RPG and board game reviews and discussion presented from a game-design perspective. We review and discuss modern role-playing games, classics, tabletop gaming, old school games, and everything in-between. We also randomly fall in and out of different games, so what we are playing and covering from week-to-week will change.
SBRPG is gaming with a focus on storytelling, simplicity, player-created content, sandboxing, and modding.
Let's just get that out of the way. This is an OSR-style living sandbox campaign with enough room for your ideas, plus a book full of hexes described with history, story, and current events. We get city maps. We get locals. The art is flat-out beautiful.
This is the setting the Forgotten Realms should have been. Not an author's setting where your characters are allowed to play alongside a cast of unkillable GMNPCs, but your setting where the characters are the important characters in the novels and stories.
The book uses BX-style hit-die rating for monsters, but this is usable by and large with any fantasy ruleset.
This is sort of the Holy Grail of old-school style settings, clearly on the same level as the amazing Harnworld. While Harnworld leans more into historical accuracy while folding in fantasy concepts, this starts with fantasy concepts and works to give them historical accuracy and a weighty feeling. Harnworld, at times, feels like magic, dragons, monsters, and fantasy elements are optional and not central to the "alt-history" realistic setting. The Northern Marches feels like fantasy was already there and helped shape the world, yet the setting doesn't "go modern" and remains grounded in the medieval fantasy baseline.
An insanely great book, replacing a shelf-full of fantasy settings for me.
The Forgotten Realms feels like "tourist Europe" with little danger, settled bucolic hamlets everywhere, and a sense of Ren Faire peace and happiness across the land. Everyone and everything has magic. Fantasy races of every shape live together in harmony, and even the orcs, goblins, and gnolls have settled into civilized lands, misunderstood "good folk." The spawn of dragons, the Dragonborn, are seen as noble helpers of civilization. I remember when dragons were feared. Even the misunderstood spawn of the Devil, the Tieflings, wander around with puzzling Russian accents, and have no taint of Hell in their blood, and are this generation's Drizzt emo-PC character choice.
The "D&D reality" is essentially a corporate "Disney reality," which is messy and dated. It is a strange "Disney Princesses" version of fantasy, its own genre, honestly, and it infects every game it touches. Even D&D clones like Tales of the Valiant, Level Up, Daggerheart, Draw Steel, and Nimble 5E can't escape that D&D zeitgeist. If you enjoy it, great! But, don't let it become your only idea of what fantasy can be, nor that other genres or ideas are "lesser" in any way.
Too many fantasy races lead to terrible world design and storytelling. It isn't fantasy anymore; it is a meaningless spectacle with no apparent meaning or direction. More and more are seeing this as a problem, and this isn't some metaphor for the current-day anything; it is just muddled confusion and the sloppy buffet-like world design where "more of everything is better."
I call out kitchen sink fantasy for this reason.
Your ideas should come first.
You shouldn't be forced to accept every class, race, option, power, monster, spell, and idea from "that other game" into "your game." Clear, focused, limited world designs are superior. Even if the world just has Dragonborn and Tieflings, and no other races, that is a superior world design than these modern ones, where the designers are afraid to remove choices.
Shadowdark does a lot with just the basic six races. That is an excellent example of a focused game. Books that keep adding races to Shadowdark don't do much for me, as they confuse the game with too much choice. I see them as net negatives to the core system.
While it is nice to "have options" and "all the work done for you," that should never come before your ideas. John Carter of Mars is a fun, imaginative, unique, and compelling setting that has nothing to do with kitchen sink fantasy. This is another IP that Disney ruined, and the best we have today of something similar is Goodman Games' Purple Planet series. Good fantasies and compelling stories can be found outside the kitchen sink fantasy genre.
I love the Dungeon Crawl Classics rule, "only one monster of each kind exists." This is the way. The ogre is one monster; come up with another brute if your campaign needs another. Commoditized, fantasy factory, stamped out clones of monsters, leading to stagnation and boredom.
The classics that inspired D&D are precious, special, and the products of vivid imaginations. We will never have new ideas if we only recycle old ones and continually regurgitate 6th-generation clones of original ideas in our games. The classics were, in fact, recycling of biblical stories, but we have not had a level of pop-culture recycling so hard, so systematic that the genre develops a culture of its own.
I call it out to put your imagination first, and avoid the corporate colonization of the idea of "what fantasy is" from being co-opted by these ideas. Once you accept the D&D reality, it's akin to a religion, and you might as well give up playing every other game and log into D&D Beyond to consume digital goods that align with that worldview. You will be happier there, rather than trying to "fight the system" aimlessly in clone games.
Strong, compelling, good-versus-evil, character-driven fantasy is not dead.
Sadly, for me, having been there from the start, the Forgotten Realms is to me. Greyhawk is, despite the efforts of historians and those who write for the game these days. I love both settings, but I can't unsee what we had, and the repackaging of these settings as something that D&D 5.5E speaks to.
If I ever revisit this setting, it will be in GURPS as a deadly, gritty, low-magic setting, like the one we first played. The ones on the first two covers of the boxed set.
The "serious D&D" setting.
The one that was supposed to showcase the original AD&D game, and was a reset from the Monty Haul and power-gaming Greyhawk games we had grown tired of, and one that 5E has turned back into. A world where characters mattered, kinship and family were who you were, and life was short and violent.
Easy raise dead or resurrection? You had to roll resurrection survival each time, as there was a hard limit on the number of times, and finding a cleric high enough to cast it was nearly impossible (a 9th-level cleric and a 17+ WIS required). You had to make death saving throws to survive being polymorphed and returning to your original form. Oh, and there were only two named clerics described in the gray books that were high enough level to cast this spell: one was the leader of an evil cult, and the other one was dead.
If you wanted it, you had to be able to DIY your own resurrects, and then retire that character as a pocket cleric and hope they weren't assassinated. Evil factions would target clerics who possess such power, so you never advertised you had it. What? My character is targeted by evil because they have a spell? Yes, you helped the good guy side. That level of power made you a target of cults, demons, and evil gods. That never happens in 5E, since power is a guarantee and so widespread that everyone feels like they have it.
There should never be a "resurrection in every temple" in the world. The idea is stupid, lame, and comes from trash video games, not fantasy.
Even the NPCs in my world were careful, and they didn't "ride in to save the day" like they did in many campaigns that I have heard about. Elminster was not immortal, and probably had only a handful of resurrections remaining. He was thoughtful, careful, and conservative in his use of power. If there was another way, he would take it or send someone else if he could. He knew he was a target, too.
Characters used to be part of the world instead of feeling like they logged into an MMO.
Stories used to matter here.
Factions were deadly serious.
Evil existed.
The world used to matter.
Your character used to matter.
No NPC was immortal or more important than the characters.
Of all the settings published for Dungeon Crawl Classics, I like Hubris the best. This setting includes several new thematic classes that support the world, as well as optional rules, new gear, and the book then provides loose descriptions of the world's areas, each accompanied by a lay of the land chart for random features, an encounter table, and several sample preset location descriptions.
We also get new spells, gods, and patrons! We have a bestiary, tables for random towns and adventure sites, and a bunch of very cool tools to make running the setting and keeping it feeling strange easy.
"His intent with Hubris isn’t prescriptive (there is no Mike Evans’ World of Hubris Lorebook) but rather a stew of horrors and nightmares offered up as fodder for the imagination. Like that moldering box of Heavy Metal magazines up in your weird uncle’s attic, Hubris is meant to inspire." - Hubris, a World of Visceral Adventure, page 3.
The whole book is a fever dream of insane ideas and over-the-top craziness.
The only downside is that if the entire world is this over-the-top and insane, you may struggle to distinguish the normal from the fantastic. This world is already set on 11 on the crazy dial, and it almost has a Gamma World meets Rifts meets Dante's Inferno feeling to it with mechanical murder machines walking around as characters, demons, and mutants everywhere.
A core tenant of DCC RPG is that every monster should be unique. No more kobolds sacking merchant caravans, no more armies of orcs, no more cookie-cutter dragons. In DCC, whatever is threatening your PCs is some ancient horror, utterly foreign, utterly unknowable, and utterly terrifying. When you dismiss the familiar you make games magical again. - Hubris, a World of Visceral Adventure, page 3.
I can see towns and villages walling themselves off from the crazies outside, just trying to live an everyday life amidst the madness and squalor. Doing this and creating a healthy suspicion of outsiders can get you the contrast you need to run effective horror and fantastic world games.
I like having that contrast. Humanity is just trying to huddle up and stay alive. Inside a town, it could feel like a typical Middle Ages fantasy town. Outside the walls? All bets are off. This place is crazy outside the walls. This keeps the towns from looking like a Star Wars creature cantina, and holds what is outside the walls still insane, scary, unknown, and fantastic.
You could do "wacky world" with a town, and have murder machine bartenders and half-demon innkeepers, but that makes the extraordinary the ordinary. This is my problem with modern D&D, every character race lives together happily and is no different than each other. Nobody is special. It is all animal crackers, various shapes and tastes, all the same.
To do a crazy world like that correctly, you need to channel some of the Heavy Metal movie, and turn up the savage dial to 11. Just to live, you need to be a constant epic and kick-butt, over-the-top force of nature. The world is a terrible, brutal, dark place where death is easy, and survival goes to the strong.
And like the forward says, the world isn't a setting, but a box of inspiration.
If you want a good idea of a purely over-the-top version of a DCC world, Hubris is about as good as it gets.
Over 40 years, I watched the planes go from something inhospitable, the realm of souls, unreachable and too alien to conceptualize...
...to a theme-park default setting.
The planes ruined the 4E setting, and we felt betrayed once the expansions came out, assuming "planar adventures" at level 10 (out of 30 levels). The fantastic campaign world stopped at level 10 like some MMO starting zone (Elwynn Forest in World of Warcraft). The planes as a campaign setting began in 4E in earnest, and the established campaign settings (Forgotten Realms, etc.) felt like afterthoughts. We have never recovered from this state of affairs, and none of the great settings have ever been revisited.
This assumption never stopped, and it is the current state of affairs with Wizards. All of their fantastic IP in campaign settings are withering on the vine, with zero support in 5E, no gazetteers or atlases, nothing introducing players to the world, and they seem to focus more on the planes than the settings their novels (once NYT best sellers) reside in. This is like the Lord of the Rings franchise abandoning their world for some nebulous "multiverse" and "planar setting" just because the writers want to have the freedom to do sci-fi or something but still have that Lord of the Rings name attached to the project.
Lord of the Rings: Planetfall, the Rise of the Star Empire.
Okay, shut it down; the IP is obviously dead. Either that or the studio can't hire writers who can do the work. This is what happens when "everything is a sequel" - people need to shoehorn in things that would have been "new ideas" into "old properties," and both are ruined.
But that above picture? This works in Numenera perfectly since the game is built around a core of anything possible. Still, Numenera is just one world without needing planes of anything watering the setting down. Numenera is not a theme park; it is a blank sheet of paper used to imagine anything.
The planes are the ultimate theme park game world replacement. Need a gothic vampire area? Need a beast-lands? Need a Norse place? Need a Greek place? Need a floating whatever with some whatever on them? An infinite city? A ringworld? A water/fire/earth/air place? A shadow dimension? A place with lots of (non-religious affiliated) demons and devils?
We got a plane for that!
Old campaign worlds? They are there too! The planes answer every question. The beauty of the planes is if the parent company gets sick of supporting a planar setting or just wants to do a one-shot, it is easy - a plane is disposable and ultimately meaningless. Sure, we have room for you old-timers, too; just put the campaign worlds we don't support in there!
And planar settings feel lazy. There is no history to write for a planar setting. Cartography feels unimportant. You do not have to fit the place into a campaign world and culture. It feels like a lazy way to "skip the work" and deliver a setting without making it work with anything else. The price for unlimited creativity - is nothing being compelling, related, or holding meaning.
The planes, as they exist in the default mindset of 2023, are overdone and tired. They are not the "home of the gods" anymore. None of them seem alien or strange, and it is just a disconnected theme park of ideas used in a hundred campaign worlds before.
I would take a decent theme-park world over a planar setting any day.
They aren't even "planes" anymore.
It is an overused and nebulous junk drawer that does everything poorly without form, history, connection, or function.
I do love Greyhawk. While we started in the Mystara setting, we revisited Greyhawk during the 3E era and rediscovered a wonderful and fantastic place.
Part of me wonders if a lot of the inspiration for the Forgotten Realms was to somehow "erase" Greyhawk after Gygax was forced out of the company. You see many of the same sorts of "but we do it better" things in the Realms and much more annoying godlike GMNPCs. And we still see the classic Greyhawk modules pushed hard as IP, with no love or recognition for the place from which they came.
All the great modules started here:
A1-A4
C1-C2
D1-D3
The incredible GDQ Series
The S series, including Tomb of Horrors
The T series, including Temple of Elemental Evil
...and many more
And then we have the really sloppy "borrowing" of the classic Greyhawk adventures for the 4E non-setting, some "place floating out in space" valley map that was never really intended to matter beyond "level 1-10 MMO starting zone" before planar adventures began. There were 4E versions of the significant campaign settings, minus Greyhawk, which was one we wanted to see. Most of the 4E settings were not as great as the originals, and the Forgotten Realms one all but destroyed the world we loved.
It is frustrating and sad since these are the great IP settings of fantasy. Every bit as significant as Star Wars, Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, or Star Trek.
You look at the above list of adventures, which are as great as "the battle of the death star" or other iconic moments in cinema history but played out on people's kitchen tabletops. And the setting from which they came feels like it sits ignored.
I swear Wizards does not know what they own at times.
And I get the feeling that modern D&D is more about the planes, with the 4E cosmology still present and influential in the setting and all of the Magic the Gathering settings being used as substitutes for the great works of art that were the original campaign worlds. We also see micro-settings tied to a single adventure, which is okay, but I don't feel they compare to an entire world.
Those who revived Greyhawk for 3E knew how important a world was. Funny how a lot of those creators moved on and became Paizo, and created a strong world of their own which continues to this day.
I would love new novels and books for all of the classic D&D settings. I would love new takes and new heroes. I love new adventures in these worlds as good as the GDQ adventure series or the Tomb of Horrors. I would love to see "the new classics." I would love to see the original creators consulted and brought in, along with an A-list group of writers to craft new stories.
But I know better.
...
These settings are likely abandoned and shall live on cherished in our memories.
Shout out to RaRa-Rasputin and his Youtube channel. Go subscribe and support his work. He had a great interview with James Raggi, the author of Lamentations of the Flame Princess, has this wonderful discussion about why he set his game in the 17th Century. Around the 15-minute mark we get this:
When people play medieval fantasy, they are not playing like medieval. There's so many modern assumptions still in there, and the 17th Century is when those things are starting to exist, so they make sense as far as how people play anyway.
This is a fascinating quote, and there are many in here, and one about Middle Ages settings that make me feel that a true Middle Age game is so far away from our "modern" experience that it would almost seem like playing in a sci-fi setting than anything we associate with traditional "medieval fantasy" as we know it in tabletop gaming.
You take the concept of serfs and peasants, and how they belonged to the land, could not leave or move to a new town, and were more considered property of the local lord. That isn't anything we know in traditional fantasy gaming, it is borderline controversial to even mention these days, and framed as science-fiction we are more ready to accept this as a concept. Seriously, if you did a big-budget sci-fi movie where evil Earth corporations enslaved an alien race and used them for labor, that would be something you could mentally frame and accept easier than accepting the fact we used to do this to each other on this planet.
This one statement sends me down the rabbit hole of reading history. An ACKS game, played right in a true Middle Ages setting, is not at all like a Lamentations game in the 17th Century. ACKS would feel like playing sci-fi, and I dare say the farther back you go, the more sci-fi things become.
The modern experience is a very small window in time. It is the one we are the most familiar with, and it is the framing we use to look at other people and other times with.
Modern Fantasy
When you consider the "modern fantasy" generic world, and this world is this almost "all ages sort of generic Tolkien meets MMO" world. It is built off safe fantasy art, sterilized by corporate sensitivity reviewers, double checked so it won't anger Twitter or the stockholders, and it becomes this self-sustaining force that permeates every fantasy game.
Generic fantasy has become this manner of speaking, dress, world building, and a look and style that I feel is decidedly like a "modern world dress up" with some fantasy architecture thrown in there. Harry Potter is the great example of modern-relatable characters, very modern in outlook and manners, living in a fantasy world. All of the TV tropes in Xena and Hercules, those direct-to-video fantasy movies, animation, and those sort of modern people in fancy dress living in a world with fantasy replacements for modern conveniences.
I feel this world mixed with a set of rules even enforces a manner of acting, such as someone who behaves like they are playing a set of rules instead of playing a character in a real world. The world takes on this manner of acting, and people in the world act like they are playing one version of a fantasy game instead of acting like real people in a realistic world.
D&D 4th Edition felt like it had this problem in an acute manner. It did not feel like a real world, at least not to us, it felt like the world of a video game MMO following a specific set of rules. There was this layer of the artificial put on top of everything, how people in the world behaved, the governments, wars, conflicts, exploration, rural life, city life, and every other facet of that reality. The fact the planes are integrated into the world and a part of normal life. The gods are real and "end bosses" for the world.
My Fantasy, My Perspective
With the current edition of D&D we have a huge Magic the Gathering influence, and this high-technology magic feeling where magic can do anything for zero cost. For fans, it is great to see those worlds come alive. But it does bring in a culture, sort of nebulous reality that can be anything to anyone, and it changes the fantasy reality to a "be anything and do anything" sort of world with multiple dimensions, modern influences, and a lot of - I don't want to say baggage - but assumptions that can mean anything to anyone is the better word. It does feel more nebulous and that "the world exists from my perspective" is a modern thing and also a powerful force of marketing the game.
I feel modern fantasy is evolving from the "generic MMO fantasy setting" to more of the world is "your perception of fantasy, and every perception is valid" sort of experience. There is also this feeling of empowerment delivered with the game, almost like a Power Rangers sort of thing, but tailored for a mass audience. Because I play a powerful wizard in game I somehow have more power in the real world sort of sales pitch.
They blur fantasy with reality, which in previous editions of the game was a no-no because of the effect it had on some people's perception of reality.
Also, the zero-cost magic thing is also troubling to me, as our current world is dealing with resource shortages, pollution, worker suffrage, and great imbalances of trade from this "infinite consumerism" mentality. Infinite magic is the Amazon.com one-click anything goes mentality, and I can see why big companies don't want you questioning it. More on this later, but infinite magic I feel enables the "my reality, my fantasy" experience these companies are shipping today.
Fantasy Conveniences
I need my cell phone. I need my mass transit. I need my freedom of speech, freedom of association, and other human rights. I need my airline travel. I need my Internet. I need my speedy travel. I need my public education, schools, and universities. I need my on-call law enforcement with detectives and judicial resolution. I need my familiar governmental authorities and government programs. I need my modern outlook and assumptions. I don't want people of different heritages fighting or coming into conflict. The world must be cosmopolitan with dragon-folk, demon-bloods, and other fantastic races walking around without any differences, bad blood, mistreatment, or suspicion.
Very few of these things are in the historical record. They get Harry Pottered into a lot of these settings. The farther you go back, the more alien the world becomes in all of these regards.
The modernization of modern fantasy RPGs is this commercial force in making a product more acceptable to a mass audience. Some call it a Disney-ification of rules systems once they go mainstream, and you see that in some of the newer movie and series reboots as well.
I feel when companies add these fantasy conveniences where they create "magic parallel technology" for what are things we are used to in the modern world, something is lost. We aren't immersing ourselves in a unique world or time anymore. We don't have to be curious and figure things out. We don't have to learn the lands, peoples, and cultures. We have our traditional Western and current-day assumptions and biases preloaded into the setting and everything feels comfortable. The setting is pre-colonized with our biases and we don't need to learn to adjust to a different time and place.
We are still stuck in the modern world, the one just around us in our daily life, and never escaping it.
The OSR = Room to Explore
I feel this is why I am gravitating more towards the OSR. There is room for experiences outside of that generic fantasy core that has been overdone and I feel become a stereotype of the Western and Internet-centric experience.
How can we ever learn to understand and respect other cultures if we are constantly transposing our own reality onto everything we experience?
The OSR has a lot of room to explore, grow, and find niches that spur me to read history and understand a time outside my own. Also, to understand things from a non-Western perspective. ACKS got me deeply enthralled with the Middle Ages experience of faith, lordship, the pitiful worker experience, and the entire forging kingdoms through blood and conquest. Are there bad-controversial things in the game by today's standards such as forced-servitude? Yes. But as a player, I am free to fight them and correct that wrong, if I choose. The game doesn't erase things it doesn't want me to see.
Lamentations of the Flame Princess got me deeply into horror fiction and also the parallel horror of colonialism. Are there bad-controversial things this game? Yes, it is a horror game. But we need the terrible in here so we can confront our own fears and feelings about how Western society (and to be honest, a lot of non-Western societies) was built off the backs and blood of others. The game does not hide that truth that is integral to the horror experience.
ACKS and Lamentations have me buying and reading history. My real-world life and experience are growing, and I am educating myself as a life-long learner. Modern fantasy feels like a frozen TV dinner in comparison. It doesn't nourish me mentally, challenge me to rethink what I am told on the Internet, and give me that depth of knowledge that makes me an interesting person.
Lion & Dragon can also be mentioned here, but I am still reading that game and it looks like a fun one.
Are there less-heavy options in the OSR? We got Old School Essentials, Labyrinth Lord, Basic Fantasy, and Castles & Crusades that can fill the need. They can easily do "modern fantasy" if that is your thing, or they can do a lot of other things. The games aren't really written to enforce one world or style of play. If I want a game that doesn't challenge assumptions and delivers the modern feeling, they are all here.
We have Dungeon Crawl Classics out here too for a more Heavy Metal fantasy experience of gonzo anything goes play. And there are many others, from a Conan-style game to sci-fi, hexcrawls, gangsters, and many other options.
But most importantly, I have that choice, and I can play these grim and gritty and with any assumption I want. And I am not having modernity forced on my game because the rules include it as a requirement to make the game comfortable to a mainstream audience.
Also, the room I am finding to explore in the OSR is not only in the games I have to read and enjoy, but the room inside myself I have to grow as a person in my experience and knowledge.
So another possible setting for Savage Pathfinder (or Fantasy) is a pretty cool one, the classic Mystara setting for the original B/X D&D games. I just picked up a set of the original PDFs (plus the PODs you can buy, please make more of them available) on DriveThruRPG, and this is a strong contender to take my #1 spot - just because I have a long history with these lands and they were the home of the first adventures I ran as a DM.
Everything is here, the world, a cool setting I have a history with, that familiar feeling, and plenty of places to explore and visit again. I could use this for classic B/X as well, just grab Labyrinth Lord and we are good to go for years of fun, no conversions, no waiting for the Savage Pathfinder books to come (I have the PDFs but books are so much easier), and I have everything I need to make it work.
So the question becomes, B/X or Savage Worlds?
B/X vs. SWADE: Goals
This comes down to if you are a fan of the "gamey games" that Savage Worlds implements as a part of the system, such as chases, initiative, bennies, raises, social interaction, and the other systems that Savage Worlds ships with that B/X does away with. Me? I am a fan, and while playing solo it is fun to navigate some of these systems and play through them. Also, initiative in Savage Worlds I feel is way easier than d20 style systems and it does away with a lot of math and sorting of up to a dozen combatants when a combat begins.
I like Savage Worlds combat as well, there is a lot more play and options in a modern system such as this, and you can make a lot of choices and switch up tactics from turn to turn, work together, and use edges or skills to manipulate the flow of the action.
One thing about B/X is you don't need to convert, and you have everything right there. You do lose things in the conversion, and things get mechanically soft (or you forget a monster ability). If you like rules-as-written and want things clear, do not convert. If you are shooting for more of a story and the type of action Savage Worlds simulates well, then convert.
For this playthrough I want more story and pulp action, problem solving and NPC interaction, and I am not as concerned with an old-school simulation. I love B/X and the old-school ethos, it is just for this game I want to play more with the characters and setting than the dungeons and the monsters. Some settings to me beg to be played as a grand drama, where others are a darker crawl into the dungeons and the nature of greed and power.
Focus on Quality, not Quantity
Old school modules are notorious for using quantity as quality, to make a fight challenging they will throw 13 rats in a room and expect you to handle hit points, initiative, and attacks per rat, and they will give you a hit point list for all of them individually (1,1,1,2,2,2,2,3,3,3,4,4,4). In Savage Worlds, that's one swarm. But if you are playing an old-school module in SW, adjust the monsters in quantity and shoot for quality encounters rather than the adventure-as-written.
Similarly, if you have a room with 10 goblins, think about knocking that down to a wild card goblin leader and four extras - and maybe give a few special weapons and attacks/defenses (bow with poison arrows, burning pitch, caltrops, or an entangle weapon). You just took a "bulk fight 10 goblins" sort of old-school hit point grind and turned it into a fight with some interesting options and challenges. Less combatants but more quality that leverages the special parts of the Savage Worlds rules is better than a boring bulk creature fight.
Similarly, consider non-combat options to resolving encounters such as stealth, skill rolls, negotiation, role play, and using powers or gear. Again this is obvious when you are playing Savage Worlds, but if you are in a certain old-school mindset you may get locked into the "if there are 15 orcs in the mess hall, you gotta defeat 15 orcs to get through the room" and all other options disappear from your mind. This happens to me on conversions, and I have to take a step back and wonder, could a food fight be started? Can you wait out dinner? Where would they go to afterwards? Is the time of day even right for a meal to be served? Could the food be spiced to be extra spicy (for laughs or other reasons)? Could an illusion be used to make the food less appetizing? What happens if a large rat or insect runs through the room?
Are there other ways of dealing with this encounter than the obvious?
Again, instead of a "fight quantity of X" sort of encounter, you are creating something that can be roleplayed through, skills used, or other inventive uses of the rules and leveraging the options and powers the system gives you. The resolution to the problem the room presents can be solved with more than just combat, so your quality is being reflected by a wide variety of resolution options supported in the rules and character abilities.
In B/X the referee ruling on player experimentation is the core of problem resolution, with a default focus on combat as the final resolution. You don't need special rules or abilities, maybe perhaps a save or ability check if there is a question of success chances. Nothing says you can't do any of the above in B/X either, you can be just as inventive and have a good referee play off that.
In Savage Worlds you have systems, edges, player abilities, skills, and the minigames built into the rules that help you resolve problems. These need to be considered when you think about how an encounter can be resolved. For a solo play experience, I find the structure here to be of great assistance when I make rulings and try to have characters influence the story through skills and abilities.
My Second Go Around
When we played this in our years-long campaign the stories started personal and NPC-based, and then naturally shifted into "superhero save the world" plots. When that happens I feel you lose the personal and dramatic stories that are lower-level and a lot more meaningful. By the time our campaign ended the only reason to go anywhere in the world was because of a world-ending plot, and frankly, it got tiring. We were young and did not know any better, but what else can you do when you lack hindsight and experience?
I tire of superhero movies these days for the same reason. Plots where you start out invested in a few characters and their struggles always turn out to be an "end of the world" plot and you lose that connection to their personal stories. And honestly, in many cases the world never ends or can change much because the next movie needs a normal world to setup the next end of the world. The story becomes "too big" and we lose the intimate feel that drew us in.
I would run these on a lower-level and make all the plots driven by NPCs and stories instead of extra-worldly threats. You can change the world, things evolve, towns can rise or fall, and the world is a living world where making a difference in an area matters and continues on in the campaign.
Classic Modules
One thing about out campaign was that Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms did not exist in our minds. All the classic AD&D modules took place here. The Slave Lords, B-series, S-series, Tomb of Horrors, and everything else is scattered around the world here on the map. We have a world, just put the dungeon somewhere and let's play! We were kids, so we kit-bashed everything, played using D&D rules and tossed in AD&D as we needed it (like the classic Labyrinth Lord setup), and all the best modules and adventures were in this world.
Would I keep that? I probably would. If this is the D&D homage playthrough, this will be it. Everything is on the table here. I may change a couple things, add characters, change up the stories a little, but if I feel the need to pull these adventures in, they are there and they could fit in if I needed them.
And I can get the PDFs, so that is cool.
Fantasy Companion or Savage Pathfinder?
Classic Mystara can stand beside Pathfinder's Golarion and be an equal. The settings are comparable, and Mystara has the benefit of me knowing and playing in this world since I was a kid. Now, Mystara does not have all the things Golarion has, two I can think of off-hand are a Cheliax-like evil kingdom and a ruined starship fantasy-tech place. I could fit places like that in if I really needed them, and I could take a huge isolated area and crash Barrier Peaks S-series style starships into the planet and have my tech-fantasy area with that classic twist. A evil kingdom of demons (or just a city) could pop up somewhere as a story drama to play through.
I am leaning towards the Savage Pathfinder rules, with a scattering for the Fantasy Companion mixed in (like the magic item generator). I hope the printed books come quick, or I may be ordering some print outs from somewhere of the PDFs I have or printing out a few sections for reference.
More when this game gets going, since I have a couple things in the way of playing. I am now focusing on teaching another player how to play Savage Worlds, and she should be getting up to speed and happily having adventures soon.
This is a complete game book for five bucks. Yes, it isn't 1980 anymore, this is 2015, and this is a seriously great value for such a great retro-clone old-school game.
Did you see the monster expansion for Basic Fantasy?
Seriously, what in the roleplaying world is going on? Four dollars?
Ordered.
For those of you in the know, Basic Fantasy is a retro-clone that keeps the best parts of D&D 3.5 and throws the rest of the complicated parts away. It uses a D&D 3.5 style rising AC and target number where the monster's AC is the to-hit target number, yet clones most of the original D&D spells, feeling, and flavor. It is a seriously cool game that gets back to the hobby's roots, is simple, and most importantly...
Look at those prices.
You can download the PDF of the main rules for free, so this game is great for groups that want to play something yet not invest a lot of money in expensive books. Does it bother me that this isn't D&D 5? Not in the least, and in fact, I welcome a return to the old days in spirit and feeling, where dungeoning was deadly, your ability to pry room descriptions out of the referee in real life gave you a better chance of survival, and you didn't need rules longer than an IRS tax form. I love the old-school rules and feeling of freedom in both refereeing and playing.
Your real-life wits mattered, not your character build.
Best of all, the old-school rules this was inspired by came before the influence of videogames and MMOs which tainted our hobby. It is purist, it is old-school cool, and it is cleaned up slightly with some sane compromises that old-school D&D should have had.
Think of it as a sort of classic-retro Monopoly sort of game where you are playing the game as it was meant to be and you'll get it, and can sell it better to players.
You know what's better?
I picked up six modules for under four bucks each in my order. Take a look at these:
Morgansfort, a starting base adventure module for under four bucks. This reminds me of the old "Keep on the Somewhere" style modules that gives a party of adventurers a home base with some intrigue, inns, shops, NPCs, and other necessities that allow the party to have a home when they aren't out dungeoning. Seventy pages too, which puts it just a little under the size of a Pathfinder adventure path installment.
The Chaotic Caves, a sandbox style starter module that mimics some of the old 'pack in' starter modules of the old D&D game. For under four bucks you get a starter module that gives you that 'just starting out' experience.
Eight books for about thirty dollars? Mind you, most of this is content for the game master in 352 pages of adventures and campaign locations, and there is a 170 page rulebook (with free PDFs) for the players. About 70 pages of the basic book are monsters (with the rules being about 100 pages long), plus an additional 84 in the monster expansion for about 154 pages of monsters. All this for a grand total of 606 pages of fun for the price of one D&D 5 or Pathfinder rulebook is a great deal.
Considering all the play time you will get out of these, it is like picking up a classic retro game collection on Steam and having months worth of material to play with. Yes, you need players that are interested, but sometimes a deluge of releases like this at these prices can attract an interest all their own.
This is what I like to see, the old-school community seriously stepping up and putting great stuff in stores like Amazon at prices that shock the customer. This is how old-school competes with the thirty-dollar (fifty retail) art-book games that continually try to redefine what the original editions got right in numbers, simplicity, and feeling the first time.
Who would have know that 2015 was going to give us some very cool old-school gaming surprises such as this? This is very cool stuff, and worth supporting and playing.
We hadn't got around to playing through the latest Dragon Age game, so DarkgarX and I decided to play through Inquisition to get us up to speed on the latest lore, and more importantly, the feel of the game.
I can feel this was worth it, because one comment DarkgarX had about the pen-and-paper game was that, "I want a game I can care about, that feels real to me and is serious."
Bioware does great work, and we have been playing their games a while and can spot some of the campy and somewhat 'Bioware' things they do in the games, such as the multi-cultural approach, some of the twisted fiction plot-lines, and they have their own unique 'take' on fantasy in general that is say different than, Game of Thrones. If you can imagine a Bioware-made Game of Thrones game you know what we mean, things wouldn't be 'Martin' they would take on a distinctively Bioware feeling and approach. It's not a bad thing, it is just different and sometime a mix of campy and serious.
Tyrion Lannister may be talking about his chest hair in the Bioware version, if you know what I mean. I love the tounge-in-cheek aspects of the Bioware games, and I also feel they have a more balanced approach when it comes to presenting a more-inclusive variety of fantasy that doesn't focus as much on angry white men as history and pop-culture has the past 2,000 years. Don't take that the wrong way, but you know what I mean, and I like things a little different in my entertainment and gaming.
I thought it would be fun to highlight the more campy, Bioware-y, and multi-cultural aspects of the videogame, but he felt otherwise, like he wanted a more serious and dramatic approach. Watch the video and you'll get what I mean. This was an interesting shift in what he wants from a game, and as a good game master, I picked up on that and will be running the game a little differently than I had planned.
We will get back to that later, but there is another facet to this discussion I wanted to bring in. Dungeons and Dragons is a lot like comic books and what I would like to call "tribute fiction." Tribute fiction works like this, if Hollywood comes out with a new Alien movie and it does a blockbuster summer, you can bet three months later comic books will have Alien-like creatures rampaging through them, roleplaying games will have xenomorphs in them, and video games that give you the Alien-like experience will start to appear. It isn't bad, it is just the normal echo of pop-culture through itself over and over again, and it is the reason D&D 4 warlocks were teleporting Nightcrawler-like heroes out of the X-Men. It isn't really original, it is just like a best-of remix of various pieces of pop-culture in fantasy and also cool things people like.
But really, all fiction is a form of tribute fiction, since everything borrows off the consciousness of what came before. Some fiction though, is more tribute than others.
It is like Dragon Age versus D&D. Dragon Age does borrow from pop-culture, and so does D&D, as they are both part of the fantasy pop-culture continuum. Dragon Age is a specific implementation of a fantasy idea, where D&D is more generic. Watch the trailer again, but this time think of it two ways:
This is something that makes me want to play Dragon Age.
This is something that makes me want to play D&D.
It works as a generic D&D trailer as well, in that you have medieval trappings, magic, dragons, castles, and "things you see in fantasy gaming." It works better as a Dragon Age trailer, because the trailer is tightly tied into the specific implementation of the Dragon Age idea. If Dragon Age is the Southwestern restaurant, D&D is the generic buffet where you can also get Mexican food. It is the reason why D&D pulls in a huge list of inspirations in the 5th Edition DMG, such as Game of Thrones and Middle Earth, and really any other fantasy source material. It is by its nature, more tribute fiction than is either of those specific implementations of the fantasy idea.
If I want to play Dragon Age or have a group of people who love Dragon Age, I will either play the pen-and-paper game or the videogames, because I will get the full experience.
If I have a group of people that want a more generic experience, I will play Pathfinder or D&D, because they do a lot more different and varied things. They are not the best at doing a specific thing, they just do a lot of things well enough that people can hook their idea of 'fantasy gaming' on the D&D train and ride along.
Now, D&D has specific settings in the form of Grayhawk, Faerun, Dark Sun, and other places. To those who read the Faerun novels in the 90's, that place is as much of a Dragon Age as Dragon Age is to people that are fans of that setting. It is unfortunate that D&D has gone under such seismic shifts in rules and setting lore, because there was a real feeling that Faerun and other settings could have broken out from D&D's shadow and 3rd through 5th Edition rules-turmoil and been stronger worlds with a more Middle Earth feeling to the lore than just as 'settings to play D&D in.'
Again, it is an interesting comparison with Dragon Age in focus, presentation, and feeling. With Dragon Age, it feels like the world comes first, and the rules are a secondary concern. With D&D, it feels like the rules come first, and the settings are secondary concerns.
It is a good thing to know as a game master, does my group like the lore of a specific world better, or are they fans of a specific set of rules? This is part of the appeal of Pathfinder admittedly as well. In any case, finding out what players want and focusing on that will get you a better sense of enjoyment and fun, and success for your gaming time.
