Tuesday, August 27, 2024

#RPGaDay2024 for 27 August: Marvellous miniature

Today's prompt: Marvellous miniature

I loved the concept of the Ral Partha three-stage mini: a set of three minis that represented your character's arc from wet-behind-the-ears novice to practiced journeyman to supreme master.

There was always one small problem, of course.

Whose character survived to high level?!

And this wraps up my participation in the #RPGaDay2024 challenge, a few days prematurely. I'm heading out of town for at least a week to the wilds of Idaho, and a combination of limited time and even more limited Interweb access means I'm tying a bow around this one right here.

Saturday, August 24, 2024

#RPGaDay for 24-25 August: Triple-double!

Saturday's prompt: Acclaimed advice
Sunday's prompt: Desirable dice

Game time is of utmost importance. Failure to keep careful track of time expenditure by player characters will result in many anomalies in the game. The stricture of time is what makes recovery of hit points meaningful. Likewise, the time spent adventuring in wilderness areas removes concerned characters from their bases of operation - be they rented chambers or battlemented strongholds. Certainly the most important time stricture pertains to the manufacture of magic items, for during the period of such activity no adventuring can be done. Time is also considered in gaining levels and learning new languages and more. All of these demands upon game time force choices upon player characters, and likewise number their days of game life. - "TIME IN THE DUNGEON," 1e AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, p. 37

So, like a dozen years ago or so, I started theming my dice to whatever game I was playing at the time, based on the color scheme of the cover of the box set or rule book - yellow and orange for Boot Hill, black, white, and red for Traveller, purple and red for Chill. When I started planning a new Flashing Blades campaign, it was time to put together a new theme.

Kinda like the way these turned out.

If you're looking for some really spectacular dice, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the incredible creations available at Cassiopeia Dice - some terrific videos on her Twitter feed.

Friday, August 23, 2024

#RPGaDay2024 for 23 August: Peerless player

Today's prompt: Peerless player

Let's call him Rich, 'cause that was his name.

I met Rich at The War House FLGS in Long Beach, talked old school roleplaying games, and exchanged phone numbers, with an eye toward maybe playing sometime. When I learned he loved 2e Boot Hill but never played any of the published TSR modules, we decided to run a campaign linking the five adventures together. Rich was a USAF veteran wtih a good job in upper management, a family guy, and a big Wild West buff. We were different men outside of gaming, careful to stay away from politics by mutual understanding when we got together to play. As gamers, we were sympatico.

The campaign ran for a couple of years, and we'd just about made it through the last module when Rich informed us he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the summer of 2018. The cancer metastasized to his liver and gall bladder; his treatment was confined to relieving symptoms, and he was given six to eight months to live. It would be great to say he outlived his prognosis; instead he was gone by the middle of October.

Some people play with an established 'friends' group, but I tend to find new groups for the campaign I want to run each time, rather than relying on a set cadre. I'm glad I do, because I might not've met Rich otherwise, or played in one of the most memorable campaigns of my life.

Thursday, August 22, 2024

#RPGaDay2024 for 22 August: Notable non-player character

Today's prompt: Notable non-player character

One of the few features of 3e D&D I really like is giving monsters character levels, a quick and simple way of making any monster unique, or at least different from its peers. I mentioned this on a forum twenty-odd years ago - probably EN World or the pre-Gleemax Whizbros forum - adding that this was somethig I'd liked about 1e AD&D as well. Demihumans, liches, lycanthropes, and vampires as described in the 1e Monster Manual may include character levels along with their given abilities. As a referee, I took full advantage of this to create interesting encounters with which to challenge and bedevil my players.

Enter Vlad Tolenkov. Appearing in Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits as one of Lolth's allies, Vlad occupies a castle in The Nightworld, a sunless realm located in an alternative part of the Prime Material Plane imediately beyond a portal from the Demonweb. In addition to his powers, Vlad is also a 15th level magic-user, with all that entails.

I first started refereeing toward the very tail end of 1977, using our kit-bashed 'edition' of D&D - the Holmes blue box, the 1e Monster Manual, Blackmoor, and The Arduin Grimoire - so right from the giddyup I'd used AD&D monsters with character levels, but seeeing a vampire magic-user in an official module almost three years later was still pretty cool to teenage me.

This whole concept of monsters who were once human, or human-adjacent, touches on the notion that the most dangerous and terrifying creatures lurking in the dark places of our imaginations are funhouse mirror images of ourselves - the horror of Jordan Peele's Us, for example, leans in hard on this. I suppose Nietzsche's, "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you," applies here as well. Monsters who were once human, or are similar to humans in outlook, increase the range of motivations available in presenting the challenge - they can even imply a familiarity.

Wednesday, August 21, 2024

#RPGaDay2024 for 21 August: Classic campaign

Today's prompt: Classic campaign

Classic PUBLISHED campaign? The Giants campaign for 1e AD&D. Just well thought out with terrific locations and a fun backstory. I got to experince the modules as both a player and a referee.

Classic AD HOC campaign? Our 2e Boot Hill campaign a few years back, in which we strung together the five published modules for the game as a single camapign set in southeast New Mexico c. 1873 to 1875.

Classic HOMEBREW campaign? Merchant princes with LBB Traveller - started with a free trader and worked our way up to a 2K or 3K dton hauler plus a patrol escort for security. Our last trading mission brought home close to a billion credits profit!

Tuesday, August 20, 2024

#RPGaDay2024 for 20 August: Amazing adventure

Today's prompt: Amazing adventure

Released in 1979 by Phoenix Games, The Lost Abbey of Calthonwey is my favorite published adventure because it does so many things well. The abbey and the dungeon beneath it are thoughtfully designed as both an intriguing environment to explore and a space for adventure. It leaves open the possibility of further adventure with undefined lower levels upon which the referee can expand. It has a terrific backstory that allows it to be dropped into a homebrew campaign. It's filled with non-player characters with motivations and relationships that reward players who didn't take Charisma as a dump stat.

What makes it stand out for me is how the design of the abbey itself reflects the events of the backstory. Spaces built for a purpose by the brothers are re-purposed in ways that are interesting and make sense. This is a really big thing for me, as it adds a feeling of history to the location that doesn't involve timelines or pages and pages of exposition - it's something the adventurers can see in front of them rather than having it read to them. I'm not sure how much I did this before Lost Abbey, but it's been something I include when designing a feature in a setting ever since: how has this place changed since it was built? what are visible clues to its builders and their intended purpose?

Saturday, August 17, 2024

#RPGaDay2024 for 17-18 August: Two-fer Again!

Saturday's prompt: An engaging RPG community
Sunday's prompt: Memorable moment of play

The RPG Pub is my go-to for gaming-talk and more recently running a Flashing Blades play-by-post. It's a good mix of useful site features, outstanding moderation, and a critical mass of posters who aren't completely full of crap.

My most memorable moment of play is only dimly remembered: my first character was a fighter, playing blue box D&D, and he got punked by an orc or something. That wasn't the memorable part, clearly. What's memorable to me is the feeling of grabbing the dice and making a new character, to keep exploring the dungeon. It was in that moment my lifelong conviction that adventure games are about the setting, not my character, took hold. Adventurers come and go, but the dungeon remains.

Friday, August 16, 2024

#RPGaDay2024 for 16 August: Quick to learn . . . or not

Today's prompt: Quick to learn

Honestly, I got nothin'.

So let's go to the alternative topic generator. For the 16th, the alternative topic is Dungeon, and I roll an eight: Present an idea for a Random Encounter.

Dungeon. Random encounter. Okay then.

First, I need a random encounter, so I'll go to the tables in the back of Flashing Blades. One of the dungeons - and yes, there are more than one - in my campaign is located in the basement of the hôtel de ville - city hall. I roll a 5; the encounter is with a Lawyer and a possible Patron. The offered patronage is a 7: "The Patron wishes to have a message taken to someone in a dangerous position (a prisoner in the Bastille, perhaps, or a soldier on the front)." Perfect.

Next, what's the story of this encounter? I grab a handful of Rory's Story Cubes - since this patronage is about delivering a message, I grab the Voyages collection for inspiration and roll the following: Amoeba, Spectacles, Puzzle Piece, Map, and Domed City. Oh, this could be good.

A procureur - procurator, a legal professional like a solicitor - named M. Bondurant approaches the adventurers with a proposition: he needs a prisoner in the dungeon to look (Spectacles) at a document and confirm whether it's genuine or not. If it is, the procureur believes the document will be exculpatory when presented to the magistrate, but the gaolers will not let him see his client, by order of the consuls - aldermen. If the adventurers can get the document to the prisoner to confirm its provenance - bribing the guards is trivially easy - Bondurant will be very grateful; a small satchel of louis d'or and free legal advice will be offered for their trouble. If asked why he cannot see his client, Bondurant will claim that one of the consuls holds a petty grudge against the procureur from a previous case.

The aforementioned document is a key to a map (Map) in Bondurant's possession. The key is written in a code (Puzzle) that only the prisoner, a renegado - corsair, or pirate - named D'Enfer can decipher. The map is to a city in Barbary (Domed City) where a great jewel stolen by D'Enfer is hidden and it's Bondurant's intention to retrieve it; he also intends to double-cross D'Enfer and leave him to his fate at the hands of the consuls.

Somewhere in here is a disease (Amoeba) - in the dungeon? in the corsair city? - that presents a threat to the adventurers, or D'Enfer, or Bondurant, or everyone. Will D'Enfer share the contents of the key with the adventurers? Will the renegado attempt to double-cross Bondurant by enlisting the adventurers to recover the jewel? Will the adventurers try to put one over on both the procureur and the corsair?

Wednesday, August 14, 2024

#RPGaDay2024 for 15 August: Great character gear

Today's prompt: Great character gear

I'm a bit obsessive about playing dress-up with my characters.

I want to know what they wear, what it looks like, what it's made of, if it's patched, embroidered, previously owned, how it changes with the weather and the seasons. I want to know about their accessories - jewelry, hat bands, knife sheaths, spurs, baldrics, kerchiefs, plumes. I want to know what's in their pockets - a whetstone, a pack of chewing gum, a jackknife, a pocket comb, a string of rosary beads, an engraved silver matchsafe, an old love letter.

And truth be told, this goes beyond just clothing. My Flashing Blades character has a "library card" - the index card on which I keep track of all the books in his collection. My Boot Hill character ordered custom saddle, boots, spurs, chaps, and gunbelts, all with embossed crescent moons in honor of his last name, Luna, and when he received a charro suit as a gift, the silver conchos were moons as well. My Traveller free trader captain designed his crew uniforms including the patches for his ship and his trading company; the same logos were painted on the ship and its air/raft, and on the walls of his office in his cabin.

A big part of what immerses me in a setting is material culture, "the aspect of culture manifested by the physical objects and architecture of a society." I love authors who tell me Arbuckles is the brand name on a sack of coffee beans, or directors and set dressers who put bottles of Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray soda in their characters' hands. It draws me into the world, brings it to life, makes it real, and a bit of obsessive styling or collecting does the same thing for my characters.

Tuesday, August 13, 2024

#RPGaDay2024 for 14 August: Compelling characters

Today's prompt: Compelling characters

As a player, I'm very strongly a Develop-In-Play guy, letting characterisation emerge through the events of the game rather than trying to have a strong sense of who my character is right from the giddyup. That's a little tougher as a referee, especially with my emphasis on intrigue - a big part of my prep is creating a social milieu for the players to explore - so my approach to non-player characters is a bit more like many gamers approach their own player characters.

So what are my basics for creating non-player characters with whom players are likely to interact?

  • Relationships: characters have spouses, children, siblings, close and distant relations, coworkers, friends, romantic partners, allies, rivals.
  • Goals: characters have personal preoccupations, avocations, ambitions.
  • Strengths and weaknesses: characters have abilities and deficiencies, insight and blind spots, mastery and inexperience.
  • Quirks: characters have hobbies, interests, habits, 'a distincitive way of looking at things.'
It doesn't take much to do this, honestly; because of my extensive use of random reactions and morale rolls, my goal is to "prep to improvise," so often just the non-player character's basic attributes - and I lean heavily on generic characters for this - plus a couple of tags or keywords or something can be enough to help maintain consistency in characterisation.

In my experience, non-player characters should feel like real people living in a real world, and my prep and referee roleplaying is toward that end.

#RPGaDay2024 for 13 August: Evocative environments

Today's prompt: Evocative environments

Way back when I came up with random dueling locations - I present to you these fields of honor . . .

This Field of Honor
F is for Field of Honor
Yet Another Field of Honor

Monday, August 12, 2024

#RPGaDay2024 for 12 August: RPG with well supported campaigns

Today's prompt: RPG with well supported campaigns

There are many roleplaying games out there with literally dozens of campaign modules.

Flashing Blades has exactly one. But it's a corker.

An Ambassador's Tales by game designer Mark Pettigrew put the player characters in the service of a French diplomat and agent of the Cardinal (Richelieu or Mazarin, no matter), and together they travel the length and breadth of Europe in the service of the King. The adventure sees the player characters visit Habsburg Austria, the Serene Republic of Venice (at Carnival, no less), Spain, the Dutch United Provinces, and finally England.

There's a lot to like about this adventure - action, intrigue, terrific locations, three-dimensional antagonists - but my favorite part is the potential rewards the adveturers may receive at the end. The campaign fulfills the promise in the core rules that social and professional advancement shouldn't come exclusively from die rolls. Characters may receive promotions, be knighted, and earn gold as a result of their efforts in the service of France, and it's something I keep in mind as I run FB, looking for opportunities for someone to step in and send a character to the head of the class.

Saturday, August 10, 2024

#RPGaDay2024 for 10-11 August: TV and One Shots

Saturday's prompt: RPG you'd like to see on TV
Sunday's prompt: RPG with well supported one-shots

What roleplaying game would I like to see on TV? Traveller, except I already have Firefly. Flashing Blades, except I already have Zorro. Boot Hill, except I already have Deadwood. GangBusters, except I already have Boardwalk Empire. Chill, except I already have The Night Stalker. Top Secret, except I already have The Man From UNCLE.

So I guess I'm good.

I'm gonna admit I'm not exactly sure what a "well supported one shot" is - how much support does a one-shot adventure need, anyway? I'm guessing they mean games supported by one-shot adventures, in which case I would have to say Traveller leads the pack - and I'm not just talking the incredible run of "classic" little black book adventures, as outstanding as they are. If you've never seen Michael Brown's "2D6 SF Adventures," you're in for a real treat.

I should also mention the adventures for Flashing Blades. A handful of adventures come with the core rules and the High Seas supplement; there are also two volumes of short adventures plus one campaign adventure - more about that on Monday. Like the "classic" Traveller adventures, the adventures for Flashing Blades expand the world and provide the referee with reuseable non-player characters, organizations, and locations - while Traveller's adventures give you starships bases and labs and planets, FB give you taverns and theatres and villas and fencing salles and forts, and they take you to Venice and Spain and Florence and the Netherlands and the Caribbean. FGU packed heck of a lot of refereeing material in its adventures, for which I'm personally very grateful.

Friday, August 9, 2024

#RPGaDay2024 for 9 August: An accessory you'd like to see

Today's prompt: An accessory you'd like to see

A dozen years ago I picked up a book, Barmi: A Mediterranean City Through The Ages, which traces through lavish illustrations the development of a fictional city somewhere on the western Mediterranean littoral. As someone who works in land use planning, I was immediately enthralled, seeing a Stone Age settlement transformed through the years to a modern city. I was also intrigued by the possibility of using Barmi as a ruritania in my Flashing Blades campaign - it took some years, but that's the campaign I'm running right now.

Barmi is in fact only one in a series of books on fictional cities around the world: Lebek, in the Low Countries; San Rafael, in Central America; and Umm El Madayan, on the coast of North Africa, each tracing the development from pre-history to the modern day.

Around the time Honor + Intrigue came out, I was approached about working on some setting-neutral city guides for swashbuckling roleplaying games. I declined - this is my hobby, not my vocation - but if anyone was to ever take on a project like that, for any adventure game in any genre, really, these books would be extraordinary models on which to base them: a timeline of evolving city maps, punctuated by illustrated details about construction and daily life.

Thursday, August 8, 2024

#RPGaDay2024 for 8 August: An accessory you appreciate

Today's prompt: An accessory you appreciate

I've been a fan of Rory's Story Cubes since I first discovered them more than a dozen years ago. I bought them to play with the Cabin Kids, which we still do, but I quickly discovered they made a great creative tool for my style of preparation, fleshing out bare bones random encounters.

Free associating with the Story Cubes helps keep me from falling into predictable ruts as a referee, as I noted in the linked post: " . . . I would never, ever have come up with anything even remotely like this on my own. The Story Cubes lead my imagination to wholly unexpected places, which is what makes them so much fun." I lean heavily into genre tropes and clichés to help with prep before the game and improvisation at the table in actual play, and toward that end I read and watch cape-and-sword fiction to feed my imagination, but what makes them tropes is their recurrence in different works. I like to think my swashbuckling 'highlight reel' is pretty extensive, but Story Cubes allow me to approach that knowledge with fresh eyes.

Wednesday, August 7, 2024

#RPGaDay2024 for 7 August: RPG with 'good form'

Today's prompt: RPG with 'good form'

good form: (chiefly UK) behavior that is both morally and socially correct; proper manner, decorum or etiquette.

2e Boot Hill has my favorite 'social system' of any roleplaying game, consisting of a reaction table and a morale roll. What makes it so distinctive is the reaction table, introduced in BH1 Mad Mesa, the first published adventure for BH, which isn't based on modifiers for an attribute like Charm or Charisma but on your character's earned reputation.

It's an elegant system, one I like so much I adapted it to Flashing Blades. So how does this relate to 'morally and socially correct behavior'? It's all in the modifiers. Behaviors which earn a character positive reaction roll modifiers include respect for law and order, friendship, heroism, belonging - honestly, this is way better than alignment in influencing how characters act, because it directly affects how non-player character see the adventurer, whether or not they will react favorably, offer assistance, and so on.

#RPGaDay2024 for 6 August: RPG that is easy to use

Today's prompt: RPG that is easy to use

Arguably the simplest roleplaying game I played was Metagaming's Melee and Wizard, the skirmish rules that would form the basis for - or were derived from? - The Fantasy Trip. Now, many gamers consider Melee and Wizard to be exclusively skirmish rules, but I'm inclined to believe that if the rules allow me to roleplay a character in an imaginary world, that's sufficient. Dawn Patrol and En Garde! are unquestionably roleplaying games given my personal conception of roleplaying, and based on what we actually did with the two 'microgames,' there's no reason I can see for excluding them.

I picked up both Melee and Wizard in 1978 or 1979, and indeed we used them primarily for arena battles at first, but as (some of) our characters survived more than two or three battles, they began to take on a life of their own, so we grew curious about the world around the arena and their lives beyond its walls. Whereas AD&D was our game for exploring dark dungeons and howling wildernesses, Melee and Wizard lent themselves to a sort of urban fantasy setting centered on the fighting pit - first there was a tavern where our gladiators drank and wenched and gambled and brawled between matches, then a neighborhood grew around that and a city around that.

The whole thing very quickly developed a Sanctuary feel - remember, Thieves World was published in 1978, contemporaneously with Wizard - leavened with a bit of Lankhmar, in particular a Thieves Guild that would offer bribes to fighters to throw battles, a dangerous proposition as survival couldn't be guaranteed for characters attempting to yield or feign serious injury.

In any case, this lasted about a year or so, and by then I'd largely moved on from fantasy adventure gaming for Traveller, Boot Hill, and Top Secret. The whole experience would strongly influence a 1e AD&D character I created years later, a high Dexterity fighter who I modeled on one of my old Melee gladiators.

What stands out in retrospect was how the barebone rules didn't prevent us from making stuff up on the fly as we needed it for our adventures away from the arena, and then would find their way back into the fighting pit - scaling walls, leaping, taunting, cajoling. With three stats and no skills, we still managed to have what would arguably be my first real experience with swashbuckling adventure outside of the Yaquinto boardgame. Fond memories indeed.

Tuesday, August 6, 2024

Sea Soldiers: Marines in Flashing Blades

MARINE
A Marine is a Soldier in the Royal Marines Regiment. Marines are trained to fight at sea, and are stationed onboard warships and important government ships. Being a Marine is quite dangerous, especially since French Marines were expected to learn by experience. They had their initial training on land, although expected to serve at sea. Characters with this background are assumed to have spent enough time on ships to have 'learned the ropes.' Characters from other backgrounds who join the Royal Marines will always start as Recruits (not Troopers) and will be expected to fight at sea. Characters with Marine background are allowed to determine starting rank normally (just as Soldiers in
Flashing Blades). The Royal Marines are recruited in both France and the Colonies. - High Seas, 2.2 NEW BACKGROUNDS & SKILL CHOICES, p. 1

The piracy supplement High Seas gives us French Royal Marines as a character background and career path, along with a very good colonial "small wars" adaptation of the original military campaign minigame in the Flashing Blades core rules. Established in 1622 by Cardinal Richelieu - who was sincerely dedicated to improving France's presence as a marine power - as les compagnies ordinaire de la mer, the first royal marines were composed of independent companies commanded by naval officers to patrol the docks and man the ships of the nascent royal navy. By 1626, the independent companies were first organized as a regiment, le régiment de La Marine, and through various reformations and renamings through the rest of the 17th century, French marines would remain a fixture of the Royal Navy, though not without challenges, such as a succession of ministers of war appropriating the various marine regiments for service in the Royal Army.

A Marine's duties are described in High Seas as follows (4.2.3 Marine Duty, p. 8).

Marines may be stationed either on land (as additional garrison troops for forts) or at sea. For every two months served aboard ships, a Marine may spend one month at a colonial port. While garrisoned in the colonies, Marines determine Colonial Campaigns in the same way as Colonial Soldiers. Marine troops are added to the French total in Colonial Campaigns, but are usually stationed only in small numbers (twenty or forty).

At sea, Marines are assigned to serve as boarding and defensive troops on French Warships and Merchantmen. On a small or medium sized ship (such as a Corsair, Merchantman, or Small Warship) a squad of twenty Marines will be stationed. Larger vessels may have forty or sixty Marines (two or three squads). Warships rnay carry large numbers of Marines for raids.

On board Merchantmen, Marines are only defensive. Roll for normal encounters for the ship (as detailed in section 6.2.3). If a hostile encounter occurs, use the rules in section 6.4 to determine the outcome.

On Warships, Marines rnay participate in Naval Battles (as boarders), or in land raids on foreign colonies'(as raiders). The design and use of naval battles are up to the discretion of the Gamemaster. If the High Seas players are familiar with wargaming, the Gamemaster may wish to use some advanced rules for naval battles (see the beginning of section 6.4 for a list of good ship-to-ship wargaming rules). Otherwise, the rules in section 6.4 may be adapted for small naval battles.

Marine raids on foreign colonies should be handled as detailed in section 4.2.2. Marine raiders, however, may face varying numbers of defenders, depending upon the colony and the situation (as determined by the Gamemaster). After successfully taking a foreign port, Marines may roll twice for Booty.

So, good enough as far as it goes. Can it be more?

First, in 17th century France, another option for characters wishing to serve as sea soldiers is a military Order, the Knights of Saint John, based on the Mediterranean island of Malta. Sergents, lay brothers of the order, served as marines aboard the knights' galleys, and later roundships, in their ceaseless war with the Barbary corsairs and the Sublime Porte. Sergents can also be found at commanderies - abbeys - of the order in France. A campaign of player character knights, sergents, and sailors aboard a ship of the order could be a lot of fun.

Second, does a character with the Marine background have to be a marine at all? Looking at the skills available to Sailors/Pirates and Marines in High Seas (2.2 New Backgrounds & Skill Choices, p. 2), both backgrounds offer the following skills: Acrobatics, Captaincy, Seamanship (which Sailors/Pirates receive automatically), and Strategy. Both backgrounds may take the Gunnery martial skill as well. The main differences are in bonus skills between the two backgrounds - Marines get Captaincy and Strategy, Sailors/Pirates get Acrobatics - the presence of Pilot on the Sailor/Pirate's skill list, and martial skills, with Marines getting three and Sailors/Pirates only two.

With this in mind, a character with the Marine background could take the necessary skills to be eligible to sign on for a Sail or Gunnery position aboard ship from their own background skills. This effectively makes a "marine" simply a sailor who is better trained at fighting than his shipmates.

So is a "trained fighter" really a thing in High Seas? Well, as a matter of fact . . .

Once an enemy ship has been grappled, boarders (led by the ship's Master-at-Arms) may swarm aboard. At this point it is necessary to determine how many Trained Fighters are in each crew, as shown below:
  • 1/4 of a Merchantman Crew are Trained Fighters
  • 1/3 of a Navy Ship or Privateer Crew are Trained Fighters
  • 1/2 of any English or Dutch Crew are Trained Fighters
  • All Pirates are Trained Fighters
  • All Marines are Trained Fighters
  • All of a Ship's Officers are Trained Fighters
A boarding party may only be made up of Trained Fighters. (6.4.7 Grappling and Boarding Melee, p. 20)

So, a "Marine" then could be a Royal Marine, a sergent of the Knights of Saint John, or simply a sailor or pirate who's a bit more badass in a fight and serves in boarding actions.

My current campaign includes one more option for service as a sea soldier: the marine militia. Members of the city militia may also serve aboard the chamber of commerce-owned privateer galleys as "marines" and are treated as Trained Fighters.

Monday, August 5, 2024

#RPGaDay for 5 August: RPG With Great Writing

Today's prompt: RPG with great writing

Opinions about Gary Gygax run the gamut among gamers, but page for page, pound for pound, the 1e AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide remains the most influential roleplaying game rulebook/manual in my collection. Thirty-five years on, I still reach for it for refereeing advice, written in Gygax's uniquely florid style.

Like many gamers, Gygax's writing style, in particular his vocabulary, was influential far beyond playing AD&D. I distinctly recall lying on my bed, or the floor of the family room, with the DMG spread open in front of me and my red hardcover Merriam-Webster dictionary close at hand, so that I didn't miss any of the pearls secreted in that crowded tome.

But beyond the rules and advice and the lavender prose, what sticks with me still is Gygax's depth of knowledge, of history, mythology, and literature, fantasy and otherwise that came through in his prose. This was not at all surprising in the context of the time - scratch a wargamer and you'd find an amateur historian lurking beneath the skin. A love of books shines through in references to Bulfinch, Shakespeare, and Lives of the Saints alongside Anderson, Dunsany, Sprague de Camp, and Leiber, and Gygax's affection, enthusiasm, and respect for literature fed into my own. Gary Gygax spoke directly to my love of words and ideas, an abiding passion I still feel today.

Sunday, August 4, 2024

#RPGaDay2024 for 4 August: RPG with great art


Today's prompt: RPG with great art

Without a doubt, my favorite artwork in a roleplaying game product is the Dan Brereton illustrated Nocturnals: A Midnight Companion for Mutants and Masterminds. Nocturnals is one of my favorite comics, and Brereton's fully painted illustrations are a big part of that, along with great characters and a terrific setting, of course.

When I purged my roleplaying library about fifteen years ago, I hung on to 1e M&M and this sourcebook, and while I'd probably use the old TSR Marvel Super Heroes FASERIP rules these days to run a Nocturnals-inspired campaign, the sourcebook would be an invaluable resource as well as a beautiful one.

I discovered the series when it was first released in a comic book shop in Fresno, California in the summer of '95 and was immediately taken by its mix of gangsters, aliens, and undead rendered in Brereton's signature style. As I approach a signature birthday, the temptation to get a Doc Horror or Gunwitch tattoo keeps growing on me.

Saturday, August 3, 2024

#RPGaDay2024 Blog-O-Rama!

Hey, this looks like fun!

I'm a couple days behind, so I'll catch up here.

1/8 First RPG bought this year
Spire: The City Must Fall by Grant Howitt and Christopher Taylor, published by Rowan, Rook, and Decard in 2018. I don't recall how I heard about this game, but as I was preparing a city campaign and I like to cast a wide net for ideas, I picked up the quickstart and liked it well enough to finally shell out for the .pdf. Contrasting my long-established refereeing habits with how other gamers approach the same challenges and opportunities helps me break free from imagination calcification. Spire was much more traditional than I expected and I was able to glean a few interesting ideas - unfortunately I can't share which ones just yet, in the event my players are peeking. That could actually make an interesting future post, at the opportune moment . . .

2/8 Most recently played
I'm currently running a play-by-post Flashing Blades campaign at the RPG Pub, but my last experience as a face-to-face player specifically was 2e Boot Hill, several years back. This isn't counting some Traveller, Burros & Bandidos, and Flashing Blades solo play.

I tend to be a referee far more often than I am a player. Before Flashing Blades, I ran 1e Chill face-to-face for the Cabin Kids.

3/8 Most often played RPG
Given my blogging pursuits, this answer surprises some people: "classic" Traveller. I've played and run more Traveller than I have any other game by a fair amount. Merchant princes, independent troubleshooters, mercs for hire - played 'em all off-and-on since the late Seventies. No matter what I'm playing or running at any given moment, Charted Space - my house-ruled Judges Guild sectors, not the canonical GDW OTU - is always lurking in the back of my mind.

In fact, in quiet moments recently I've been daydreaming about a lost colony Traveller campaign, set in a system behind the fringe of Charted Space, forgotten - perhaps - by Humaniti.

Sunday, July 21, 2024

More Adventure Gamer Than Not

Friend of the blog EOTB at Chronicled Scribblings of the Itinerant Overlord spotted my post the other day about "classic adventure gaming" and was kind enough to respond, providing some very helpful background.

First, I'm not a podcast listener - the voices in my head don't like competition - so I missed the whole development of "classic adventure gaming" by EOTB and friends. I'll let EOTB take it from here:
And this gets to the reason for starting up the podcast - we want to reach people who aren't playing any form of "D&D" but love the idea of hanging out with their friends to explore lost tombs, find fabulous treasure, and cross swords with personal nemeses. But because D&D has been around for a long time now, with significant social media reach outside the membership of the hobby, when many of those people hear the word "role-playing" they think "an adult version of tea party".

Because that is what they read, see, and hear.

And often, they're just not interested in that. You can get all of the adventure I listed above in other media, with zero tea party. There's no reason at all to play D&D if you don't like tea party. You can play video games as a group, remotely. You can meet up somewhere and run a 40K scenario. You can get your fill and never have to risk sitting across from someone telling you that unless you are willing to repeat that in character, it never happened at all and they won't consider it valid for play. Or your funny quip that made everyone laugh, yeah...the DM insists your character said it too.
(emphases in the original - BV)
So, I'm the epitome of "a little knowledge yadda yadda" in this.

EOTB's point is that many people who might be receptive to imaginary adventures with friends around the dining table equate "roleplay" with "playacting" - it's his assertion that this was never the intention of the creators of the hobby - I mean, OD&D bills itself as rules for "fantastic medieval wargames campaigns" - and "roleplaying" has come to means something quite different from my humble concept of simply "making decisions as your character." "Classic adventure gaming" is an concerted effort to unburden the hobby of a phrase that can be self-limiting.

"Adventure gaming" isn't really something new, actually; this has bubbled up in various forums and the blogosphere over many years - but this seems to be an effort to gain wider acceptance, particularly in differentiating CAG from whatever it is the OSR's become, and in light of the diversification of the hobby: "story games," "narrative games," &c. Fortunately for me, I'm not the only person with questions about to what extent charaterisation plays in CAG, and EOTB addresses that as well:
But now after explaining further why we arrived at the stance of rejecting the term roleplaying completely, let's get to the meat of BV's question:
"This is the essence of Develop-In-Play rather than Develop-At-Start gaming. Old-school and roots gamers tend to be speak in terms of "story" as an emergent property arising from actual play rather than one planned by the referee - story is something seen in hindsight - and from my own experience, so is characterisation. The more decisions I make for my character, the more subsequent decisions are likely to reflect a consistency and a coherence with what came before. My characters develop interests, habits, and quirks that build on those experiences and ambitions and "my guy" becomes someone else altogether, very different from where the campaign started. I don't know if EOTB's concept of CAG necessarily excludes or proscribes this."
The short answer is: there's nothing about this that is outside the bounds of CAG, at all.

Every time I create a character it is essentially myself as that class type. But as BV says, the character, by virtue of interacting with the game world, often becomes a variation of myself that is different than all the other variations of myself I've played before. I might never bother giving the guy a name (I do name some of my characters) but he's still different than EOTB-6106 and EOTB-5114. He's made different enemies, developed different habits and often would handle the same situation differently than another character of mine would.

But he also might not. He might handle it exactly the same. And that's the point: I don't care if he winds up different or the same as some other character. He's not why I'm playing, what happens with him as a character per se is some sort of happy accident, and it might be nothing worth remembering. Because I'm not here to develop a character, I'm here - me, EOTB-0001 - to explore tombs, find treasure, cross swords, and kick ass. He's the tool I use to do it, just like a good hammer. Nothing about the hammer is my hobby, however. It's rather incidental to the point even if I truly appreciate a great hammer.
I kinda suspected this, from the way EOTB wrote about refereeing non-player characters - " . . . the knowledge, goals, abilities, resources, and quirks of the NPC or monster they are running . . . " - but it was great to have it confirmed so clearly here: "The acceptable roleplaying floor for an individual participant must be zero so that people who aren't into that can relax and have fun. The ceiling can be whatever each group determines." (emphases in the original - BV)

And that becomes an important part of expectations setting at the start of whatever campaign a referee wants to run. I was upfront with prospective players for my new Flashing Blades play-by-post campaign that it's a "social megadungeon," in which the "rooms" are non-player characters and the "passages" the web of relationships between them - there's treasure to find, swords to cross, and even tombs to discover, but the main modus of exploration in this campaign is talking to people. This is in no way precluded by CAG, of course, but it's imperative to make clear what "adventure" means in the context of this campaign: duels, affairs, intrigue, sure, but also career advancement and social climbing, and if zero roleplaying is the floor, then a player should also understand that the ceiling is quite a bit higher than if I was running a good ol' fashioned dungeon crawl and leave room for others to explore and enjoy that space as well.

As for me?
With "roleplaying = playacting" as a starting point, I'd reject that term, too, and I can relate to how that perception of the hobby could be seriously off-putting to potential players who just want to imagine themselves, say, swashing bucklers in the gardens of Fontainebleau.

Playing 5e with the Cabin Kids and their friends years ago reminded me so much of my own experiences when I was introduced to D&D. 5e is a gawdawful mess of a game and I was throwing stuff out right and left because once the kids had their stats and classes, bought some gear and figured out their spells, they were ready to roll. Backgrounds? Backstory? Fuck that, I'm a ranger with a bow, let's go kill a dragon and find some treasure! And yet, as we played, personalities emerged, tiny bits of backstory crept in here and there - I think there's a certain amount of inevitability to this when you hand creative people an imaginary world to mess around in.

Me, I start every character, every game with some variation on the same basic motivation: "Out there is a fortune, waiting to be had! You think I'll let it go? You're mad!" Get rich, or die tryin'. Let's go kill a dragon.

So I'm more adventure gamer than not.

Thursday, July 18, 2024

Make Mine . . . Adventure Roleplaying?!

Friend of the blog EOTB at Chronicled Scribblings of the Itinerant Overlord recently outlined the precepts of classic adventure gaming (CAG), defined thusly:
It is the style of gaming presumed and presented in the 1E PHB and DMG which was common before a playacting style of "roleplaying" grew into a new normal. It rejects the term "roleplaying game" or "RPG" because today those names firmly convey implicit expectations running contrary to practices of successful adventure gaming.
I've liked the phrase "adventure gaming" as a description for the hobby since I first encountered Tim Kask's regrettably short-lived Adventure Gaming magazine decades ago, and a lot of what EOTB and friends write hits hard for me, in particular:
Adventure gaming is campaign based; the idea of one-shot games is foreign to adventure gaming. A game world exists and persists apart from any group of characters. When combined with the expectation that players grow in mastery of a set of rules, a single set of rules is used for very long periods of time (if not indefinitely) so that players gain enough time in a single ruleset to understand it thoroughly as opposed to a superficial understanding.

Nobody is trying to tell a story. A GM writes places and situations; if a future is written, it is the future of what will happen in that location or what those NPCs will accomplish if the players choose not to engage with it or them at all. No attempt is made to pre-determine the course of what will happen if the players decide to engage with that content. Because the GM has determined the goals, resources, abilities, local geography, and "personality" of any NPCs at a location, they have all the tools necessary to react believably and distinctly to whatever actions or plans the players may devise at the time of contact.

Should their plans and luck dictate such a result compared to the preparations and abilities of their opposition, players are allowed to "win" situations convincingly and without artificial tension or danger imposed by the GM. Conversely, the game is generous with 2nd chance magic so the GM need not prevent bad plans and poor play from reaping a whirlwind.

Player agency is paramount. The burden of what course of action is taken is on the players, not the GM. Adventure gaming is not well-paired with a table made up entirely of passive players, regardless of how excited a GM may be to try it. Many tears occur when a GM attempts to run an adventure game with players who really want the GM to tell them what they will be doing tonight, with players making only minor decisions through the course of the evening but otherwise seeing if they can succeed at the goal a GM has set before them. It is tailor made for groups having a minimum of one player who likes to make decisions. Not everyone has to be a decision maker if the rest of the group is comfortable with allowing a minority of however many to perform the role a GM performs in typical roleplaying campaigns of deciding what the group's course of action will be for a gaming session.

A GM accepts that world building and location/scenario writing is a parallel but separate hobby to the game itself. GMs enjoy worldbuilding for its own sake. There is no feeling that time spent devising locations and NPCs is "wasted" if players do not interact with it. Instead, because the GM has written out the effect of players not engaging with that content at all, the game world changes accordingly and seems to the players to move even where they've not personally intervened.
Music to my ears, truly.

I do hang up a bit in a couple of places, and let me make clear right from the giddyup none of my hang-ups are meant to disagree with or cast aspersion on the precepts of classic adventure gaming presented here. Rather, my hang-ups reflect the ways in which personally I'm not a "classic adventure gamer."

My personal conception or ideation - I'm loathe to call it a definition - of roleplaying is, "Making decisions as your character." If your character is a game-world avatar of you sitting at the table, as in CAG, then that still fits my concept of roleplaying. So does the "playacting style" EOTB describes as it's practiced and advocated for by many in the hobby. From where I stand, roleplaying isn't strictly deep-character-immersion or "talking in funny voices." "My guy" is a perfectly valid approach to roleplaying for me.

That said, I find that while I start generally somewhere in the vicinity of "my guy" - random generation, optimising what I can where I can, handwaving backstory - I rarely stay there for long. For those familiar with the history of GDW's En Garde! the game started strictly as tabletop fencing skirmish rules but over time and repeated play, the players started to think of their characters as existing in the setting, and wanted to know more about their lives. From this came rules for military service, carousing, mistresses, and gentlemen's clubs. That fits my concept of roleplaying to a tee, and indeed it slots in with CAG as well, which reinforces for me the notion of En Garde! as one of the earliest adventure games.

From my own experience, making those kinds of decisions for my character - what to pursue and how to pursue it - suggests a nascent personality which influences subsequent decisions. While I start off an adventure gamer, as I play the campaign I'm prone to make decisions less based on my own logic sitting at the table and more from the perspective of the imaginary character in the imaginary setting, their experiences, their ambitions, their place in the game-world. As I make more and more decisions as the character rather than as a player, that's when a backstory may emerge, in dribs and drabs, further coloring how I think of, and think as, "my guy."

This is the essence of Develop-In-Play rather than Develop-At-Start gaming. Old-school and roots gamers tend to be speak in terms of "story" as an emergent property arising from actual play rather than one planned by the referee - story is something seen in hindsight - and from my own experience, so is characterisation. The more decisions I make for my character, the more subsequent decisions are likely to reflect a consistency and a coherence with what came before. My characters develop interests, habits, and quirks that build on those experiences and ambitions and "my guy" becomes someone else altogether, very different from where the campaign started.

I don't know if EOTB's concept of CAG necessarily excludes or proscribes this. Consider the following:
There is no expectation players will act at the table as if a game were not occurring; players are expected - not discouraged - to use what the modern hobby mistakenly disparages as "metagaming". A player who knows that fire prevents trolls from regenerating but declines to use it because "my character doesn't know that" is roleplaying instead of adventure gaming.

Conversely, GMs must not metagame - because a GM has perfect knowledge, they must limit themselves within the knowledge, goals, abilities, resources, and quirks of the NPC or monster they are running at the time in order for a functional game to occur. This is almost the exact opposite of how most roleplaying games view the player-GM dynamic, and an example of how character-first roleplaying flipped the playstyle in a 180 away from how early games ran.
(emphasis added - BV)
I agree with the idea of "metagaming" as presented here: I tend to think of anything in the rules as within the realm of knowledge of the player characters, but I also tend to violate one of the principles of CAG EOTB sets forth - "Because a GM is comfortable with highly experienced players, rules tinkering for tinkering's sake, or perhaps to artificially reintroduce an atmosphere of player uncertainty due to ignorance, is discouraged." - in that I will switch things up to create surprises or new challenges, such as introducing trolls that are vulnerable to salt rather than fire, frex.

More to the point, if the referee can be expected to create characterisations for non-player characters, monsters, and the like, and hold to them, perhaps the intent is not to limit players from doing the same so much as it is to not lose sight of playing the game. Hopefully EOTB may weigh in on this in a future post.

As I said, as things stand, while I'm very much a roots gamer, I wouldn't label myself a classic adventure gamer as styled here. Perhaps "adventure roleplayer" is more my speed, because after weeks or months or, ideally, years of playing, "my guy" is rarely just my avatar any longer.

Tuesday, July 16, 2024

Loot!

A dozen years ago Desert Scribe at Super Galactic Dreadnaught posted about "non-standard treasures" in the Holmes edition Dungeons & Dragons sample dungeon and B2 Keep on the Borderlands and B1 In Search of the Unknown. The posts are effectively a guide to looting the Caves of Chaos and Quasqueton, and I loved them so much that I said in the comments I wanted to do the same for Flashing Blades, a game with its own actual, literal booty table (FB core rules, p. 28)!

Years passed.

And at long last, here we are.

Clothing
coat, gentleman's, cloth-of-gold 50 £
hat, cloth-of-gold 15 £
suit, gentleman's, cloth-of-gold 100 £


Decorative Items
chandelier, Venetian glass 500 £
chess set, silver and gold pieces 250 £
goblets, crystal 150 £
idol, Inca 100 £
lilies, white, 1 doz. 1 £
rose, red 1 £
tapestry, medieval of knights jousting 100 £
tea service, gold-inlaid with silver utensils 75 £


Functional Items
blowgun, genuine Caribe Indian 10 £
book, Da Vinci manuscript 1000 £
books, library set 100-200 £
bow, genuine Caribe Indian 20 £
chamberpot, silver with coat of arms 25 £
dog, hunting 70 £
falcon, hunting 60 £
longsword, fine quality 100 £
parrot, exotic talking 50 £
racket and ball, tennis 10 £


Jewelry
crucifix, jeweled 200 £
earring, gold pirate hoop 5 £
gem, Constantinople Emerald 10,000 £
gem, Constantinople Emerald (wax forgery) 1000 £
gems, bag of 1000 £
medallion, Knights of the Golden Fleece (melted down) 120 £
necklace, Inca 60 £
ring, small gold 25 £

There are a lot of items described - Delft tiles, marble statues, cherry bon-bons - in the various FB adventures which aren't ascribed values. This is a missed opportunity, one I may have to take up at some point in the future!

Monday, July 8, 2024

More Pseudoskills

In our new campaign, one of the players created a pseudoskill for his character, an unconventional healer using the Physician skill house rule.

Chemist + Physician = Paracelsian Medicine

Not gonna lie, I was pretty excited to see this idea of creating specialty skills out of the standard skill list take root in another player's character.

Here are some additional ideas for pseudoskills.

Oratory + Bargaining = Negotiation
I created this one for my own character, a smooth talking Student of Law, and used it to help his landlord get an investment loan to become an olive oil merchant. Negotiation is the polite or refined form of hustling, as represented by the Bargaining skill.

Oratory + Literacy Master = Poetry
Oratory + Seduction = Sonnetry
This one was also for my character - I wanted to make poetry a thing for him, a part of his Occitan heritage. These are pretty self-explanatory; one normally doesn't take check marks for Literacy, but a character pursuing this as a pseudoskill should be permitted to do so, using Wit as the defining attribute.

Oratory + Theology = Preaching
The ability to deliver a rousing or edifying sermon or a moving eulogy, this is an obvious choice for priests and ministers.

Theology + History = Hagiography
Hagiography is the "lives of the saints" - this is useful for identifying the connection between a saint's name and a location or an organization, similar to the Heraldry skill, or for invoking the proper patron for blessing an activity.

Horsemanship + Polearms = Jousting
Jousting was still a thing in early modern France; frex, jousts were held as part of Louis XIII's coronation celebration and appear in Richard Lester's 1973 epic The Three Musketeers. This could be a remarkable alternative to rapiers and pistols as a dueling challenge!

Magistracy + Pilot = Maritime Law
Magistracy + Heraldry = Salic Law
Two more areas of legal expertise, the law of the sea and the law of noble succession.

Friday, June 28, 2024

A Small Footprint, Or A Curious Omission

I stumbled across a review of Flashing Blades by Arthur at Refereeing and Reflection: Tangled Thoughts On RPGs and Related Hobbies published about seven years ago. Here's a short excerpt.
What’s even more interesting to me than these rules themselves, however, is Pettigrew’s notes on their use. He makes the entirely fair point that they aren’t necessarily going to suit all groups – especially if you’re just running a one-shot – but for the purposes of an ongoing campaign they can add a heap of flavour. On top of that, he even makes the point that you can use them to break up periods of adventuring (with one or two adventures happening a year) and make a truly generational game, with the campaign unfolding over a span of years. This I find fascinating because it has Pettigrew enunciating, a full year before it was published, the concept of generational play over an epic span of history which became a major factor in Pendragon – thus anticipating a widely-celebrated innovation in game design and in the idea of what a campaign might cover.
I find it intriguing that FB still gets positive reviews, in this instance thirty-three years after it was released, as well as a well-deserved call-out for innovation in roleplaying games.

It's rare that I find anyone with anything bad to say about the game. Many of the retrospectives I read over the years speak highly of Flashing Blades, and the stories of different campaigns are fun to read. And that made me curious: how big a foootprint did this fun, innovative game make when it was released?

If the major roleplaying game magazines of the mid-Eighties are any indicator, Flashing Blades didn't even leave a pinky toeprint. A search of the indices of Dragon, Polyhedron, Space Gamer, and White Dwarf don't mention the game at all: no reviews, no articles, no adventures, nothing. Only Different Worlds mentions it, with reviews of the core rules and the Parisian Adventure and High Seas supplements.

That makes the game's continuing good vibes, which appear to be largely a blogosphere phenomenon, all the more fascinating forty years after its release.

Monday, June 24, 2024

You Got Your Boot Hill In My Flashing Blades! Reputation and Non-Player Character Reactions

Other gamers are suprised sometimes when I'm asked about my favorite roleplaying game and I tell them it's original, "classic" Traveller. In fact, I've played more Traveller over the years than any other game, roleplaying or otherwise. As a result, I've internalized a lot of Traveller's rules, which is why when I need something like a reaction table or encounter ranges or something, I tend to default back to the system I know so well.

When I returned to Flashing Blades about thirteen or fourteen years ago, I brought in Traveller's reaction table; random non-player reactions are something of a cornerstone to how I referee roleplaying games, and I can recite the little black book table and its modifiers from memory. In the years since I last ran FB, however, I played in a three-year Boot Hill campaign, which has my favorite reaction table in roleplaying games, full stop.

The first thing to understand is that 2e BH doesn't have a "social attribute" for player characters: no Charm, no Charisma, no Fellowship. It also lacks social skills, or really any skills at all, and the original rules include only one social rule, minor (non-player) character morale. Boot Hill's NPC Reaction Table was introduced in its first published module, BH1 Mad Mesa, and it was included again in BH2 Lost Conquistador Mine. For a game with no social attribute or skills, it's absolute genius, a rule based on the adventurer's reputation, built from the player character's actions and standing in the setting.

So as I start a new Flashing Blades campaign, I'm changing up my reaction table. Now there's one important difference between BH and FB; the lattter has attributes and skills affecting social interactions, so the challenge before me is to incorporate those while keeping the essence of a reputation based system. First, there are a few small changes to the reaction tables as published in Mad Mesa and Lost Conquistador Mine - we made some of these same changes when we played our Boot Hill campaign years back.

NPC Reaction Table
Roll Reaction
2 or less Deadly - NPC will attack at slightest provocation
3 Hostile - NPC will attack if player makes slightest threatening move
4 Insulting - NPC tries to pick a fight
5 Suspicious - NPC watches character closely
6 Undecided - NPC watches character
7 Undecided - NPC is cautious
8 Friendly - NPC is off-guard
9 Trusting - NPC is friendly and does not suspect character
10 Helpful - NPC will give reasonable aid
11 Helpful - NPC is willing to join character
12 or more Loyal - NPC is willing to risk his or her life for character

Reaction Roll Modification
-4 Character has killed a friend of the NPC
-2 Character has killed someone known to the NPC
-2 Character is caught performing a criminal action
-1 Character is a known criminal
-3 Character is a known enemy
-1 Character is a stranger
-2 An argument is currently in progress between the character and the NPC
-1 NPC is drunk
+1 Character has previously helped the NPC
+1 Character and NPC are together in the same group
+1 Character refrained from killing a friend of the NPC when given the chance
+1 Character is an individual known to have performed a heroic deed
+2 Character has saved the NPC's life
+2 Character is a known friend
-3 to +3 Character skill check results

Now, Flashing Blades has six social skills: Bargaining, Bribery, Captaincy, Etiquette, Oratory, and Seduction. As presented in the adventures, social skills are pretty straightfoward rolls against an attribute, as seen in thie example from An Ambassador's Tales.
The player-characters must be fairly tactful about dealing with the explosive cake and saving the Ambassador. The Bavarian chocolate cake is the Emperor's pride and joy, and any violent destruction of the pastries or ill-concealed removal might result in a bad scene. Clever characters may think of special excuses for removing the cake (e.g. saying that M. de Bienvenu has been advised by his doctor to avoid sweets, or, perhaps, that he is allergic to chocolate). Similarly, they might 'switch' cakes with him. Otherwise, some player-character with Etiquette skill must make a successful roll against Charm to avoid a scene. - "Habsburg Hospitality," An Ambassador's Tales, p. 8, emphasis added
One of the problems I have with a system that depends on an attribute or skill roll is that the universe comes to be defined by the character sheet. Persuade the count to loan the adventurers four horses? Oratory roll against Charm. Make sparkling small talk with the baroness over supper? Etiquette roll against Charm. Bribe the guard captain to overlook a transgression? Bribery roll against Wit. This is very unsatisfying to me. I jumped through a variety of hoops to make this work in my last FB campaign, but given how smoothly the combination of reputation and morale worked together to create nuanced social system for BH, I want FB social skills to fit into this framework.

The solution is, a social skill check becomes another modifier to the reaction table. Taking a cue from Flashing Blades' combat rules, a social skill check is a simple attribute check but the results will be handled similar to extra damage (4.53 Weapon Damage, p. 17) for serious wounds.

Modifier Social Skill Check Result
+3 Roll of 1 exactly, at referee's discretion
+2 Roll of one-half or less of skill value
+1 Roll of more than one-half of skill value to skill value exactly
-1 Roll of one more than skill value to half-again skill value
-2 Roll of more than half-again skill value
-3 Roll of 20 exactly, at referee's discretion
Example: Jacques has Charm 12 and Etiquette skill. He wants to impress a potential mistress with his manners. The referee determines the skill check number is 14 - Charm 12 with +2 bonus for Etiquette - and Jacques' player rolls a six on 1D20. In addition to whatever modifiers he has for reputation, Jacques gets an additional +2 modifier to the reaction roll to see if the mistress is indeed impressed by Jacques' rizz.
Flashing Blades lacks a Bravery score like Boot Hill, but for purposes of rounding this into a social system, a Wit check will work; if the situation is especially complex, or the non-player character is particularly significant, the referee can even call for opposed Wit checks. Together the skill-influenced reaction roll coupled with a Wit roll produces something comparable to what we used for BH while maintaining the role of FB social skills and skill checks:
  • Negative reaction, fails Wit? Cowed
  • Neutral reaction, fails Wit? Resentful compliance
  • Positive reaction, fails Wit? Possible ally
  • Negative reaction, passes Wit? Possible enemy
  • Neutral reaction, passes Wit? Disinterested
  • Positive reaction, passes Wit? Willing to negotiate
  • And this avoids the situation of a player character's attribute score defining the universe, my personal pet peeve.

    Wednesday, June 19, 2024

    Pinching Pennies? Monthly Expenses in Flashing Blades

    Monthly expenses (food, shelter, etc.) 3 £ x Social Rank (see 3.8) - 3.72 Outfitting, Flashing Blades core rules (p. 12)
    Mark Pettigrew cited Traveller as an influence on Flashing Blades, and it may be most evident in the treatment of careers and character finances. Like Traveller, Flashing Blades likes its player characters struggling to make ends meet and hustling to pay the bills, i.e., seeking out and accepting patronage opportunities. Salaries alone are rarely enough: a Social Rank 5 Minor Official (5.21 The Social Scale, p. 23) in the bureaucracy makes 70 £ annually (MINOR OFFICIAL, 5.53 Ranks and Positions in the Bureaucracy, p. 32) but has monthly expenses totalling 180 £ for the year. Given that most player character bureaucrats start at SR 7 (3.8 SOCIAL RANK, p. 13), the disparity is even greater and the need for additional funds more pressing.

    Player characters don't simply rely on their salaries, of course, receiving an annual allowance (3.71 Yearly Allowance, p. 11) in addition to whatever salary - if any - they receive from their careers. The source of the annual allowance isn't defined; historically, people received income from rentes and other annuities, but inheritance, rich uncle, or a remittance to stay far away are all plausible explanations for a character's yearly allowance as well. Between a salary and a yearly allowance, an adventurer may make enough to meet annual expenses: an SR 7 Gentleman Minor Official bringing home that same 70 £ but with a yearly allowance of 300 £ will still have 188 £ left over, at least until the fermier général and the parish priest extend their hands for taxes and tithes.

    Advantages such as Wealth, Title, and Land may add to an adventurer's yearly allowance, but the latter two also increase expenses in the forms of higher Social Rank and property upkeep, and with greater income comes higher taxes and tithes as well.

    So, can a player character reduce their monthly expenses to better live within their means?

    Before I can answer that we need to understand what exactly is covered by those monthly expenses. First, shelter for most characters will be a rooming house or a hostel, or more rarely an auberge (inn), which generally caters to travellers, not tenants. At Social Rank 3 and below, lodgings are likely shared, with 1-4 beds with straw ticking and cheap blankets in a rented room, pegs on a wall for hanging clothing, a tin basin and a pitcher of water in the hall for ablutions, and the possibility of a cut-down wine barrel for use as a tub with water drawn from a well in the garden. From Social Rank 4 to 7, rooms are usually private, with two thin mattresses, one of straw and one of feathers, covered by a thick wool blankets, a basin and pitcher on a table or chest of drawers, a small wardrobe, a stool or small wooden chair, and bathing water warmed in the kitchen. At Social Rank 8 and above, lodgings are a small suite with a sitting room or salon and a bedroom or bedrooms as well as separate shared quarters for servants. A mattress and thick comforter stuffed with goose down cover the bed, a decorated and gilt ceramic basin and pitcher sit on a carved chest of drawers, and an expansive wardrobe stands against a wall, with a covered, cushioned chair and footstool on a carpeted floor nearby. A glazed iron bathtub is concealed by a screen or secluded in its own small room for privacy.

    Students and soldiers may also find lodging in a rented room in a private residence; d'Artagnan finds a room in the home of the cloth merchant M. Bonacieux after his appointment to the guards company of M. des Essarts on his arrival in Paris in The Three Musketeers, for example. Students of Theology, during their months of study and service, are expected to live in a community with other students not dissimilar to monks; the accomodations are comparable to that of merchants, but the cleaning and cooking are handled by the students themselves. Titled nobles of Social Rank 10 and above may find accomodation in the hôtel or townhome of another noble family, comparable to that of a rooming house but with better quality service - more on that in a moment; for such nobles, monthly expenses are halved as the accomodation is considered a display of hospitality expected of the nobility which is repaid by pourboires (tips or bribes) to the staff and service rendered to the family.

    A single morning meal is provided for lodgers of SR 3 and below, consisting of a thick vegetable soup or stew and brown bread with thin beer or table wine to wash it down; monthly expenses also cover a midday and evening meal, usually purchased from a street vendor. Meat is rare and usually consists of mutton or goat meat added to the stew or baked in a crust, or a fish ragout if near the ocean or a substantial river. If a SR 3 or below rooming house serves meat in its meal more than two or three times a week, the absence of dogs in the neighborhood may be noticeable. Meals are served in wooden or clay bowl or on platters with drinks in clay mugs. At SR 4-7, lodgers may expect to receive a morning and evening meal as part of their expenses; the stew will usually have meat, typically the aforementioned mutton and goat, and roast chicken is common table fare as well. The fish ragout is supplemented with whole fish roasted on a spit. Boiled vegetables are served as sides. Beer and wine remain the most common beverages, with rum or brandy available for an extra fee beyond what's covered as part of a character's monthly expenses. Service is on pewter bowls and platters, while drinks are served in clay or pewter mugs. At SR 8 and above, meals come in courses of four or more, with a variety of meats: roasted mutton and fish are common, with beef and especially wild game appearing with some frequency. Along with platters of boiled vegetables, raw celery is considered a delicacy and exotic New World vegetables such as tomatoes and potatoes may be present as well. Good wine and spirits are served in crystal decanters and goblets while meals are served on china imported from the East Indies or silver bowls and platters.

    Finally, the rules specifically mention food and shelter, but what's about the ever-elusive "etc."? Some services may be covered by monthly expenses. At SR 3 and below, maids will change and launder the characters' bedlinens monthly and the character can get their clothing laundered and crudely patched on the same schedule as well; swashbucklers are a rough and tumble bunch as a rule, and stains and tears should accumulate readily in the course of their adventures. Between SR 4 and 7, linens are changed and quarters swept and dusted weekly, and a washer woman will launder clothing as needed while a seamstress will skillfully mend the garments on the adventurer's behalf. A young boy, perhaps a son of the owner or a servant, can be expected to bear messages for the adventurer, and to carry a torch at night, for the price of a small tip folded into monthly expenses; the boy's safety is the adventurer's responsibility and should be considered carefully in the assigned task. A groom will tend to an adventurer's horse as part of the cost of upkeep (3.72 Outfitting, p. 12 under Transportation); the groom will hotwalk, brush and feed the horse and summon a veterinarian if needed. At SR 8 and above, servants abound: chambermaids see to the linens every few days and sweep and dust daily while laundresses launder and seamstresses expertly repair and alter clothing on request. One or more ladies' maids or gentlemen's butlers will assist the adventurer with dressing and attend to the character's bath. A concierge will make sure that the accomodations are kept up and summon workers to perform necessary maintenance as needed. Messengers may be dispatched not just around town but to neighboring cities on the player character's behalf.

    For all characters, monthly expenses include incidentals ranging from clay pipes and tobacco to woolen hose to shoe repairs by a cobbler, at the referee's discretion.

    Okay, that's what your money gets you. What if you can't afford to live at the standard expected of your station?

    Characters who cannot afford, or who choose not to pay, the monthly expenses associated with their Social Rank will find their effective rank decreases; a SR 7 Gentleman who pays 15 £ per month for expenses will find that others treat them as having SR 5 instead. This may affect opportunities such as membership in a club, admission to seminary to pursue a career as a Student of Theology, or to advantageously apply to a regiment. The most important consequence to the adventurer due to a lower effective Social Rank is the loss of influence.
    Sometimes, however, influence may have direct effects on the game, in one of two ways. First, any character may expect informal, polite requests to be granted by those three Social Ranks or more below his own, if he can roll his own Social Rank or below on a D20. Thus a Marquis could ask a small favor of a Baron or a Bishop, and have his request(s) granted on a roll of 13 or less on a D20. Polite requests are defined as those which are easy to grant, and which are of minor significance to the person asked (such as a Magistrate waiving a small fine, a Captain looking after someone in his company, a Baron allowing hunting on his estate, etc.). The possibilities are endless. Polite requests, no matter how polite they may be, will also often be influenced by bribery or reciprocal favors.

    In addition, influence of Social Rank may be used, on rare occasions, to force those of lower Social Ranks to perform services which may be difficult or dangerous. Such services may only be requested of one six or more Social Ranks below the character, and may only be asked once per year (unless the character increases his or her Social Rank that year, in which case, he may ask 2 services). Such services may not be outrageous (e.g. asking an NPC to lay down his life for the character, or to give the character large sums of money) and the request must be within the power of the person requested. The person requested has a choice: to grant the request, or to automatically lose one Social Rank himself. A small reward or bribe is almost always offered for such services, Examples of difficult requests might be a Treasurer of a Royal Order bullying a rich merchant to go into an investment with him (perhaps with the lure of possible profits), a Lt. General forcing a townsman to quarter troops in his house, a Grand Duke squeezing a Secretary of a Noble Order to admit him to the Order, etc. Of course, some such requests may be granted through threats or violence, rather than influence. - 5.22 Influence (p. 23)
    A character with a lower effective Social Rank will find their influence is constrained to that of their temporary rank.

    A character who does not pay the monthly expenses for at least four months will find their chances of promotion reduced by the difference between their Social Rank and their effective rank; frex, a character with SR 7 paying only 15 £ per month for four months will find their chances of promotion reduced by two. Finally, at the referee's discretion, a character who lives at a lower rank for six or more months may have their actual Social Rank reduced by one.

    Can living at an effectively higher Social Rank improve influence and chances for promotion? That's a subject for another post.

    Tuesday, June 18, 2024

    Plus de trousseau: More Skill-Based Equipment for Flashing Blades

    My Flashing Blades house rules include five new skills for characters to choose. In keeping with my Te Deum pour un massacre-inspired stuff-for-skills house rule, here are items a character taking the new skills may expect to receive.

    Skill Item
    Falconry A gauntlet with a tassel, jesses, a field leash, and a swing lure
    Musician A musical instrument and 1D6 sheets of music
    Naturalist A plant press, a bottle of grain alcohol, and 1D6 glass jars with stoppers and horsehair threads
    Physician A fleam, a metal bowl, and a clay jar with 2D6 leeches
    Surgeon A trousse including scalpels, hooks, a clamp, a probe, needles and flax thread, and a bone saw

    Sunday, June 9, 2024

    Student of Theology: Seminary and Minor Orders in Flashing Blades

    Characters who wish to join the Clergy must have Theology and Latin skills, and must start as Students of Theology. Gentlemen with the necessary skills may choose to start the game as Students of Theology, in whichever school of theological thought the wish. All others may roll 2D6 at the beginning of each year after the start of the game, in an attempt to roll the entrance number of a school, to become a Student of Theology. As characters may not roll to enter a school at the start of the game, all characters who are not of Gentleman background must wait a year to enter a school of Theology.

    To study Theology in the 17th Century, one commonly went to a school or college run by one of the powerful monastic orders of the times. Each order has its own requirements for years of study needed to be ordained, and the amount of time each year which must be spent studying Theology. . . . At the end of a character's study as a Student of Theology, he is ordained into the Priesthood. - 5.42 Joining the Clergy,
    Flashing Blades core rules (page 30)
    A Student of Theology in Flashing Blades undertakes a three or four year period of study in order to become a Catholic priest, so what exactly happens during that time?

    The last half of the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries, known today as the Counter-Reformation, was a time of renewal and retrenchment for the Roman Catholic Church in response to the rise and spread of Protestantism. One of the principle events of that period was the Council of Trent, conducted in two dozen sessions between 1545 and 1563 under the auspices of three different popes; the Council attempted to address what the Church perceived as spiritual laxity and temporal abuse by the clergy. Among the recommendations - known as the Tridentine reforms - was to improve the education and training of priests, and this led to the founding of seminaries, what the game calls a "school of theological thought."

    The Student of Theology in Flashing Blades then is a seminarian. Seminarians, during their periods of study, live in a community, similar to monks. They are expected to be devout, dilligent, sober, and chaste. They wear eccesiastical garb and attend services several times a day, with periods of study in between.

    Seminarians also take minor orders. The minor orders are offices within a parish church or abbey responsible for assisting the priests in running the church and performing Mass. The minor orders are porter, lector, exorcist, and acolyte.
  • The Porter is responsible for locking and unlocking the doors of the church and ringing the bell. Porters also act like doormen or guards, keeping the congregation safe during services - in the era of the Wars of Religion, this is no small thing.
  • The Lector reads non-Gospel biblical passages during services; Gospel readings are limited to the major orders.
  • The Exorcist of minor orders is not Father Merrin from the eponymous movie; exorcism of demons is left to ordained priests. The exorcist's main responsibilities are assisting with baptisms, performing "minor exorcisms" - mostly annointing with oil and praying over the infant - in preparation for consecration.
  • The Acolyte is the highest ranked minor order, lighting candles and carrying them in ceremonies and processions, administering bread and wine to the priest during Mass, and otherwise assiting the priest.
  • Before the rise of seminaries as part of the Tridentine reforms, "porter-lector-exorcist-acolyte" was a pathway to the priesthood, and seminarians are still ordained in the minor orders. As part of their training, Students of Theology will serve in a parish church; principally this will be as a lector, reading Holy Scripture - literacy in Latin, remember - during Mass and, particularly in the last year of their studies, as an acolyte and more rarely as a porter or exorcist. Much like the Student of Law's stage and clerkship, this gives the seminarian practical experience in the service of a parish church, working alongside priests and a pastor and interacting with congregants - and for the referee, another pathway for enmeshing the player character seminarian in the life of the setting through rumors and patronage.

    An interesting thing about ordination in the minor orders: it's open to the laity. This does in fact open another pathway to the priesthood for characters who don't want to be seminarians, but it's also an opportunity to involve a character in the life of a parish church without the responsiblities and strictures of ordination as a priest. As a quick and dirty house rule, say roll 8+ to become a porter with promotion to lector - literacy in Latin required - on 8+; promotion from lector to exorcist requires a 9+, and promotion to acolyte - Theology skill required - from exorcist requires 10+, all on 2D6, of course. Service is four months a year for each minor order. Promotion attempts are rolled once a year as per the core rules, so the time to ascend through the minor orders is variable and probably pretty lengthy, but that fact that one can rise to acolyte while keeping a wife and family and pursuing another career might be appealing.

    So how about Aramis? We know Aramis becomes a priest as well as superior general of the Jesuits, an ambassador, and a duke over the course of the novels, but what about Aramis the King's Musketeer of the first book? Well, we know that Athos and Porthos intervened "at the moment of my ordination," as Aramis describes it, so it would appear he is a lapsed seminarian who plans to return to the Church at a later date, which means he's probably ordained in the minor orders already.

    Now, a reminder: Flashing Blades is a game of swashbuckling adventure, and priests historically fought duels and carried on affairs and participated in politics, so none of this should imply a life of mundane service for player character clerics. Through active participation in a parish church, a seminarian will become close to priests, curates, and pastors, and quite possibly members of the bishop's curia, and will get to know parishioners as well; awareness of the politics of both the Church and the local community should follow. A better understanding of the Student of Theology experience should open doors to adventure, not close them.