Kort, the World's Weakest Kobold

Ah, Kort, my old friend... it has been several years since Kort's first appearance, cowering bravely in the ruined kitchen that the other members of his gens had told him to clean up and use to get dinner ready...

This was first edition AD&D and Kort had a hit point, a cleaver, and a grubby chef's hat.

Kort was also the only monster that the party talked to in that entire game.

He was, quite simply, described as "too pathetic to kill".

And he was. Weak, feeble, kind of stupid, barely any common sense... Kort was the only character in that game who was guaranteed to kill himself in one hit (which gave rise to a description of Synnibarr as "The game where everyone is Kort", years later).

The weird thing is, he was really fun to play.

He sniveled, he closed his eyes and waved his cleaver at the PCs in a desperate attempt to defend his "turf", and then the PCs were nice to him and gave him a measure of respect.

Kort now owns and operates a grand restaurant in the kingdom's capital city.

I once thought about re-making Kort in Third Edition D&D, but realised that he would be far more powerful than he should be and abandoned the idea.

Further Classes and Other Blather.

Though late, I will continue to update with the various custom classes and house rules that I am using in my home campaign. Today's particular gem will be the mountebank, a class I badly wanted to see back when it was first mentioned by Mr. Gygax in a Dragon magazine no small amount of time ago.

For the iteration presented, I am indebted to the version by David Prata that appeared in Footprints No. 12.

My interpretation of the class can be found here.

At some point I plan on finishing the versions of cavalier and barbarian that I wish to use, but that depends on my being able to start them... The mad scientist will be up next, followed by the necromancer (though that worthy's spell list may take a tad longer). I am also planning to post the rake in the near future... the assassin will appear at some point after that.

In other news, I am delighted by random rolls, as they caused Demogorgon to make an appearance in my home campaign recently. This gave much pause to the paladin, especially when he realised that two of the party's henchmen (known as "the twins") conversed in much the same manner as the dual heads of the demonic overlord. No, there is no connection, but the paranoia builds...

Also, I have started the slow process of creating what I believe would be called a "mega-dungeon", though I dislike the term myself. Called Bleakholme, I will be trying to post various bits and pieces here for others to use or not, as they wish.

Musings

I have been remiss in updates, mainly due to starting college after a twenty year gap in any sort of formal education. So far, so good, further updates on my education as warranted (i.e.: probably none).

I love this post.

Home Campaign and Further News

Despite the hectic pace of life and the difficulties that surrounds it, I have been able to maintain my home campaign for no little time now. This in spite of the ongoing employment issues (i.e.: the lack thereof) and the D&D Day at the Library (Tacoma Public, that is), which is nearly a year old at this time, and all of the other varied things that destroy my time and attention.

I can no longer refer to it as my Ravenloft (albeit house-ruled) game, as the players have managed to escape the demi-plane through the, to me, novel expedient of placing a helm of opposite alignment on the head of a domain lord (Drakov, for those of you wondering) who promptly failed both his magic resistance check and his saving throw and caused Falkovnia to instantly collapse, causing everyone in it to be scattered across the planes. The PCs are presently in the Forgotten Realms.

A word or two about that.

Like much that I do, I take an odd approach to campaign settings. In my youth, I would strive mightily to re-cast canon into something useful or appealing (to me, of course) whilst still allowing the use of new material. Not so much at present. I am using the originally released Forgotten Realms boxed set, no other published information, just things I'm making up. I am compounding my hubris by having placed the PCs in an area not covered by said boxed set, thus forcing myself to make up a great deal.

So, at present, the party is cooperating with the incarnate deity Tash (NG, Reason, Fair Play, and Justice, quasi-deity) in hopes of obtaining more information about the demi-plane they so recently escaped. This with the goal (of the paladin, at least) of being able to destroy the evil or at least free the innocent. As Tashluta (City of the god Tash) is beset by two groups of enemies, Tash promised his aid if they could free up his resources by throwing a sharp check to one of these factions.

The choice being between the rakshasa lords of Narubel or the Serpent-Men of the Black Jungles.

They chose to go after the Serpent-Men...

As I am choosing to make the Realms something of an interdimensional Sargasso, said Serpent-Men are the descendants of an exploratory/colony group hailing from the Scarlet Brotherhood. Yes, they plummeted far back in time in addition to crossing dimensions.

All in all, things are going well on that front.

I am hoping to begin a weekly update schedule, detailing the various classes and rules changes I am coming up with. Several of the classes are completed, but I am struggling with how I wish to approach others (mainly the barbarian and cavalier) given my founding principle that a sub-class with higher entry requirements should be better than the base class. On the other hand, I have no wish to be as absurd as the classes presented in the old UA.

Good luck and good gaming!

Things You Learn...

Quite a few people seem to spend more than a little time savaging 3rd Ed./3.5 D&D, I generally don't (saving my bile for 2nd Ed...), as I spent several years playing it and, overall, had a great time. The fact that I've grown disillusioned with it does not destroy its worth.

One of the things that I started doing in Third that I've carried on with is the rule I started calling "It's on the table". The origins of this were due to some of my Third players being far better at mechanical jiggery-poky than I am. So, in an effort to save my sanity and keep the game being fun, I told them that they could use anything their black little hearts desired... but that I could, and would, use whatever horrific monstrosity they came up with against them at some later point, they had, as I put it, "placed it on the table" and it was fair game. Conversely, I said, whatever I use as an NPC is also on the table.

So far, in my current Ravenloft 1st Ed mash-up the oddest a player wanted to start with has been a half-orc, even though I stated that I am open to whatever they'd like to play. (I wouldn't necessarily let it be powerful, but it would be at least on par with the PHB assortment of races.) This being the case, all of the oddball races (and classes) have been NPCs (now, this is, at least sort of, Ravenloft, so all of the races have been at least human-seeming, but...) and now there is a small selection of potentially interesting options.

At present, on the table are:

necromancer (my own version of such a class)
mad scientist (a class of my own creation, a sub-class of magic-user)
half-ogre
weirdling (all of the semi-humans, such as the tiefling, but exact bloodlines may vary)
drow
Gamma World mutant

And that's about it... oddly when I started the post I would have said there were more, but I've checked and it's not so... (though weirdling is pretty open-ended now that I think of it).

Some Commentary from the Past

I recently obtained a collection of old White Dwarf issues and have been gleefully perusing them. The Fiend Factory articles are a huge treat, as I find it fascinating to see the origins of many of the Fiend Folio creatures (and the commentary on their use by Don Turnbull is both useful and provides an insight into how things were done in that time and place).

However, I'm going to focus on a different bit of commentary by Mr. Turnbull. The following comes from the end of his review of the Players Handbook in White Dwarf number 10:

"However those who have grown up on the first edition need
not be alarmed - all this is completely compatible with the
familiar system and I don't believe it will be long before the
necessary changes and adjustments are taken under the belt; as
in all things practice and habit are great teachers. I have no
shadow of a doubt that the Advanced rules will be accepted
and incorporated into campaigns currently in progress, though
the DM will, as always, have the final say as to what is and
what isn't allowed in his dungeon/world.
Of course, perhaps the most important function of the
Handbook is as a source of reference; no more searching
through stacks of magazines and books to find the information
you are seeking (dammit - what issue of Strategic Review
contains the stats for rangers? and where did I put the copies
of Strategic Review anyway?). Pretty well everything needed
is here, carefully compiled and indexed; if it isn't here, it is in
the Referees Guide of which I for one can't wait for my copy.
There is little more I can say. If you already have a copy, you
may share my apprehension at the amount of time it is going
to take to digest all this new material, but I suspect you also
share my whole-hearted welcome of it. If you haven't, and you
are the least bit interested in D&D, the sooner you get a copy
the better. I said of the Monster Manual that it was TSR's
most impressive publication to date; that is no longer true -
this accolade must belong to the Handbook which is nothing
short of a triumph."

Now, when he says "first edition", he would appear to mean what we now refer to as the "LBBs", or OD&D... which many would argue is a very different game from AD&D.

Which is somewhat true, but it is still very similar, and I think his claims of complete compatibility are strongly grounded in truth.

What intrigues me about this is the idea that this kind of reaction doesn't really happen with regards to today's D&D. "Third" edition did provide a token conversion system... which is hardly the same as compatibility, but to my knowledge, "Fourth" edition didn't even bother with that. (The numbering of the editions, as virtually all of us know, is horribly flawed... there are, I think, about four ways to view it, leaving the current publication of WotC as Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, or Eighth edition. It all depends on which publications one counts as "editions") Also, the current mindset seems to be, "Come, join us in playing this game, it's way better than the older one!", rather than the attitude expressed by Mr. Turnbull above.

And now, back to perusal...

A Quick Thank You...

...to Swords & Dorkery for the mention in his, as yet, most recent post, not to mention being added to his blogroll.

Any of you who wander by here who haven't come from there should check it out, especially the post on half-orcs.

I think this will mean I'll have to step up my game on posting...

Let's hope I can avoid the Hivemind Syndrome. :)

I Strongly Suspect I'm Mad...

But I need to refine this a bit further...

Yes, if you can make it out, it's R.E. Howard's Hyborian Age affixed to E.G. Gygax's Oerth.


Oh, come on, as if the Suloise weren't related to the Stygians?

Men Out of Time

The thought occurs to me that there has been a multitude of examples in literature of the hero being a man (occasionally a woman, but I think the disparity greatly favours men) from "our modern world" - whenever that is - who is transplanted to a fantasy world.

It never seems to be the villain who is the cross-world voyager.

Oh, there's occasionally a lesser bad-guy who is such, usually weak, venal, or tricked into assisting the true villain, but there's not (to my knowledge) any example where the Dark Lord(tm) is such a traveler.

So, depending on your groups style, you could spice things up a bit in your fantasy game by having the new and terrible threat be from a modern (or futuristic) world. You'd have to make such a villain a competent, lucky, and powerful as the heroic types of the stories, otherwise they wouldn't survive. Let's face it, if dropped into a medieval fantasy world, most of us would be dead in short order. This has to be someone who is able to survive, prosper, and be a credible threat.

Motive becomes something of an issue, however. In the literature, the hero usually picks the correct side by pure luck (and/or incredible prejudice), if he does pick the wrong side, he's usually made aware of this pretty early on and gets to go on a revenge kick as well as protect the good guys. This could work for a villain, but you'd still have to work out why he's evil.

Some ideas:

The villain has been converted somehow. (Been made a member of the undead, "seen the light" (dark?) and converted to an evil god, etc)
The villain is trying to make things better, casting down unfair monarchies and re-building the world in a more "sensible" fashion.
The villain is out for blood. (The fantasy world's wizards' guild refused to help him get home/refused to believe him and so he's going to smash them all, despite this nonsense about cosmic calamity...)
The villain senses opportunity... (Just because he's a cubicle-monkey back home doesn't mean he's going to be one here).
The villain doesn't want to go home... yet some heroic group are trying to make him. (This ties in well with the above, but on its own is a bit weak).

Cross-Playability and the Warhammer Changes

So, back in August of this year, I was given the work Night's Dark Masters, the vampire book for WFRP 2nd Ed. I've been collecting the rest of said 2nd Ed since then, but I've recently found out about the 3rd Ed... which is dramatically different from its predecessors...

I'm not thrilled.

I know, the shock, the amazement...

I'm not even sure why I feel the need to ramble on about this, those that agree with me (due to exasperation with novelty, the desire to maintain perfection, or sheer hatred of truth and beauty) will continue to do so and those that disagree (due to addiction to novelty, the desire for perfection, or sheer hatred of truth and beauty) will plot my inevitable downfall... or continue to do so, as their fancy takes them.

Nonetheless...

I rather like the second edition, overall it is the same game, but it does have certain tweaks and some things were deleted, changed, and what-have-you. I think the strength and toughness changes were silly, but can understand them, and the reining in of elvenkind was an unlooked-for delight, so things seem fairly reasonable. Also, I really like the fact that the systems are basically compatible. Yes, you'll have to tinker a bit with it all, but not too much and you can use all the old material with the new.

This is, I think, an important point. Similar to how D&D was, essentially, the same game from 1974 to 2000 (I realize that the differences seem vast, but they really aren't... and I say that having already gone on record with my hatred of second edition AD&D...), WFRP was the same game from 1986 to 2009. All the material released in those periods was usable if you happened to want to use it (though some was so dreadful I wouldn't have wished on my worst enemy... OK, maybe I would have inflicted Skills and Powers on them... if I were in a really bad mood).

I like improvement (one of the things that many intelligent gamers really like is some form of non-random character generation - in many games, I like it too, but there are some times I like trying to make a character out of a set of random rolls - so packaging a well thought out "point buy" system, along with the old random method, in your game's new edition isn't going to hurt anyone, under normal circumstances...), but I also like backwards compatibility. Deleting the usefulness of the small library of game books I've already purchased isn't going to win the new edition my friendship or money.

The point must be made that I am probably not the "target market" anymore, and therefore superfluous...

So be it.

I do wonder who the current "target market" is, however. Is it anyone who's played the previous editions? And am I cheap, or does $100 seem a tad pricey for the start-up kit?

A Small Update to a Long-Neglected Soapbox.

And so we once more attempt to maintain a floundering blog...

There has been an attempt at running several games since our last posting. Longest running being a Space:1889/Castle Falkenstein cross pitching the PCs against the nefarious time-meddling Morlocks (currently looking for a new night as one of our players has started school), a First Edition D&D game (using a heavily revised version of the Ravenloft setting, domains have been axed willy-nilly and other have been added with the goal of trying to make it all seem like a coherent world, not just a haunted mish-mash) - which is still going, but we have very few players, and, most recently, I have started running a BECMI game at the Tacoma Public Library's Main Branch for their D&D night (running every other Tuesday from October to December, the link just goes to the upcoming session) and the turn-out was very positive.

I am hoping that more people arrive next time and maybe we can get a few more DMs (for whatever games they'd like) as the Olympia Room that we are using is rather large.

And Once More We Lunge From The Shadows...

Unfortunately, we have been most remiss in actually posting our witticisms and thoughts. The blame falls mostly on illness, lack of a clear vision, controversy, and, of course, laziness.

Many apologies to the three of you who follow this regularly.

We last promised the details of the fighting men for the Cassandrian Campaign, and we will, in short order, attend to that. However, we first wish to touch upon the aforementioned controversy.

I refer, of course, to the grandly titled 'Supplement V: Carcosa'. Many have reacted with disgust towards the work, unfairly, I think. I was, to be honest, rather surprised that any controversy arose. I had perused some of the author's posts on the Dragonsfoot Forums and whilst I may not care for his style of gaming (too doomful for my tastes), there's nothing objectionable there. Creepy, horrific, and disturbing, yes, but then I own and have read the Book of Ebon Bindings, so I'm not exactly squeamish... Lamentations of the Flame Princess has an interesting take on the assorted drama, and I refer those interested to that blog (pausing only to note that one of the objectors to Carcosa uses a picture of Blackwolf from the film 'Wizards' as his 'avatar'... human sacrifice to summon and bind horrific entities being beyond the pale, but a Hitlerian-obsessed mutant sadist warmonger is OK...)