character ventured out from that achingly familiar and comfortable Platonic-ideal inn (you know the wood-timbered Tudor one complete with roaring fire, tankards of mead, rolly-polly innkeeper, etc) and then into the dark corridors of the unknown. Sadly the sheer success of the game and the trail-along popular cultural acceptance of vanilla fantasy have buried, or at best obscured, this tension--enough where exploration of the weirder edges of pulp fantasy become liberating again.

But it's the edge that helps make the contrast meaningful, a concept with a long pedigree in pulp fantasy. Think here of John Carter, a Virginian ferchrissakes, thrust into the bizarre societies of Barsoom or the veneer in Howard that just barely covers the historical nations of Hyboria.

In the very first issue of Dragon magazine (#40 in case you actually give a crap) I picked up was an article by Douglas Bachman that stamped itself on my young impressionable kid DM mind. Leaving aside the article's misguided and overly-complicated Chivalry and Sorcery-fueled desire to inject High Fantasy (capitalized of course) into rpgs, there was an intriguing notion that wormed its way into my consciousness about the desirability of having a stark—physical even—separation between the mundane and fantastical parts of your setting. Human civilized life right here, the life of adventure over here.

As Bachman puts it:

“...There is an essential element which will determine the success or failure of a game as High Fantasy: the division of the world into Home Areas and Wyrd Areas (“wyrd” is an Old English word meaning destiny in the sense of an inward potentiality in process of becoming, with an approaching inevitable end; it eventually was changed through use into “weird”). A Home Area is one in which everyday life as we know it exists; it is the Primary World.

A Wyrd Area is the realm of the Dark, the actual world of Faerie. It is in Wyrd Areas that one encounters monsters and has adventures. All AD&D dungeons are Wyrd Areas...

The boundary between Home Areas and Wyrd Areas should be set out clearly. The use of mile stones, walls, magic barriers, hedges, toll gates, rivers, and ditches all serve to clearly separate the Primary World from Faerie.

Home Areas are populated by humans. It may be appropriate for a few elves, dwarves or halflings to be visiting a Home Area, but they should not live there...

It is imperative for players and DMs to understand the need for this division, and to handle the separation creatively. For instance, all adventures are appropriately undertaken and all experience points gained in Wyrd Areas. Bawdy houses, government, trade, agriculture, law & order, and military orders/units—the entire ambiance of En Garde! or of a feudal society (or any other historical culture/society)— are appropriate to Home Areas.”

It's also a contrast that unsurprisingly some of our more creative gaming brethern have been articulating more as of late. James Raggi, for instance, finds it important enough to tackle it in his own ever-opinionated game treatment of weird fantasy. In the more interesting parts of the LotFP referee book you'll find paragraphs like this gem of a flame-war starter:

“The ability to create...mystery is why a verisimiltudinous campaign world is recommended. If everything is fantastic (as it is in Sword and Planet stories and genres), then nothing really is. It's exotic, to be sure, and this isn't to disparage the enjoyment of such things but it becomes very difficult to differentiate “normal” from “abnormal” in a game world that is fundamentally alien from the start.”

And again this tension is repeated by the creator of one of the more alien, exotic, and beautifully-imagined settings, Geoffrey of Carcosa fame (or infamy depending on your point of view). He devotes a recent blog post—which seriously deserved more play in the blogosphere—to a move away from all-strange, all the time feel of Carcosa toward a new Clark Ashton Smith-flavored setting, now fittingly-titled Isle of the Unknown, that explicitly embraces this contrast.

So a very long-winded way to justify some of my own campaign choices (which are, of course, at the end of day a matter of personal taste). The Hill Cantons are a borderlands area in which characters pass from the a human-dominated civilized world so dull and stolid and rooted in our historical, late 15^th century stand-in institutions that magic, demi-humans, and all that is weird are almost forgotten. While town adventures might happen they only do so in the border towns that the swirling chaos is starting to encroach on—the core lands themselves have little to show for them adventure-wise.

That is until something comes along perhaps to upend the apple cart...

Firearms, Cossacks, and Polish RPGs

I have been enjoying a series of posts by Jonathan Becker on firearms and D&D a little too much as of late (when one begins arguing about whether or not the cylindrical shape of a smooth-bore musket ball has an effect on the gun's accuracy, you know you have a problem).

JB's mention of Polish hussars reminded me of one of my favorite early black-powder periods the Wild West-like time period that the sprawling Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth experienced in the early to mid 17^th century. With an anarchic southern borderlands and a gallant sword-playing nobility, the period was ripe for adventure stories which the Nobel prize-winning author, Henryk Sienkiewicz , captured marvelously in his three novel adventure series that begins with With Fire and Sword. I'm throwing a clip below from the 1999 film version just to see if that doesn't inspire you to want to throw in a Cossack barbarian incursion into your own campaign (ok, maybe that's just Slavophile me talking).

Which gets me to my second tangent, I've been a fascinated with a number of foreign-language role-playing games such as the French rpg based in Jack Vance's Lyonesse and all the Euro D&D spin-offs. Needless to say, I was doubly stoked to find Dzikie Pola, a game based in the very same period, which is all the more frustrating because I have not figured out a way to get a copy of the damned thing. Any ideas out there from our globe-trotting brethren? (Word on the Lyonesse game by the apparently now defunct Belgian company, Men In Cheese, will get you extra credit.)

Empire of the Petal Throne, the “Gamist” Early Years

Empire of the Petal Throne is often referred to by old school D&D gamers as the “favorite game I never played”, a notion that I (sadly) cling to myself. Having developed a case of Tekumel fascination after an impulse buy of Barker's Man of Gold novel, EPT also became for me the one and only gaming system I bought in the entire two-decade period in which I swore off gaming.

At the time though, the fiddly-seeming, original D&D-flavored rules seemed far less interesting and evocative than the setting squeezed around. (Likely the nature of the Tekumel beast impels nearly all it's admirers—outside of the group still playing with Barker or other hardcore initiates—to be background-consuming admirers rather than hands-on practing admirers these days.)

These days my thoughts run about 180 degrees in a different direction. OEPT starts to look more and more as a fascinating set of tweaks and experiments building off a core of D&D rules and concepts when they were both still young and fresh. Which is why I find the remarkably well documented --if obscurely filed away--accounts of the game's early days so fascinating. It's a glimpse into a sweet-spot time when a richly-imagined setting firmly rooted in pulp science fantasy added to the excitement of an adventure game—a time before when acting out scenes from Tsolyani daily life became the end in itself.

Take the following account from M.A.R. Barker from the Runequest Con booklet I quoted from yesterday:

“When I first dragged my dusty tomes on Tékumel out of my basement in 1974, I thought of them as little more than background material for a “dungeon” to entertain my friends in our small gaming group at the University of Minnesota. I had been dissatisfied with the background-less, society-less “dungeons” then being played: when one came up out of a “dungeon,” what did one do? Go to a bar, drink, and fight? Go to a “hotel” and sleep until the next “expedition?” Wander around the streets of the “town” where very few buildings had interiors or even shopkeepers? Go to a “temple” to be healed or to “pray” for useful magical benefits, sorcerous weapons, etc.? Go on an “outdoors adventure,” using a set of rules designed to appeal to backpackers? The choices were limited...

The format of the game offered interesting complexities, but little was in print. One of our first referees, who had played with Gary Gygax and had introduced the game to our group, brought in a government. Being a medieval history major, his ruler was a Duke, and the social structure was feudal. The “church” for good folks resembled Catholicism, while the “temples” for “evil” characters were simplistic borrowings from Robert Howard’s Conan stories and the like. Admittedly, we had a great time.”

I love the telling honesty of that last line. The following, fascinating account from one of Barker's original players, Lady Anka'a, gives some texture to what the newly-synthesized campaign was like in its first year. One should note that this original OD&D-based campaign was not yet the OEPT version that was commercially published by TSR. Ironically it was Gary Gygax no less who convinced Barker to create the slightly more-divergent, percentile-diced based system.


(By the way all of this information was found on the Tekumel yahoo group. If you dig this stuff, you should mosey over there and join up. Among other things you can find an old email from the same lady that talks about how Barker developed the original manuscript after objecting to Mike Morand, of Old Geezer fame and the likely DM mentioned above, let his players ice the Archangel Michael. Whoa.)

“So it passed, that one August evening, hot and sticky, we all traipsed down to Klaeber Court--which was the office for the South Asian Studies Department, which Prof. Barker headed. It was not in the usual gaming place, because he wanted this to be private--he said then he planned to publish it and we said we would be discreet about it...

7:00 pm was the appointed time, but we got there and as usual, we hung around and chatted for a while. Eventually, Phil took out a number of green-covered mimeo booklets--two volumes each, and passed them around. Maybe 100 - 150 pages total.

We read through the booklets while Phil told us about the world, and we eventually started rolling up characters. In those days, it was pretty much a copy of D&D in stats and combat. We all got characters and looked through the books and decided what class we would be, fighter or priest or magic-user. It was different from D&D in that there were many more sociological things we had to deal with right at the start. Like picking a god to worship and alignment, though Prof. Barker said alignment was not as big a deal as in D&D, in other words stability and change were not automatically inimical...

Our origin, and that of all the original player characters, was that we originated from the Southern Continent (never seen on maps) and had decided to leave and cast our fortunes in the north. We were supposedly about 18-years-old or so. We each arrived on the shores of Jakalla in a small boat. We landed, sold the boat, and with the few coins we got from that and the clothes on our backs (and presumably a small pack of personal items) we entered the world of Tekumel, and the Tsolyani Empire...

At first the campaign was mostly a dungeoning campaign, with interesting twists. We first fought in the Tlakotani slave arenas for money and earned enough to outfit ourselves, to go into Jakalla's underworld, kill monsters and get gold--kaitars--so we could get better equipment and kill bigger monsters. And we would earn points and go up levels, and do more and better stuff. The usual D&D progression. The first six months or so was mostly that.

But it was fascinating. We encountered monsters we had never heard of before, and strange people and places. The idea this was a metal-poor world and such was made clear to us from the start, but we absorbed a lot through asking questions, and on our shopping trips to outfit ourselves. Later we ended up exploring most of the planet through use of the tube car system.

Those were some of the best adventures I have ever played in, in any campaign. They are still etched vividly in my memory.”

Barker goes on to say in that convention piece that “the original Empire of the Petal Throne was about as realistic a simulation as Monopoly is of Atlantic City of the 1930’s.”Personally though, I would love to see nothing better for Tekumel to return to its “gamist” roots, to a time when those barbarian outsiders explored vast, history-soaked underworlds by torch-light with nasty barbed chlen-hide swords in hand.

Instead of yet another clunky (or narrativist-rooted) edition of rules, why not a return full circle? Why not a whole new, old edition of OEPT that explicit posits itself as a tricked-out, rules-lite version of OD&D with a outwardly, less canonically-obsessed tone? Based on the sales of new, old rules sets presenting heavy designer-flavoring such as LotFP--which has effectively sold out on its entire first print run--my hunch is that the professor would have a hit product on his hands.

M.A.R. Barker on Rules Lite

I came along this quote from M.A.R. Barker the other day about his next steps after dropping the needlessly-complex Swords and Glory second generation rules for adjudicating his wonderfully baroque Tekumel:

"After awhile, I began using the simplest possible system with my own gaming groups. As my old friend, Dave Arneson, and I agreed, one simple die roll is all that one needs: failure or success. The players don’t really care, as long as the roll is honest. Who cares if I hit with the flat of my shield, with the edge of my shield, or whatever? The story’s the thing!

A low score on a D100 roll denotes success; a high score signifies failure. A middling score results in no effect, or an event that is inconclusive. Thus, an 01 denotes the best possible result for the character, with perhaps more goodies than he/she bargained for: the foe goes down with one blow, the spell hits the exact target, the character easily swings up onto the mountain ledge. A 100 (i.e. 00), is a total, horrible flop, perhaps death or destruction: e.g. the opponent cuts our hero down, the poison works, the climber falls screaming off the cliff. A 45-65 = a natural result; the fight continues, the struggle to climb the peak goes on, and the like. A sliding scale from 01 to 100 gives all sorts of interesting ranges of success/failure."

There you go, no real rules just a ref and two ten-sided dice. Take that inveterate rules tinkers.