One more trip to the Paleolithic...

Last weekend, the gaming group I have recently infiltrated finished up our first little trek through fantastical Stone Age Earth (Glaciers & Glyptodons).  I'm obv biased because I GM'ed the adventure, but I really do like some of the details I'm left to think about with the game.

Before that, though, let me note some of my own shortcomings as a GM and adventure designer that became obvious during play...

As someone who feels like I take a fairly combat-centric approach in understanding what RPG rules (especially old school rules) are meant to provide for us, I think I might just not be very good at combat!  There was at least once in running a skirmish that I was ready to jump right back to the PCs' acting a second time in a row, without even giving the enemies a chance to move, attack, etc.  Possibly related to this:  I think I tend to load up combat encounters with way too much same-yness, so that they just amount to slogging through attack rolls until we see how the numbers allow things to play out.  I say it's possibly related because I also think that part of my issue with running combat is realizing how monotonous they have a chance of becoming and immediately trying to compensate for that by speeding things along as quickly as possible - even if it means I lose control of the order of battle in the process.

Ah, well, lots to reflect on in that rambling...

The game had some huge positives for me, though!  First, as a setting I'd been wanting to tackle for a while, the Paleolithic holds a lot of promise for further adventures.  The PCs were set up as inhabitants of a region known simply as The Valley, which I intro'ed with this image...

Stolen from HERE...

...and which hardly got any attention except as the background for the adventure's setup.  The Valley has a lot left for exploration...and coupling this notion with another area I need to improve on as a GM (the balance between sandbox play and railroading), I would really like to work out some hex crawl guidelines for Glaciers & Glyptodons that go beyond the few wilderness encounters I prepared for this first adventure and provide players with more of a chance to feel like they're interacting with a truly open and dangerous world.

With that said, I do like the high points of the story that was told with this adventure, as the PCs were summoned by the Hidden One (read: Denisovan and/or Elf) Drelon to go on a quest to investigate and possibly destroy a metal(!) ring found near the coast to the west of The Valley.  Here's Drelon...

I definitely went as LotR-esque as possible with this setup to emphasize the Stone Age Earth/classic fantasy connection I wanted to see in G&G (heck, "Drelon" is just a barely-rearranged Elrond...😐).  However, I was also able to work in another trope I've kind of obsessed over for years at this point...Atlantis!  In this adventure, the players were ultimately led (read: railroaded) to the nation of Atlantis, named as the "Island Home" of a dying race of Saurians who possess magic and metallurgy beyond that of the mammalian humanoids that existed during the era.

The end result was a small party of Hidden and Sturdy Ones (Elves and Orcs) helping to defend Atlantis from an invading band of Humans, which nicely set up an invitation from the Saurians to the adventurers to bring more of their kind to the ancient city.  This fits into a little mythology I've worked into my headcanon in which explorers/escapees from a multispecies, magical Atlantis serve as an origin for other fantasy realms.  It's all stretching, I know, but I don't get a chance to run this kind of stuff very often, so I pulled out as many stops as I could in satisfying the stories I've been telling myself for years...!

Finally, my biggest takeaway from G&G is probably how happy I am that I tried the combo of races in the style of 5E and classes at a LightBox power level.  I can't quite put my finger on why I like it so much.  Maybe it's that extra bit of flair that 5E races give a character, compared to the...ahem, lighter treatments they're given in Swords & Wizardry Light.  Or maybe it's because it lets me look at all of those 5E race options out there in a new...er, light...or even just because it makes Ravnica easier for me to visualize running.  Whatever it is, I'm excited to explore it more moving forward, and it seems like an approach that could unite a number of the mini-projects that I've thought about and then ignored on this blog over the years, from running Ravnica, to Light City, to Underground Elemental Beastfighting, to Project 5.5.  I'm even tempted to cobble together my own little Fantasy Heartbreaker to ground the other projects.  Hopefully more to come on this...!

Glaciers & Glyptodons

 One of the very first things I blogged about (more than five years ago...geez...) finally got its shot on the videoconferenced tabletop last night.  The awesome online gaming group I've fallen in with took on the setting I've wanted to try for quite a while now...fantasy reskinned and shifted around a little to resemble our own prehistoric world...

I've had a blast putting this together and hope the crew are truly enjoying it, as well.  They SEEM to be, but they're all really kind people who would probably never let on if they hated it. ;)

At the very least, the group really seemed to embrace the mashup of classic fantasy tropes and prehistoric humanity.  When the Neanderthals in the party (called Sturdy Ones in the game) are named Smashpunch and Blork! (with exclamation point), I figure the Orc-ness is coming across decently.  (Of course, they really are just reskinned Orcs...)

If you think you'd enjoy seeing what I provided to the group for character creation and the tiniest core of the setting, you can check out the doc HERE.  It's pretty basic and could use a lot of editing, adding, and testing, but I'm glad to have something to work from.

It also makes use of the 5E race + Old School class approach that I mused about HERE...and it actually worked pretty well so far.  I'll have more on that at some point soon.  Well...hopefully...

Thinking about an OSR blogging challenge...

So, I've been thinking a bit about April's A to Z blogging challenge and what I might want to take on this year.  One of the ideas that I hit on, and that I think I'd like to pursue, is to take an RPG setting idea (I think I'll go with the Paleolithic Adventures that I mused about in one of my first posts on this blog) and map out its components to the alphabet, so that by the time the month is over, I have something that can be compiled into a form that others might like to see.  It kind of fits an idea I've thought about trying on here, that I call "Filling up a White Box," in which I'd take the OGL skeleton of the Swords & Wizardry WhiteBox Rules and systematically reskin them into a different game.  So, maybe it'd be called "Filling up a White Box with Rocks."  Heh.

Anyway, the more I thought about it, the more I realized how much I'd like to see what other people would do with a similar task.  Ever since the monster known as the d20 system brought us "D&D" for every genre imaginable, I've loved seeing people take the basics of the class+level+icosahedral-combat rules system and expand it into new realms.  Like those old Dungeon magazine microgames...those were awesome, right?  Some people are clearly quite gifted at this (I'm looking at +James Spahn and +Simon Washbourne here, among others), but we could all probably do a decent job with a little structure, eh?

Then I realized that this might be even better as its own "challenge," since it could be ordered based on the needs of the task itself rather than...the alphabet.  Like the challenge goes something like:  (1) Theme, (2) Races and classes, (3) Equipment...etc., with questions for each one that would encourage fleshing out the game.  I just think it'd be awesome to see people pick a topic they've always wanted to explore, or maybe have explored in their games, and bring it to life.  Like someone's game is about juvenile magic-users at a wizard's school, and another one is Matrix-style gnostic cyberpunk, and someone does Super Sentai, and there's a Vampire clone, and...and...maybe someone hits upon something amazing...!

Well, I have about one good idea a week, and I thought I used that up a few hours ago when I decided tonight should be taco night, but I really like thinking about what this could be if others were interested.  So, does anyone have any thoughts on how I could get the most mileage out of this?  What would encourage others to participate?  Or am I just a bit loopy on a Friday afternoon?

Paleolithic Adventures

For a while now, I've really enjoyed the idea of playing an RPG based on early modern humans, toward the end of the Paleolithic Era.  Thanks to all of the stories I've encountered throughout my life involving "cavemen," the prehistoric human is one of the key archetypes in my imagination, right up there with wizards and cowboys and superheroes.

Illustration by Irma Deremeaux

There's an interesting period, somewhere around 40-50,000 years ago, where it appears that humans had reached a state of behavioral modernity with regard to abstract thought, use of technology, and maybe even social structures.  In other words, modern RPG players could probably be thrown into the situations of this time period and actually have a general idea of how their characters might react.

What really takes this time period to another level as an RPG setting, though, is the fact that multiple branches of the near-human family tree probably coexisted.  There's an article here that even compares the state of the world at that time to The Lord of the Rings (and that's coming from the statement of a geneticist)!  And then, of course, there's Homo floresiensis, the tiny prehistoric humanoid (which may have been around until about 12,000 years ago) nicknamed the Hobbit.

It all adds up to an easy re-skin of a basic RPG like Swords & Wizardry White Box to fit the time period.  Change up the weapons, of course.  Maybe give magic more of a shamanistic flare.  Then the non-human character races can be matched to the hominins around at the time.  Dwarves are hardy and work well underground...why not make them classic "cavemen" like Neanderthals?  Homo floresiensis would be halflings/hobbits, of course.  And the branch of humanity known as Denisovans, which hold a lot of mystery with regard to appearance and behavior, can be elves.  Heck, there's even evidence of another lineage having interbred with Denisovans at some point, so it would be easy to add in something like orcs and still feel like we're being prehistorically accurate!

I might even be okay with a dinosaur showing up in such a campaign.