Preview Read-Thru: The Doom That Came To Astreas

 Greg Lambert and the good folks at Chronicles of Aeres were kind enough to slide me a preview pdf of their latest Kickstarter book, The Doom That Came To Astreas.  It's a sword-and-sorcery setting and adventure for D&D 5e, and I figured as an occasional 5e DM and Sword And Sorcery Respecter, it would be fun to take a look.  Am I the target audience for this book?  Probably not, and that's okay - and we'll circle back to that later.

It occurs to me that when you look at a product, there are several important questions we ask that help us decide its quality.  The first two are what does it say it is, and what is it actually.  Sometimes you grab and adventure and it's more of a sourcebook, or vice-versa; sometimes a book claims to support a particular sub-genre, but then you read it and...not so much.  The third, and maybe most important question, is how well does it do it.

In the case of The Doom That Came to Astreas (hereafter just Doom), the answers to the first two questions are clear.  Doom says it's a sourcebook for a sword-and-sorcery continent, and a decent-sized 5e adventure set there.  And, thankfully, that's what it is.  Whether you enjoy the style of presentation is one thing, but Doom is certainly what it says on the tin.

The sourcebook section of the book gives us the rundown of Astreas, its current status and history, and the major threat (we'll get to that presently in the adventure).  Doom does so, in part, through quite a bit of fiction, and character quotes.  This technique is sufficiently prevalent that I really felt like it was the 90s again and I was reading a White Wolf book (your mileage will of course vary).  Through these pieces we are introduced not only to the world of Astreas, but to some of the NPCs and PCs (you heard me) we'll be dealing with in the adventure portion.  The art throughout is nice enough, and the maps in the book are colorful but maybe a little muddy and cramped for my tastes.  The layout is modern in terms of fonts and color-on-color, but readable throughout (thank you).  Doom is written in a modern style - which is to say on the loquacious side - with some read-aloud text in the adventure here and there.

As far as crunch, 5e folks will find new takes on bird-men, frog-men, lizard-folk, and barbarian types within, each with special qualities that fit with the Astrean milieu.  I don't know how plug-and-play adaptable any of these races would be to another 5e game.  I was a little surprised there weren't new spells to help shape genre expectations.  The five great cultures of Astreas each represent one extreme of alignment (Good, Law, Evil, so forth), and they have monolithic cultures that generally exist in isolation from one another - which is why a mixed group of PCs tromping about to each area in the provided mega-adventure is kind of a big deal.  There are also horgs (they're orc/hobgoblin stand-ins) and kobolds, who are standard draconic 5e kobolds.  

The provided adventure sequence is a strange beast.  Although it can be played with original characters, it is designed to be played with the 7th-level pregens included in the book, who are nicely representative of the vibe of Astreas.  Those characters aren't empty sheets, either - they have backgrounds and deep ties to the storyline.  So in this sense, there's a lot of Dragonlance going on here.  Some of my readers will be cringing at this point, but when you consider that Doom is meant for 5e players, this all makes a good bit of sense.  The adventure itself is designed to run 5-10+ sessions using the pregens -- so maybe this is a good palate-cleanser adventure for a group taking a break between WotC hardbacks, for example.  The pregen PCs are fairly iconic, and have the gimmick of having come together previously to stop the evil sorceress, but failed and were flung back in time a month, de-aged (ie lower in level).  Now their only hope to actually defeat her is to assemble the broken bits of an artifact.  You can see this has all the tropes, stacked nicely - so it comes down to whether running something like this whole-hog is right for your group.  Again, you could run it with original PCs, but I honestly think you'd lose a little something by doing it that way.

The adventure itself is a globetrotting fetch-quest in which the PCs have a month to collect the bits of the ancient axe in question, reassemble it, and use it to whack the BBEG.  However, the substructures of this adventure are not as railroady as that might sound (with the understanding that epic questline stories like this are inherently railroady -- again, "does what it says on the tin").  As the PC are dispatched, via magic, to the different parts of Astreas, they get to do a little hexcrawling in each 'zone'.  Here, the authors want you to keep your strict time records, enforce the need for food and water, and so forth -- nodding to old-school D&D play as the hexcrawl proceeds.  See what I mean by a strange beast?  Neither fish nor fowl.  I wonder if players who are on board for the epic quest will be turned off by the hexcrawling?  There is actual stuff for the DM to track throughout - the ongoing invasion of the horg hordes must be marked on the map, and should influence which way PCs travel (and to what zones they travel first).

Each geographic section of the adventure provides wilderness encounters, and a hexmap with adventure locations of note marked and detailed.  The adventure itself has a LOT OF STUFF in it, plenty to do, with varied combat and social and intrigue challenges.  The authors have inserted innumerable sword-and-sorcery easter eggs throughout, which were quite fun, but I note that for the most part they're second-generation references - ie winking nods to the Conan films, or Fire & Ice, not sly references to a Lieber novel.  I found that kind of interesting, and it jibes with some of the author statements as far as influences.  Regardless, all the tropes you'd think would be somewhere on the map, are indeed somewhere on the map - ziggurats, gladiatorial pits, standing stones, stinking fens, lost temples, etc.  The epic quest is a whirlwind tour of sword-and-sorcery stuff.  Naturally, eventually the PCs assemble the artifact and have their confrontation with the BBEG.

So now we come to the third question - how well does Doom do what it sets out to do.  I'm content to say it does it very well, but we must understand it's a narrow target.  A sword-and-sorcery setting sourcebook with a Dragonlance-style epic quest as the default mode of play, with small regional hexmaps meant for real crawling, all done up for D&D 5e.  If I'm not the audience for Doom - and perhaps I'm not - then the real measure of its value, and success, will be whether the 5e audience is ready for this love letter to sword-and-sorcery films.  The separate adventure bits are good, but I suspect any old-school DM with a strong pulp background would not find them super valuable to loot from.  However, the encounters and mini-hex-maps are solid enough that a 5e DM would probably find them useful even if not running Doom itself.

Not recommended for: old-school non-5e DMs looking for something to easily cannibalize.  Although you might be entertained reading parts of it thanks to the setup and easter eggs.

Maybe recommended for: 5e DMs looking for something to steal from for their own campaign, especially if your campaign has space for mighty-thewed barbarians, dinosaurs, and ziggurats.

Definitely recommended for: 5e groups tired of WotC/Forgotten Realms adventures and looking for a change of pace, especially if the idea of "sword-and-sorcery plus we do a little hexcrawl" appeals.  (Compare Tomb of Annihilation, though; if your group just did Tomb maybe it's not time to do Doom yet if you're looking to shift gears.)

(Stirring Tales of) Organized Play, Part Three

 Schism is the normal state of organized play groups.  Whether it's a national-level D&D thing, or a Vampire LARP, or something else, eventually it's going to fork. There will be a rules change, or a change in leadership, or in population, and a group will break off and do their own thing (often while continuing to do the old thing as well).

A couple years back some changes in D&D Adventurers League were controversial enough that we saw some attempts at splinter groups.  One such was led by a guy I knew from work (and a couple other dudes), so I was invited, and I showed up to check it out.

The concept was that they wanted to do mostly-DDAL, but rolled back to the last iteration of the org-play rules (with a couple other small changes).  Ostensibly they wanted more DM freedom, and better-interlinked stories.  All laudable goals.

The issue was, they didn't know how to get there (in my opinion).  I asked lots of questions and didn't get answers to many things - the airplane was being built in flight.  How much vetting does a DM or an adventure need before being run?  If this is Forgotten Realms, what year is it supposed to be (players will care), and how tight is our canonicity?  How do we deconflict DM usage of published material?  Are we soliciting only pick-up groupings of PCs, or can stable tables evolve naturally?  Some conflicting answers on these throughout.

There was a Discord server as the hub of recruitment and play - this was really my first in-depth use of Discord for this sort of thing.  I still think it has both advantages and disadvantages years later!  Immediately it was apparent we had a lot more players than DMs.  A lot more.  As in, this is going to be a problem.  For the couple months I was involved, I only saw two other people running games at all (and no, this did not include the couple people in charge of the whole show).

The first thing I ran was Ruined Tower of Zenopus, which I was eager to try in play after falling in love with it.  It plays as well as it reads, has great old-school feel despite being for 5e, and I continue to recommend it.  I had plopped the ruined tower down somewhere down the road from Waterdeep, near Illefarn, where I was planning to stake my claim to run the area.  Two session of Zenopus in, the PCs in question hadn't gotten very far and weren't enjoying themselves as much as I would've liked.  They were pretty passive and wanted a "mission" to go on, and they wanted things to be wrapped up by the end of the session.  This was going to be a continuing playculture problem with this splinter org - the DDAL model was strong in their minds, and most of them had never played anything besides 5e.  They had certain  playstayle assumptions baked-in.  I kept trying to be the guy running classic-leaning content...

Next I ran several sessions adapting material from Under Illefarn - updating the NPC lore in case anybody was enough of a Faerun-head to care about the time discrepancy, etc. These sessions went a little better, as they were more self-contained and mission-y, but nobody bit on exploring the larger dungeon despite pointers and hooks aplenty.  The idea of spending several sessions (and sorties) into the same dungeon didn't fly with this crowd.

At this point I knew for sure I was in the wrong place.  The organization wasn't very organized, and despite dozens of game-hungry players none of them seemed to want what I was selling.  I had a talk with a couple of the organizers about my observations, made some suggestions, and we parted ways.

I presume the experiment failed and the splinter group faded away.  Sometimes that's what happens.  Enthusiasm and good intentions don't keep an org-play program running.

Minor Magics from the Living Totem

 Upon exploring the Living Totem - something between a tower and a giant golem - the Rat-House Bastards were awarded several very minor magical items.  They are reproduced here from the Wampus archives.

anti-lagomorph fetish - this “lucky rabbit’s foot” on a brass chain grants its wearer +1 to any roll to track, catch, or attack any rabbit or rabbit-like creature (including rabbits, hares, pikas, bunnies, jackalopes, rabbitjacks, two-headed death hares, etc).

ululating torc of unexpected predation  - worn as a bracelet, this bit of ancient bronze costume jewelry tightens slightly whenever a large creature within 120 feet thinks about eating the wearer.

ring of vanity - A simple silver ring in appearance, this item is extremely efficient at accomplishing a limited purpose.  Once per day, the wearer may trigger the effect by running his or her fingers (including the one wearing the ring) through their hair, and then tossing their head to the side a bit with a flourish.  Immediately the character is instantly bathed, de-loused, groomed, and coiffed, and their clothes are cleaned as well.

silken pouch of fairy teeth - This pouch of red silk, tied with white ribbon, contains several fairy teeth mixed with scented potpourri.  If carried in the pocket, next to a coin purse, the sympathetic harmonies of the fairy teeth resonating with the coinage deduct 15% (or 1 in 6 for such systems) from attempts to pick-pocket the character.

scintillating shard - To all appearances a rainbow-colored toothpick, this magical piece of wood has a singular power - if the shard is jabbed into a plate of food (even a bowl of soup), the flavors in the dish are transposed: bitter becomes sour, sour becomes salty, salty becomes spicy, spicy becomes bitter.  The shard functions once per week on a normal-sized portion of food (it will not work on an entire cauldron of soup).

Dubious Maps

 I don't claim to be much of a cartographer.  When I need a map for a Wampus Country session, I usually just draw it.  Yes, there are plenty of resources out there for dungeon and cave maps and things like that, but far fewer for buildings.

Here's a map of South Street in Thistlemarch, which was used for a holiday-themed adventure.

Very basic, but in this case what I cared about was the relationship between the homes, as I knew the PCs would be interviewing residents and there was a likelihood of a chase.  The Piggwiggles are a terribly fat, upper-middle class family; their across-the-street neighbors the Haypennys are slight and impoverished.  Further up the street lives dashing duck bachelor Drake Scaupley (yes, he's a duck, and he's still searching for the Legendary Duck Tower, as no PCs have taken him up on the quest).

Mrs. Jellyjam's Home For the Remarkably Aged was the most detailed location for the adventure, not counting Mr. Scrimm's kitchen help who was eaten by a Christmas Pudding.  The old folks' home contains a number of potential PC resources in the form of elderlies with lore, people who could perhaps train you, and even one sweet lady who counts as a sage for certain subjects.  There's also a gentleman who lives on the third floor who is probably a death knight but nobody's rude enough to say anything about his skeletal pallor.  The proprietress Mrs. Jellyjam herself is, as the name might imply, a woman of ample rump.

This next map from the archives is from a sequence of sessions in which the PCs were dealing with the Rat Emperor and the Cult of the Black Rat.  

The School for Wayward Girls, in River-Town, was the perfect place to hatch the cult's evil plan, which involved cursing these poor young women to become pregnant with were-rats.  Gross.  Anyway, the PCs foiled the experiment before it bore fruit (or rats).  The NPC notes on the map are the entirety of the personality sketches of those NPCs, presented here on the map so the PCs could keep them straight.  The only thing not on there is which of the wayward girls was secretly sort-of-in-league with the Cult (and I don't remember now which one it was).  You will be pleased of course to hear that the PC wizards noted that Abigail, upon graduation, would be strong apprentice material.

You don't need a fancy map most of the time.  You need a map that does what you need it to do.

Organized Play, Part Two

 I spent a couple years involved, in small ways, with D&D Adventurers League.

It started during Season One; I had run a con the previous year that had Pathfinder Society games, and for year two, it made sense to include a bunch of the "new hotness" - 5e, by way of DDAL.  So we ran some games, they were successful, everyone was excited.  There was a lot of DDAL springing up that first year, and it was good to get in on the ground floor with the local folks who were getting into it and feeling it out.  Some nice people.

For a while I ran occasional DDAL sessions at the FLGS.  These went well, they were getting a good group going there, and I was just a sometimes DM.  Based on a look at the adventures I know I ran, this must've been Season One through the very beginning of Season Two.  I can tell you for sure I ran Dues for the Dead, The Courting of Fire, The Scroll Thief, Drums in the Marsh, and Tales Trees Tell at the FLGS, I have vivid memories of DMing that sequence.  I would still be interested in talking to Jobe Bittman about the bits that WotC cut out of The Courting of Fire.

I didn't love DDAL.  To be fair, I wasn't in love with 5e, either, but it was functional and a way to meet some new folks and maybe generate new gamers, so I was willing to put in some work.  The org-play structure of DDAL wasn't horrible, either... but the culture started to be its own thing.

It wasn't really apparent to me until later, because I stopped running games.  I could see from peeking in on the online discussions that DDAL was getting a little weird as far as playculture.  Org-play does this - it becomes its own thing, and the loudest voices will skew the idea of "normal" play.

By Season Five I was running again, and I ran the entire low-level sequence that season, including at an out-of-state con.  That was fun!  Again, everybody I met was pretty cool there.  Got to play in The Iron Baron epic, that was interesting - anytime you do a multi-table thing, it's interesting to watch the logistics.  That adventure earned my dwarf paladin the enmity of all fire giants forever!

Later at TridentCon I ran a higher-tier adventure and hated it - the weird habits the playculture was building were really obvious at that level, I don't think I had any fun running that session of In Dire Need.  I went on a business trip to Ottawa and sat in on a game at a FLGS there, and those players were hospitable and fun to share a table with.  The main issue I had with DDAL, people-wise, was some of the online loudmouths, some of the moderators and admins, and a handful of people on the local 'scene' who were cheesy, mouthy, or both.  Probably all organized play is this way.

I remember playing at a local con - this was Season Seven I think, so I'm skipping ahead - and my PC was killed.  Actually killed, no resurrection, due to a quirk of that season and the way in which he was slain.  The table went silent as everybody expected me to freak out, I guess.  I didn't freak out, I was losing characters before some of these players were born, right?  I hung out for the rest of the game, other than sneaking across the street to buy everybody at the table Wendy's Frosties.  When you lose a PC, you either drink beer or eat ice cream.  Ice cream it was.

Worth noting that in my experiences in DDAL, "faction stuff" didn't come up too much.  Occasionally it got a player a side-quest or extra info, but there wasn't much effect on the way people were playing their characters.

During Season Five, we worked with DDAL admins to write a 'Con-Created Content' adventure for use at TridentCon.  It was supposed to be a trilogy - con trilogies were very popular at the time - but that ended up being too ambitious.  I did the story outline, Jack Shear did the actual writeup, then I took an editing pass for clarity, sanity-check, and to drop in some Forgotten Realms references where we could use more.  That Poe homage adventure, The House on Weeping Quay, was eventually approved for play.  It had been changed by the DDAL reviewers a smidge from what we submitted, and surely what we submitted was dialed-back from what I originally wanted, but it was ready to go.  The map was jacked up at the time, but we forged ahead.  

I ran The House on Weeping Quay for the DMs who were going to run it at TridentCon, and I think it went okay.  A couple questions came up, we figured out how we were going to run those bits, and so forth.  At the con, the module was run I think four or five times for different tables.  And never run again.  Why?  Well, although we were allowed to publish the dumb thing through DriveThru, I didn't get proper maps done in a timely fashion for first possible release, and then after some delays it dawned on me that I didn't care about potential DDAL sales.  Would I rather put the adventure out the way it was supposed to originally look?  With some extra content?  With the original heckin' cool magic item that DDAL wouldn't allow?  And if I were going to revise it, did it even need to be 5e?  Would I be better off publishing it as an OSR thing?  It's still sitting there, waiting for a final edit and an updated manor house map.  I could put it out quickly if I had a map, I guess, and were content to release the "original DDAL version", even if it were no longer approved for DDAL play.  Nobody's clamoring for it, that's for sure.

That was the end of my DDAL career, I haven't touched it since Season Five.  Well, that's mostly true - I was briefly involved with a DDAL splinter campaign, and it was a painful couple of months.  We'll take a look at that next time we talk about organized play.

Game Jamming

Not long ago I participated in a "game jam" focused on OSR stuff.   I like community stuff when I have the time to participate, I sometimes like writing under time (or subject matter) pressure, and I figured why not - so I went for it.

My contribution was Vague Elephant Project, which has some elephant-themed monsters and spells of a Wampus mien.  It's free on itch.io, or you can find it on DriveThru in a pay-what-you-want status.  I must credit the game jam with shoving me out of a writing lull.  I don't know that I'd hurry to do it again, though - I didn't see authors talking to each other about submissions, cross-pollenating etc, and I wish it resulted in more downloads and comments than it did.

The submissions for the jam were a mixed bunch - as is rather the point, I think, to encourage people to contribute and create in ways they previously hadn't.  Of the submissions, I want to call out The Queen of Decay and Walkers & War-Wagons.

The Queen of Decay by Brian Rideout is a very nice adventure which you could drop into any swamp region in your home campaign.  Brian does a fine job of giving us an ongoing situation (Oneera the dream priestess kidnapped by Volara the witch) and plopping it amidst some good swamp hexes that are worth plopping on your map.

Every NPC has motivations and likes/dislikes.  Much of the stuff here is linked to lore from the World of Weirth campaign setting, but explained quickly in sidebars (I don't have the cult of Yig-Noss in my world, but I can see it's an evil snake cult, and I certainly have one of those).  While the default tone is sword-and-sorcery, you could squint and read it all as fairy tale as well.

Walkers & War-Wagons by Mr. Triceratops is a brave attempt at vehicle rules for OSR systems, in particular post-apoc/sci-fi vehicles (cars, mechs, aircraft) for the in-progress Red Ares game.  I have no idea if the rules work well in play, but it's an admirable attempt - perhaps more influenced by non-old-D&D than I would like, but that's me.  Triceratops uses damage reduction for vehicular armor, for example.  Also STRICT SPEED RECORDS MUST BE KEPT.  I want to hear more about how this works in play, bolted on to some other system.

Head over to that game jam page and download whatever looks interesting - that's the point.

Get Resurrekt

 Farting around with AD&D content generation!

 Over on the Twitter, Aaron the Pedantic asserted that resurrection in AD&D was more prevalent than in the Appendix N literature that inspired it.  That seems true enough to me given that AD&D even HAS resurrection in it.  Which Appendix N material has a straight-up “resurrection by priest” in it?

But the conversation gave me the impression that Aaron, and perhaps others, think resurrection is as common in AD&D as it seems to be in some later editions.  I don’t think it is - purely the gut talking here.  I can’t remember any resurrection in any of my AD&D games going all the way back; nary a one.  I remember one time the party had to settle for a reincarnation, and that was a huge deal at the time.

Skip over the lower-level raise dead for the moment, which is great and all, but you need a fresher corpse. Let's stick with resurrection, since that's the verbiage we were using in the Twit thread. Resurrection is a seventh-level spell, so you need a 16th-level cleric with 18 WIS to cast it (PH20). Presuming you don’t have an 16th-level cleric in your party, how do you even get access to a resurrection spell?

You can't encounter a 16th-level cleric in a dungeon unless you're on the 16th level (or lower), per DMG175.

Seems like you’re better off finding a suitable cleric on the overland map.  Maybe you know of one, in the big city in your campaign.  I hope you do, because coming across a friendly resurrection-capable cleric while exploring the wilderness is extremely unlikely.  Again, I’m just farting around here, and welcome commentary and picking-apart of any of this.

Chance a space/hex includes a castle: 3% (per DMG173, Random Wilderness Terrain)

Chance an uninhabited area has a fortress: 5% (per DMG182, Outdoor Random Monster Encounters)   These seem like parallel methods; let’s default to the higher chance for our purposes here, 5%.

DMG183, castle size influences chance of “character type” inhabitants thusly:

small  30%

medium  35%

large  40%

But also have Humans result thusly (sending us to the Monster Manual for details):

small 10%

medium  15%

large  20%

Only four kinds of humans can be in that castle; let’s presume we’re rolling a 1d4 here and there are equal chances of the four.

Bandits can only have 5-6th level cleric

Brigands, same

Berserkers, 7th level

Dervishes do much better, up to 12th level, but that won't hit the mark.

DMG184, if it’s a “character-type” castle, chance of a cleric is 18%.

This cleric is of level 9th-12th.  Call it a 50% chance of having a character of 11th level or higher.

In order to have access to resurrection, the cleric must be 11th level and have the capacity to cast 7th-level spells (requiring 18 WIS, but note that NPC clerics get a +2 WIS; let’s presume for the sake of this investigation that any given 11th level cleric has 18 WIS).

Taking even the most generous spreads, that’s:

5%, 40%, 18%, 50%.  That’s a .0018 chance of a given hex containing a cleric capable of casting resurrection on behalf of suitably-aligned PCs.

Am I gaming this out right?  Do you actually have a better chance of finding a Dervish fortress in the wilderness than you do an other-cleric-owned castle?  That’s pretty interesting by itself.

Permanent death in the unexplored wilderness awaits!