The Great Pumpkins

I played in an 11-hour halloween one-shot last night, run by my friend Jeremy Hill. It was a solid game, lots of fun. Every player had 2 PCs, college students who were going to a Corn Maze and Pumpkin Patch. Each of your two PCs would arrive in two different car pools.

Scenes bounced back and forth between these two groups. One group ran into bloodthirsty ghosts at the pumpkin patch. The other group's car broke down, and they ended up asking for help at a creepy old house a few miles down the road... a house full of cannibal cultists. They seemed to be two entirely separate adventures taking place on the same night but just a few miles apart, but we eventually learned that the cannibal cult were actually the ones responsible for stirring up the ghosts that the other groups was battling.

It was pretty nifty way to tell the story. Jumping back and forth between the two groups allowed some cool "cliffhanger" cuts. Because each player had a two characters (one in each group), every time we hit a dead end in one mystery investigation, we could cut away to the other group for a little while.

When we'd come back to the previous "dead-end" later, in the intervening break one player or another would always have come up with another option that we hadn't tried before. I feel like there were places where we would have otherwise gotten frustrated or locked up, but the scene-hopping just naturally shook us free of that every time. It organically encouraged us to think outside the box. What's more, switching between our two characters worked to give you a break, so the nearly 12-hour session seemed to flash by super fast. Without exception, each player chose radically different personality and character types for their two characters, which probably amplified this rejuvenating effect. It worked really well.

I'm seriously considering stealing this trick for my own games going forward. 

Hammer-Patterned, The Multiplicity of Tongs

This is a story synopsis and play-by-play for a tabletop RPG I ran last night. The game was completely improvised, and the system was 6X, so it ended up being pretty wacky.


Starting premise was essentially "reclaim" mode of the video game "Dwarf Fortress". If you've never played DF, just picture the abandoned halls of Moria from Lord of the Rings… with a penchant for going FUBAR in delightfully slapstick ways. If you are familiar with Dwarf Fortress, you'll get a couple of inside jokes below, but you'll also quickly see that we diverged  from the source material.

For a thousand years the mighty Dwarf enclave known as "Hammer-Patterned, The Multiplicity of Tongs" had stood solid within a rocky mountain at the edge of the empire. But now, several years have passed since word or caravan had come forth from Hammer-Patterned, and the worst is feared.

 A small group of stout Dwarven settlers and explorers has been sent forth to Hammer-Patterned to learn the fate of King Blordok Syrupbraid, re-establish the trade-route if possible, and claim salvage rights should things in Hammer-Patterned turn out to be as bad as they are feared.

An aside about the ridiculous name: Three of us grabbed random words and we mashed them together to come up with a silly title worthy of a Dwarf Fortress. It didn't make any sense to us, either, but it certainly is in line with the bizarre naming conventions employed in the source material.

Our party of stout dwarves explorers is as follows:

• Oredang the Miner (played by Devon, who had a fair amount of Dwarf Fortress). Gender: Female. Skills: Miner, Novice Organzier.  Equipment: Steel Pickaxe, pet Yak calf. Beard: black, long and twisted.
• OIN son of GLOIN son of BROIN son of DROIN son of MOIN (played by Dan), (hereafter referred to as simply "Oin son of blah" to save me a lot of typing.) Gender: Male  Skills: likes Ancestry  Beard: 7 and 1/8ths inches
• Cog Claspshanks (played by my wife, Sarah). Gender: Female  Skills: Stone Engraver  Equipment: Carving Tools  Beard: 9 braids (one per child she bore)
• Brunhilda the Carver (played by Laura). Gender: Female  Skills: Carver, creates statues, curious, good fighter with a hammer.  Equipment: Hammer, Carving Tools   Beard: Has a red beard she wears in two braids.
• Thugnar the Bold (played by John). Gender: Male  Skills: bold, break rock with hammer, drink ale copiously.  Equipment: Hammer Beard: Long flowing blonde beard, braided intricately.
• Mad Oleg (played by Eric). Gender: Male   Skills: Ore-taster  Beard: filled with minerals

Fine specimens of craftdwarfship be they all.

An aside about investigation and skills:   In retrospect, I wish I'd done more with Mad Oleg's unique and flavorful "ore-taster" skill. It's got great potential for an investigative scenario, but since this was an off-the-cuff 6X game (and thus what mysteries there were remained mysterious even to the GM until they were randomly defined), I just didn't really figure out a way to make it matter. Similar things can be said for Oin son of blah's "likes Ancestry" skill that would have been really useful in Continuum or Trail of Cthulhu, but was hard to work into 6X on the fly. I wish I could have integrated these into the story better.

I started the game with some narration about the overland trip. When you arrive at your destination, the food cart has already run out and you've polished off half the mules. That baby Yak calf is starting to look pretty good.

Then I threw in a passing comment about the sad state of the disused trade route and especially the statuary along it, and it nearly took the game in a completely different direction.  I said the ancient statues at the side of the road were overgrown, and someone had put pumpkins or jack-o-lanterns where the statues heads should be, but I didn't really know where I was going with this. It was just color, drawn from an old fantasy illustration I saw once for one of the Lord of the Ring books. The players immediately started blaming the elves, so I said that near one of the statues was a tree with an old ramshackle treehouse in it's branches, and they could hear the slow sad sounds of a banjo on the wind. 

The players debated whether to sneak past what were clearly creepy elfbillies, or just burn the place.  Seemed like a great place for our first card draw.

Card Draw?  We were using a variant of 6X that I'm calling cardX. Instead of making a chart and rolling a die, each player rights a possible outcome on a notecard, and we draw one out of a hat.  Learn more here.

So we get our first result: 

• 1: "Burning down the treehouse starts a forest fire. We have to run quickly and rush the cart along, breaking the axle."

Which I think came as a surprise to the player who first proposed that they burn down the treehouse, as he thought he'd been talked out of it. That happens with 6X.

We threw in a little color narration about dim-witted elven hillbillies having a conversation as their treehouse burnt down around them. One with a banjo, the other a pitchfork. "There they go, setting' us afire agin. An' I was jus' bouts to warn 'em that there's nuthin down that road but the ol' haunted dwarves place."

Escaping past the (flaming) tree line, and hauling their booze kegs on their own backs, our fearless dwarven explorers find themselves at the massive bridge that marks the borders of HammerPatterned the Multiplicity of Tongs.

The bridge was carved of stone and set with cogs and machinery. Dangling from the sides were chains ending with metal Tongs clattering in the breeze. With his knowledge of ancestry, Oin son of blah was able to explain that the local custom was to hang a set of ancestral tongs to commemorate the moment and place of passing of any dwarf. Clearly, hundreds of dwarves had died on this particular bridge. At the far end of the bridge was a mighty lever, so Thugnar the bold ran across the bridge and yanked the lever while his friends were crossing more slowly behind him.

I like to imagine that the other cards in the bag were full of horrible trap-riddled death the likes of which would have made even One-Eyed Willie turn white as a bone, but alas the one the players drew said simply:

• 2: "The cog bridge plays beautiful music!"

The lever set the gears turning, and the chains and tongs dangling from them clattered together in a pleasant tinkling melody, accompanied by the deep bass rumblings of the bridgeborn machinery that powered it all.

Thereafter followed a long section without any cards being made or pulled. There were probably a couple moments where we could have done cards, but each time someone would announce an idea they had that sounded fun enough we all just conceded the narrative ground to them.

The dwarves came to the gates of HammerPatterned, which were huge granite things set with engravings of hammers. The doors looked like they hadn't been opened for some time. We tried speaking "friend" to them, but to no avail. An oversized steel hammer and tongs hung from a chain, dangling out of the mouth of stone grate above the doors. A grate perfect for pouring something down on unwanted guests, like boiling oil.  Most of the party stepped back or to the side.

Nearby was a pumpkin patch, growing in the sunlight beside the gates. Not a particularly dwarven crop, but we all grudging acknowledged you could ferment and brew with them if you had to. Oredang pastured her Yak calf at the p-patch.

Speaking of Yak p,  by this time Thugnar had started knocking on the massive doors with the dangling hammer, and the other players suggested that his greeting should be that someone or something pees on him through the grates above.  Sometimes you just gotta play to your audience.

Wet and smelly but surprisingly undiscouraged, Thugnar decided to yank on the big chain to see if maybe it rang a bell inside and summoned servants.  Instead it made the grates above open up. As i was about to narrate huge rocks falling and call for a card draw, again a player interrupted me with a rather more amusing possibility so I just said yes. A Yak fell from grate, narrowly missing Thugnar and going splat on the ground.

Additional chains and tongs now dropped and dangled from the grates as well, because clearly, any place where a Yak might feasibly drop on you is a place likely to have claimed the lives of many a drunk dwarf (and thus need commemorating per the previously described local custom). So the players climbed up the mesh of chains and into  the inside of the gatehouse.

Inside where the desiccated remains of a dwarf who had barricaded himself into the gatehouse. He'd clearly lived here for some time before passing on when the beer ran out. The grain and foodstuffs he had with sequestered with him were nearly out as well, but had been enough to sustain the Yak until this very day.

Before the booze ran out, the dead dwarf had kept himself busy carving the walls of his gatehouse tomb. Here is an engraving of a dwarf and and elephant. The dwarf is riding on the elephant. Here is an engraving of dwarves and an elephant. The dwarves are holding hands around the elephant. Here is a superior engraving of dwarves and an elephant. The elephant is giving birth to the dwarves. Riffing off of "Boatmurdered" (google it), mostly, followed by one  reference to the Simpsons: Here is an engraving of just words, dwarves runic script in shaky handwriting, "can't sleep, elephants will eat me, can't sleep, elephants will eat me".

Undaunted (and now motivated by the inescapable conclusion that the fortress had been abandoned and thus the salvage rights were theirs), the players took down the barricade, and opened the doors.  Beyond were balconied galleries, overlooking the main hall and gates to the fortress. Far below them the main hall angled downward into the bowels of the earth.

It was at that moment that I told them, "all of a sudden, you hear a terrible noise reverberate through the fortress. Everyone contribute a card to the hat describing a possible noise." Apparently someone liked my engravings, because the card that was drawn said:

• 3: "The Sound of a Mastodon"

There was much debate over how to differentiate the calls of an elephant, mastodon or mammoth from one another, but eventually everyone decided it was indeed a mastodon. It didn't sound particularly close, however, so the players probed deeper into the galleries.

The floor of the main hall below fell further and further down, until at least 7 stories separated the extended balcony they walked upon from the main floor. As they probed deeper into the gloom, they eventually saw a giant Jasper elephant statue. It's head rose to the level of the balconies, so it was 7 stories tall, and equivalently long.

Mad Oleg said something to the effect of: "That is the largest collection of Jasper I have ever seen in all my years of ore-tasting, and the second-largest elephant statues I've seen, too."

The thought occurred to me then and there that it'd be a cool demise for the fortress if they'd had a "Trojan Horse" scenario where the elephant statue had brought some invading force… but the gates were clearly secure and intact, whereas at Troy the gates were torn apart. If I wanted to go the Trojan route, I'd have to give the players another clue… and I'd have to do so quickly, because in 6X you can't be subtle or slow because at any time a player action could derail your plans.

So I said there was a lever nearby. The players pulled it, and the entire top of the mountain retracted, giving them a clear view of everything. This meant you'd be able to drag the 7-story statue in our out of the fortress's 2-story gate. That (plus "the elephant is giving birth to the dwarves") made me feel like I could later go more explicitly Trojan and it'd be deemed foreshadowed rather than contradictory.

Oin son of blah suddenly got the idea into his head that if we can't find stairs down from the gallery, maybe we can somehow find stairs down from an elephant. It was a novel idea, and he approached it with masochistic gusto, suddenly jumping off the balcony towards the head of 7-story elephant. This had some potential to backfire, and we hadn't done cards in a while, so what the heck…

• 4. "The jasper elephant collapses into a pile of bits burying Oin."

An aside about character mortality: I probably would have been justified in killing poor Oin given that result and it's vague statements about his status at the end of it. 7 stories of falling and then being buried under tons of shattered jasper could easily be lethal.  Just like I could have made the Yak, rather than just it's pee, land on Thugnar earlier, and taken him out.  Instead I would just file this away in the back of my mind. Later, when it was time to start kicking the players butts a little, I'd remember that I'd previously gone easy on the two of them.

The statue fell to rubble, and this gave me a chance to reinforce my Trojan Elephant idea. I narrated that it had been a wooden frame with a jasper shell, hollow on the inside, and mostly breaking his fall as it collapsed in upon itself.

Rather than split up the party, I allowed the others to quickly find a ladder down and start unburying Oin son of blah. But as they labored, they could again hear the trumpeting of a mastodon, and the sound was now growing closer. Oh, and something about the cantilevered clockwork mechanisms closing the mountain top again since no one was up there holding the lever any more.

They free Oin son of blah, bandage him up, loot the huge garnet eyes of the crumbled statue, and then realize the source of the mastodon sounds is now only 1 room away from the main gall. It's behind Door #1.  Mad Oleg starts trying to barricade Door #1. The other players start to scatter, and one opens a door across the room (which we'll call Door #2) to make an escape. The remainder of the part started describing various other dubious escape routes, and I decided the best way to bring this chaos under control was to have everyone make a card describing the event they wanted to have resolve first.

• 5. "Inside the door [Door #2] is the skeleton of a mighty elephant. It's eyes light up with a ghostly flame and focus on Oredang."

So whatever the mastodon sound was on the other side of Door #1, it was suddenly back-seat to the Undead Elephant behind Door #2. That precipitated yet another card round.  The card I put in to the pot was particularly nasty, but alas it was not drawn. Instead, we got:

• 6. "The mastodon bursts into the room, shattering Mad Oleg's barricade! The mastodon then crushes the skeletal elephant in one blow of its mighty trunk!"

Combat in 6X (or my cardX variant) is pretty damn swingy. Here we have flaming ghost elephant about to attack Oredang one moment, and then it's obliterated by something else entirely in the very next action.  Why, I don't know. Clearly, with the players having that much narrative power, I needed to stop pulling my punches.

I gave everyone the opportunity to put in one brief bit of flavor narration that didn't change the overall situation, so they could illustrate how they fought or fled as appropriate, and then we did another card round to determine how the fight would resolve.  Hammers and picks were swung, Brunhilda clambered up a ladder to line up a daring leap towards the mastodon's head, and the monster thrashed about. Then:

• 7. "The mastodon impales Oin son of bla on its left tusk, and Thugnar on the right. Both are badly injured and freeing them will take much effort or heroism."

Yep, that card was mine. Major wounds and impairment to two PCs, and specifically the ones I'd gone easy on earlier. I decided to keep running combat for however long it took the players to make up a card that defeated it and get the corresponding lucky draw. As for my own cards in that time frame, I planned to eliminate one PC from the fight per round. Chances are they'd win the day, but we'd see if the mastodon couldn't take a few of them with it.

And wouldn't you know it, the players drew another one of my cards the very next round.

• 8. "The mastodon swallows Cog Claspshanks in a single gulp. Meanwhile, the impaled Dwarves bleed profusely, and Thugnar's weakened arms drop his hammer."

Three PCs down, 3 to go. More color narration for those that weren't swallowed, impaled or immobilized, and then another card-round. But I was not anticipating this result.

• 9. "Cog discovers that this mastodon is also hollow."

That's definitely a good break for the PCs, but a little open to interpretation. Hollow in what way? Well, if you leave it up to the GM, you have no one to blame but yourself.

So, I narrated that Cog drops down into the belly of the mechanical beast, and is immediately sealed inside one of several cages therein. Above her, safe within a metal cockpit with, are two kobolds operating the bicycle-driven mechanisms of the mechamastodon.  They have reinforced windows that let them look down at Cog, or stare out through the "eyes" of the mechamastodon.

Next round:

• 10. "Brunhilda jumps on the mastodon and starts beating it about the head with her hammer. The main effect is that she manages to realize there are kobolds inside. She kills the closer one."

We do some more color narration, and someone mentions that perhaps the mechamastodon, now missing the copilot, could be stuck running around in circles. That's funny enough to say yes to. 
At this point, I decided it was worth dealing with the impaled people. I announced that one of the tusks went limp, and Oin son of blah slid off the end of it. He's now bleeding out on the floor as the mechamastodon runs circles around him. I directed the players that this round of cards should not resolve the overall fight, but primarily determine Oin's fate.

• 11. "Oin dies in a pool of blood and miasma.   Dan's next character may arrive as the first of a wave of migrants sent to aid your colonization."

Dan quickly came up with a brand new character, well, kinda…

• GROIN son of OIN son of GLOIN son of BROIN son of DROIN son of MOIN, (hereafter referred to as simply "Groin son of Oin" to save me a lot of typing). Gender: Male  Skills: likes Ancestry  Beard: 7 and 3/8ths inches

As a general rule, when a PC dies, I usually require that the replacement character be something very different from the previous character, so there's some sense that death has impact, and is a thing to be avoided. Usually. This time, however, it was funny enough, and relevant to the "likes ancestry" mention on the character sheet, that I felt that was actually the perfect way to continue.

Various color narration. Circular mechamastodon chase. Cue benny hill music.

Then: "I am GROIN son of OIN son of GLOIN son of BROIN son of DROIN son of MOIN. You killed my father, OIN son of GLOIN son of BROIN son of DROIN son of MOIN. Prepare to die!"

• 12. "Groin son of Oin swings into the battle on a long tong-chain. The mastodon is still running in circles, however, and Groin son of Oin misses it.  Meanwhile, Brunhilda drops into the mammoth next to the kobold."

Color narration. The kobold shrieks: "Peddle left! Peddle left! Why aren't you peddling? We're going in circles!" and then realizes that Brunhilda has replaced his copilot. He goes for his loaded crossbow, she goes for her hammer.

• 13. "Brunhilda bashes the kobold to mush! Thugnar is saved through the immediate application of dwarven french bread through the wound."

Wow. Bread bandages. Or rather, a bread blood plug. If it didn't very specifically say "saved", I totally would have had that backfire… but the spirit of the cards should be obeyed as much as possible, even if it makes no sense. I mean, everything else in this adventure is logical and sensible.

I'm not sure exactly what happened next. The kobold was dead, the threat neutralized. They must have freed Cog. I remember Devon saying that Oredang had grown attached to her fine steel pick.
Mad Oleg wanted the flaming trunk "mechanism" off the ghost elephant, which was now somehow retroactively also a hollow mecha-skeletal-elephant and not a ghost elephant and I'm not really sure how any of that made sense, but it was amusing and he'd had the unfortunate distinction of not having any of the cards he'd created get drawn by anyone in any of our 13 to-date pulls from the hat, so I just said yes to his crazy idea. Plus, that retcon made at least as much sense as shoving bread into your wounds

… but other than all that miscellaneous insanity, I'm not really certain what the context was of this card, or why we were drawing:

• 14. "We need beer. NOW."

So they all piled into the mechamastodon, and drove it around till they could find the local brewery.
The brewery was guarded by kobolds in bronze armor, carrying bronze whips, and making mastodon calls on bronze french-kobold-horns. They apparently assumed the PCs were just another run-of-the-mill kobold-filled mechamastodon.

The doors to the brewery swing open, revealing dozens of emaciated, broken dwarves, clearly now enslaved to the kobolds.  They are being forced to labor, and brew pumpkin ale for their kobold overlords. It is a truly sad sight, and a dishonor that cannot go unavenged.

Thugnar leaps forth from the cockpit of the mechamastodon, in much the way Athena sprung from the head of Zeus. The mythical reference will matter (sort of) a few cards later. The other dwarves start crawling out of the hole Thugnar leaves behind him, except for Brunhilda and Cog who drive the mech.

• 15. "Thugnar plows into several kobolds, knocking them down. Thugnar plays kobold golf. The mastodon's tusks swing, killing several. Oredang sneaks into the brewery! Another mechamastodon appears!"

The two mechs battle, mastodono-a-mastadono.

• 16. "Our mastodon rams their mastodon. Mad Oleg is thrown from the rear. Sensing his opportunity, he lobs the flaming ghost trunk into the hole in their mastodon. It lights on fire."

More color narration followed. Oredang and Groin son of Oin took up position near the beer.  The battle raged on as they sampled the kegs.

• 17. "Brunhilda drives their mammoth backwards, forcing it through the doors into the walkway over the abyss. Burning kobolds climb onto the top of the mammoth."

There was no previous mention of an abyss prior to this card, but not only is that how 6X works, but it's also perfectly in tune with the subject matter for there to be a big bottomless pit with a narrow walkway spanning it such as one might use to battle a balrog.

• 18. "The hide is burnt away as Cog figures out how to shake off the flaming kobolds into the abyss. The other dwarves have liberated the brewery."

There dwarves bow to their new saviors. An elderly, broken looking, emaciated dwarf steps forward. He identifies himself as Blordock Syrupbraid the Younger, son of Blordock Syrupbraid the Elder, and thus heir apparent to the throne now that HammerPatterned the Multiplicity of Tongs has been liberated. Mainly he serves as a obligatory exposition/wrap-up info dump to explain in case anyone had missed the finer details of what had happened. Kobold siege. Kobolds appear to give up, but leave a giant jasper elephant behind. The dwarves hall it inside, and worship or party around it. When everyone's drunk… well, more drunker than is usual even for a dwarf, the kobolds sneak out of the elephant and deploy mechamastodons to conquer. 

Being drunk, stupid, and beaten-down, these dwarves have started worshiping elephants and specifically the giant jasper elephant statue. They even call the players half-elephant demigods in dwarven form, come to free them from the half-elephant demigods in kobold form who were enacting the punishment of the high elephant gods.

Or something.

At this point, I realize we haven't had anyone go crazy, which is totally a Dwarf Fortress thing. So I start narrating how one of the dwarves here had used the giant jasper elephant as a component in a slightly fancier artifact statue of his own design - mainly by attaching wheels (so they could haul it in) and big garnet eyes to the existing statue. But it's totally his design now, and the pinnacle of his life, and as the players explain that the statue has been destroyed, he goes berserk. 

You thought the previous fights were big and crazy, wait till you get a load of even round one of my big climactic battle with the psychopathic spreekilling craftsdwarf. We pulled out all the stops for this one!

19. "Mad Oleg knocks him out with a single blow."

Nicely done, sir.

All that's left is the "happily ever after" solution, so I let everyone throw into the hat their own personal best interpretation of how this could end.

• 20. "After being honored by the freed dwarves, the party seeks out the next fortress.  However, at their camp that night, Oredang's pet yak calf creeps up on them -- her mouth opening to reveal a kobold crossbow…"

I must say I rather like the idea of a mechayakcalf getting the drop on them. Was it replaced by kobolds when they left it in the pumpkin patch, or was it secretly a kobold spy mechayak all along?

Recent Gaming Shenanigans

I haven't gotten around to much blogging lately, so here's a quick run-down of recent games I've played or GM'd. Probably any of these could have been an entire blog post unto themselves, and a few might still be if I find the time and energy.

• I played Lacuna at the Emerald City Game Fest. This nearly became part of my "A good GM can save a bad system" post, but after a couple weeks of keeping it warm on the back burner of my mind, I've decided I don't like the taste of it after all. It's certainly unique, and an admirable experiment, but not one I plan to subject myself to again any time soon. Reviews I've read since suggest that PCs can perform all sorts of crazy stunts, but our game was rather more restrained than that. Ours played more like a mystery or detective story in which all the PCs had amnesia and expectations of cause and effect were upended. I had too many questions about the setting, and the GM (not just the NPCs) had too few answers; I found it frustrating. I guess I was hoping for Inception meets The Prisoner, and would have been totally okay with The Matrix meets Blue Velvet, but what I got was more like Memento meets Eraserhead. Interesting to watch, but damn hard to game in.
• The day after that, our Truth & Justice campaign wrapped up. I was likewise never quite rocked by that campaign. I really wanted to be challenged more. The plot was a little slow, the villains not as colorful as they could have been, and just not enough tension or drama to really engage me. I would have preferred to have the baddies be a bit more "in your face". The players (myself included) share some of the burden as well, as we never really worked together well and didn't chase plot threads perhaps as well as we could have. I guess I wanted less dysfunction, and more action. The game thankfully didn't meltdown or implode, but it also never seemed to get beyond a simmer.
• My Continuum campaign has had a few out-of-character hurdles. Individual sessions have been really good, but since it's a game where Information Is All, I can't really blog about any plotline (like the basilisk deaths near the 1527 Paracelsus symposiums, or the part where Derren Brown was posing as Christopher Marlowe) that's still in process. And they've been in-process for a long time, as we've only been getting half as many sessions as expected. Normally, I GM twice a week for two different playgroups in the same timeline/universe. The Wednesday night group had to take a month off from play because of one player doing a lot of summer travelling. Just before the Wednesday group returned to the game, the Tuesday group also had to take a month off because a huge work deadline hitting a player. So I had a couple weeks without GMing my Time-Travel game, preceded and followed by less GMing than normal.

Knowing in advance about the month-long gaps in my Continuum group's schedules, I planned to GM as often as possible for our Thursday night one-shot group. However, between my wife getting a promotion that totally rearranged our home schedule, a friend at that game coming down with chicken pox, and me getting sucked into a video game, then mired in a short patch of writers block... well, the month shot by with me just GMing once. That puts me in withdrawal. It gets ugly. My wife came home from work one day, and found me passed out in the bathroom with 3d6 sticking out of my brachial artery.

• The one time I did get to GM on the one-shot night was Og, which I totally only ran because I couldn't quite get the pregens finished for the Cyberpunk scenario I was planning on running. Og is a very goofy caveman game. I've run it a couple times before, more than a year ago, and worked in some Land-of-the-Lost references and time-travel nonsense which seemed to go over well. This time, though, I think I bit off more than I could chew. The PCs scattered every chance they got, and I was left with too much plot for their limited caveman vocabularies. I started grasping at straws, and pulled out of my belly  The Great Gazoo, an intervention team from the Planet of the Apes, [a Slip-and-Slide, the Beach Boy's Pet Sounds] and about half a Roman Legion. I felt like it was a huge cluster-failure, but most of the players seemed to laugh their way through it.

This past week, however, the gaming has swung back around and apparently I've been on fire (or just really obnoxious).

• Thursday night we played Lady Blackbird. Honestly, I lack confidence in Lady Blackbird's mechanics, and I think a bit more definition to the setting (and magic) would be a huge benefit. Leaving so much up to the players is dangerous, especially when I've been role-playing deprived for a week or two. I played Snargle, the shapeshifting goblin pilot, and I hammed it up to no end. There was way too much discussion of goblin-porno and the proper inflating of boobloons.  I'm quite certain it was nothing like what the designer of the game intended, and it may very well have undermined what the others at the table wanted too, but at least it entertained the bystanders at the game store.
• Then the night after that, dinner with friends lead to an impromptu game of Microscope. Our setting was an alternate earth with urban fantasy elements, where famous fictional literary figures became real. Dracula, Lilith, and Dr. Jeckyl all made appearances. There was this scene where I played Dr. Jeckyl (which I pronounced Gee-kell with a thick scottish accent so I could sneak past the initial round of character declaration without most people realizing who I was really playing till the scene got going) and turned into Mr. Hyde and crawled around under the table in some very inappropriate LARP-ish antics with my secretary. What happens under the table, stays under the table.

I am definitely looking forward to getting my regular fix of plot, puzzle and drama sometime soon, in hopes that it will pull me out of this over-the-top perverted character-actor spiral.

Black Crusade / Broken Chains / Free RPG Day

This past Saturday was Free RPG Day, and my local game store asked me to run a demo in their store of one of the free modules they'd be giving away. Sounded like fun, so I signed up to run the introductory scenario "Broken Chains" for the upcoming "Black Crusade" RPG.

Before I dive in to what I thought of Broken Chains and Black Crusade, I'd like to take a moment to thank Greenlake Games. They were really invested in the whole Free RPG Day concept. They had tons of product to give away, and packed gaming tables into every square foot of space they had available. They were especially nice to us GMs. I walked home with a stack of freebie adventures, a commemorative d6, and a coupon for 25% off my next purchase and a free Iron Die. Very cool of them.

Now on to Broken Chains and Black Crusade...  

• SPOILER WARNING - Plot points of the adventure (as well as mechanics of the game) are discussed below. Read at your own risk.

Black Crusade is the next iteration of the ongoing Warhammer 40k RPG. This version is from the point-of-view of renegades of Chaos. 40k has always had a thing for anti-heroes. One of the major conceits of the setting is a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" perspective, where the agents of the Emperor do horrible things in the name of saving mankind from itself. Black Crusade focuses more closely on that aspect of the setting, by having the players take on the role of the legions of Chaos. The PCs in this game are the very demon-worshiping psychic psychotic heretics the rest of the game line is trying to save humanity from.

Black Crusade uses mechanics adapted from Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, and Deathwatch (the three other 40k RPGs currently in print), which in turn use mechanics adapted from the 2nd Edition of the Warhammer Fantasy RPG. Now, personally, I would have preferred it had it used 3rd Ed Warhammer's rules, because I love the dice and it plays fast and easy. 2nd Ed is a bit clunkier and old-school-ier, and not nearly as familiar to me these days. 2nd Ed is grittier, but certainly not easier.

The demo version reduced the mechanical complexity a little in various places, and I very intentionally played fast and light with the system myself. I cheated the initiative system a little, skimped on the die modifiers, and kept the combats short. Several of my players were clearly interested in taking it the other direction, however, and would have been happy to use the full system with all of it's many combat modifiers and special actions. In retrospect, I wish I'd anticipated that and spent some time refamiliarizing myself with the options available to them, as it may have enhanced the gaming experience for more than half the table. That said, I think everyone had fun, and at the end of the night I got thanks and hand shakes from strangers, so I don't think it bombed by any stretch of the imagination.

It's worth noting that this is a very lethal system. We actually only ended up with 1 PC getting hit at all during the game, but despite his thick Space Marine armour and his genetically uplifted Toughness stat, that single hit ate up about 80% of his hit points. Most of the PCs would have died from that blow, and it came as a surprise attack from ambush so it's not like anyone could really avoid it.

This brings up a few related issues I have with the game system.

I'm not certain the game concept is particularly well-suited to the high lethality nature of the mechanics. One can argue that in Dark Heresy or Rogue Trader, much of the crux of the game is in avoiding gun battles. It's a dark, deadly world and the PCs should try to manipulate situations so that they don't end up fighting except when they have a strong advantage (or no other options). They've got the authority and power to push people around a bit, and should be engaging in as many social conflicts as physical ones. Death Watch (the space-marine version of the 40k RPG) certainly features less talking and more action, but the PCs are compensated with power armor, heavy weapons, and redundant bio-engineered organs. Black Crusade features a mix of PC types - armoured Chaos Marines, wild demon-possessed Psykers, and social-oriented Apostate Heretics.  The gap between the combat-focused and social-focused PCs is pretty wide, and quite quickly lethal. As renegades, you lack the support and authority to leverage conflicts away from combat. And if the party has even one Blood-God-worshiping berserker in its ranks, the squishier characters aren't gonna have much luck avoiding fights.

The adventure did include some special threats intended to challenge the parties heavy-hitters, but as mentioned above my first die roll of such nearly vaporized the toughest PC. There's a steep curve to figuring out system balance and encounter design given this PC mix, and any mis-step is likely to result in quick character turn-over. So while I appreciate that some efforts were taken to address this in the adventure, I really found the system far too lethal and unforgiving for my tastes. What's more, there just wasn't any justification within the adventure for including the non-beefy PCs. 3 out of 6 characters were geared for combat, and 3 out of 6 were decidely not. Of those 3 non-combatants, only 1 really ever had anything to do in the adventure as written, and the other two completely lacked a moment to shine.

Now it may be that that particular gripe is well addressed and balanced in the main rulebook. I'm not sure how, given what I saw in the Broken Chains intro adventure, but it's possible. I imagine doing so would probably take some high-end social and support powers, but such powers just weren't evidenced in the sample characters provided with the adventure. The closest I saw in this adventure was a character who had the ability to add +1 degree of success to all her successful social rolls. This sounds impressive on some abstract level, but as near as I could tell it did nothing in the adventure. There really wasn't any point in the scenario where you needed a particular level of social success, and the abbreviated start-up rules didn't offer any suggestions of what the in-character difference was, either. The difficulty chart was of no help, either, merely telling me that a "challenging" roll was +0 and a "very difficult" social roll was at -30.

This was further complicated by environmental factors around the first likely scene in the scenario where a social roll was going to be of use. The PCs wake up in a derelict spaceship that's been drifting for generations; most of the people they meet are half-mad cannibals who attack on sight. The first NPC they meet who actually has any clues to what's going on is down in the bilges. He lives in the sewers of the ship, hip-deep in noxious sludge and dedicated to the God of Plagues. My players looked at the entry point to his lair, and the three socially-competent characters decided to wait outside. The  combat-specialist PCs, being Marines, were equipped with full environmental suites in their power armour. So the three beefy kill-happy PCs marched into the muck, and engaged in a "don't ask, just kill" policy. The NPC with all the info is non-human, disgusting, murderous,  and yet a push-over that "in no way is supposed to be a challenging fight". The PCs got the thing they new they needed from him and ripped him apart (long before any mention could be made of him knowing roughly what had happened on the ship in past 200 years and who had woken them from suspended animation or why).

Even had the PCs tried to get info out of him, a lucky Intimidation roll would have done it just fine, so again the Marine characters are all you really need. This is, sadly, a recurring theme of the adventure. I guess you need the fallen Tech Priest character for the first scene or two as well, but once the PCs have all their equipment back (they start unarmed), everything after that can be solved with nothing but brute force. Given this as the "introduction" to the game, I don't have a lot of faith that the finished product will feature mechanics or advice intended to make the squishy human / social characters viable.

For that matter, I gotta say, I don't feel this adventure was a particularly good introduction to the game. Don't get me wrong, I actually think it's great way to start a campaign, just lousy at it's role as a one-shot introduction to the setting.

Here's the plot: The PCs wake up from suspended animation in a prison ship, having missed the riot by 200 years. They have to battle generations of prion-infected cannibal savages, a couple of creepy demons, automated defense systems gone haywire, and eventually the team of Inquisitors who were also woke up about the same time as themselves at the opposite end of the ship. There's some mystery stuff going on in the background, but if you don't have time to explore the vessel in its entirety, that won't really matter. Eventually, the PCs make it to the bridge and battle the Inquisitor. Assuming they win, they can pilot the ship to the Screaming Vortex (or some other Renegade gathering) and gain a buttload of Infamy Points for "capturing" a mile-long Imperial ship. It's a great place to start a campaign, and early success will reward the players with a huge creepy ghost ship that can serve as a long-term plot device or setting. Other than a lack of balance for the squishy humans, it sounds and plays great.

Problem is, it gives you absolutely no feel for what the session of Black Crusade is likely to be like. I imagine very few sessions will start with the PCs waking up in a prison. The likely enemies of the PCs, Imperial troopers and citizens, are almost absent from the scenario. Part of the charm of Black Crusade is presumably going to be that you get to play the rebels and renegades, but that streak of rebellion was almost entirely non-existent in this scenario. It didn't feel like you were playing the "bad guys" either - every NPC they met was more depraved and less civilized than even the PC berserker.  There are two demons in the scenario, but no appreciable word count is spent on any sort of Faustian deals that would have illustrated that the "heroes" of this adventure are supposedly in bed with Chaos.

So there was lots of genericly 40k-ish theme and flavor, but nothing about the Broken Chains adventure made it feel particularly "Black Crusade"-ish. While reading (and later GMing) this adventure, the thought that crossed my mind was that everything but the first and last scenes could have been run identically for a group of loyalist Imperial PCs in Dark Heresy or Rogue Trader. Have the PCs be Inquistor Crane and his Acolytes, and make the encounter at the end be against a group of Chaos Marines who escaped from the hold, and everything in-between could be identical. In fact, I kind of suspect this adventure was first written (or at least brainstormed) as Dark Heresy scenario, and then converted to Black Crusade as an afterthought when it was realized that the marketing opportunity known as Free RPG Day would fall just a month or so before the Black Crusade release date.

I still enjoyed it (a lot, actually), but I don't feel it gave me any particular insight into what a typical session (or campaign) of Black Crusade will be like. Which means that as an introductory adventure to the upcoming game, it probably fails. As a generic starter-seed for a slightly atypical campaign of any of the four 40k RPGs, though, it's a success. Enough of a success, actually, that I regret running it as a one-shot. I kinda wish I'd hand-picked a play group and used a slightly expanded and modified version to start up a campaign of something. In our one-shot, we didn't get anywhere near the end of the adventure, but we did see enough of the ship that I couldn't reuse the concepts in another campaign without having to dream up a whole new ship and scenario. Whatch ya gonna do?

Bad Habits in the Vineyard

Last night I ran Dogs In The Vineyard for the weekly one-shot group. Actually, this was part two of what looks to be a three-shot. I'm finding I really like the system, but it has some awkwardness. There's specifically three bad habits I'd like to "break" my players (and myself) of, if I were to run something longer than a single scenario.

1. Bad Habit #1: Spending too long agonizing over how to total up your See.
   I'm guilty of this one as well, and I figure if I'm going to be hypocritical, I might as well put it up front and label it as such. I had one See in particular that I really just should have Gave on, because I was taking too long to calculate all my strategic options.
   I think this one would sort itself out over time. As you become more familiar with the system, the decisions will become more intuitive.
   Seriously, if you're agonizing over whether to take the blow on four dice, or take it on five dice but leave a higher die for your Raise, you've already failed to assess the situation properly. Unless the stakes are "do I die?" (or maybe if the conflict hasn't escalated beyond talking) you should really be Giving in once it tips past the third die on your See.
   
   
2. Bad Habit #2: Trying to use all your available stats and items in every conflict. 
   For example, one player wanted to call on his d6 in "Exorcist" during a conflict with just a shady character trying to talk them out of poking around in his silver mine. I told him he could roll it, but only if he publicly declared that the man was clearly possessed. 
   There's a strong impetus to call on everything to get the extra dice every conflict, but it's often not appropriate to do so. I imagine that over a long campaign, always calling on everything would make conflicts repetitive.
   It also makes conflicts much longer, where Giving more often would speed things up. The problem is that no one wants to Give because it means you sit around with nothing to do while the conflict rages on. Given the choice between sitting around idle, or grasping and stretching to invoke the trait that will score you another die, people will almost always make the "non-boring" choice even if it drags out the fight. After the fact you might realize that you were sacrificing the group's enjoyment for the sake of your own, but in the heat of the moment such clarity is unlikely.
   
   
3. Bad Habit #3: Picking the same fallout again and again.
   The game tries to counter this by letting anyone veto a proposed fall-out effect, but the issue I keep seeing isn't about people choosing something narratively lame.
   The problem is mechanical, not conceptual. Most bad things that could happen to you could be represented in several different ways (adding d4, downgrading to d4, subtracting other dice, reducing a stat, losing an item, etc), but one of those options is clearly better than the others.
   The rule system's insistence that +d4 is actually a bad thing is a little odd. I've seen how it can be bad, because a big pile of dice fools you into getting cocky and taking the blow when you shouldn't. But from the point-of-view of a player who's new to the game, adding a die looks like it's always a good thing. Perception becomes reality.  Mathematically, it's certainly better to add +1d4 to your sheet than to downgrade an existing 2d8 down to 2d4 or 1d8. The fallout system treats them like they're identical, but clearly they aren't. Plus 1d4 is just better than  minus 1d8, anyone can see that. Even losing just a d6 is arguably more than twice as bad as gaining a d4.
   Let's face it, you'd rather add "Blind as a Bat" at d4 than downgrade "I'm a handy with a rifle" from d6 to d4. Ironically, being blind would make you a better shot. The system is a little weird.

None of these three problems with the system (or players) are insurmountable.  Bad habit #1 will work itself out naturally over time, and #2 will be easy to solve over the same stretch of time with just a tiny bit of intentional effort.  I could see myself running this game system as a campaign, and it'd be a lot of fun.

Issue #3 is the only one that presents a real long-term problem, worthy of a house-rule.

UPDATE: My first proposed house-rules to "fix" issue #3 were far too draconian, and as was pointed out in the comments to this post, would result in a spiral of death over the course of a few sessions as PCs were forced to burn through their good traits. A better rule would b: The first time in any session that you get a fall-out total of 12+, you're required to pick something other than +d4 for at least one of the two long-term effects. 

Invoking this just once per session per player will prevent abuse, mandate some variation in results, and most likely not result in an undesirable death-spiral. Plus, by linking it to taking Injury, you further motivate players to sometimes Give in challenges instead of taking the blow.

Such a rule may also help address another problem I've noticed with system, namely that since Body is used for the "Do I die?" roll, it's more important than the other three stats. With this house-rule in place, having a really high Body score doesn't take all the danger out of being injured.

Beam Me Up Before You Go-Go

Last night I ran "Wham Trek" at my weekly one-shot group. The mechanics were an extremely light trimmed-down version of Warhammer FRP 3rd. After a brief explanation of the rules, and a tiny bit of clarification that this had nothing to do with George Michael, we were ready to go.

For those still scratching their heads, Wham Trek was an RPG scenario blending of a couple of crazy old boardgames designed by the great Tom Wham, with just a hint of Star Trek parody. The PCs were the crew of the Znutar, and they were responding to a distress call from the backwaters world known as "Snitopia". It would appear there was an unexplained geological upheaval on Snitopia, and an entire mountain range was jumping up and down on the peaceful snits.

For those still scratching their heads, George Michael was half of the 80's UK pop duo "WHAM!"

For reasons I can't really explain, this was a game I'd wanted to run for a long time. I'd been unable (until just recently) to figure out mechanics that would work for it. In theory, it needed to be goofy and light, but able to support random interactions of bizarre weapons and alien biochemistry. I used the board from Awful Green Things as the map of the PCs spaceship. That map shows (amongst other things) where 12 different weapon types can be found on the ship, so I assumed I needed a system that would make these 12 weapons functionally different. I felt that Fudge or Risus or the like wouldn't do that - but in retrospect I probably could have saved myself a lot of trouble.

As it turns out, I forgot to make the PCs specify what weapons and equipment they took down to the surface until they were in the middle of a fight and had already sounded the retreat. As a result, my big list of weapons didn't really matter. I also managed to forget to print one very important sheet of paper - the page with all my NPC stats. Several days had passed since I'd statted out those NPCs, and the morning of the game I'd had a very distracting emergency trip to the vet for one of my cats, so I really had no fuzzy clue what the stats were. Which meant more improvisation, as it turns out was alright.

Dice mechanics were pretty simple, using the dice from Warhammer 3rd as a narrative engine without most of the baggage that game brings with it. I skipped the green and red dice, the fatigue rules, the recharge rates, etc. The "comets" on the yellow dice gave PCs narrative control, the "Chaos Star" on the purple dice meant something really bad happened. In theory I had worked out success, boon and bane results for all the weapons and a few locations internal to the "mountain range" (that is to say, the Bolotomi from the Snit's games) but they really didn't end up mattering as we just improved our way through my missing paperwork. (I wouldn't be surprised if none of the players even knew I was missing most of my GM's notes, since I just kept my error to myself and rolled with it. GMing and grifting have more in common than most of us suspect. If you can fool your players into believing everything is running smoothly, it usually will.)

I replaced the intricate critical hit system from Warhammer with a neat little subsystem stolen from the "New Hope" game I played in last week. Each PC had a handful of consequences - disarmed, wounded, distressed, and captured/killed - they could choose from when a foe got a hit on them. A critical success (lots of hammer or eagle symbols on the dice) let the attacker choose which consequence they suffered, otherwise it was defender's choice. In addition to the common consequences, every PC had one custom consequence unique to that character. The captain could be seduced by aliens, the chief engineer could avoid personal injury by having the engines go offline, the doctor could get cranky and drunk, the communications officer might start speaking in tongues, etc.

It worked well enough for a one-shot, but probably would have been better if I'd had my carefully-balanced NPC stats on hand so I would have felt more confident throwing real challenges at the PCs. As it played out, there were very few injuries and no real PC fatalities. I was probably too easy on them to really capture the proper Tom Wham feel. No one seemed to complain, though.

The best developments of the night started when the Pilot (played by Peter) engaged the warp drive while in the atmosphere of Snitopia, and thus slingshotted around to an hour before the scenario started. You know, the classic Star Trek trick of bumbling into time-travel. This gave them the opportunity to actually cause the problem they'd responded to. When things went poorly and the 1st Officer was lost, they just flew out to where their ship had been half an hour earlier, and kidnapped the younger self of the 1st Officer, thereby disrupting the time line. Transchronal ripples spread throughout the universe as they continued to mess with their previous selves and engage in more time travel. In one time line, they contaminated the Snit gene pool with xenomiscegenation and converted them into a Fremen Fedaykin army that spread across the cosmos destroying everything in the name of the 1st Officer (who, along with the ship's mascot, was revered as a God). Then they undid that timeline and prevented themselves from ever visiting the planet in the first place. Good clean stupid fun.

All in all, we had a blast. I sort of regret the amount of work I went to trying to customize the game system. I made Ook and Leadfoot (the mascot and the robot from Awful Green Things) into followers akin to the "Small But Viscious Dog" in Warhammer, and created small deck of random weapon affects, none of which probably needed the level of detail I'd prepped for them. The game was a big success, but probably would have been just as successful with 1/3 the prep work. Hopefully I'll learn that lesson one of these days.

May the Blackbird be with you

Last night I played in a one-shot called "New Hope" that was sort of set in the Star Wars Universe, and used mechanics somewhat based on the indy RPG "Lady Blackbird".

It was set several years after Return of the Jedi, and the New Republic was every bit as as nasty as the Empire had ever been. Everything you recall from the movies was just Republican propaganda. It was an interesting twist on the Star Wars setting as seen through the perspective of The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again." It was a good game and plenty fun, but could probably have used a stronger opening scene. The GM vaguely explained the situation, but since it's a game where the Players have a lot of narrative power, he left most of the details fuzzy at first. He was trying to leave us free to take things in whatever direction we wanted, but as a result, we had a really slow start. I think if he'd narrated the opening situation more forcefully and given us a memorable villain to really hate, the first hour of the game would have been a lot better.

The rules were really interesting. They were derived from or inspired by Lady Blackbird, which is an indy game I was ignorant of until last night. I downloaded it this morning and took a peek through it, and I can tell that New Hope customized and built on it quite a bit. Overall, I think the changes were good ones. That said, I kind of felt like the GM's backlash dice pools were just a little too small. I think they could stand to range from 5 to 9 instead of 4 to 8. It's hard to say for certain, because we had some really lucky rolls on the players part. I just think the game would have been in it's best possible light, if the PCs had taken 25% more damage across the board and had to start worrying about resources and situations. I was the only one really hurt badly during the game, and that was only because I took some very big risks and painted a target on myself. I was so intrigued by the damage system I intentionally left myself open to suffer more of it.

My favorite part of the rules were definitely the "hit points"-like mechanism, which were customized to each character and really made you agonize over damage. You had three rows of labeled boxes. The first row was more like traditional HP, or like a World of Darkness health boxes, in that they were labeled "Hurt", "Wounded", "Crippled" and "Dead" or something to that effect. Below that was a row that had to do with our social status and the level of pursuit, so they were "Recognized", "Wanted", "Hunted" and "Infamous", I think. Then the fourth row were customized to each PC. My character had a wife and family - their health and safety were 5 of my 6 boxes in the third section. When you take damage, it's usually 1 or two points, and you get to apply them to any empty box that seems appropriate. So in a bar-fight I'd probably take the damage as physical damage in the top row, but I might instead take it in the second row and narrate that I was now a wanted man for having killed the person I was struggling with. If my family was present during a conflict, I might knock boxes off of them and say they were captured or harmed in the battle. One of the other characters was a rich man, and he took damage to his wealth when he got backlash off a roll to bribe someone. Having these custom consequences for each character was pretty cool, and really spiced up the conflicts. I may just have to steal the idea sometime.

Overall, it was good fun, and I'd definitely recommend it if you like the free-form "story game" narrative approach to role-playing. The RPG it was closest too in feel (at least of RPGs I'd played before) was probably Universalis, and I imagine if you like that you'll probably get a kick out of New Hope (or Lady Blackbird). It had more structure than Universalis, but appealed to the same mental space and had a similar spirit.

You can download New Hope for free.

You can also download Lady Blackbird for free.

Two comments on Wraith: The Oblivion

Last night, my weekly one-shot group played Wraith the Oblivion. Two observations:

• I really like the concept of you playing two characters: your main character, and the shadow-self (like the devil on the shoulder) of another player. It was really flavorful, and it meant every player always had something to do.
• Both the mechanics and the setting were probably more fiddly than is ideal for a one-shot. (Having now played the old Vampire, Werewolf, Changeling and Wraith, I have to say that Vampire is the most accessible and newbie-friendly of the batch.)

Twice As Powerful With His Crew Stabbing Him In His Shirtless Back

Update: Rereading this, it seems far more bitter than I really intended. I don't have the time to edit it right now, so it'll have to stay, rant and all. So I'll qualify it with "it was actually quite fun, just really frustrating at the same time". Like get-up-and-walk-away-from-the-table-for-a-moment-because-you-need-to-calm-down-and-can't-believe-how-bad-the-other-player-just-screwed-up-your-plans fun. Anyhow...

Several weeks back we arrived a little late for this sci-fi short-shot we were playing in. Four other players had already made their characters when my wife and I got there. No problem, the GM says, character creation is fast, flexible, and a little experimental. So, I ask, "what positions in the crew haven't been taken yet?" They say, "actually, we don't have a Starship Captain yet. Why don't you play the captain?"

We're late, I don't want to hold up the game, and as it happens it was the day I was diagnosed with Achilles Tendinitis, so I name the character "Captain Achilles". Top of the character sheet says "Character Concept", so I write "Captain Kirk with Prosthetic Leg". We'd recently watched some season 1 classic Trek - before he develops the strange pause-laden over-dramatic speach method that marks his characterization in season 2 & 3 and the movies. In short, I'm thinking I'm making a heroic and competent captain - Star Fleet's finest, beloved by his crew, etc, but with an old war wound as a handicap to keep me from dominating the game.

Next step in character creation is handing your character sheet to the left. That person adds an aspect to your sheet. Then they pass it left, and another person gives you your second aspect. I get my sheet back, and my two aspects are "Twice As Powerful With His Shirt Off" and "Compensating For Something". Thanks, guys.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. All I knew was that the setting was ostensibly that of the old Traveller system. Now, I don't know Traveller very well, but it never struck me as slapstick or a parody. What I didn't know, was that in the 20 or 30 minutes we'd missed, they'd decided the crew would be the worst most dysfunctional crew that had ever been press-ganged into service. But they didn't tell me that. Nope, no clue had I till my first attempt to give a real order.

Now, when I'm playing a ranking PC, I don't pull rank often. It's not any fun to be bossed around, so I play it a lot more casual than any military or workplace would ever allow. In recent memory, this has burned me twice. So, it's not till the situation is dire that I start making command decisions, and the Pilot, Engineer, and Ship's Surgeon decide to do their own things instead. Total cluster. "Oh, well," I think, "that's what I get for showing up late. At least it's just a one-shot. I'll just roll with the punches." For the second half of the session, I switched from Captain Kirk to Zap Branigan, 'cause clearly that's the type of captain the rest of the players wanted. Any attempts at using logic, charisma, or discipline were going to be disrupted by the other players. Worst crew ever. We end up crashed, our passengers and crew imperiled, on this desolate ice planet run by a mad scientist. But, we didn't all die, so I considered that close enough to victory for a one-shot.

Imagine my surprise then, when, several weeks later, I come back from vacation to discover that a follow-up session to this game has been put on the schedule. Now I'm stuck reprising my over-compensating, shirtless on Hoth, incompetent captain, doomed to be disrespected by his crew. "Oh, well," I mutter again, and try to put on a good front.

Twenty minutes into this second session, it becomes clear that our NPC "host" is not just a mad scientist, but a genocidal fiend. He was marooned on this planet after being back-stabbed by the Draconian Empire, for whom he'd been a designer of superweapons. In the decades he'd be stranded here, he'd built a new super-weapon, a space ship with artificial intelligence and the power to destroy entire solar systems. He was now planning on obliterating a third of the galaxy to get his vengeance.

So, I talk to my horrible, incompetent crew. I know ordering them to fight won't work. But it is "Space Hitler" we're facing here, so I figured the players would grok that he's the badguy. "We need to figure out how to deal with this villain," I say. "We need to separate him from his ship, and knock him unconscious. Then the pilot and engineer will be able to jerry-rig a distress signal or possibly disable the AI in the ship." We discuss this, we lay out signals (blink three times, as silly as that sounds), we discuss it again and again, disseminating this information to all the PCs. Everyone is on-board.

A few scenes later, we have an opportunity. The mad scientist is in room with us in his base. All the PCs are present. There's two sets of 40-foot hangar doors between us and the evil AI ship. We've all got weapons drawn, because it had turned out one of our passengers had been a Draconian spy. The spy was subdued, and the Mad Scientist stood with his back to me. I blink three times at the Pilot's player, and attack the Mad Scientist. The game has no sneak attack rules, but the GM gives me initiative. I get a good hit, but it's not quite enough to take the Scientist out in one blow. Even though we had weapons at the ready, I started with an unarmed attack, because we wanted to capture the Mad Scientist and keep him as leverage so the supership couldn't just vaporize the planet. The scientist counter-attacks with a laser, but misses because I burn through a bunch of character resources to stay alive.

It gets to the PC Pilot's action. He shoots at me. Yep. My character is his target.

Then it's the Engineer's action, and he starts throwing pies at me. I kid you not.

3 other PCs flee the room. They're not really combat characters, and one had already been wounded by the Draconian spy, so I can't really blame them.

On my actions, while focusing my attacks on the Mad Scientist I shout orders to my crew to help me stop this madman - all the while reminding them that he is planning the genocide of billions. I even chose not to attack in round three so I can make a Leadership roll to force the Pilot to do his duty to not just his Captain but also Humanity. The player of the Pilot character blows through a big stack of Fate chips to resist it.

About 4 rounds into the fight I finally get some help from one of the other PCs, but by then I've burned through all my Fate Chips and taken a lot of damage. Even that PC decides to wrestle me to the ground on round 5 or 6, because she decides that's easier than fighting the villain plus all the other PCs. Total freakin' chaos.

The session ends with me in the brig of the evil super-ship, and everyone else buddy-buddy with Space Hitler. "Oh, well," I think, "at least it's the second-half of a two-parter. I'm out for a couple of scenes, but it'll all be over soon."

This Thursday, we're playing part three.

Toe-Eating Mechano-Crabs

Posting those sketches my players did at the last game reminded me that Devon had requested I put up on the web a photo of the drawing I'd made of the toe-eating mechano-crabs that attacked us in a game she ran a few months ago.

Our weekly one-shot group sure runs some interesting games.

Cartoon Goonsquads

Last week I played in a game of the Cartoon Action Hour RPG. Our setting was vaguely reminiscent of (a sort of bastardized blend of) Thundarr, Voltron, and the Superfriends, which is just about perfect given the name of the game. We had a team of teenaged superheroes battling against an army of stormtroopers and mecha from the collapsed ruins of Minneapolis. What more can you want?

I really loved the Goon-Squad mechanics. They were like Brute Squads in 7th Sea (in that they acted as a unit, and rolled just once per squad) or Extras in Savage Worlds (in that they took just one hit to eliminate) but went one step further player-facing. The Goon Squads in Cartoon Action Hour don't ever roll. Each turn they threaten a single PC, who rolls against their static value. A good roll defeats the entire squad. A bad roll means you have to face them again next turn (at -2), and a really bad roll means they've captured you. They do no damage, they just immobilize PCs. If another player defeats the squad later, you're set free / you recover instantly. Now, in general, I'm not thrilled with mechanics that knock players out of the action for one bad roll. However, when you consider how fast the combat went and how easily rescue could be achieved, it all worked really well.

I definitely got a favorable impression of the game and the system. Character creation looked a bit more involved than it really needed to be (we, thankfully, had pregens), but the game itself played very quick and easy. The vehicular combat rules puzzled me, but were more confusing than flawed. I imagine once you've handled a couple of vehicular fight or chase scenes, they'd be less troublesome. And the fact that no one in the system ever dies, and that exploding vehicles just expel the crew in humorous ways made weirdness in the vehicle system a non-issue. It's not like one critical hit was going to kill the whole party.

The GM did say that the original movement rules were a lot more complicated and involved than they needed to be, so he abstracted them down. Between that, the pregens, and the confusion over vehicle hits, it's hard for me to really rate the complexity of the system, but what I saw was plenty fun (and light) for a one-shot.

The Quest for the Sky Food

Lengthy scene by scene break down (and more than a few colorful throwaway highlights) of last night's game:

• Started in a tavern, when a wizard came in to hire some adventurers. Might as well do things classic, eh?
• Fermented StunJelly, and frosty mugs of Ice Troll Blood "on tap".
• The Wizard was the infamous Hiram B'schnoz, Sverfneblin Illusionist, and his symbiotic Tween. I'd planned on having some fun with his diminuative stature, but the PCs ranged between 2 and 5 feet as well.
• An unexplored asteroid was passing nearby. Hiram had hidden it behind an illusion so no one else would know it was out there and ready for the pillaging.
• 3 out of 5 PCs could fly, so they borrowed a Giant Hornet to carry the others.
• Once they'd pierced the illusion, the PCs were attacked by Gorbels riding Thorks. I know, that's a bit of a stretch, but I wanted to establish early on just how odd the "all FF" scenario could be. It's kinda explained below.
  
• When a Gorbel was knocked off a Thork and fell hundreds of feet, he bounced back up like the rubber ball they are.
• The leader of the Gorbels was General Gorbels. When the PCs popped him, all that was left was hot air and a hitler mustache.
  
• The Nilbog PC fell out of the sky too, and was also unhurt.
• The beach he landed on was populated by female Quaggoths. The Nilbog had the aspect "Greatest Lover", and much adult hilarity ensued.
• The Fiend Folio is the Bible. The PC priest carried a copy around, and would reference it in-character. This was a stroke of genius - I'm so glad I made that last minute alteration to the setting taglines. The PCs were reading passages aloud in reverent tones, and it "spoiled" secrets in ways that were a laugh riot.
• More Quaggoths gather as word of the PC spreads. The first group of Quaggoth were carrying battle axes. The lastest Quaggoth arrival was unarmed. Page 74 of the holy book says "A particular quaggoth group will always be either unarmed ... or armed - there will never be a mixture of unarmed and armed types in the same group". Since there was one fewer axes than quaggoth, the fuzzy critters all buried their weapons in the sand.
• Sky food! A "crystal ball" falls from the sky, it being the same off-white color as the great void-sky. The quaggoth rip it open and eat it. The more Sky Food starts raining down. It smells nasty and makes your eyes sting, but unlike any other food in the Fiend Folio, the Sky Food doesn't try to eat anyone.
• The local Fire Newts have a special version of the Fiend Folio, with Apocrypha. It's hand-written entries on the blank page at the back of things they'd discovered that weren't in the original holy text.
• There's an information exchange - Ossible the Imp (from the 3.5 FF) answers the newts questions about his species, in exchange for the information about Sky Food. As this happened, Sarah actually wrote a Sky Food entry in the margins of page 80, between "Skulk" and "Slaad".
• Sky Food falls from the Moon, about once a Moonth. Since the PCs can fly, they head to the Moon.
• The Nilbog ends up getting dropped again. He lands on the moon, in an SkyFood farm being tended by Crab Men. Our "Token" pokerchips make good castenettes / crab men claw sounds.
• An awesome scene as the PCs debate the notion of food that doesn't attack you. This is unheard of! Eventually they learn that once you know the secret True Name of the Onion, it is rendered docile. Or so the Crab Men claim under duress.
• Flind knights (riding Disnenchanters) attack. The badass Flind leader goes all Nunchuku on them, and is Nigh Impossible to defeat. Lots of tokens get spent (and the Fire Mephit PC gates in a Smoke Mephit cousin - with a Dennis Hopper-esque voice) before he's felled.
• The Smoke Mephit took a few hits off the Euphoric Imp, and the Euphoric Imp smoked the Mephit. Ain't no Flinds gonna harsh their mellow.
• The PCs storm the castle. Flind army is easily circumvented (mostly 'cause it was nearly 10pm already) and the clever Steward (a Grell in a silver tiara, with a personality reminiscent of the Chamberlain from The Dark Crystal) leads them deeper into the castle to the throne room of the "Great Master".
• The Great Master is a Crypt Thing. His pet is a Guardian Familiar, perched on a pile of silver.
• The Aarakokra made a cat toy and tempted the kitty off the silver. It died. A second later, it was reborn bigger. The PC priest unholy worded it. A second later, it was reborn bigger.
• The Great Master was not amused. He teleported the party away in stages, as they traded insults and taunts.
• Two PCs came back, and got teleported away again.
• The group reassembled, and tried again. This time they parleyed. They bluffed that Ygorl himself needed the Crypt Thing to leave this moon on a mission. The Crypt thing countered with "The Holy Book indicates that Crypt Things, such as myself, must stay in their lair permenantly. 100% In Lair percentage, you can look it up - just ignore the part about how I'm not actually disintegrating you."
• Eventually, they set up a deal. They'll take all the onions (and get rich back home for having a non-man-eating crop) so he doesn't have to keep handwaving the darned things away.

Wow, that was a long synopsis. Seems kinda random as presented, but a lot of thought went into this - I carefully "balanced" the ecosystems.

1. The beach was populated by female Quaggoth and female Fire Newts. Men were very scarce. Turns out that's because the oceans were full of Kelpies - who can hypnotize men to their deaths but won't attack women. The ocean also had Dragonfish and Throat Leeches. Dragonfish have poisonous spines - and Quaggoth are immune to Poison. Throat Leeches can only be detered by heat or fire - and Fire Newts have a breath weapon. So the Female Quaggoths do the hunting and fishing, after the Fire Newts heat up the water just enough to repel the leeches.
   Other critters in that environment included Thorks (who have internal furnaces) and Gorbel (who can float on the waters surface or bounce down the beach). The Thorks were too hot inside for the Gorbels to bite, but they'd grab their feathers and hang on semi-parasitically. The Gorbels preyed on Quaggoth only when the later were in their culturally-enforced unarmed phase. Gorbels are described as "mischevious", so I figured this was all almost plausible despite thier lack of intellect.
   
2. On the moon, the Onion farms were carefully tended by Crab Men. Crab Men have a passion for silver, and the Crypt Thing's treasure was all silver. The Crab Men would roll onions at him (from out of his range) to pay tribute, and he'd teleport the stinky things away (usually into the gravity well of the planet). The onions were thus "Sky Food" making life a little easier down on the hellish beaches. The Flinds had set themselves up in their traditional role of luitenants and minibosses. As for the Grell, the Guardian Familiar, and the Disenchanters - well, lets just say I'm thankful everything else made enough sense that the PCs didn't go asking any more questions about how that came to be.
3. And, as detailed in an earlier post, back home the PCs live in a carefully maintained fortress-farm of barely contained killer plants. Or, they did, before they returned with Onion seeds and simplified life considerably.

So, the PCs retire as rich men. Should I ever do a follow up game, I'd probably put stronger emphasis on the gemstone economy, and include a subplot about trying to track down the lost tome of THE ADVANCED DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS MONSTER MANUAL, which is known only from parenthetical references within the holy Fiend Folio.

F# Fiend Folio Characters

Last night's F#FF one-shot featured:

• an Aarakocra (a bird person whose arms are shaped kinda like a pterodactyls)
• a Blindheim (a four-foot frog whose eyes are blinding spotlights)
• a Fire Mephit (a winged implike fire elemental)
• a Nilbog (like a Goblin, but backwards - due to a temporospatial disease, damage heals a Nilbog)
• and a Euphoric Imp (a drug-dealing hallucinogen-producing devil from the 3.5 Fiend Folio - I'll explain how that came about below)

I have three of the five character sheets in front of me, so I'll share the aspects that I know:

Erik's PC:

Snarl Bite Howl III
Background: Nilbog
Background: Gentleman Adventurer
Background: Great Lover
Catch Phrase: "I shall compose as I fight!"
Catch Phrase: "I laugh at danger, ha ha!"
Catch Phrase: "No one expects Snarl Bite Howl III!"
and he eventually added Catch Phrase: "Weee!!!!" because he kept getting dropped from great heights.

Sarah's PC:

High Priestess Winnefred
Background: Blindheim
Background: High Priestess of Ssendam (Slaad Lord of Insanity, Madness spelled backwards)
Background: Learned ('cause normally Blindheims have animal intelligence)
Catch Phrase: "Now I shall consult the Holy text of the Fiend Folio."
Catch Phrase: "By the golden light of Ssendam"
Catch Phrase: "Do my ears decieve me, or..."

Mark's PC:

Ossible
Background: Euphoric Imp
Background: The Pusher
Background: Spawn of hellfire and brimstone
Catch Phrase: "Dude, I'm like totally baked"
Catch Phrase: "I got what you need right here"
Catch Phrase: "Dude, that was like, totally uncool"

I learned a few things about F# from these characters. It's clear to me that if you really want to focus on a very narrow character you can do so, but there's no real benefit to it.

Look at Ossible. He was a very fun character, but he wasn't terribly deep. 5 of his 6 aspects are essentially redundant, or at least interchangeable. Partially, that's the result of my dictating that one aspect should be a Fiend Folio race. Euphoric Imp covers the same ground as his other two Backgrounds and overlaps a little with 2 of his three catch phrases. Despite all that overlap, there's no real benefit. In four hours of play, we had one situation where "spawn of hellfire" was applicable but "Euphoric Imp" wouldn't have been. If we'd all had a little more experience with the system, I'm pretty sure Ossible would have been a much more broad character. For example, we probably should have gone with a background of "Walking Blasphemy" or at least "Not In The Holy Book".

About that: Earlier in the day, I'd emailed the group and asked who wanted to play what races, so I'd have a little advance notice for finalizing my scenario idea. Mark replied with a whole character write up for the Euphoric Imp named Ossible (and his brother Robable, and his sister Lausible) and how he'd ended up in the Prime Material Plane because of falling through a Magic Portal that he'd (in a drugged stupor) mistaken for a taco stand.

This, of course, didn't work within the limits of my proposed setting. The Euphoric Imp is from the 3.5 edition of the FF, and the game was supposed to be "If it ain't in the 1st Ed Fiend Folio, it's just a myth". One of the other taglines of the setting was that "There are no other planes, only this bastardized version of the Astral". I'd have been completely within my rights to deny this character and insist he come up with something more fitting to the setting. But gaming is about having fun, and Mark was definitely excited to play this character he'd come up with. I hate to discourage someone from prepping for the game (even if he didn't read my post of the game's Taglines), and it's not like there was some long term balance issues to worry about. So I said yes.

I even modified one of the taglines of the game to accommodate him. It was changed to "The Fiend Folio is the Bible" which opened up lots of cool avenues in the game, but I digress... That'll have to wait till a later post.

On a related note, I don't think most characters will need anywhere near 6 aspects. The 3 catchphrases, in particular, are likely to end up under-used, or to duplicate one or more of your backgrounds. I think there's just a touch of a learning curve to the system in that regards: your first character will be suboptimal, but you'll learn from the mistakes pretty quickly.

I'm still glad the game allows for so many aspects, as that means you can have a really diverse and complex characters.

The game definitely rewards Jack-Of-All-Trades characters over specialists. I don't think that's a problem, as long as the players understand it when they're making their characters. When next I GM F#, I'll be sure to emphasize to the players that it's better to leave one or more aspect "slots" undefined than to be redundant.

Aspects for F#FF

Here's the setting tag lines for the F# one-shot I'm running this Thursday at the Emerald City Game Feast:

1. All Fiend Folio, All The Time. Bizarre and Mundane are inverted. If it's stats aren't in the 1st Edition of the weirdest monster book of them all, then it's only a myth. Such things as orcs, humans, and rutabegas are spoken of in hushed reverent tones, or lambasted contemptuously, depending on who's speaking.
2. There are no other Planes, just this bastardized version of the Astral. The PCs hail from a city state on an asteroid floating in the great off-white void.
   
3. Life is hard, harsh and unfair. The ecosystem rests upon the backs of a handful of plants, all of which are carnivorous. Giant "Fortress Farms" keep the food from eating the cities. The priesthood is corrupt and evil (afterall, they worship Lolth, the Elemental Princes of Evil, and the Slaad Gods), and charge a huge margin on create food and water spells. The various races live in the same city, but are not created equal.
   • Corollary to Tag Lines 2 & 3. Many other such rocks and city states float in the void, and when they pass close enough for contact it results in wars, adventures, and cataclysmic cultural shifts.

As is typical for F#, the PCs will each have up to 3 catch phrases and up to 3 backgrounds. I am putting one restriction on them, however: Each player must pick a race from the Fiend Folio. Their character is a member of that race, and they must work it into (or use it as) one of their aspects. So "Drow" would be perfectly acceptable background, but so would "hen-pecked Drow husband/slave" or "I was an ordinary Fire Toad, until the day I was granted intelligence by a perverse whim of Ssendam". Heck, I'd even accept "The first Carbunkle to graduate from Business School" (though first carbunkle to graduate from the Seminary of Lolth might be more in keeping with the setting).

They'll roll and use that aspect per the normal F# rules, but it also grants whatever powers the race has according to the Fiend Folio. In some cases, like Crab Men or Hook Horrors, that's really not anything, but should someone choose to play one of the four Death Slaadi, for example, it'll come with some magic and baggage.

I intend to fill in the details of the City-State and Asteroid the game starts on based on the races the players choose to play. I'll probably let the players decide whether that race is common or rare within the city. If we've got flying PCs, the City will be on the surface. If we're all Sverfneblin and Terithrans, then it'll be a subterranean city with surface given over to farming.

Henching International Temporary Services

Despite my grumblings about the rules, I had good fun playing Risus last night.

It was a superhero scenario, where the PCs were the henchmen of a supervillain. Actually, we were temps. We worked for H.I.T.S., Henching International Temporary Services.

I played a big dumb thug. My attributes (called "cliches" in Risus) were:

• "Want I should whack dem now, boss?"
• Gettin in ta fings.
• Keep on Truckin.

We were using this house rule where every PC also has a boon and a bane, which can boost or penalize other actions. My boon was "immovable object" and my bane was "big as an armored car". The later was applied literally. I was a normal human from the waist down, but had something like a 14 foot shoulder span.

We'd been hired by a supervillain named Chow Fun Yung, The Yellow Peril. He was an exageration of ridiculous pulp villains like Dr Fu Manchu. He gave us all spiffy yellow costumes and proper henchmen names tied in to various Asian menu items.

• I was Yam Pot,
• Sarah's wiry contortionist acrobat was Udon Noodle,
• Eric's unappreciated yes man was named Pig's Ear,
• John's aged, possum-playing, Henching Union organizer was named Thousand Year Egg,
• Steve's crooked beat cop was named Special Pork Surprise.

We were hired to rob a charity benefit. The supervillain's alter ego was the caterer of the event. He pretended to have nothing to do with the crime, and was an "innocent victim" of our attack, so he could have an alibi. That was a fairly clever way for the GM to keep the NPC supervillain from overshadowing us PC henchmen. Of course, it meant we were without guidance from da boss for most of the session, which meant we improvised... fairly poorly. The group tended to splinter, because half of us were dumb, and the rest incompetent. Jolly good fun.

I got beat up by Miss America - the superhero who once won a major beauty pagaent. I also got beat up by her Red, White and Blue Helicopter. I awoke in jail, and had a hard time getting reunited with the rest of the group. I was really good at getting in ta fings, but not so good at gettin out uv um. Once I got moving, though, it was hard to stop me, thanks to "Keep on truckin".

All Fiend Folio, All The Time

Ah, the much-derided Fiend Folio. Whenever a list of hated monsters from D&D comes up, you can bet several of them graced the pages of that first edition Fiend Folio. Some are just too silly. Others are actually cool descriptions, but wasted on yet another 1+1 HD critter (with no special powers) and which just doesn't fill a role kobolds, ogres or orcs didn't already cover. A handful of others are now-classic (and perhaps even over-used) races that seem to be always played-against-type by fanboys and best-selling-novelists alike.

Yet at the same time, the Fiend Folio accounts for about 52% of the things that keep the D&D setting from being just another overdone generic fantasy rip-off. Go read your first edition Monster Manual, and you'll find nearly everything comes from Tolkien or folklore. The handful of critters that don't spring from such a source (Beholders, Mind Flayers, and the like) really stand out, like you're watching a "one of these kids is doing his own thing" segment on the Sesame Street of our youth. The Fiend Folio was the book that said "if this setting can have Otyughs and Lurker Aboves, it can have freakin' anything!" Fiend Folio took that concept with it when it went to town.

For all it's flaws, the Fiend Folio was clearly something special.

---

Reflecting on this, I thought it might be interesting to run an "All Fiend Folio, All The Time" campaign. If a critter isn't detailed in the FF, it doesn't exist. And yes, that means no humans. PCs would be Bullywugs, Flinds, Snyads, Tabaxi or Xvart*. An Ogrillion monk would be a good PC choice too, but it opens the can of worms of how you explain Ogrillions (an Ogre-Orc crossbreed) in a setting that lacks Ogres and Orcs.

My first inclination was to do a wimpy compromise. Flinds seemed hampered if they didn't have Gnolls, so I thought perhaps I'd allow any critter that was mentioned in the Fiend Folio, even if it's stats were located elsewhere. On further research, I can tell that's just not gonna work. I knew my beloved Flinds mention Gnolls, and that was in fact part of why I contemplated this route. Little did I realize they also mention Orcs, Hobgoblins, Bugbears, Ogres, and Trolls. If that's what one monster entry coughs up, I imagine it'd be a normal D&D setting by the time you were done listing the cross-references. Drow mention other Elves, Ettercaps mention Spiders, Nilbogs mention Goblins, and then there's new Devils, Demons, Giants, Trolls, etc. Better to just draw the line and say if it's stats aren't in Fiend Folio, it's just a myth.

Of course, that means the local ecology and environment are pretty bizarre. Plant life is restricted to Algoids, Kelpies, Whip Weed, Wither Weed, and Yellow Musk Creeper, all of which are just as likely to eat you as to become salad. I'm thinking Al-Mi'Raj and Rothé steaks are the mainstays of every meal, augmented by the occasional fried Blood Hawk or Urchin sushi. (Speaking of which, we're probably looking at a gem-based economy, considering that Urchins and Carbuncles both grow them.) You wash it all down with a little fermented Stun Jelly. That, or maybe the priests are relied upon heavily for their Create Food and Water spells. Discovery of the rutabega would be ripe with all the promise of a modern get-rich-quick scheme.

About 40% of the critters in the Fiend Folio either are subterranean or from the Elemental Plane of Earth, and another 40% are from the Ethereal or Astral Plane. So I think we dump the contradictory baggage that is the planes, and just declare the setting to be large asteroids floating in the ether with all the critters in the FF being native to the whole place. The PCs are from an asteroid composed of one or two city-states (with sprawling fortress-farms where the dangerous food sources are kept under armed guard), and most adventures start with other asteroids crashing into, accreting into, or recently arriving in orbit around them.

Sounds like fun, though probably just for a one-shot or short-shot.

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*: Oh sure, you could nudge up the power range a tidge to feature Drow, Sverfneblin, Kuo-Toa, and the two flavors of Gith as Player Character races. Doing would no doubt simplify the process of recruiting players to this hypothetical campaign. At the same time, I kinda feel like giving the players something as comfortably familiar as the Dark Elves and Deep Gnomes is sort of squandering the uniqueness of the All Fiend Folio setting. Then again, now that I've contemplated the weirdness of the rest of the environment, perhaps giving the players access to the good ol' familar Drow is a really good move towards making the setting approachable.