Known World, Old World

I bought (.pdf, have you seen the shipping costs that Chaosium quote for transatlantic shipping?!) the new version of Magic World, which is basically a reprint of Elric! stripped of it Moorcockisms. And very nice it looks too; a clean, relatively simple d100 fantasy game. The first supplement, Advanced Sorcery, is due soon - again it is largely a reprint of Elric! material, in this case The Bronze Grimoire. 

Chaosium should note* that they are selling .pdfs of Elric! on DriveThruRPG for a couple of quid cheaper, at current exchange rates, than Magic World. And, of course, that nothing short of free is quite a cheap as Legend, which itself is basically a reprint of Mongoose RuneQuest II stripped of its Gloranthaisms. And speaking of Elric, with Legend you could run the Mongoose version of everyone's favourite albino (outside the one played by Mel Smith in The Princess Bride), as all(?) their Elric of Melnibone stuff is on DriveThruRPG for less than £10 a book...

But as Brian Butterfield would say, "that's not all". So, what do we have on the d100 fantasy scene at the moment? Well, we have OpenQuest 2e on the way (I backed the IndieGoGo campaign, and am looking forward to seeing the improvements/additions that Newt Newport has made to this system). Slightly more complex than that, we have Magic World from Chaosium. An extra level of complexity is added - mainly by virtue of its 'faction' system - by Renaissance (now available in a Deluxe form), built on OpenQuest and Legend. One level more complex again is Legend, with its Combat Action 'economy' and system of Combat Manoeuvers  And then we have the big boss of d100 fantasy gaming, RuneQuest 6, which I haven't had a chance to look at yet, though I expect it to be stunning, if I bit too much for my current tastes. 

I own OpenQuest (and soon will have a copy of 2e), Magic World, Mongoose RuneQuest II and Legend, and Renaissance (in the free SRD and hardback Clockwork and Chivalry 2e form). I also own the Basic Roleplaying 'big gold book', will probably buy RuneQuest 6 if it ever appears with a UK supplier, and have a number of out-of-print d100 fantasy systems (I particularly like my GW-produced RQ3 books). With all these extant systems, and given the fact that many of them are OGL (and those that are not appear keen to licence third parties to produce supplements), this is a vibrant, lively time for d100 fantasy gaming.

Well, if there are many other gamers are as daft as me, willing will buy umpteen different versions of d100 fantasy, of course the d100 scene is vibrant! I can't quite decide which is my favourite d100 engine for fantasy gaming (which is yours?). "No, really?", I hear you say, shocked. "I had no idea that you suffered from gamer ADHD", you gasp. However, the intercompatibility of these systems - and the nature of the d100 system itself - not only its modularity, but the simplicity and consistency of the mechanics - means that GMs can pick and choose the best bits from each of these systems. Sadly(?), between Magic World, OpenQuest, and Renaissance, there is little need for Hammerstein! as yet another d100 system. But hopefully this flowering of d100 fantasy systems will stimulate the production of d100 fantasy adventures and other supplements for use at the table. 

*Hopefully, if Chaosium did take note (though given that they don't even notice e-mails, it seems) I'd hope this would not mean an end to the sale of the classic Stormbringer/Elric! .pdfs - we wouldn't accept other kinds of books being deliberately kept out-of-print, and the resurrection of out-of-print gaming books is one of the great success stories of recent RPG history - or an increase in their price, but rather a more reasonable .pdf pricing structure at Chaosium.com.

[Extra: Of course, this is not the limit to d100 fantasy built on a BRP(ish) chassis. In the pipeline are both AEONS, built on the D100II SRD, and Classic Fantasy (originally a BRP supplement) is being rewritten as a 'Legend compatible' complete game.]

Rather than simply putting up pictures of whatever I have managed to paint, I thought it a good idea to write them into my campaign as NPCs or encounters, even if the miniatures themselves won’t necessarily be used in play. I've statted them out for Hammerstein!, which is simply OpenQuest/Renaissance/Legend with a few tweaks.

Lenk the Sour is a Captain in the forces of the 2nd Centurion of the Half Clock*. 

Lenk the Sour [Brugelburg Miniature]

The 2nd Centurion is a brutal overlord. Refugees from his underpopulated Shadow can be found in Wilderhaven, living in crowded Docktown tenements. The 2nd Centurion will burn villages in reprisal for some slight, or simply to clear land for his great passions, the noble pursuits of hunting and tournament. The 2nd Shadow abounds with ruined villages and overgrown copses, providing a home for Faerie and worse. 

The 2nd Centurion has little need to maintain a population of agricultural peasants, and has even less inclination to meet his feudal obligations to them. He controls the Fort-agin-the-Moors. The Fort is a staging post for Adventurers into the Craggen Moors, and as such is home to trade in exotic pre-Cataclysm artefacts and relics, with ‘liberated’ abhuman treasure hordes inflating the prices of everything from ordinary provisions to weapons and armour. There is also a woollen mill and monthly textile market, as the luxuriously fine wool from the Ogre shepherds enters civilised lands through the Fort. 

Lenk is the 2nd Centurion’s prime thug. The 2nd Centurion despises Lenk for his crude manners and low birth, and Lenk responds with ever greater servility and renewed attempts at ingratiation. Lenk, therefore, has erased any conscience that he may once have had. He feels no doubt or remorse when he dispossess peasants, mutilates poachers, or cuts off the thumbs of militant wool workers. There is nothing Lenk will not do to his own people, if he thinks it will win favour from his ‘betters’.

Lenk is a tall, powerful man in his 40s. His small, alert eyes are set in angular features. Even as his face is mean, it takes on a pathetic cast when interacting with those of noble birth, or who otherwise hold power; from weasel-cruel to grovelling-mouse. 

Lenk the Cruel

STR: 15 CON: 14 SIZ: 15 INT: 11 POW: 8 DEX: 9 CHA: 6

Damage Modifier: +1d2


Weapons: Coward's Falchion (1d6+2, M), many daggers (1d4+1, S)

Armour: Breastplate and backplate, helmet (4 AP)

Combat Skills: Close Combat 70%, Ranged Combat 50%, Unarmed Combat 50%

Notable Skills: Athletics 60%, Dodge 50%, Influence 70%, Insight 50%, Perception 40%, Persistence 40%, Resilience 50%, Ride 40%, Stealth 30%.

Magic Points: 8

Cantrips: Demoralise (2), Ignite 2, Strength 1, Weapon Enhance 1 

Cantrip Casting: 30%

Among Lenk’s weapons is a COWARD’S FALCHION. Lenk knows that it is a powerful magical weapon, but he does not know its true nature. Forged by a sorcerer for his orc general, the brutal looking weapon has a vestigial intelligence, and seeks to be in the possession of the strongest warrior it can. When fighting an opponent with an inferior combat skill (use the opponent’s highest skill, even if it is not the one being used), the Coward’s Falchion grants a two step increase in the wielder’s Damage Modifier. This means that Lenk often has a +1d6 Damage Modifier. However, when the Coward’s Falchion is used to attack someone with a superior combat skill it betrays its wielder inflicting a -20% penalty to both attacks and parries.

[The Coward’s Falchion impresses its own primal personality onto the wielder. You might want to resolve this by using ‘experience’ checks against Pendragon-like personality traits. The owner of the Coward’s Falchion gains a check against Cruel, Arbitrary, and Cowardly at the end of each game year. This is IN ADDITION to any checks against these traits that may have been gained for the cruel, arbitrary, and cowardly acts that the character might have performed using the weapon. If the character hasn’t carried or handled the Coward’s Falchion for any significant period of time during that year – for example, if it has been locked in an armoury, no checks are necessary. However, even if the character primarily fights with another weapon, or does little fighting at all, so long as he or she carries the Coward’s Falchion it will warp their personality. A simpler option is to impose Persistence tests that increase in difficulty over the years, each time the wielder is presented with an opportunity to be cruel, and especially to cut down the weak. If the test is failed, the personality of the Coward's Falchion will assert itself.] 

*Wilderhaven is built on the site of the Classical city of Kallipolis. During the Cataclysm, Kallipolis burned, its buildings fell, and much sank into the bubbling tar of the Belch. During the Classical Era, the countryside was controlled by six forts arranged in an even semi-circle – a half-clock – to the east. Each of these controlled a ‘Shadow’ of Kallipolis, with the city itself conceived of as the hand of a sundial. After the Cataclysm, the commanders of these six forts used what was left of the legions under their command to carve out hereditary baronies. They have retained some of the Kallipolian stylings – Classical history is the source of their legitimacy – so tin-pot barons call themselves centurions and their brute squads are their legions. They currently owe their feudal loyalty to the Pirate King, their power inextricably tied to the economy of Wilderhaven.     

Hammerstein!, is my OpenQuest/Renaissance/Legend work-in-very-early-progress hack that attempts to build a simple(ish) OGL d100 game that evokes WFRP1e with the 'adventuresome' turned up and the 'grimdark' turned down (but not off). Basically, WFRP1e in Fighting Fantasy's Titan... hmm, perhaps I should just do that rather than write my own game... No, I need my own 'heartbreaker'.

Anyhow, when I think about running WFRP1e in Titan, I think about stripping out all the non-adventuring professions, to ensure everyone has combat, magic, or other specialist skills that would help them adventure rather than scrabble in the mud, pushing their own guts back inside. WFRP1e does adventuring well, if everyone rolls a combat profession (which tend to come well equipped and highly skilled) and someone rolls a wizard's apprentice. If, as has happened when we've played, everyone rolls characters whose chief skill is the ability to dance, you have a troupe of poor, ill-equipped buskers*, and any dungeoneering will get grimdark indeed. However, I play RPGs with people who have no intention of poring over lists of skills or equipment. Even OpenQuest character generation turns my players off the game, as they take a long time to assign skill points and buy equipment, have little fun doing so, but then have invested so much time into the character that killing them off early would be a real enthusiasm drainer. WFRP character generation was easy. Players chose three things; their race, their career category, and their name. Everything else was settled by random rolls, but nevertheless produced interestingly shaped bones on which to build a character. The oracular power of the dice demonstrated right at the outset.

With Hammerstein!, one thing that I've been doing is building archetypes that assign all the skill points and select the equipment of starting characters in order to make d100 character generation a quick, easy process. It's one step up from using pre-generated characters, as the players still get a feel of the system in character creation, and get to roll dice even if they don't make too many choices. Here's part of the work-in-progress, from the chapter on character creation. Why the bombardier archetype? Because it is alphabetically the first of the fighter archetypes.     

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I've pretty much finished my first draft rewrites of the character creation, skills, and combat chapters, taking the best bits from OpenQuest, Renaissance, and Legend. There won't be many changes for the examples set in these (related) rulesets. Some skills have been merged or rationalised, I've adopted large parts of the Renaissance Serious/Grave Wound system, there'll be some changes to the magic systems, but not much. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. But I do believe in tweaking what ain't broke, so bits here and bits there have minor changes. Hammerstein! will be using the OpenQuest/Renaissance combat system rather than Legend's beautiful system simply, because that much complexity is wrong for our group. Rather than have specialist combat skills, as Renaissance does, unusual weapons or advanced styles are dealt with by 'combat proficiencies' - the core skill remains Unarmed Combat, Close Combat or Ranged Combat, but the combat proficiency allows them to use the weapon without penalty and/or use it in mechanically distinct ways. There will be madness rules, and while I always want to add in Pendragon-esque personality traits and passions, I think I might be able to stay my hand this time.


*Actually, by the rules, busking is one of the best ways to make money in the cities of the Old World. It's certainly better than much low-skilled labouring, which barely pays well enough to keep a character fed and housed. 42 shillings to support a character for an 8 day week. That's just over 5/- per day. It's 2/- per night to sleep on the floor in a common room of an inn, and 3/- is the minimum a character can spend on (pre-prepared) food and remain healthy. Okay, so you might be able to live even more cheaply than that, of you are not renting a patch of floor and have the space and equipment to prepare your own food. But still, it is realistically (for a grimdark game) hand to mouth. Buskers, however, so long as they make a Fel test, make 1d4+1 GOLD CROWNS every hour. If they fail, they still make 1d6 pennies. Why, in the name of Sigmar, would our characters even think of battling Chaos when they could prance in the street and live like dancing kings?  

So, the plan is that by presenting the players with, at first, a small number of choices for their characters, we will slowly build the world through play. As we build a common understanding of the people, factions, locations, and logic of this world, the players will, naturally enough, be able to see a wider range of possibilities for action. Unfortunately, I've been very busy lately, so these three adventure seeds have been taken from published adventures (no point having a couple of cupboards of stuff if you're not going to use it). Names have barely been changed, if at all, but what actually happen might vary. *Will* vary, if for nothing else that all three were written for quite different systems. Here's what I presented to the players: 

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With your last silvers, you have formed the Respectful Companye of Gentlemen Adventurers. While dossing about in the various dives that serve as social clubs and job centres for 'resting' 'professional' adventurers, you hear a variety of rumours.

A notice is pinned to the board in the Copper Bottom Inn in Docktown. It reads, 'Capable persons required to protect valuables. Well paid, food and board supplied. Contact Utho the Landlord.' Asking a few questions, you find the notorious inventor Wolfgang van der Kugel (great-grandson of Wilhelm van der Kugel, pirate/engineer and builder of the harbour barrage) is being harassed by extortionists, and in keen to employ 'adventurers' to put an end to this problem. He is offering 100 silver pieces per adventurer, payable when the problem is solved.

Widow Thanato, of Docktown, is complaining of demons in her house. She insists that something is eating the contents of her root cellar. She says that she can hear it moving about and growling at night. Widow Thanato is poor – there is no reward for dealing with her problem – but she is a popular, well-known figure in Docktown. And she is a close friend of your landlady, the Spinster Grunhilde.

Sariedo, a merchant of some repute, is known to be looking for adventurers. He is offering a large amount, 500 silver pieces per person, for a party to recover an item from the Belch for him. He warns repeatedly of the risks that adventurers might face, but always jingles his purse as he speaks of danger. When pressed, he tells more; he wants the party to recover a fist-sized amber gem that he believes is hidden in the cellars beneath the ruined storehouses in the Monastery of Righteous Revelation. He offers to pay 250 silver pieces to the party up front, and the adventurers can keep anything else they find. 

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My players, however, appear to lack the mercenary instinct. Of the four, two have so far replied - the barbarian acrobat (played by S) and the warrrior from the Contemplative Empire of the Egg (played by A) - and both have opted to help the widow. 

As unemployment edges toward 3 million and we all face significant cuts in our standard of living over the next few years at least, I thought I’d escape to fantasy. But it is difficult to earn a living there, too. Over the next few posts I’ll consider the ways in which a few RPGs deal with living expenses, and ways of earning a living that aren’t glorified murder and robbery. Some of the economies implied by the equipment and price lists and suggested wages simply do not work.

I’ll start with Mongoose’s ‘new’ bargain ruleset, Legend. Legend uses silver and copper pieces as the standard units of currency, with 10cp=1sp.

On page 111 we have a list of food and lodging for those on the road, i.e. short term lodgings, whether a flop house or a private room, and food bought in inns and taverns, or from street vendors. These range from 3cp a day for poor standard, through 1sp 5cp for average, to 7sp a day for superior food and lodging.

According to the table on page 85 of Legend, jobs such as Temple Assistant, Librarian, or working in the Militia, for example, can all be expected to earn you about 2sp a day (some of these come with free food and / or lodging), making it perfectly possible to maintain a decent standard of living even if you rely on more expensive short-term rented lodging and buy food in inns and taverns. It would be impossible to maintain a ‘superior’ standard of living through the kinds of employment listed here (except by being a lucky gambler or a good burglar). Some of the jobs, of course, pay far less – a manual labourer can only expect 3cp per day. Nevertheless, it is possible to see how people maintain some kind of standard of living according to the implied economy.

However, page 85 of Legend also has a table suggesting that PCs should spend a proportion of their ‘personal wealth’ to maintain a certain standard of living, ranging from 10% for ‘subsistence’ to 100% or more for ‘ostentatious’. The preceding page notes that ‘the terms used are relative to the amount of money the Adventurer has available: ‘luxury’ to someone with only a few silvers in their purse might be taking a bath once a week. To someone with several thousand, it might be taking a bath in asses milk every day.’ While I get that wealth is relative, I don’t get how an Adventurer, whose personal wealth will fluctuate much more than a regular person, can maintain what they might call ‘luxury’ simply by spending 80% of their personal wealth. After a successful raid they might have hundreds of silver pieces, AND after a spell of lean pickings, when they are grubbing in their purse to find a handful of copper pieces. Even if it did make sense to say that a person who only knew a nearly empty purse would see their 80% living a luxury, to suggest that an Adventurer would makes little sense.

And that is before we ask whether personal wealth includes loot, or just the income from employment in spells of ‘down time’. Because, if it includes loot, 1000sp stolen from the Sherriff’s strongbox will maintain a ‘luxurious’ standard of living for an indefinite period of downtime for the price of 800sp. This is true whether the downtime is a month of so of carousing between raids, or a year long spell of semi-retirement until the heat has died down.

I expect that some of this will be expanded in the forthcoming equipment guide, Arms of Legend. But until then, Legend has a system that allows PCs to spend months in downtime between perilous adventures, taking part in an abstract, but still sensible economy.

Old news, perhaps, but Mongoose have their very own Old School Revival going on. Their house sci-fi system is Traveller, which apparently looks a lot like Classic Traveller (1977). And they’ve announced that their house fantasy system will be Legend, aka Mongoose Runequest II, which, again apparently, looks a lot like Runequest 2 (1979).

My copy of hardback Traveller arrived this morning, and I have the Legend core rules on order down my FLGS. Both are available in digest sized books (and if I do run Traveller, I will be tempted to buy the digest sized rulebook to be passed around the table), with the Legend core rulebook looking a steal at £9.99. On the basis of the reviews that I’ve read, I’m expecting to like both systems a lot. Deadly combat, characters differentiated by a manageable skill system that places them firmly in the world, and ‘realistic’ advancement systems. Oh, and deadly combat. Did I say that?

Traveller looks a lot less intimidating than I had taken it to be when I read about it in the 1980s. Part of that intimidatory presence was what was written and said of character creation – I was left feeling that it was too complex. And compared to Basic D&D, it is. That is a low bar, though. But a greater part of that intimidation was the result the adventures in White Dwarf and Gamesmaster International. They always seemed so interesting and exciting (and the same goes for my late-1980s exposure to Call of Cthulhu), but as a dungeon-hacking player and DM, I really couldn’t understand how you would run a game that involved anything other than a succession of corridors and rooms, largely populated by monstrous combat opponents and stuffed with randomly rolled treasure. We played D&D, and only D&D. The Warlock of Firetop Mountain was our model. We played… poorly.

In fact, (Mongoose) Traveller looks a relatively clean system, built around 2d6 skill checks, while Legend displays its Basic Roleplay descent in its d% skill checks. Both have easy ways to determine levels of success or failure. Both systems look (relatively) easy to GM, and more importantly, easy for players to understand and build consistent decision-making on. Both have character creation systems that aren’t over long, but look like they’ll do a very nice job of connecting characters to the world/universe in which they will adventure.

It seems, whether I like it or not, that I am taken with rules systems that involve character creation that uses careers or the like to tie players to the world and their own history, I like advancement systems that do not produce superheroes, I like skill systems that suggest styles of play other than 'kill everything' (and methods for the mechanical resolution thereof), and I like combat systems that are dangerously deadly, even to experienced PCs. Or, at least, I have come to like systems with these components.

I can see Traveller and Legend becoming become my systems of choice - it'd be nice to support an existing RPG publisher, and FLGS, rather than put most of my disposable income into the hands of eBay traders, and to play a game that is actually in print (with magazine support - see Signs and Portents).

For further 'Old School' goodness, Mongoose also publish Paranoia and the Lone Wolf roleplaying game.

This blogpost has not been brought to you with Mongoose. This is not an advertorial. It has just ended up reading that way.