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Fighting
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The Tiger Roars Lonelylands, Part 2 by Kenton Kilgore An Aside About Gaming in the Internet Age You younger folks,
who have spent seemingly your whole lives hooked up to a computer, can skip
this part: it’s for old farts like me. As I’ve mentioned, I actively
played/ran AD&D
games from 1982 to 1998, then took a 12-year break (except for some dabbling
with 3rd Edition in 2004). While I did own an Osborne
Executive during that time, I didn’t use it a lot for gaming.
Once
upon a time, this monster was considered “cutting edge” and “portable” I did, however,
create blank character forms that I printed out and players could fill out
with pencil, replacing them only when the sheets wore out or were almost
illegible (back then, you will remember, printing stuff was expensive and
slow and involved tearing off those side perforations—weren’t those a total
PITA?). I also used the PC to type up and keep an index of Dragon Magazine
articles, as well as lists and descriptions of NPCs. But everything
else—writing up adventures, drafting rule changes, drawing maps, calculating
experience points, maintaining an adventure log of what happened in each
gaming session—I did with pen and paper. I’ve never been a computer geek and
I’m still not one now (despite what my wife thinks), and as late as 1998, I
was dismissive of computers and the Internet. You didn’t need a PC for gaming
then, and truth be told, you really don’t need one now. However, in coming
back to gaming, I’ve embraced the computer as an invaluable tool. For the new
campaign, I’ve developed character sheets using Excel, and I don’t just print
them out and have the players fill them in: instead, I keep all the PC’s info
there and crank out fresh sheets for each gaming session (because printing’s
cheap, quick, and easy now), recycling the old sheets. I wrote up all my rule
adjustments (as discussed here and here and here and…well, you get the idea) using Word,
and store them on the computer. Ditto for coming up with adventures and
filing them: back in the salad days, I used to throw out most of old “modules”
once I’d run them.
A
blank player-character sheet that I created with Excel. I type in all the
info and make changes after each gaming session Most of my players
(like me) are and have been very visually-oriented, preferring pictures of
what their characters encounter over verbal descriptions. Google Images has
been a godsend for that: I pull stuff off, print it, and hand it out at the
appropriate times during games. What’s fun for me as a DM is to use an image
that’s a little bit different from the players are used to, and then have
them wonder if, say, what they’re seeing is an orc*
or something worse…
I
don’t care what GW says, to me, this is what orcs
will always look like *In my campaigns, by the way, orcs
aren’t green, and they have pig snouts. And muskets. Maps used to be
something that my players knew existed on my side of the screen, but rarely
saw. Now I use PowerPoint to draft copies for them—minus “interesting
details” like locations of secret doors/traps, and exactly what is in each
room—that they can look at during games to speed play and to give them a
better idea of where their characters are. I used to have well
over a hundred issues of Dragon Magazine—I subscribed from ’82 to ’96 or so,
if I recall correctly—and as you can imagine, those took up a lot of space. I
bought the Dragon Magazine Archive (5 CDs with Issues #1-250), got rid of all
those mags, and stopped maintaining my own index. I regularly drop by Grognardia for inspiration (even if he does favor
original D&D over AD&D) and to listen to what another old-school
dinosaur like me has to say. While I like some of the 4th Edition
D&D artwork, I have no use for the game itself, so I don’t visit the
official website. Thus endeth the aside. Back to your regularly-scheduled
article…. The “Lost”
Campaign As I’ve mentioned several
times before, this campaign is inspired by one of my favorite TV shows, Lost. This
is not to say that the premise is that the player-characters were aboard a
plane that crashed on a mysterious tropical island. Rather, this campaign
borrows some of the elements of Lost and goes from there. What
elements, you ask? Mystery. Lost threw a bunch of strange
stuff—polar bears in the jungle, the Smoke Monster,
electro-magnetism, “The
Numbers”—at its characters and its audience, then took its sweet time
explaining what they meant (some things were never explained). I’ve taken a similar
approach to the campaign, starting with the fact that none of the players
know how their characters got to the ashen campaign world I call Lonelylands, or even what Lonelylands
is. I’ve been more forthcoming with answers, though, than Lost
was, bearing in mind that many of the show’s initial viewers bailed because
they didn’t get explanations fast enough. In only their second gaming session
in Lonelylands, the players learned that a “Red
Faction” (see below) might have brought them here to neutralize them.
What
is Lonelylands, and will the player-characters ever
manage to leave? Other times and other dimensions. The narrative of Lost
moved back and forth through time and even, in the final season,
into an alternate
reality. In addition, the protagonists wandered about the island,
finding and puzzling over artifacts from earlier times: another crashed plane
(full of drugs), an old sailing ship in the middle of the jungle, a ruined
temple, the remains of an Egyptian-style statue, and—most notably—bunker-like
stations built by the mysterious Dharma Initiative. Flashbacks and “flashforwards” like Lost did are hard to replicate in a role-playing game, but I have littered Lonelylands with plenty of “stuff” from elsewhere and elsewhen. They’ve encountered:
Literary allusions. Lost
referenced many books: Watership
Down, The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Carrie, Heart of Darkness, Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men,
etc. My campaign is heavily influenced by one work, T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land.”
In their travels, the party encounters:
“Madame
Sosostris” in her true form. She almost succeeded
in taking down the party I make references to
other literary works, too. As mentioned previously, the “Table” that the
party arrived on had names of places from The Lord of Rings, The
Chronicles of Narnia, and the Fafhrd
and the Grey Mouser stories. The lair of the leucrottas
was a tomb for a prince of the Kelmain, a warrior
race from the Elric
series. And they encountered a friendly
stegosaurus that an NPC insists on calling “George.”
If
you’ve never read this, well, you really ought to New “cast members.” Speaking of NPCs,
let’s talk about them—and new PCs, too, for that matter. Lost had a big cast of
“core characters” (Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Locke, Sayid,
etc.) and an even larger cast of major and minor characters who came, went,
and sometimes returned (either to stay or to leave/get killed off). When my little
gaming group started up with all of three characters—a ranger, a thief, and a
magic-user—it was obvious that they were massively short-handed in the
beating-on-stuff department. This didn’t improve much when two new
player-characters—an assassin and a cleric using mostly mind-affecting
spells—joined. Accordingly, soon after the party arrived in Lonelylands, I gave them some muscle in the form of a
friendly NPC they met. Actually, I gave
them a LOT of muscle. “Grunga” is the latest version of
a character I played many years ago, back when my buddy Pat ran a Forgotten Realms
campaign. Later on, Pat started up a Shadowrun
campaign, and I transmogrified the character for that game. In his AD&D
iterations, Grunga is a half-ogre fighter of—as you
might imagine—tremendous Strength and Constitution, and very limited
intellect (he tends to talk like Cookie Monster or
the “crockydiles” from Pearls
Before Swine). Grunga is and always has
been, however, a very nice guy (Neutral Good alignment, reflecting his human
heritage and upbringing) and extremely loyal, the Labrador
Retriever of NPCs. Sometimes a DM will
inadvertently create an NPC that overshadows the PCs, either in terms of raw power
or in personality. Though Grunga has always had
plenty of hit points (I introduced him as a 3rd level fighter) and
can dish out plenty of damage (18/00 Strength and ogre-sized weapons), he’s
never dominated the group. That’s mostly because he just plods along, keeps
his mouth shut, and does what Lassiel (the group’s
leader) tells him to do (which is usually bashing down doors or particularly
tough opponents).
Shortly after adding
Grunga to the group, my friend Pat and his wife Pippa (who have played in several of my previous
campaigns) joined, adding Gelion, a male half-elf fighter/magic-user specialized in
the bow; and Jocelyn, a female
human fighter. Suddenly, my little wimpy party was a good size and could kick
some serious butt. Had I known that Pat
and Pippa were jumping aboard and bringing
bruisers, I wouldn’t have introduced Grunga, and
sometime soon, he might be written out of the campaign, just like a minor
character from Lost. For now, though, he’s good to have along to keep Clover
(my daughter Ally-Jane’s character) safe, and to keep Matt’s assassin “Volke” in line (Matt sometimes likes to act up). Lost had recurring
villains (most notably, Ben Linus) who
bedeviled the protagonists, but that’s sometimes hard to replicate in a game.
Player-characters (well, the ones I’m dealing with, anyway) have the annoying
habit of sticking bad guys with a lot of arrows or other sharp, pointy
things, and then jumping up and down on said bad guys’ broken bodies until
they just die already. Nevertheless, I’ve
challenged the party several times with a large tribe of hobgoblins
(“The Dog Skulls”), tossing lots of them and their goblin lackeys at the PCs.
The party has also tangled twice with a quartet of badass githyanki
warriors, Chaotic Evil Psionic Plane-Jumping Dickheads who like to trade
punches with the PCs just for gits and shiggles. Most recently, our heroes have thrown down with
a horde of human cannibals, and they’ll see more of those scary dudes in the
near future.
Githyanki: ruining people’s gaming sessions since 1981 Secret and/or sinister organizations. Lost
had “The Others” and the
“Dharma Initiative,” mysterious groups who inhabited the island before the
protagonists crash-landed. The Others initially
seemed sinister and hostile, but eventually joined most of the protagonists.
The Dharma Initiative was revealed to have been a scientific group conducting
weird experiments. Though no one in Lonelylands is
trying to abduct random party members or tap into enormous reserves of
electro-magnetic energy, there are nevertheless two organizations rumored to
exist. Early on in Lonelylands, the player-characters in my campaign ran
into an NPC wizard, Sessemdyr,
who said he belonged to a group called “the Collectors,” and that one or more
of them might be “Collectors” too. To prove his point, he showed the party a
tattoo on his arm that he said was the group’s identifying mark: he then
proceeded to calmly scrape off a layer of false skin on “Volke’s”
arm to reveal an identical tattoo. Sessemdyr speculated that,
like him, the party had wound up in Lonelylands
because another group, “The Red Faction,” viewed them as a threat. Though the
party didn’t know if they could believe Sessemdyr
(they had never heard of either group), they nevertheless remembered two bits
of graffiti on “The Marker,” a stone monolith they had encountered shortly
before. The first piece read: Do
not trust the Collectors The second read: The
Red Faction lies and waits Since taking their
leave of Sessemdyr, the party hasn’t learned
anything more about either the Collectors or the Red Faction, but they might
soon enough…
Getting
off the island in Lost wasn’t easy, and it won’t be easy to get out of Lonelylands, either Escape. Many of the plotlines on Lost focused on the protagonists’
efforts to leave the island, either by raft, freighter, sailboat, lifeboat,
frozen donkey wheel (don’t ask), or a forced-to-land jet plane (yeah, yet
ANOTHER plane). Most of the characters were anxious to get off the
inhospitable place filled with weirdness and danger (though some never wanted
to leave), and who can really blame them? They were just ordinary people
caught up in an extraordinary situation. AD&D
player-characters are not ordinary people, though, and you would think that
an inhospitable place filled with weirdness and danger would be just the
environment they’d be craving. And you would be wrong. All of my players want
to get their guys out of there ASAP. I don’t think they’re bored (at least, I
hope they’re not bored), but the
setting is, perhaps, a bit too grimdark for them. Also, I think they miss little things
like, say, having a place to spend any of the loot they’ve been gathering on
their travels. Or, say, being able to take a bath, or not having to wonder
when the sunlight is going to return. Soon after their
characters first arrived in Lonelylands, they were
informed by Sessemdyr that there was no escape,
save perhaps a place (which he had never seen) called “The Edge,” thousands
of miles from where they were at that time. Later on, they learned that the
zeppelins had entered Lonelylands through “The
Gate,” some sort of very large magical/scientific/both construct supposedly
much closer. So they changed direction and are headed that way. Next time, I’ll tell
you about what they found along the way…. More Black in Black Posted March 2011 |
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Fighting
Tigers: Other
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