What time hasn’t been taken up by working on Tabletops, NaNoWriMo, a new home-based business my wife and I are starting, the utter madness of work, and a little break time with Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has been spent working on ‘Mote’, my first Mage: The Ascension character. (Actually my first World of Darkness character at all! Crazy, I know.) Even though I’ll be joining the game in about a week, the GM (who’s a good friend) let me sit in on the last session of the game. That’s not something I’ve seen a lot before at other tables, and let me tell you, being able to watch people interact at the table while you wallflower a bit really isn’t a bad thing at all. Especially when it’s a game whose mechanics and spirit are unfamiliar to you, I might seriously recommend that a new player joining an existing group ask to do this, and very strongly recommend that GMs make the offer to any new member of the group.

The thing I’ve discovered about Mage, by the way, is that it really taxes parts of my gaming brain I didn’t really know I had. I’m used to discrete numbers in games–even in reasonably flexible games like Unknown Armies there’s a number of specific effects. But having to use one’s component spheres–the generic “building blocks” of magic in Mage–to create unique effects? Tricky–a lot tricker than I really expected.

This has me a little worried; I’m beginning to think that I’m not the creative gamer and writer I thought I was (let’s not talk about my NaNoWriMo status right now.) On the other hand, I’ve not actually had to use these magical effects in the game yet. They’re being created in a vacuum without any firsthand knowledge of how they work in-game. So I figure that once I get some playtime under my belt these things will make a lot more sense.

There’s no real advice here or thoughts for you to take home to your own game–this is just me musing about how different Mage is from anything else I’ve had the pleasure of playing. Certainly I’m looking forward to playing the game; I’m just a touch nervous.

Anyway. Stay tuned–the cool stuff should be here no later than Friday!

That’s about to change.

A friend of mine has been running a Mage: The Awakening game for a while now, and he’s invited me to join the party. From what I understand, he’s changed how Avatars work slightly–in his games, Avatars are very much something external, with their own goals and methods that reappear throughout the ages as the Avatar gets different hosts. (The party’s primary patron, for example, has the Avatar of the Merlin, and throughout the ages has been Myrddin, Talesin, and a number of other individuals throughout history.)

What’s peculiar is that however much I read the Mage books, I can’t actually find myself enamored of any particular Tradition. I normally have no trouble making characters, but something about the Mage method of character creation isn’t jiving with my usual methodology. (Possibly it’s the lack of distinct powers and archetypes, which is where I usually start.)

Anyone have any suggestions on how to do this? The advice I’ve heard from one of the other players in this game is to envision a couple of different scenarios and figure out how I’d get out using the various spheres of magic. Not sure if that’s a good way to do it, but I’ll be giving it a shot. Other ideas are welcome, though.

I will have the promised rituals for dealing with goblins in Unknown Armies soon; unfortunately this week has been quite insane (workplace drama and massive crunch time.) Once certain NDAs are no longer relevant, though, I’ll post some details about what I’ve been working on; those of you in the IT field may find it interesting.

Anyways: I did want to piece together a couple of thoughts, because I’ll also be busy this weekend playing in our occasional, recurring game of Birthright D&D. Birthright is an old AD&D setting with unique rules and a truly fascinating world; its primary conceit is that it combines the traditional adventuring character with rulership of provinces, temples and other holdings. Cerilia (the ‘material world’ of Birthright) is a dark place, and a place with extremely few magic items. Whereas the simple longsword +1 would be quickly tossed aside in settings like the Forgotten Realms, in Cerilia that same longsword +1 is a priceless family heirloom proudly guarded and wielded by the head of a noble family. There’s also the matter of one’s Bloodline—how much (if any) of the divine blood of the gods of old flows through your veins and gives you supernatural powers unlike any others found in D&D settings.

Birthright has the interesting distinction of having the most individual publications of any setting in TSR’s or WotC’s history—TSR produced a boatload of small books about individual provinces, and there are dozens and dozens of provinces across one massive continent. In short—it’s a really interesting setting that’s all too often overlooked by fans of “old school” D&D.

The game we’re playing has been pretty heavily modified from the original, however. The fine folks over at the now-defunct birthright.net managed to pull off several iterations of a 3e and 3.5e conversion with complete classes, race writeups, spell lists, feats, bloodline powers, religions, etc.—nine full chapters! However, they still largely stuck with Birthright’s impoverished mass-combat rules, which was odd and somewhat unrelated to what you could actually do in the game. Our group originally bastardized the Warhammer 40K rules for mass combat, but we’ve recently become disillusioned with those. I’m trying to push for the use of the mass combat rules found in Cry Havoc, Skip Williams’ Sword & Sorcery sourcebook (which is well-written and has some really interesting takes on fantasy mass combat. Go get it.)

Despite being able to play with our original group only once every six months or so (due to the group spreading out across several states), the Birthright game remains a favorite of ours. Cerilia, as I said above, is a dark place; the more you know about it, the more hopeless the entire world begins to feel. Elves hunt humans for sport; dark creatures bearing the blood of an ancient evil god have conquered vast stretches of territory; and the lure of political power makes treachery an ever-present threat. But because we decided to play as a single kingdom, dividing responsibilities up amongst ourselves and working for the collective good of our burgeoning nation, we’ve essentially broken out of the every-man-for-himself mindset of most of Cerilia’s rulers. As a result we’ve been quite successful (though not overly so) and interestingly, this has given us a real sense that we’re actually changing Cerilia and giving it hope for the first time. No other RPG I’ve played has ever quite given me that same sensation, and it’s remarkably powerful.

So forgive me if I don’t post much at all this weekend; my compatriots and I really do have a world to save.

If a character has an inventory, then shopping is something GMs will just have to deal with. Naturally, no GM likes being told “eh, you’ll just have to deal with it”, so here are six ways to turn that in-game shopping time into something fun. And by ‘fun’ I mean ‘more interesting than flipping through pages of splatbooks.’

0. But First, An Important Rule 0!

Okay. Before we go any further, you need to pay attention to this. This is Rule Zero for adding roleplaying value to your party’s shopping trips: There is no such thing as a freakin’ Wal-Mart. Sure, a modern-day RPG can get by with big-box store runs for things like duct tape and rope, but there’s no store anywhere that blithely sells everything, up to and including suitcase nukes, under one roof. If you’ve got such a store, get rid of it—now. Retcon if you must. We’ve all played in games where the lazy GM invents a magical superstore that has everything you’d ever want. All else being equal, this is incredibly boring. (To the credit of my current GM, who does this, he’s using some of the tips I describe below to make his Wal-Mart much more interesting; but you’ll have to keep reading to learn which ones.)

“Wal-Marting” generally encourages every bad behavior we’re trying to prevent and permits very few roleplaying opportunities. Everything at your fingertips with no personality and no reason that this massive economic and magical/scientific powerhouse hasn’t conquered the world yet? Embarrassingly bad. Don’t do it. Ever.

1. Specialty Shops

This is sort of the counterpoint to Rule Zero. Every business naturally has a specialty and a market it caters to. Even the big-box stores specialize; Wal-Mart sells a lot of stuff, but it all falls into the category of “household necessities” (and also NASCAR kitsch and crappy meat, but whatever.) In most RPG settings, individual sellers will specialize much more than they do in real life. Blacksmiths, gunsmiths, wizards selling scrolls, etc.—nobody makes everything and nobody has everything for sale.

What this means, of course, is that unless you’re in a very wealthy and populated area that’s got a wide variety of stores, it’s very unlikely that your players will be able to find a Holy Avenger or grenade launcher in a shop somewhere. This is not a bad thing. It’s the lesson of  The Incredibles—”When everyone’s super, then no one will be.” Having the neat stuff available to everyone cheapens all of it! Not to mention that making your players keep track of who sells what where (and maybe when—and we’ll get to ‘why’ in a moment) keeps them thinking about the world and keeps them immersed in the game.

Incidentally, a lot of games have “availability” ratings for exotic items. Those are sort of a take-it-or-leave-it thing for me—if I’m on the fence about something being available to the PCs I’ll use them, but most of the time I’ll make a quick “you can/can’t find that here” decision based on my idea of where they are. I’m especially wary of ratings you have to roll, though. Your mileage may vary, but don’t think you’re stuck using those and don’t let your players convince you to roll them if you don’t want to.

2. Make Individual Shops and Shopkeepers Memorable

This is one of those things that, when done right and with restraint, can make your game fantastic. Most GMs know to at least give most NPCs some sort of interesting quirk to differentiate them in the minds of the players; accents and speech impediments are the most common (because they’re easiest) but you occasionally get the peg-leg, eyepatch, etc.. Take that as a starting point, and expand it massively for the occasional shopkeeper you want your players to remember. Don’t worry so much about the NPC’s backstory, because players hate stories that don’t involve them; rather, make the NPC as full of life and character and uniqueness as you might make your own PC. This does two things: First, it imprints the NPC onto your characters minds—”guy with the limp” pales in comparison with “Jack the mechanic, who’s got two sons he yells at constantly and who keeps misplacing his tools, but who instantly warms up to anyone that treats him like a Good Ol’ Boy and threw in a free oil change on that account. Oh, and his dog humped the mage’s leg, and that’s now a hilarious YouTube hit.”

Naturally, the stores or stalls that such unique and fascinating individuals do their business in must also be unique. Fantasy games offer a lot of unique opportunities for this. Imagine a basement alchemist who works without light to avoid open flames, or a blacksmith whose forge is kept hot by a fire elemental, or a shop precariously balanced on a cliff’s edge or the top of a tower. Why does this livery stable have the right to do business from inside the local church’s walls when no other such shop exists—an ancestral right? a reward for a heroic deed? a corrupt priest? Be inventive and don’t be afraid to make crazy ideas work—the real world’s a strange place and you have to be stranger. And even if you don’t make the shopkeeper memorable, your players may well remember “the guy who sells potions from the blue barge at the docks.”

One caveat: The Incredibles rule applies here, too. Use this sort of character and location depth judiciously—often enough to make your players excited about the world they’re playing in and the people in it, but not so often that it becomes exhausting for you and your players to keep up with. It’s easy to burn your players out with fantastic descriptions, and constantly trying to one-up yourself will quickly lead you from “fantastic” to “utterly ridiculous”. Again, though, used correctly your players will remember these shops and tradesmen for the entire campaign—and beyond.

3. Things Happen in Stores, Too, You Know

No shopkeeper has a “No pants, no plot, no patronage” sign hanging on their door (well, okay, one of mine now does, but only because he’s a dwarf and doesn’t want to see things at head height and… well, nevermind.) Got your players out shopping in the various stores you’ve come up with? Awesome! Now they’re in a semi-public place that plenty of other people may need or want to go to. Time for things to occur!

When I was jotting this list down on my lunch break, I came up with this list of things that could happen while the players are shopping. And this is just what I thought of while eating half a sandwich:

• The PCs have a ‘chance’ encounter with the servant of a lord in need of assistance.
• The PCs are interrupted by a violent robbery that leads to a fight in a crowded shop filled with fragile goods.
• The PCs walk in to find the shopkeeper being threatened by a creditor or extortioner.
• Enemies of the PCs spring an ambush on them in a shop they know the PCs must visit when they return to town.
• The PCs enter the store to find the shopkeeper dead, and quickly find themselves framed for the crime.

Surely you can do better than what a ham sandwich and I ended up with. Start thinking.

4. Fraud and Malfunction, or “Okay, Apparently That Guy Sold Us Cleaning Supplies, and Not Holy Water. Also Zombies Don’t Like Soap. Run.”

I talked earlier about the use of fraudulent goods in your game, and that advice remains good. Fact is, not everything sold on the market works as advertised. Some things will be outright fakes, and others just won’t work as well as they should. Of course, this isn’t always due to hostile intent or fraud—sometimes it’s a simple matter of inadequate quality control.

The Eberron setting has a particularly good setup for this that you may want to adapt or borrow—House Cannith, the dragonmarked house that specializes in the manufacture of alchemical and magical goods, has the legal right to set standards for the quality of all such goods. However, it’s generally not worth their trouble to enforce it everywhere, so independent craftsmen often sell shoddier goods for less. Thus, the prices for goods you see in the Player’s Handbook are those of Cannith-made (or Cannith-regulated) goods; but you might be able to get a sunrod at half that price—and it may work half as long, or be half as bright, or simply not work at all. Of course, there’s a chance it might work better too. (Keith Baker wrote a post in the WotC Community forums about this a while back, but I can’t find it at the moment.)

Just as there are good shops with memorable craftsmen, there are cheap shops with crappy goods. The latter makes the former that much more interesting and ties the players closer to them, so be sure to scam your players every now and again. They’ll appreciate it. I promise.

(Okay, don’t do that, at least not randomly. Do it purposefully, like you mean it.)

5. Goods That Fell Off the Wagon. Um, I Mean Barge. Yeah, the Barge.

The only thing that causes more long-term headaches for players than malfunctioning or fake items are stolen goods. This makes sense—the guy who sells them the fake is running away from the party, while the guy who wants his stuff back is running towards the party and is often accompanied by guards, police, soldiers, mercenaries, or (worst of all) a search warrant. Depending on your setting, stolen goods may or may not remain the property of their original owner after a sale or two, and depending on what the stolen goods are the party may not be willing to give them up. The possibilities for trouble abound!

Of course, the next question is how the party got those hot goods in the first place. Obviously in this case they bought them (or this entire post would be titled something like “Six Ways to Deal With PCs Who Steal Like Link After He Gets the Bombs”.) How did the fence get them? Did he know they were stolen? Did he steal them himself? Will it help the PCs situation at all if they help catch the original thief? Get your players asking these sorts of questions, and as long as you can provide interesting answers you’ll have yourself a fun adventure.

6. Strong Relationships With the Guys Who Keep You Armed

This is sort of the ultimate goal of all of these suggestions. The whole point is for your players (and their characters) to build strong relationships with the world their characters are moving through and with the NPCs that inhabit it. While its often very tempting to make your campaign a “us-versus-the-world” game, where the PCs can’t trust anyone except themselves, that tends to (a) make your NPCs predictable, and (b) keep your players from caring very much about the world you’ve so carefully created. So help them build up friendships with the NPCs they’re likely to see most often—the shopkeepers. Have your shopkeepers ask your PCs for favors (i.e. quests) and in return, let your shopkeepers give discounts and little favors to the PCs.

Heck, when the climactic battle is looming and it’s clear that the PCs are the only ones who can save the world from firey destruction, maybe that friendship the PCs developed with Tim the Arms Dealer pays off and he says “Here, take whatever you want from my warehouse, and go save us all.” Your players will have earned it, not just through combat and following your plot but in taking the time to connect with an interesting NPC. You know, roleplaying.

Remember waaaay back at the beginning of this post, when I laid out the “No Wal-Marting” rule? The GM in the D&D game I run has a magical Wal-Mart with everything ever contained within, and with access points all over the place; but because our party has developed a rapport with a particular shopkeeper, visiting Wal-Mart has gone from “I teleport back and get X” to “I teleport back and tell Frank ‘hello’ when he appears, and then hand over the shopping list. Oh, and Frank, I’m supposed to deliver a message; apparently the girls want to know if you’re free this evening?” Would it be fun if we had more than one shopkeeper to visit, and more interesting places to see? Sure. But even just one can turn into something interesting. So while you don’t need to do everything I’ve listed here all the time, do try to work some of it in when you can and when it will help. You’ll be amazed at what will happen.

The player archetypes I mention are those described in the 4E Dungeon Master’s Guide, which has as good a list as any of player types. (Trying to fit people into neat little categories is always a pretty futile effort, as you’ll see, but the eight categories the DMG lists aren’t mutually exclusive.) In alphabetical order:

• Dexter, a changeling fey pact warlock, played by ‘Cort’. Telling Dexter’s backstory would really be telling tales about dozens of “people”–he is a consummate chameleon, and his true past remains a mystery. Dexter’s darker urges (the sort that eventually lead you to making a pact with powerful fey creatures) send him adventuring, and he has absolutely no qualms about killing anyone or anything that threatens him or his friends, but when things get rough he still usually picks the ‘heroic’ thing to do. Usually.
  (Player archetypes: Explorer, Power Gamer. Cort is fantastic at optimizing characters–Dexter had a +13 Bluff check at first level!– but he also enjoys discovering things about the world and being ‘Batman’ (he always has something up his sleeve.) Tends to play characters who are very good at ferreting out secrets, one way or another.)
• Guy, a human illusionist wizard, played by ‘Tucker’. Guy is a social pariah, due in equal measures to his aberrant dragonmark and his complete lack of social skills. He recently spent a few years with a clan of dragonborn in the Blackcap Mountains in northern Breland, where he met and befriended Torrin.
  (Player archetypes: Instigator, Thinker, Power Gamer. Tucker also loves making powerful characters, and for him it goes hand-in-hand with his Thinker attributes. He’s always looking for the most optimal choice at each opportunity for a decision (which is one reason he’s an excellent chess player, too.) However, he’ll happily leave that behind when the opportunity to do something presents itself (even if it’s not entirely in-character). Once he’s started something, though, he’ll often roleplay situations out rather than turn things into dice rolls. Really, he’s balanced perfectly between Instigator and Actor in that regard.)
• Koh’Rel, a warforged battlerager fighter, played by ‘Bobby’. Koh’Rel has given up the name his Cyran manufacturers gave him in favor of a Giantish name. He fought for Cyre in the Last War, escaping destruction only by virtue of being imprisoned in the Mror Holds and practically forgotten there. After his eventual release, he found himself without a country (and with some contempt for all Cyrans anyway); he trained briefly in a monastery but soon left to find a different destiny. He now seeks a way to Xen’drik, hopefully on a wide, straight road paved with dwarven corpses. He hopes to prove to himself that he has a soul before he gets there.
  (Player archetypes: Actor, Storyteller, Explorer. Bobby might be a better powergamer than even Cort–an engineer by trade, he’s constantly playing with numbers. But Bobby’s methods are different from most ‘munchkin’ powergamers: He tends to think of an interesting character, create a fascinating story and set of goals for that character, and then find ways for that character to have the best possible numbers that make sense for it. He also loves delving into the histories of Eberron (and worlds of his own devising), and acts out everything–he’s the only one of my players who describes every attack in fights.)
• Torrin, a dragonborn tempest fighter, played by ‘Noah’. For reasons unknown to all but himself, when Guy was eventually forced to leave the clan of dragonborn who had sheltered him, Torrin followed. Since then he has carefully kept Guy safe in some very dangerous places, usually without complaint. Quick and devastating in combat, he is otherwise reserved.
  (Player archetypes: Slayer, Watcher. Noah is actually pretty new to tabletop RPGs and is still coming out of his roleplaying shell. As a result, he tends to fall into the Watcher category in non-combat situations, although sitting back and thinking often gives him time to think “outside the box” and come up with interesting ideas. Combat is where he really shines as a player–he dives right into it with gusto.)
• Vance, a human artificer, played by ‘Don’. Vance is curious, fearless, always interrupting with questions and comments, and always willing to take things apart to see how they work. He’ll spend an entire day walking the streets of a town to find patterns in the tilework or to study its bridges, or incessantly asking a craftsman questions about his creations. He might be annoying (when not sicced on others), but he’s in many ways the moral compass of the group: No matter how wild he might’ve been acting a moment before, he’ll almost instantly drop everything to help someone, and the rest of the party follows without question. He’s an excellent alchemist too, though the party isn’t entirely comfortable with someone who acts like the world’s only half-gnome, half-kender alchemist.
  (Player archetypes: Actor, Instigator. In this game, Don dives head-first into his character and doesn’t come up for air, and is always finding something to do. This threw me for a loop at first, since in the game Don runs combat often comes first, but he’s apparently got very different styles as a player–in fact, he often seems to want to avoid combat.)

Sharp readers will notice that I’m simultaneously blessed and cursed with five players who between them cover all eight of the 4E DMG’s player archetypes. That’s been a pretty big challenge for me–it’s often difficult to find something that engages people with such different styles of gaming–but when it works the payoff is tremendous.  It also means that they tend to think in different ways, leading to several instances already where the players have gone in directions I never expected. (That’s even harder to do in my game than usual, since I run it online and have to have all my combat encounters mapped out ahead of time!)

The other interesting thing about my players is that they’re all math-and-science guys. Cort, Noah, Tucker and myself all work in the IT industry (not at the same company, for the record); Bobby is a civil engineer; and Don’s got a degree in physics, which he uses constantly (he works in a custom glasswork shop and is pretty much constantly doing calculations to make sure he’s turning out the best-quality work he can.) I’ve got actors and costume designers and librarians in the D&D game I play in; thus far I actually haven’t been able to pin down a lot of differences I can write about, though they’re definitely present. It’s a good contrast that helps work both sides of my brain.

At any rate, I hope this helps you flesh out subsequent “actual play” posts; I’ll henceforth be including a stubbed player/character matrix in each AP post to help newcomers keep things straight. The next session has been moved up to this Sunday, so more will be coming very soon!

The (Very Incomplete) Backstory:

Currently, the PCs are working as a group in the small town of Nowhere in Breland. Nowhere is a town of about 2,000 people, about half of whom live and work in the House Orien enclave there: Nowhere is situated at the lightning rail junction south of Hatheril and south-west of Vathirond, and its entire economy is based around the cargoes and passengers that pass through the town. They’ve come back to Nowhere at the behest of its guard captain, one Kaius Romani, who presented them with a problem: The captain has been the victim of an unusual blackmail scheme for about a month. The anonymous blackmailer has not demanded money—rather, he or she has demanded that Nowhere’s guards be assigned to particular ‘beats’ in the town.

After a day of investigation, the party’s suspicions came to rest on one Kolmar Hamholm, a vicious-looking dwarf with a bad reputation in town, and his employer Simeon ir’Bettarn, a wealthy merchant with widespread investments and who employs Kolmar as his ‘factor’ in Nowhere. Additionally, with the help of Captain Romani the PCs have picked out several guards whom they believe might be particularly susceptible to bribery or blackmail themselves, and who might be the reason the blackmailer wanted the guards moved about. Most of those guards patrol the southern section of Nowhere, colloquially called “Trackside”.

We pick up our story at dusk, as the party troops back to “The Blue Bull” (where their rooms in town are)…

Play Summary:

When the party arrives back at “The Blue Bull”, they find a distraught woman waiting for them. After the party agrees to a private audience with her, she introduces herself as Sariah Fatwick (third cousin to one of the guards the party attempted to interrogate.) Her problem is simple: Sariah believes that her husband, Himil Fatwick, is possessed. His behavior had been bizarre for two weeks prior, but the previous day he simply went to work and never came back. Being unable to convince the city watch that his disappearance is of any concern—their marriage is notorious for vehement arguments, and Himil had once previously abandoned her for another woman for a full week—she came to the PCs in the hope that they could find Himil.

The PCs quickly learn from Sariah that her husband works for Kolmar Hamholm (alarm bells started ringing in my players’ heads at this point, I think) as a porter, hauling goods between the lightning rail and a warehouse in Trackside. They also learn that her husband has been acting as if he were sleepwalking or dreaming, coming home later and later each evening, and in his stupor occasionally muttered something about a “new opportunity” that would “make them rich”. Two of the PCs—the warforged Koh’Rel and the changeling Dexter (in the guise of a rather plain human)—escort her home while the rest of the party makes plans. (“We’re here to ask a dwarf about a man.”)

To confirm their suspicions, they decide to surreptitiously question another guard who patrols Trackside, one Jasin Shackler. Shackler is a notorious womanizer and braggart, so Dexter shapeshifted into the form of a comely woman, tracked down Shackler, and let him buy her drinks and brag at her. None of his boasts were of much consequence, but Dexter did quickly notice that despite spending a month patrolling that section of town, he had no tales of Gryphon Street, the longest street in Trackside.

After returning to the rest of the party and turning back into a man, Dexter led the party into Trackside. They carefully watched Gryphon Street for over two hours, and determined that the night watch also carefully avoided a particular stretch of the road. The party split up at this point—Dexter, Koh’Rel and Guy (a human wizard) interrogated the night watch while Torrin, a dragonborn fighter, and Vance, a human artificer, took a closer look at the warehouse. Torrin helped Vance climb up the rough wall of the warehouse and peer through a window high up on the wall; from there, Vance noticed a very heavy contingent of guards inside—at least three for this single warehouse. After clambering back down (and managing to go up and down the wall quietly) Torrin and Vance went back for the other three.

Those three badgered and threatened the pair of night watchmen until they gave in and admitted that Kolmar Hamholm had asked them to avoid patrolling near the warehouse; one was being paid, and the other’s gambling debts were being held over him to elicit cooperation. After further recriminations and a warning that if their story didn’t check out they’d almost certainly be fired from their posts, they were sent scurrying off to finish their patrol.

At this point, the party quickly prepared for a fight. The warehouse had three locked doors (aside from a massive and barred pair of cargo doors), so the PCs split up: Vance unlocked the southern door and quietly slipped inside with Guy as Koh’Rel kicked in the northern door and Torrin kicked in the eastern one (Dexter followed Torrin inside.) The guards were surprised, and despite their moderate skill—and the assistance of a trained pair of guard drakes—they were quickly overcome. The last guard was more than willing to talk to save his own hide, and pointed the party to a hidden trapdoor under some crates. That trapdoor opened into a stone-lined tunnel that leads off into darkness…

What Worked

Introducing Sariah worked very well. She’s a fairly memorable NPC—she’s connected to another NPC the party spent some time talking to in the last session, and her sob story of “Of course the guards don’t believe me; they think my husband just ran out on me, like last time!” was an instant hook, being both humorous and pathetic. She also served to confirm the players’ suspicions while avoiding any sense of railroading: She didn’t know anything, but as she spoke several things “clicked” into place for the players. I was pretty proud of how that worked out, especially since Sariah originally was an emergency “get back to the plot” NPC in case the players got way off track. Goes to show that you needn’t stop developing NPCs in your head once you place them into your story.

The players’ use of social skills also worked well. There wasn’t really room for a skill challenge here, because frankly there wasn’t much of a challenge. The players—especially Vance’s player—had done a ton of legwork in the previous two sessions, and this was part of the payoff. They did a great job following up on the Gryphon Street hint with the three guards, and I think that did all right. I’d have liked to trim some of that down (see the “What Didn’t Work” section below), just because Dexter’s the party’s “face” and social scenes tend to grant him the spotlight, but everyone got some Intimidate checks in. Additionally, the two fighters had the opportunity to make Aid Another checks to help Dexter intimidate the night watchmen, which I think helped keep them involved.

Vance and Torrin working together to help Vance climb the wall and peer inside worked perfectly. It gave them intelligence about the upcoming combat and served to confirm their suspicions about the warehouse (which they took back to Dexter, and which Dexter then used to finally break the two night watchmen’s resistance to his questioning.) While it’s tempting to try to keep players in the dark about what’s coming up (most GMs love springing surprises on the party), there’s real value in developing a sense of anticipation, and in letting the players know limited information about what they’ll soon be facing.

The fight also went very well, though mostly for technical reasons. I’m using MapTools and Skype to run this campaign, and for this session I took the time to develop macros for all the enemies’ attacks and effects, for taking damage, and for rolling initiative. As a result, despite this fight lasting twice as many rounds as previous fights I ran them through, the actual time involved was nearly the same. Enemy attacks took much less time and the initiative tracker sped things along very nicely. I also tried to warn the next player that they were “on deck”, and that quick reminder made sure that everyone had their actions planned out. That meant a lot less time lost to decision-making and a lot more time having fun.

Also, a pair of guard drakes working in tandem are scary. A second-level monster who does 1d10+9 damage if there’s an ally within two squares? I dropped Vance (the artificer) to bloodied in the first round of combat, which made things a lot more exciting and got the fight off to a good start.

What Didn’t Work

I’m having a lot of trouble pulling everyone who isn’t playing the party face into social scenes. In particular, Guy’s and Torrin’s players don’t get involved much at all; Guy has a pretty solid Insight check but not much in the way of other social skills, and Torrin has practically none at all. Since I want this campaign to have a lot of intrigue, that’s a big problem—I can’t have two players sitting out half the time.

This also results in players getting bored and announcing that they’re doing some other crazy thing. This happened more last session but reared its head now and again this time around. I know I contribute to it a bit by periodically saying “Okay, what are you doing?”—quickly I’ve got the PCs splitting up, and suddenly I (and everyone else) are tracking multiple plotlines. Tricky, confusing and very hard to keep up with.

I also need become a better judge of combats. The fight in the warehouse involved three warehouse guards—3rd-level “Human Mercenary” creatures from the DDI Compendium, with a different outward appearance—and two 2nd-level guard drakes. Total XP value was 700; the “average” XP equivalent for a fight for five 2nd-level PCs is 625, but they’d blown through the previous fights with ease. This one took a lot longer, and I think it’s because I chose only brutes and soldiers—high HP monsters who were able to either do lots of damage (the drakes) or daze the PCs with a save-ends push effect (the guards). The Human Mercenary’s “Press the Advantage” attack recharges on a 5 or 6, pushes its target one square, and applies that “dazed (save ends)” effect, and that slowed the fight down a lot. If the fighters can’t close and attack in the same round their effectiveness is drastically reduced. It was a good fight, but it took a while and I frankly expected it to use up fewer of the PCs resources than it did.

Also I need to find some way to pre-load encounter maps through MapTools without revealing the map to the players ahead of time. We lost about ten minutes during the loading process. I’m not sure this was a bad thing, though, as it made us take a break and everyone came back refreshed.

Lastly, this recap process is really long, and I need to find some way to shorten it. I’m at nearly 2,000 words here!

Up Next: The PCs explore a secret tunnel that extends beneath House Orien’s enclave in Nowhere, on the trail of a dangerous dwarf and a missing man…

Fifteen minutes later we’d listed more than twenty games.

So I’m extremely excited by the thought of branching out to other games. However, I’m certain that in the vast collection of RPGs out there, there’s a large number we just don’t know about. So if you’ve got suggestions about one genre or another, or a ‘better’ version of one game or another, please leave a note about it in the comments! I’d love to add to the list, if nothing else!

Storytelling Games

• Deliria from the apparently-defunct Laughing Pan Productions
• Vampire from White Wolf’s New World of Darkness series
• Mage from White Wolf’s New World of Darkness series

Paranormal Games

• Unknown Armies by Atlas Games
• Call of Cthulhu from Chaosium
• Grimm from Fantasy Flight Games

Superhero Games

• Heroes Unlimited by Palladium Books
• Adventure!, Aberrant, and Trinity by White Wolf
• Necessary Evil (a Savage Worlds setting) from Pinnacle Entertainment Group
• Champions by Hero Games

Classic Fantasy

• Pathfinder from Paizo Publishing
• HackMaster by Kenzer & Company

Show-Based Games

• Serenity
• Girl Genius GURPS from Steve Jackson Games
• Farscape Roleplaying Game from Alderac Entertainment

Cyberpunk

• Shadowrun (4th Edition setting using Savage World rules) by Catalyst Game Labs

Everything Else

• Toon from Steve Jackson Games
• Paranoia XP from Mongoose Publishing

Naturally, if you’ve got other suggestions, mention them in the comments. I really want to expand our RPG “reach” as much as possible.

Above all, however, remember that resisting damage is one of the things players enjoy about their characters. Don’t steal it from them. Let them resist most of the attacks of a loathsome beast if it happens to work out that way. For normal encounters, players should feel powerful. For those particular boss battles, however, you may need to step in to ensure the threat stays high.

Emphasis mine. Mike’s point can be summed up with just a paraphrase of that emphasized bit: “If your players enjoy something they’ve worked for, don’t take it away from them.” This is a corollary to the Rule Of Fun—the entire gaming hobby is pointless if its players aren’t having fun, so keep it fun by letting your players earn and keep rewards.

How many times have you seen a player acquire some new ability in a game, whether passive (like resistances or an ability to overcome damage soak) or active (like a new spell-like ability or a teleportation power), only for it to quickly lose relevance because in practically every encounter the GM negates it? I’ve seen it happen far too many times (and it’s happened more than once to me.) While this occasionally stems from the insecurity of a power-tripping GM (which are otherwise well beyond the scope of this article), I believe that most of the time there’s a more benign (though still unacceptable) explanation: Creative inertia.

Most GMs (including myself) tend to fall into certain habits when creating challenges for the players to overcome. New character abilities can quickly make those challenges, and even entire categories of challenges, far easier than they once were if the GM doesn’t adjust. (A classic example is the acquisition of mind-reading powers by a psion or enchanter in D&D; such powers dramatically change how investigations play out.) An intellectually lazy GM who can’t adjust to the new circumstances is often very tempted to say “Well, this guy’s immune to your new power” or to up a target’s damage or to make them immune to mind-reading–in short, the uncreative GM simply declares that things are as they were previously.

Here’s the problem: In doing so, the uncreative GM is declaring that the resources the player has spent in-character–perhaps by saving up money to buy a particular piece of equipment, perhaps by spending time adventuring and recovering magical artifacts, perhaps simply by spending experience points to level up–didn’t actually have any effect on that character. Not only is this immensely frustrating (after all, the player put a lot of time and effort into this too!), it shatters the suspension of disbelief. After all, if there are hundreds of enemies immune to your new power, where there weren’t any before, the world is pretty clearly not internally consistent!

When players earn some new ability by spending resources–whether those be adventuring time, money or experience–they’re doing so to acquire some advantage over the challenges you’ve been throwing at them. It’s critical that the GM let that advantage stand. If that new ability makes your current challenges too easy, the solution is not to take away that new ability; rather, you need to find new challenges for that player (and her character.) And don’t be afraid to let the new abilities lead the way; in the case of resistances, perhaps the character’s new-found resistance to necrotic damage means the party can take on the lich villain at last. In that case, the enemies they’ve been fighting should remain as they are, because they’re no longer the same challenge they were; the players will naturally seek out the greater challenge because they’ve got an advantage that’s in their favor.

This is not to say that the GM should never negate a character’s abilities in some manner, or be careful to never bypass them–but they should do so only to make that challenge stand out from the others. A good GM is constantly looking to make each encounter unique and memorable in its own way; if a player takes on a new ability that makes certain encounters easy, roll with it. They’ll naturally progress to new, challenging encounters and when you do introduce a negation of that new ability in one or two unique encounters, the PCs will remember those all the more readily.

I know I’ll be submitting several pitches myself, so get on the bandwagon, people!

The tricky thing about creating a goblin monster in Unknown Armies is that UA is a very human-centered game. Most “modern gothic” fantasy games—and by “most” I mean “everything in White Wolf’s World of Darkness product line, ever” along with games like Little Fears—don’t actually care all that much about homo sapiens. This is largely because supernatural humanoids are really pretty interesting to explore, and I’ll be the first to admit that White Wolf’s games are very good at this. But Unknown Armies is almost entirely about the things humans do to themselves, to each other, and to the world (and not just through the insanity-driven occultism UA specializes in.)

Which makes fitting goblins into the world a difficult proposition. Fortunately, like so much else, ghosts provide our way out of the conundrum (and give us yet another thread to tie this nasty little creature to Halloween.) So without further ado: Goblins.

There’s no such thing as faeries. And no faerie dropped dead when you read that sentence, because they don’t exist. Stop clapping.

This fact makes explaining a great deal of medieval mythology, especially European mythology, a whole lot harder for those clued in enough to know that demons are real, that magic is real, that the universe is a lot smaller than it appears, and that if you carve your name into a pomegranate and give it to the barber on 7th Street his scissors will whisper the name of one person trying to kill you as they trim your hair. Faeries ought to exist—so much else that seems impossible does exist, and a thousand years of superstition shouldn’t be so incredibly, blatantly wrong about the occult. But faeries don’t, which tends to make those Wiccan wannabes who end up in the Occult Underground a bit embarrassed when they start really learning things. And since goblins are supposed to be faeries, goblins shouldn’t exist either, right?

Not quite. Demons certainly do exist, and there’s a rare sort of revenant that has contributed to a lot of faerie stories. When a young child dies while a parent is punishing them for misbehaving—whether that mischief was real or imagined, whether the cause of death is directly related to their punishment or not—something of that child occasionally remains behind. That’s a goblin. They’re more likely to get “stuck” in the world if the child was abused often enough to start obsessing over behaving “properly”, although compared to the overall mortality rate of children they’re extremely uncommon. This makes for a peculiarly conflicted creature. Because they died in a conflicted emotional no-man’s-land of guilt at their behavior, bestial delight in the cruel or destructive act they were being punished for, and anger at the parent or parents they love, the goblin that’s left is a highly unorthodox revenant.

Usually, goblins repeat the same sort of minor, childish trickery that got them killed in the first place; hiding and stealing trinkets, rearranging things, making a racket (often banging pots, pans or walls), and startling household and barnyard creatures (horses, cattle, and other barn-kept beasts are a favorite target, and goblin tricks have given rise to surprisingly accurate superstitions.) But their obsessive behavior has a more complex goal than repeating pranks: Goblins desperately seek a very different discipline, without the abuse—physical or emotional—that keeps them locked in the world. By repeatedly causing trouble, in their own childish way goblins are trying to get the loving correction they didn’t get in life.

In certain cases, though, this obsessive desire to be loved and corrected without being hurt takes a darker turn. Goblins tend to latch onto families, especially families with children. When a goblin finds a well-loved infant—really, any child too young to start really causing trouble—they can sometimes possess the child, resulting in the classic changeling: A creature who looks just like the ‘replaced’ baby, but whose mind is far too clever, cunning, mischevious, and cruel to be the real child. No adept has adequately explained how goblins actually manage this possession (since revenants have to find a willing host); they never seem to do it when anyone is looking, though it’s suspected to be a slow process involving several visits to the child. The goblin is essentially “riding” the infant’s psyche to leech off of the parents’ love for the child. Sadly, this is a catch-22 for the goblin: By its nature, it continues to “act out”, ending up like Macaulay Culkin in The Good Son, and changing the parents’ emotions from unconditional love to the same frustration and anger that got the goblin where it was in the first place. Such children sometimes manage to expel the goblin from their psyche on their own, and their parents sigh in relief and say “Well, it was just a phase.” Other children never do, or do so after it’s too late and the damage has been done, and they can grow up to be monstrous in their own right.

Goblins are sometimes tricky to see, even to an adept who knows what they’re looking for—children are very good at disappearing when they’re wanted. Once spotted, though, goblins look like ugly, twisted children: Discolored skin caked in filth; an oversized mouth filled with jagged, crooked teeth; and dark clothing (no one’s quite sure why) with a tall cap (this no one can explain at all.) They tend to keep a bestial expression on their face. They also appear to always have their eyes closed, though they don’t seem to be blind in any way.

A goblin’s stats are identical to those of any other revenant. Points: 20 + a percentile roll (1-100); Body 0, Speed 10-40, Mind 10-40, and Soul 40-80.

Up next: Rituals to rid yourself (or someone else) of a goblin, and how those rituals inspired the traditions of Halloween!