The coming week, and running 5e (sigh)

Things are a little crazy, so I’m not buckling down to do a real meaty post just yet. My in-laws are in town, we’re getting tons of bad weather because of Helene, so now they’re just sitting at the house driving my wife crazy, work is very busy right now, I’m going to travel (business) to Texas this week to visit some suppliers just across the border, my wife is getting ready to go to DisneyWorld with a friend of hers, so when I get back from Texas I’ll be on my own for a little while, etc. I doubt that I’ll make Front #2 and more on my Cult of Undeath 5x5 until I get back at the end of the week, but maybe after that I’ll be good to do quite a bit of updating, actually.

In addition to all of that, I’m running for this reddit/game store group that I came up with. Two guys, and one of their fiancés, is what I hear. They’re interested in D&D 5e, so I agreed to run that for them as a quick “mini-campaign” trial run. Friday when I get back will be our first session. I have no idea what the fiancé is playing, but one guy is a mountain dwarf barbarian, and the other guy is a halfling rogue. At least, I think he’s a rogue. He never actually told me that, but the backstory sure sounds rogue-like. They seemed to be all into the idea of fantasy X-files, when I described that, but then the barbarian asked if they could all start with bags of holding. That kinda threw me for a loop. Is that a common thing that groups do? I’ve never heard of anything like that before. That seems kinda like; hey, can I start the game with some cheat codes on? Needless to say, I said no. I’m not actually anticipating having a great time, but maybe it’ll be good enough that we’ll all want to continue after the mini campaign is over. And I don’t really know the system very well, so I’ll be pretty handwavey and run it the way I used to run 3.5. It’ll be close enough, but unless they know what they’re doing systemwise, it could be a little rough. Actually, it might be better if they don’t; then I can just make sensible rules-light style rulings like I prefer to run anyway, and not worry much about it. 

I’m not quite sure what I’m going to be doing for the session, to be honest with you. Finalize any character creation and start them off outside of a large city, in fact, outside of a small town that’s outside of a large city, and there’s ghouls up on crosses kinda like scarecrows that will immediately be a threat to them. Or modified zombies or wights or something; it doesn’t actually matter exactly what kind of undead they are. They’ll be recruited to help out the small town with a rash of murders that are undead related, and then have to deal with a haunted house of some kind. I’m thinking of loosely running the first half (or maybe two thirds?) of The Skinsaw Murders, at least as a general concept, but winging anything that isn’t fleshed out or that I don’t’ remember very well in the moment. I guess I need to reread that again very soon to make sure that I’m good to run it! I also need to make sure that I have an outline that will get me past a couple of sessions or so, at least, and then I can figure out what (if anything) will follow.

But I’m not really thrilled to run 5e. I’m also playing now in a 5e game, so I went ahead and bought a like-new copy of the book for less than $20, but I wasn’t thrilled with that session either. Or rather, the group seemed fine; the system isn’t anything wonderful, though. Had almost all of the problems that I had gotten tired of with 3e, except that I wasn’t as familiar with the system, so I was more confused about a few basic things instead. I’d honestly rather just be playing 3e at this point. Not that I’d be excited to do that either.

So, let me talk very briefly about what I foresee in this session. Which, I think, we’ve only got 2½-3 hours to do before the store closes anyway. 

• The three characters all meet, after I get the rest of their backstories and backgrounds enough so that I can do something with this, at a crossroads outside of town. The small town of Brackwater (which will stand in for Sandpoint from the module, except without all that context from the earlier module, so it makes sense to change the name and not even pretend that it’s the same place), a coastal town near big tidal marshes, as you can guess, is where they’re headed, but they’re all coming from three different directions. They first get attacked by some kid of crazed wild animals or rabid feral dogs or something. Something is seriously wrong with these animals. Nearly zombified, or diseased, or blighted, or something. Not clear exactly.
• Head into town. It’s pretty subdued; but normalish. People are maybe a little extra suspicious or unfriendly, but once they get going in taverns or whatever, they find them normal. People are upset because there have been reports of deaths and strange behavior by farm animals, and a few local country boys have been injured. They’re worried about some kind of animal plague or something.
• Local sheriff or constable type guy is in the tavern. Yeah, yeah… this is pretty cliché, but he asks the PCs for help, because he’s heard something about them from someone (again, need to create some kind of tie to whatever backstories I end up finally getting) and he doesn’t want to involve the locals. There’s been a double murder at the local sawmill. It’s bad, looks occult, and he’s worried about getting the locals in a panic. The murders out in the boonies are starting to come to town. But they don't know much about the murders out of town until below...
• It looks like the murderer has come out of the swamp. There’ll be some clues to suggest as much, if I can think of them ahead of time.
• There will be calls, if they can’t figure out where to go, to help some farmers, who are showing up in town reporting strange things afoot (at their Circle K. Heh.)
• This is where they get into running battles with ghoul scarecrows. Or rather; like I said, ghouls are what the Pathfinder module originally wrote but a kind of ad hoc wight kind of thing might be more appropriate. Or even modified zombies. I’m actually thinking of making them more like the barrow-wights from Tolkien than the D&D wights of… well, of the Monster Manual. Strong, and have a freezing touch which stuns (as per the condition) save DC 15. Wights in D&D have some kind of life-drain, which I don’t want to mess with. Stunning attacks, or even dropping characters into the unconscious condition would be more Tolkien-like. 
• The ghouls/wights/whatever are taking their victims into a well, which is mostly dry, and connects via a short tunnel to the basement of a haunted house.  Here, I can use the haunted house section of the Skinsaw Murders module, maybe combined somewhat with The Haunting of Harrowstone, the first module of the Carrion Crown adventure path. 

I’m not going to worry about detailing the haunted house yet; that will absolutely not be part of the first evening’s game, no matter what else happens. So I’ll worry about detailing exactly what will happen there later—including what was the point of it all. Meanwhile, depending on how much time I have in the evenings while traveling, or when I get back from traveling, I’ll mostly be reading, but I might make another YouTube video; it’s been a good two weeks I think since I did an updated one describing the updates to my races for DFX. But first priority is the game I need to run, and second priority is the copy of Manual of the Planes as well as my second Hawk & Fisher Omnibus, which I'll be bringing with.

Travel and MoP (and Great Beyond, Distant Worlds)

https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2024/09/1-de-octubre-nuevo-dia-de-descanso-obligatorio

Doing business with Third World countries is obligatory, because all corporate overlords care more about skimming a few more cents of profit from the activity for the shareholders (including executive salaries and bonuses, most especially) than they do about the long-term health of their customer base, their communities, or even their own organization, which ultimately they tend to find disposable. If a corporation is no longer able to provide earnings for shareholders, it's discarded and the investment is moved to someone who does. Truly, corporate America is more like ravening plagues of locusts than the responsible capitalism that we're promised in our economics classes that describe the theory.

But to that point, we have to do business with Mexico. I was scheduled to go to Mexico next week, to visit one supplier in Ciudad Juarez, across the river from El Paso, TX on Tuesday, and then another one in Ciudad Acuña, across that same border from Del Rio, TX. This meant that I was going to travel by air on Monday, be there Monday night, have a (relatively) leisurely 6 to 6½ drive across quiet country roads in west Texas on Wednesday. Maybe a little longer, because I'd stop for a leisurely lunch in Fort Davis, which wasn't too far out of my way, and do a little site-seeing in the Davis Mountains, which I haven't seen in 15-16 years or so, and then arrive in Del Rio with plenty of time. Both evenings, it'd be easy for me to spend a couple of hours or so in the hotel reading my Manual of the Planes, or whatever other books I brought with me. As noted in my last post, I have an odd habit of bringing Manual of the Planes with me on business trips, but I'm not coincidentally re-reading it right now and utilizing some of its material for setting development; especially for EFX/Realms Traveler, but maybe even somewhat for DFX here and there too. 

However, as the link above notes, Mexico is not a super predictable place. I had already made these travel plans when the government decided that October 1st is going to be a mandatory day off for all workers, with only about a week's worth of notice. Now, I will either 1) stay home until Wednesday, and just see the second supplier, without going to El Paso, Ciudad Juarez, Fort Davis or any of that at all, or 2) fly into El Paso on Tuesday instead of Monday, see the facility in Juarez much more quickly just in the morning of Wednesday, and then have a much less leisurely drive across Texas... although I'll still probably get a late lunch or early dinner in Fort Davis, and hopefully see the Davis Mountains long before it's dark, and then get into Del Rio at or around dark thirty. It's a six and a half hour drive from El Paso to Del Rio; about fifteen minutes out of my way to stop at Fort Davis, but of course, I'll need to get gas, I'll need to eat lunch/dinner, and I can't stand going out to the west and not seeing something. Seminole Canyon State Park a little outside Del Rio and on the way is probably going to be out of the question; even if it's not dark, it'll be closed. Luckily, I'll probably get back to Del Rio again for other business, but the drive from El Paso to was an unusual if not unique opportunity. I'm quite disappointed; I can still squeeze most of what I want out of the trip, including the fun stuff for me during the traveling, but it won't be as relaxed or leisurely, and I won't have as much free time to read in the evenings either. 

And then, on Thursday, I drive from Del Rio to San Antonio, see my sister briefly, and take off the next morning to come home.

That's a whole lot of personal detail, but it may well mean that I'll read less. On the other hand, I was initially annoyed in the first place because my work trip is the same week that my wife will be out of town. When I'm no longer traveling, maybe I'll be reading more rather than less. She'll also be gone over the weekend, and although I do have some things I need to do over the weekend, I can still find, I think, lots of time to read or do other things in between doing those things.

Other than reading some old D&D books that I've already read and have owned for years (but which I'm really enjoying rediscovering, and they're still in Very Good or even Like New condition, because I'm always careful with my books), I also want to spend some time in the next couple of weeks wrapping up the Cult of Undeath fronts, and tying that whole 5x5 up before Halloween. That would be an appropriate Halloween activity to finish a 5x5 Front called Cult of Undeath, I think. And I want to create a new batch of iconics. The ones that I created previously ended up getting kind of coopted either into samples for the fronts, potential novel characters, or contacts. I now have a bunch of new races, and I'd like to turn those into more iconics.

Then, in November and December, I'd like to modify the DFX rules to have an EFX variant, and get rolling on my Solo Shadows Over Garenport stuff. Pretty ambitious, but I think that if I don't have some ambitious goals, I end up just frittering away my free time, and honestly, that kind of sucks.

Captain Borus, friendly and helpful Garenport NPC 

Manual of the Planes (EFX, Realms Traveler)

I’m often a creature of strange habits. The very first flight I ever remember doing, as a kid, my dad recommended when the drink service came by that I get a ginger ale. I don’t remember ever having ginger ale before that flight, and in my mind, ever since, ginger ale and airplanes always go together. I do also drink ginger ale frequently on other occasions, but I also always get a ginger ale on my flights. While not my first international trip, by any means, my very first international business trip, to Germany, was right after I had recently purchased the 3e Manual of the Planes. I still almost always bring that with me on business trips. Knowing that I had an upcoming business trip meant that I dug the book out and started reading it. I’m actually traveling to Texas and Mexico to visit suppliers in the border towns next week. It’s possible that I’ll finish reading Manual of the Planes before I take that trip, but not likely, since my in-laws are coming in to town to visit on Wednesday, and I probably won’t read much after that. I suppose on the off-chance that I do finish the book before I go, or if it looks like I’ll finish the book early on in the trip and need something to read in the evenings later in the week before I get home, I’ll also grab my Paizo books The Great Beyond (the little Paizo Manual of the Planes) and Distant Worlds (the Paizo Leigh Brackett space opera but turned to fantasy) books. I’ll probably want to read them both afterwards anyway. The only other one that I’m missing from this same kind of feel from my collection is Beyond Countless Doorways, but I only have that on pdf (I think. Maybe I actually printed it out and put it in a binder years ago. That might be worth checking on, if I can get to the box in my garage where it’s probably located…) In any case, the two Paizo books in particular will feel like an interesting epilogue or alternative to Manual of the Planes. I just looked up the publication date; September 2001! I’m pretty sure I took that trip to Germany in October, or possibly November. Twenty-three years ago! That’s crazy to think about now. I also read the 4e Manual of the Planes, on Scribd or from the library or something (can’t remember now) several years ago, but I don’t actually have that book; I just read it. In many ways, I think 4e made planar adventuring more accessible and make more sense; but it’s hardly necessary since I’m just cherry-picking elements out of the 3e version anyway, not exactly integrating the actual Great Wheel concept.

A forest in DFX's Shadow Realm. Yeah, Mortal Kom at did it first... 

It’s interesting that I really like Manual of the Planes as much as I do. When I first got it, it was still a relatively new book to the 3e canon. Of course, it was a remake of a book with the same title from 1e, but I’d already dropped out of playing AD&D, or even any D&D at all by the time it came out, so I wasn’t familiar with the Great Wheel except for seeing it referenced quite briefly in the 1e DMG. I found it fascinating enough that I went to DriveThruRPG, or whatever equivalent was out back in 2001-2 or so and bought pdfs of the 2e Planescape boxed set, and maybe one or two other Planescape products. I remain to this day fascinated with the concept of dimensional travel in a D&D-like milieu, and have toyed around with my Realms Traveler idea since at least 2013, although I’d been noodling with ideas along similar lines for years prior to that. I never did much with it other than set it up as a premise; a kind of combination of the M.Y.T.H. Adventures series by Robert Asprin and the old Sliders TV show from the 90s, or Quantum Leap from the latest 80s and 90s… or even from Gene Roddenberry’s possibly apocryphal sales pitch of the original Star Trek series as “Wagon Train to the Stars” modified to “Wagon Train to the Planes.” Add to that some actual Marvel cosmic stuff, the Kree-Skrull War, or Annihilation, or all that Dan Abnett stuff with the Guardians of the Galaxy, the Nova Corps and the Starjammers and Inhumans. If I’m often mocking D&D for being fantasy superheroes, this stuff leans deliberately into the superhero vibe instead of stepping away from it.

You’d think that something like this wouldn’t be my cup of tea at all, since I regularly profess to prefer fantasy that is much more grounded, “realistic” or at least verisimilitudinistic, and darker in nature. I frequently kind of sort of deride default D&D for being too much like the Marvel Cinematic Universe in tone, feel, mood and general aesthetic generally, while I prefer one that’s more fantasy setting but tone, mood, feel and general aesthetic from X-Files, Supernatural, James Bond, westerns, and the Godfather. Realms Traveler, on the other hand, if I ever got around to running it, sounds more like the Disney+ show Loki than it does Supernatural or the X-files. And yet, as an alternative to my darker fantasy, this is actually exactly up my alley. So much so, that I’m wondering if my just recently kick-off Elemental Fantasy X would be better off as just being Realms Traveler after all; I don’t know that I have any need for an Eberron/Heroes3-like setting to place these same themes, races and whatnot in when I might be able to do what I really want a little better by reviving Realms Traveler instead. Maybe instead of being connected geographically on the map that I drew (which admittedly, I do kind of like, but still. It’s just a quick drawing; I can change my mind there) the various realms in EFX could be differing planes or dimensions of existence. 

Or, perhaps, the EFX continent is the bridge that connects all of these realms, and the realms in EFX are areas where the planar conjunction, such as it is, bleeds planar traits into the EFX world, but you can also walk from those countries deeper into the alternative planes that are away from the “normal” fantasy world. Holy cow, I thought of this right as I typed it, and I think it’s the solution! EFX is now kinda sorta Sigil and the Outlands to my alternative planar cosmology. But it’s still a nice, big, expansive “home base” modest continent (about the size of the Continental US or Australia, you may possibly recall) so everything doesn’t have to be all weird and foreign all the time. 

What I do still need to do is figure out how to modify the system to accommodate this super-heroic paradigm while still being more rules-lite and non-tedious, which is what 3e, 4e and 5e have always been. And then I need to figure out what planes each of the EFX nations connect to. Anywhere that the “planar” races (which in this paradigm includes even elves and dwarves) are “native” to must have a planar connection, because that’s what created the planar races, either by magically modifying some of the human inhabitants who were already there, or because they poured through from the planar connection. I’ll worry about that fluff stuff in another post, but let me noodle real quick with system issues; I actually will probably undo some of my anti-D&Ding of the system; have regular hit dice, maybe, and change the magic system to be much less punitive to cast spells, add more spells, etc. I might go back to having a bunch of classes again, or at least greatly expand the list of available feats so that the a la carte build your own class options are much more expansive. (I actually prefer the latter option. I’m kind of thinking that I’m about done with classes in DFX/EFX.)

But... I guess I'm now officially combining the Realms Traveler idea, which never had much development anyway, and EFX. I just need to figure out which tag I'll use for it, and how much of the actual planar traveling I'd be doing in any putative EFX/RT campaigns.

A city in Kharnimrion, Blackquarter, which fades subtly into the Plane of Shadow, or Shadowfell as it was later called. Or whatever I end up calling my version of it, which I'll borrow pretty much as is, because it's one of my favorite of the planes from D&D.

But before I work on any of those campaigns, I need to sit back down and finish the Cult of Undeath campaign that I've started, but not touched in a couple of months or so. I should be able to whip that up pretty quick if I didn't always have people coming and going from our house, and a bazillion things to read. 

System updates and initiative

Well, I’m in an interesting place with Dark Fantasy X. I’ve actually made two updates; one to 2.3 and then almost on the heels of it, to 2.4. The change from 2.2.4 to 2.3 was mostly about adding the sylphs, tritons and dwergs to the document, the removal of the grendlings from the appendix races, and otherwise shuffling the races around just a bit. I made a few other minor changes, but that’s the gist of the real change, and what prompted it in the first place.

The 2.4 update, on the other hand, was where I decided to take the Appendix off of the file, and create a separate Appendix file. The Appendix file is also at the same rev level, since it is a permutation of the same document, but I thought it would be good to just keep that separate and allow me to add more things to the appendix without changing anything on the main. One of the things I’d like to do is take a bunch more spells from official lists (maybe 3e SRD, or some OSR file.) I thought that I could copy and paste these, but it looks like I’d have to do some editing, plus I’d really prefer to not duplicate spells or versions of spells from the main rulebook to the appendix. It’s possible, as I’m still finalizing what 2.4 looks like, that I’ll just expand the spell list in the main rulebook rather than having all of this stuff in the appendix. But probably not. If anything, I may do the opposite; consolidate to fewer main spells and more appendix spells, But we’ll see. Either way, the actual spell list will probably get pretty heavily reworked before I release this new two-part update.

I’m also considering, before I’m done, reworking initiative. I like Bob World Builder’s channel. I know some of the guys who are kinda sorta on our side of the cultural divide disparage Bob, and think he’s a shill for WotC or whatever, but I don’t think that that’s true at all. I think he’s just a nice, non-confrontational guy, and part of the reason WotC invited him (as opposed to say, Professor DM) is that they could see that and knew he’d be easier to manipulate into making their interview with him turn out to give the message that they wanted to share. Bob, especially in the last year or so, has spent a lot less time specifically talking about D&D. He’s been covering lots of other fantasy games like Dungeon Crawl Classics and ShadowDark, and even is releasing (or just released, not sure) a ShadowDark supplement for sale as a third party product. Being a nice, non-confrontational guy who kind of got a little bit publicly steamrolled by a sociopathic corporate gas-lighting campaign isn’t something to hold against him. I see him, even if he doesn’t see himself this way, as a bit of a martyr in that regard. He took one for the team. Professor Dungeon Craft has a smaller (although same order of magnitude, I’d guess) reach if number of subscribers means anything, but he’s also the kind of personality who was unlikely to be steamrolled and manipulated into presenting exactly the message WotC wanted him to without him even realizing it. On the other hand, PDM’s content lately has either started to feel like repetitive, irrelevant or sell-out in any case. I’m still subscribed, but I’m a lot less excited to see something he’s posted than I used to be. Frankly, BWB is doing better stuff lately. And, as alluded to at the beginning of this paragraph, he had a really pretty good initiative video that he posted recently, where he analyzed a lot of alternatives to the default initiative scheme, including some homebrew ones that he uses himself, and lots of other “modern” initiative alternatives from games like Index Card RPG, EZD6, Daggerheart, or many others. Frankly, he’s spelled out some that I think I like even better than the options that I have currently in DFX, so I might well make some updates there too as part of 2.4.

While I’ve played, run or at least read well over 40-50 different games, maybe even more depending on where you draw the line between a variant or spin-off versus a full-blown new game, I honestly either can’t remember or didn’t pay attention to how most of them handled turn order. I presume that most of the older games did something similar to D&D just due to not having occurred to anyone to try anything clever. And some systems I’ve used, like The Window, probably don’t even address it at all, although I don’t remember now if that’s true or not. In any case, I played enough d20 games that that was just normal to me, and I played with a small enough group that it rarely became overly tedious to do Initiative (if sometimes just barely), so it’s only been recently that it’s really crossed my mind to do away with Initiative as we know it and replace it with alternative initiative mechanics, or something that’s not actually even initiative at all. It’s kind of a bummer; the whole “Roll for initiative!” is a pretty iconic war cry in the D&D world, but still.. I’ve come to agree more and more than initiative as written is actually a pretty poor system, and even if it wasn’t causing me particular problems, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t better alternatives out there that I should be using instead.

I currently have two alternative methods in the rules (besides the 3e/5e initiative system, that is, which is a third); one of which is the older D&D mechanic of rolling a d6 for “side” initiative. While this has many advantages over ranked initiative by character, it was clearly designed for use when the game hadn’t yet strayed too far from war-gaming conventions, groups were very large, and it works more like an army war-game type of thing than something that really fits super well in a small group character RPG. I’m almost certainly going to get rid of this one. The second is simultaneous initiative, where everyone acts on the same turn, and everyone is required to state their actions beforehand and then they’re all resolved at once. This works pretty well… but it’s possibly more complicated than it needs to be.

EZD6, for example, just does simultaneous turns; all players first, and then all opponents. Daggerheart just doesn’t even bother with turn order; combat is handled just like non-combat; if someone states that they’re doing something, then it’s resolved. It’s up to the GM to make sure that this doesn’t get out of hand, but given that everyone’s read an action scene in a book or watched one in a movie before, everyone can intuitively handle this just fine, most likely, unless it’s a larger than average group with all kinds of stuff going on at the same time. (I think the ideal party size is 3-5 players, by the way.) And frankly, I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with simply going in Dexterity score order, or even just going around the room like every other game you ever play, except that possibly sometimes players may want some more variability instead of the same order all of the time. The more I think about it, the more I think all of these methods are superior for my needs to side initiative or ranked initiative, so there’s no reason to even have either of those in the game anymore. I’ll probably default to something like the EZD6 method, and have the others as options.

Third Edition era appreciation

I'm feeling a little conflicted. The Third Edition (in its various forms) existed officially from 2000-2008, and then unofficially in the form of the Pathfinder 1e RPG until 2019. I never really played Pathfinder per se, I picked up Third Edition when it was new, thought it was pretty cool compared to what I knew of AD&D of the past, and played it until probably about 2016. We did use some Pathfinder product, but mostly the early adventure paths that were written specifically to be compatible with 3.5, not with the Pathfinder update. I did kind of pay some attention to developments within Pathfinder, to the extent that they were compatible or useful with 3.5. When I was done with Third Edition, I was definitely done; I was tired of very long combats, I was tired of obligatory gridded combats, I was tired of very long and involved character generation, and I was tired of higher level play that wasn't very fun and was quite tedious in general. I was also over the D&Disms of the game; all of the Vancian magic and magically kitted up characters. I discovered Microlite in 2013, and although I still played 3.5 until probably halfway through 2016—I think; maybe we were playing Call of Cthulhu by then instead of D&D though—but I went hard into rules lite games. I always liked them better anyway, but I had been satisfied enough playing Third Edition, in its various iterations for at least fifteen-sixteen years and mostly enjoyed it. Until I got too frustrated with some of the stuff associated with it and figured that my new m20 house rule notion of adopting Third Edition into a rules lite playing style was superior for my tastes in almost every single way. At about that time, I kind of shelved most of my Third Edition books (stuck them in a bin in a closet, actually) and didn't really move forward with using them for quite some time.

As I've rediscovered them, sorta, and started re-reading some of them, I remember why I liked them in the first place. Although I also remember why I stopped using them. But that doesn't mean that a lot of it isn't still useful to me, especially since although super rules lite in comparison, my game still retains a great deal of compatibility with Third Edition material. Fluff stuff, of course, is always compatible with almost any system, regardless, but even the mechanics, the "crunch" is mostly compatible. If I need more spells, I can just turn to Third Edition spells from my books or the SRD. If I need more monsters, same thing; just reduce the hit points some and otherwise ignore much of the material in the stat block as irrelevant, but I can use them as written even so. I don't know what else I could borrow from the mechanics that would be worth the trouble, but those are the two things that there are big lists of anyway. I guess I could turn some feats or class features into alternative class feats for my a la carte "build your own class" buffet, but I don’t really see the need, most likely. But if I do ever want to; well that material's there.

I also find that the prestige classes, something I got weary of after a while, are actually kind of cool, at least in terms of an NPC character concept, even if I don't have a ton of interest in the actual mechanics of the prestige class. Maybe that's the best way to use the mechanics; NPCs that are created kind of like monsters; they have an AC, a To Hit and Damage, and hit points, created monster-style rather than like a player character, and then throw a few class-like special abilities that make them unique.

So, I'm enjoying going through my Third Edition stuff, and I'm thinking that I can get more use out of it than I expected. If nothing else, it’s been fun to reread some of these books; I just recently read the official book Drow of the Underdark and the unofficial Green Ronin book Advanced Race Codex: Drow. I’m also currently rereading Cityscape, and Dungeonscape (actually, I never read the latter the first time) and I intend to pull out and reread Manual of the Planes, Fiendish Codex 1: Hordes of the Abyss, Elder Evils and Exemplars of Evil. After that… maybe more. Stormwrack, Frostburn, Sandstorm, and the Complete Psionic book, which I also think that I never actually got around to reading are all kind of on the table right now. And I haven't read the d20 Call of Cthulhu book in a long time, and it's worth an occasional re-read. The idea that this stuff could potentially be useful to me even as someone who isn't going to be running that system again is kind of intriguing. And Privateer Press's two Monsternomicon books are among the best Third Edition books I own; every single entry is a whole adventure waiting to happen (not that some aren't, of course, better than others. But, y'know.)

I did finally get my belated copies of the DMG and PHB 3.5 in the mail today. Both were around $20-22 and shipped for free from Amazon, and both are in like new condition. They look as good on my little shelf as the MM 3.5 that they're next too, which I bought when it was new.

Of course, I do still have all three of those in the regular 3e state too. I'm a little hesitant to toss them, but they're completely irrelevant. I'll almost certainly never even use the 3.5 ones, but if I do, the 3.5 ones will certainly supersede the 3e ones. Sigh. Like I said; I'm still kind of salty about that, more than fifteen years later.

Anyway, this is a long rambly post, even by my standards, and I'm not even sure what it's about, other than some some backhanded Third Edition appreciation, I guess. I'll go ahead and throw some random art from a third party Third Edition era product at the post, and then quit while I'm ahead.

Updates a'coming

I'm considering a fairly major update to the DFX game, or at least major in terms of it adding a few new things. First off, some context. I mentioned earlier that I played 5e for the first time this weekend, and the first time for D&D specifically, i.e., the brand D&D, in many years. Probably a good 9-10 years, maybe more. What I've played since then is only D&D in the same sense that my Wal-Mart brand facial tissue is a kleenex. I call all RPGs D&D when I'm being casual, but I haven't played actual D&D in quite a long time.

My impressions of it were, and I think I mentioned some of these things in my last post, A) if you need an online electronic tool to make and manage your character, that's a major red flag. B) if you need grids, battle-maps, and tokens or miniatures to keep combat straight, on a routine basis, not just for extraordinarily complicated and complex combats, that's another red flag. C) if a single extended combat sequence takes an entire 3½-4 hour session to play out, that's yet another red flag. D) short rests are ridiculous. E) if you need a VTT to manage your combats and characters, and you're being funneled into a proprietary tool that's—as has been said on multiple occasions by executives of the company to investors—going to be based on a subscription and microtransaction revenue model, that's not a red flag. That's the whole freakin' communist parade.

I said earlier that I bought an old used copy of the PHB for less than $20. That will be, I believe, the only 5e product that I buy, and I did so kind of reluctantly even so. I also, very belatedly, ordered older used copies of the 3.5 DMG and PHB. I'd been salty about the update from 3e to 3.5, and just used the SRD for years and years. I did, however, buy the MM, because I like monsters better than players, I guess, or something. (I suppose I could buy PODs from DriveThru at relatively decent prices, if I really wanted more. Most of the ones that I don't have, I don't see the need to do this, though. Except maybe Monster Manual IV. That's one of the few that I really regret having not bought when it was new. It sells for crazy expensive on the used market.) This doesn't exactly "complete" my 3e collection, but almost everything that I missed when it was current, I've now picked up as a pdf or something for less money than actually trying to collect the real books would cost. This is interesting, because actual physical copies of the books are still very expensive; the used market for most 3e era stuff, other than the core books is still pretty inflated. I think people still quite like this game, and if maybe they're not still playing it, they're still holding on to the books for some reason. As I mentioned before, I don't actually think 5e is a significant enough update to 3.5 to have been needed, honestly. It's clearly very much the same game in most respects, and it much more similar to 3e than it is to any other D&D game or edition. Sadly, it seems to have many of the same flaws, and few of the same strengths. Hardly surprising, honestly. If it had come out instead of 3.5, or even instead of Pathfinder, that would have been pretty cool. As it is, well... eh.

But a thought also occurs to me as I'm reading all of these 3e era books again, including some that I bought and never even actually got around to reading, sadly, years and years ago now. (I actually do way too much of that.) One of the major conceits of m20 when it was first designed was that while it streamlined the actual play of the game to almost ridiculous levels, sped up the game tremendously, and made everything much faster and easier on GMs, you could still use anything from d20 or 3e as is without needing to do much more than collapse any relevant skills, and stuff like that. You wanted a monster or spell or magic item from 3e? You could use it, and the conversion to m20 was such a snap that it almost doesn't even count as having to be done; you could literally do it on the fly in your head in a second or two. If you even bothered to. It also occurs to me that although Dark Fantasy X is no longer really an m20 game because it's changed quite a bit since I first conceived it as one, that for the most part this compatibility totally remains. I hadn't really given any thought to 3e in a long time, but since moving and uprooting all of my stuff, I kind of "re-found" my collection which had kind of been put away. Not sure what I'd want to potentially use; maybe some spells, maybe some monsters, maybe some scenarios or ideas here and there... but its been kind of fun to find all of this stuff again and find a way to actually use it again, even though I've long ago abandoned the idea that I'd have any interest in running something as rule-heavy and complicated as 3e ended up being. I just don't enjoy all of that complexity anymore. 

-------<*>-------

I'm thinking of adding a new area or two to the setting. I know, I know. The Three Realms and all of that. But these areas won't really be new, just that I haven't done much with them yet. The Boneyard, for instance, kind of serves as a big empty desert that also happens to be the hub around which the Three Realms cluster. I created it more because I'm a huge fan of the American deserts and semi-deserts of the Southwest, from west Texas to southern California, to Arizona and New Mexico and southern Utah and even as far north as much of Wyoming that isn't specifically mountainous. However, that doesn't actually manage to rise to the level of it being a compelling inclusion in the setting. 

There's an interesting conspiracy theory, peddled by such "respectable" places as The History Channel, that there were Egyptians in the Grand Canyon, and that the federal government has covered it up by making the area where the find was off-limits and restricting access. I don't have any comment on whether or not that's a credible idea or not, but it's a cool idea. I'm thinking of creating some civilization in the Boneyard, or at least the Mad Max-like wreckage of one, just so I have more going on in the area than western scenery and old bones from wars between Baal Hamazi and Kurushat. And I've been toying with actually making Nizrekh and Hyperborea real areas in the setting rather than off-hand references "off-screen." But the Boneyard is probably a bit more pressing, since it's geographically contiguous to all three of my Three Realms as it is.

Not that I want actual Egyptian-like influences. But I do want something. I'm not sure exactly what, yet. 

Finally, for whatever reason, I've had some equivalent to fire genasi in my setting from very early on. I did this independently from Freeport, when I got it way back in 2007 or so, but no doubt the fact that they had the azhar race, which was also the fire genasi, but "corrected" down to LA +0, which is really where all PC races needed to be to be useable, encouraged me to keep at it. But for whatever reason, I never had the other three genasi. But as I've been working on the early stages of Elemental Fantasy X, I've been really enjoying having them, and I kind of want to add to the surturs three more races; the tritons, the sylphs and the ... I admit, I always have a hard time coming up with names for earth genasi that I like. I'm kind of considering dvergs, from the Norse word for dwarves. Oread, which D&D does already use, but which is from Greek mythology, also does the job credibly well. But I'm leaning more towards a northern European rather than southern inspiration for the setting. Besides Greek oreads were like nymphs or dryads; all gals. But we'll see what name sticks or if I keep noodling on it. I think what I'll actually do is convert the surturs to the elementalist race, which comes in four flavors; one for each elemental. Culturally they're all the same, and they all come from Kurushat. But rather than being just surturs, they'll be all four. 

I actually think that the elementalists are born like normal humans, and only manifest their elemental heritage as young teenagers. It's a thing of significant cultural importance to the Kurushi elementalists when their kids first manifest which element they'll have power over, kind of like some kind of coming of age bar mitzvah or quincianera or... something that normal Americans do instead of foreigners, although the best I've got is being shuffled off to middle school or high school. We don't really do any coming of age rituals in America anymore. Then, once it first manifests, it takes six months to a year for the young kurushi kid to gradually transform physically into one of the four elementalist races; his skin color, eye color and hair color will change, his body dimensions will probably change; it's kind of like puberty plus because of the elemental change that comes over them as well as... well, as well as everything else that happens during puberty to kids. 

I don't know that I really need more races. I've got five normal ones and five in the appendix. I'm thinking about what to do with them all if I add three more. Surturs are already a mainline race, so maybe it makes sense to put the three new ones there, and move woodwose to the appendix. Then I'll be seven and six. I'm also thinking of moving surturs along with the rest of the elementalists to the appendix instead, and adding orcs and goblins back into the mainline. But that's because the Shadow Over Garenport 5x5 features orcs and goblins quite a bit, and surturs won't make a significant appearance until at least Cult of Undeath is over. I'm also considering taking wendaks out entirely, because the more I think about it, the more I doubt that they have much of a role in the game that a player could make much use of. They're not designed to be very playable, and work more as "The Other" to use libtard academia vocabulary. 

Maybe I don't need to have so few races in the mainline section of the book. Maybe I move all but the ones that would rarely appear (dhampir, seraphs, and grendling/wendaks if I even keep them. Maybe even woodwoses belong here, rather than in the mainline part of the book.) The mainline races will be expanded to be human, grisling (Hyperborean), kemling, orcs and goblins, woodwoses, and all four of the elementalists; surturs, sylphs, tritons and ... dvergs, probably. That makes for ten regular races, a pretty nice selection (comparable to seven in the 3e SRD, and nine in the 5e SRD; although the 5e SRD also has some sub-races that technically expand that to thirteen.) Three more remain in the appendix. 

Assuming that I do this, and I'm leaning heavily towards yes, I probably will, I may want to come up with more iconics or at least some patrons that showcase more of the new races. But, that's OK. Coming up with iconics is kind of fun.

Male and female sylphs.

Male and female triton.

Male dverg. I guess I need to generate some decent dverg girl images, don't I?

5e, 3e and else

Well, I played my first 5e game yesterday. I ordered the 5e Player's Handbook (the old one, not the one that's available for pre-order.) I got it pretty cheap, or I wouldn't have. I also was motivated—many years after it's relevant probably, to finally order the 3.5 PHB and DMG. I'm still salty more than twenty years after the fact that they issued revised editions so soon after I just bought the original 3e books, so I refused to buy them when they were current, and I just used the SRD. I did buy the Monster Manual, mostly because I like monsters so much. I also did eventually make my peace with the 3e > 3.5 conversion, because 3.5 was a marginally better game, and many of the books that followed in its wake were significantly better than what had come earlier (Although I wouldn't have replaced my Psionics Handbook with the Expanded Psionics Handbook if I hadn't gotten it for extremely cheap. But it, along with Complete Psionic is just miles and miles above the original 3e Psionics Handbook.) I've actually been having fun recently going back over a lot of my 3e books, since I've found most of them and dug them out of the big plastic bin in the garage where they're sitting. I don't really have a great place to put them in our temporary rental house, but since we'll likely be here for two years, I can't just not have any of my books either. Still haven't found a great solution to that conundrum...

Anyway, I had recently (kind of) finished reading the official Drow of the Underdark book, which was published relatively late in the 3e life cycle; I believe it was released in 2007 and 4e was announced at GenCon that same year, and was out by 2008. Upon finishing it, I picked up Green Ronin's Advanced Race Codex: Drow which was a 3.5 update of their earlier Plot & Poison: A Guide to Drow. I thought it would be interesting to see the third party supplement from early in the edition's lifecycle next to the official product from late in the product's life cycle, but I found that it wasn't maybe as interesting as I expected it to be. I think I'd forgotten a little too much what both products were actually like. I also kind of had forgotten all about the infamous "crunch vs fluff" debates that raged on both the internet, and apparently in the offices of Wizards of the Coast too.

My thought, before I remembered what it was like, was that the Green Ronin book would be freer, because it was third party, to do more interesting things, and that the WotC book would be pretty lacking in surprises or anything really super interesting, in favor of playing it safe. That's... sorta true, as it turns out. Drow of the Underdark is more or less what you'd expect, but it manages nonetheless to be a pretty high quality sourcebook anyway. Advanced Race Codex: Drow does some interesting stuff, especially in the first third to half of the book, but then gets bogged down in creating one mechanical gimmick after another. A lot of books from this era did that; in part because 3e was a very crunchy game with a lot of mechanics, game designers often thought that subtle variations on existing mechanics were really clever and interesting. (Spoiler alert: they're actually not. Especially now in retrospect.)

Curiously, for a time when Paizo picked up the 3e mantle and created "3.75" as Pathfinder was kind of called, they managed to avoid this trap... at least somewhat... by focusing on how to make the game more flexible, adding all kinds of a la carte options to modify and customize classes, etc. to get your interpretation of the archetype more easily without having to do cumbersome and fiddly multiclassing or turning to homebrew/third party solutions. But not entirely. And "clever" mechanical gimmicks were ubiquitous in their adventures, sadly. A straightforward appearing module with a classic theme would be, you'd expect, immune from some of this nonsense, but it turned out to not exactly be the case. And when they weren't even necessarily doing traditional stuff, they really had weirdos out there; like layering on multiple templates to already esoteric subraces, etc. Shackled City was kind of a mess that way. Third Edition was a game that I enjoyed for a long time, but by the time I was done with it, I was thoroughly unimpressed with mechanical gimmickry, mechanical complexity, rules-heaviness, or anything else along those lines. I was done with D&D, pretty much for good. Even now, I'm only playing 5e because that's what people are playing here in my new area with my new group, and the experience is kind of deju vu; we spent an entire 3½-4 hour session in what was essentially a single extended combat sequence, and way too much time flipping through books to see how rules were supposed to work. 

I guess all of the talk about 5e being simpler and streamlined compared to 3e isn't really true. Sure; monster stat blocks are clearly shorter, but from an actual play perspective, it felt... basically the same. Sigh.

I had enough fun playing 3e that I doubt I'd want to quit, but it is a little disappointing that the system isn't, y'know, really much better, if at all, than the one that it was trying to ape again. It's quite clear, and many have pointed this out but now I can confirm it because I got the t-shirt too, that after the debacle of 4e and Pathfinder literally outselling it at several points between 2011-2014, that their mandate was "make 3e again, but make it just barely different enough that people will buy the new books instead of the old ones, and make it just simpler enough that it's simpler than Pathfinder." Meanwhile, the OSR had grown tremendously during that era. It's still small compared to the "official" market, and has become pretty fragmented and fractious in its own right, but the people who were lost to the OSR are probably mostly lost for good.

And then there's guys like me. I appreciate many aspects of the OSR, especially it's focus on streamlined mechanics and a faster pace, but I also appreciate the willingness of the non-OSR to walk away from dumb ideas and paradigms about what the game is like. There are a lot of good innovations in D&D since 1985, and people who literally don't understand why a unified mechanic is a good thing have nothing in common with my tastes. For instance. So, I almost need to take an OSR chassis, and heavily modify it to be more role-playing friendly, get rid of any hint of "dungeon-crawling", a terrible word for a tedious activity, and just otherwise kind of fix the things that the early 80s evolution into "conventional trad play" didn't fix. 3e and above ironically fixed many of them while making many others of them objectively worse.

Final Vanze Maledictus, and backup character Codon Veile

I watched some of my old SWTOR outfit videos, in part because I was raiding my SWTOR characters for names. I do eventually need to re-up my subscription and see how it all goes with SWTOR again, but I'm not quite in the mood for it now. Mostly I enjoyed listening to the White Bat Audio, Xurious, Neon Odin and Lazy Laser synthwave music that I use for my SWTOR outfit videos. I'm almost more interested in doing more outfit videos than I am in playing the actual game, which sounds kinda dumb, but there you are.

Anyway, here's the final image I decided on for Vanze Maledictus:

Just in case he bites it soon, not that I think that that's likely, I created Codon Veile. Codon Veile in my SWTOR game is a Chiss sniper playing the trooper story. Here, he's a blue-skinned air genasi rogue. The DM did tell me that the rogue character will be leaving the game when he moves out of state to get married at the end of the year, so it'll be nice to have a backup.

I do and always have kinda liked the genasi more than I should, perhaps. I suppose that's why I found ways to incorporate them as core races in most of my settings. Maybe a second remix of Eberron, a system neutral one, that replaces many of the races already in the game with planetouched would work quite well. 

Elves > Aasimar (old style; no winged guys)

Dwarves > Earth genasi

Halflings > fire genasi?

Gnomes > tieflings (pre 4e style)

Half-elves > Air genasi

Goblinoids > Orclings

Orcs, Half-orcs > Water genasi

I dunno; it makes a few of the changes sufficient that it would almost require reworking the nation where they are the most common too; especially the Talenta Plains and the Shadow Marches (or is it Marshes? I never can remember.) Maybe I'd be better off using my EFX map after all and just toning down the HoMM3 influences a little bit and playing up the Eberron ones. Maybe using the D&D names for these elemental races rather than my cute attempts to be more HoMM3-ish and call them genies and tritons, and efreets, etc. isn't necessarily the best idea after all.

I really need to get around to scanning that map, don't I?

One advantage of using the more D&D-like names is that it would be easier and more obvious to adapt the EFX setting to D&D if I do. I'm not giving up on preferring my own system and my own setting, but if I'm playing with 5e D&D heads, and I don't yet know the degree to which they're all ingrained with that system, then it might be nice to have an option to bring the setting to them in a different system. 

I almost feel like I'm back to my old Bloodlines Geocities setting development from 2001-2003 or so, though. Truly what comes around goes around.

UPDATE: I'll confirm later, but I'm pretty sure that we're in the beginning of a Hoard of the Dragon Queen run through. 

Pop culture jokes

Sigh. I'm not sure if I'm amused or annoyed. While reading of the fantasy opera of elvish singers in Middenheim for the Carnival which is the backdrop for the Power Behind the Throne module, I came across this very dated early 80s British pop culture reference.

Elven niuromaintiech music, with its complex vocal sounds, its performers’ eye-catching costumes has found an enduring audience among the other races of the Old World. The audience at this recital show their admiration of the performers by imitating their bizarrely-cut clothes, elaborate hairstyles, and lavishly-applied makeup. Those attending this recital are treated to performances by perennial favourites Adamantiel ‘Prince Charming’ Dandihyweiman, the Elven League, and the so-called ‘Wild Elves’ themselves, Duriandian Leboniel and his quintet (who plan to honour the city of Ulric with their popular ditty ‘Hungry Like the White Wolf ’).

While that's a cheeky reference to New Romantic music, it's a pretty dubious claim to have said nearly 40 years after the fact that it's found an enduring audience, or that the strange fashion and make-up affectations of the New Romantics look like anything at all these days that anyone would recognize. I'm not even sure that the references to Adam Ant and his two hits "Prince Charming" or "Stand And Deliver" (from whence the line Dandy Highwayman, referenced as a pun above) are even remembered. A reference to the Human League is more straightforward, as is about four Duran Duran references in a row "Wild Boys", Duran Duran almost said outright in the name, Simon Lebon, and of course "Hungry Like the Wolf"... but Duran Duran does at least have some enduring popularity. Heck, I saw them in concert last year, and it was pretty packed. Although the Depeche Mode concert was more packed and the tickets more expensive too. I guess they have even more enduring popularity when all is said and done.

It is somewhat ironic that the publishing house that literally brought us the word grimdark from the tagline of their futuristic variation on the game, although it applies equally well to the fantasy version, is at the same time so invested in these corny puns, but there it is. Even when the first version of this adventure was written in the 80s itself, this might have been pretty obscure. Maybe not in Britain, I suppose.

The reference the next page down to Wilhelm Pikewaver's famous play A Knight's Midsummer Dream is possibly even more ridiculous. Pikewaver? Really?

And a couple of pages after that, a reference to "What A Swell Party This Is"; holy crap, is it written for my dad? He's nearly 80, but he's always loved High Society. If he hadn't, I doubt I'd have recognized that reference.

Looks like 5es REALLY back on the menu, boyz!

I did it. Last night I got a phone call from the guy at church who I was talking to about my D&D t-shirt, and he invited me to jump into his campaign this Saturday afternoon. I think it plays most weeks, and it’s only been going for a little while; apparently the characters are only second level. Or, well… at least he wants me to make a second level character. I presume everyone else is too.

Apparently he was a feeling a little off because another group that he’s playing in (he’s running this game) is a circus of super exotic races he had asked for a bit more traditional. For this game he got as a player line-up a human ranger, a human rogue, a human barbarian and a hill dwarf cleric. My first thought was also a human ranger or barbarian before he texted me that info, since I love the good old fashioned human outdoorsman archetype, but I was hoping he’d let me run a different kind of alternate ranger. But after seeing the line-up, I thought maybe something a little different was in store. He told me that a more exotic race given how “bland” this line-up was might be good, and that the rogue’s player (his adult son) will be getting married and moving out of state at the end of the year. But still; I’m thinking that some magic is what’s needed, so I created a fire genasi sorcerer. Rolled it up in D&D Beyond, since you can do that for free, although I didn’t find the application really all that intuitive, unfortunately. I even gave my son-in-law a call to check over my work. We’ll be talking a little bit tonight. Still waiting on some feedback from the DM on what to do about equipment and money, but in the meantime I did a pretty straightforward conservative estimate; some basic first level non-magical stuff along with a few healing potions. If I can upgrade anything or have a bit more money than my very cheapskate estimate, I can cross that bridge when I get there.

Here's a few options to choose from for my appearance. 

I’m calling my guy Vanze Maledictus, a riff off of some SWTOR character names that I’ve used already. I still have some time to tinker with it before I send him a draft to review. I picked the noble background, and decided that Vanze was born to a life of privilege. He and his twin sister Vanisse used to run around their father’s manor causing all kinds of trouble. But while Vanze was more of a good-natured and likeable scamp, his sister had a much darker edge, and may well have been a full blown sociopath from the get-go. Upon reaching her middle-upper teen years (I dunno; seventeen, or so?) she chafed so badly under the rules of her father than she made a fiendish pact bond, became a warlock, and burned her family estate to the ground to escape, caring little (or least not showing that she cared) that many of the family servants and even their parents died in the blaze. Vanze was away at the time, but arrived in time to confront her at the conflagration. His own sorcerous powers had not yet come into their own, so he was badly defeated and humiliated in this confrontation, and his sister left him, presumably to die himself. However, in the end, he was not seriously physically harmed. He moved in with his extended family for a time, and when his magic came, as it does to sorcerers, he declared his intention to find his sister, wring an explanation from her for her actions and bring her to justice, or at least some kind of reconciliation for all of the trauma that she caused. 

However, to be perfectly honest, Vanze is only of average intelligence and has little practical experience with the real world, giving me the opportunity to play him up as kind of arrogant, although not really deliberately; he just really has no idea what real life is like, and doesn’t understand the practicalities of sometimes even very basic everyday tasks. He’s kind of got a devil-may care swashbuckler attitude with a bit of an edge, kind of like the Three Musketeers, cares mostly about his immediate group that he’ll be latched on to as well as his family, or what remains of it, and is a bit callous, although not necessarily intentionally, towards the needs and wants of anyone else. He’s also full of really impractical suggestions and ideas, because it never occurs to him that they are impractical. 

In addition to this, I found a copy of the PHB on Amazon. I’m not thrilled with buying anything from Wizards, but I’m buying this from some third party at less than $20, so I doubt WotC will see a single dime from my purchase. But I figured if I’m joining a 5e group presumably long term, I better bite the bullet and get the game. Or at least the PHB. We’ll see if I bite the bullet to get anything else or not, but I can probably get the other two of the core books for more or less the same price.

How to GRIMDARK a D&D (or D&D like) game

Although I’ve given a lot of thought and put a lot of effort into my DIY house rule document; so much so that it became easier to make it a full blown self-contained ruleset rather than merely a house rule document, I do also think that for some players, that may be more intimidating or off-putting than simply having a set of house rules. Some people really like to feel like they’re playing an official game with rules that are readily available. I actually can add a pretty simply house rule template that would go on top of almost all other rule sets. The only thing that would still vary is my custom races, but that’s a little harder to make common in spite of system.

Grozavest, spooky grimdark vampire capital

If not using my regular rules document (recently slightly updated!) then I think you could do well enough with any of the following systems, which I know well enough to confidently say that they’d work: Sword & Wizardry (any version), Labyrinth Lord, Basic Fantasy, Old School Essentials, or any of the original D&D rule sets that those are attempting to emulate (OD&D, B/X) although I actually think that the emulations or retro-clones are better games at this point. Presumably, they’d work just as well with something like Dark Dungeons X, which emulates the BEMCI/RC just as well, or any other retro-clone that’s not based on any AD&D version. It’d also work pretty well with Microlite Purest Essence or Microlite74 or any of the other “retro” Microlites. I’m not a fan of the reduction in Microlite of the six abilities to three (or four for some versions) and no longer see the point in it, but if you change that, then you’re pretty close to my rules again since that’s basically the route that I took to get there, layering on gradually over time things like Heroism points, advantage/disadvantage, tearing down the classes into an a la carte build your own class menu. But none of those really impact the tone too much, they are more about just having mechanics that I like for regular gameplay. I’d be happy enough ignoring most of those and playing with something like ShadowDark or Knave 2e or Five Torches Deep, or any of the games mentioned previously—although I’d no doubt add a few other things and I’d have to think long and hard about what to do with the cleric; an archetype that I dislike tremendously. What I want to talk about instead is actually how to implement some rules like a template on top of any of these rulesets (or even 5e or Pathfinder or Tales of the Valiant, etc.) to “grimdark” them up. If you do this, the other rules changes are more about personal preference; these suggestions below are about genre, tone and mood.

1) Stats. Depending on which system you’re modifying, you’ll notice some differences in terms of what stat generation method you’re presented with and what the bonuses are. In older games, the stat bonuses were more modest and only applied at the highest ability scores. IN 3e and above, they started applying much more smoothly across the range of ability scores, and the top was much higher. That said, the math of ability scores and modifiers vs targets like armor class, etc, remains more or less the same; as Professor Dungeon Master pointed out in a video a while ago, it’s basically 8+ (unmodified) on your die roll; all of the changes to modifiers, bonuses, and target numbers don’t change this. The bigger numbers are, however, psychologically designed to make you feel more powerful, even if mathematically you actually aren’t. For a more grimdark game, go back to old school bonuses; the addition of a couple of points of bonus won’t make enough of a difference to make the game unplayable, but it will change the psychology of the players, as they recognize that their players don’t have the inflated bonuses that they’re used to, and they’ll feel the difference. A few near misses that would have hit with an extra +1 or +2, and they’ll really feel it. But it shouldn’t actually change their overall ability to succeed.

2) Hit Points. If this applies psychologically to stats, it applies even more to hit points. It’s actually gotten quite difficult to kill PCs sometimes, once they get past a certain level. However, in my opinion, the very low hit points of older games at low level is too low to actually facilitate grimdark. Sure, sure… there were some famous meat-grinder games back in the day, but that doesn’t actually encourage a darker tone; rather it becomes a game of either frustration or dark comedy as you flame out with your fighter Conan, followed by Fronan and Bonan and Nonan and Konan, etc. I think modern D&D did a good job in giving lower level PCs more hit points; enough to take at least a hit or two in all but the most unlucky of cases. However, it quickly goes out of control as you add levels. I don’t add hit dice anymore in my game… I add 2 hit points when you level up. That’s it. Characters need to be vulnerable, and the genre changes considerably as you level up in the game to one of overt superheroes who don’t seriously fear almost any combat. Players routinely and blithely jump into combat shouting huzzah and expect to win D&D, because their characters have been designed by the game designers to win D&D. That’s probably the single most important thing to do to change the game to a more grimdark tone and feel.

3) Levels. Speaking of those levels, even without runaway hit points, there’s little reason to play the game at very high levels. Even in standard D&D with standard tone and feel, an extremely small percentage of players actually get up above about 7th level or so. I recommend greatly slowing leveling down. If characters are leveling up every other session or so, and in my experience that’s not unheard of at all, I strongly suggest cutting that down to only 20-25% or so that speed. I wouldn’t even mind 10%, but maybe that’s too slow for a lot of players.

4) Death and Dying. In older games, PCs were dead when they hit (or fell below) 0 hit points. In 3e and above (at least) there was a “dying” status where you were out of the fight and dying, but not dead per se; unless you either hit -10 hit points, or failed three death saves (with an easy DC), etc. Again, I actually don’t have a problem with the concept of giving the PCs a chance to not die. Too much or too easy death starts to turn the game into Paranoia rather than grimdark. It veers into comedy or absurdity at least rather than a darker mood or tone. But it’s also true that most “modern” games have been too generous in terms of allowing get out of death free cards. I now allow one death save, DC 15. If you fail it, you die instantly. If you pass it, you still die in two rounds unless you are stabilized. If you still have a Heroism point handy, my equivalent in some ways to the old Action Point concept, you can convert death into a near death experience by burning one at this point. You’ll instantly go to 0 hps, still be unconscious but stable, and will take a permanent scar, i.e., a loss of an stat bonus. This has psychologically the right approach for me; it feels like death, but the near miss mechanic means death isn’t quite as permanent as it can be. But… well, see below. 

5) Sanity. This is a mechanic made famous by the venerable Call of Cthulhu role playing game written by Sandy Peterson. It was added in its BRP incarnation without any conversion to make it native to d20 when it was stuck in the d20 Call of Cthulhu game. A few years later, it was ported to Unearthed Arcana, made open content, and officially an option for D&D 3.5 (as it was at the time.) Many fantasy games flirting with horror themes and tone have attempted to either use a variation of this sanity system, or create one of their own. I find that the Call of Cthulhu sanity system is pretty fiddly and too complicated; I feel like the author to created it couldn’t resist showing off the research he did in actual mental disorders, when in reality a much more simple and easier to apply at the table system would have served better. (This is especially true given that Call of Cthulhu is based on the BRP system, which is relatively pretty rules light anyway.) The concept of sanity is maybe questionable, but it’s a genre convention, and while probably not at all realistic, neither are a lot of other things that routinely happen in the hobby to characters. I do have a sanity mechanic, but it mostly only comes into play when attempting to cast spells. The whole “fail a sanity check” when you see some tentacles or whatever is borderline silly, but the idea that trying to use magic strains or even breaks your brain works very well for me. My sanity mechanics are incredibly simple. You make what is essentially a charisma saving throw; CHA + level and if you fail, you consult a little d6 table and apply the temporary effect. If you critically fail it (natural one) you pick up a permanent penalty (cumulative, if you end up having more than one critical failure in your career) to your sanity checks in the future.

6) Casting Spells. I greatly prefer roll to cast over spell slots and spells per day. DC is 10 + (2 x spell level.) In other words, a second level spell would be DC 14, a fourth level spell would be 18, etc. You can cast them as often as you want. If you fail, you make a sanity check; the DC is the same as the spellcheck level, and the spell fails to do anything. If you critically fail your spellcraft roll, your spell backfires and targets you. If that doesn’t actually make sense for the given spell, then instead an otherworldly entity is ripped from the outer darkness from whence magic comes and attacks you obsessively until either you or it is killed. Area effect spells can be really nasty, because they might well end up targeting your entire group. In addition, you make your sanity check with disadvantage. Critical failure, which because it happens on a natural one will happen on average once every twenty times you attempt to cast, is a little bit like Russian roulette. Sure, you can cast with impunity as long as your roll to cast is successful. Even a failed roll has a relatively minor penalty; a chance at a failed Sanity check and a failed spell. But a critical failure… ouch. This makes magic much less routine and mechanistic, as it tends to be for D&D and other similar games, and more mysterious and edgy, and potentially kind of frightening.

7) Magic Items. This one is pretty simple. Magic items are much more rare than is normal in any edition, even the old ones. In addition, if you have a magic item, it’s probably a mixed blessing. Maybe it does what you need it to do, i.e., it works against ghosts or daemons or whatever while a normal item would not, but it also has a cost associated with it. I once created a magical super-sized sword that was too big for the characters to really use effectively. In addition, it had a mouth on the hilt that actually bit the hand of the user and drained his life slowly; but it was the only way to defeat a particularly nasty undead creature of some kind. Like spells, all magic is a two-edged sword; as dangerous to the user as to the target.

8) Monsters. The final step to grimdark your game is how you use monsters. This isn’t any kind of mechanical thing to do, though, just a style question. Monsters should never be routine. Fighting monsters shouldn’t ever be easy or boring or whatever. Monsters deserve, even low level monsters like goblins or kobolds, to be frightening and to use tactics or strategies that make them dangerous. They should be foreshadowed, and they should be played up to be scary and disconcerting if not outright creepy. There should always be a question as to whether or not the PCs are even capable of defeating the monsters in a straight up fight, and PCs should avoid as much as possible getting sucked into that situation. They need to research, plan and strategize how to minimize the monsters’ advantages and work a little harder. The idea that you just shout huzzah, roll initiative, and charge into combat with the expectation that you’re prepared to win at D&D is the antithesis of the grimdark tone and should always be avoided. What do you do for combats then? Bad guys! Criminals, thugs, cultists, bandits, etc. Wild animals is another good alternative. Now granted, I’m not at all saying that you shouldn’t have the PCs fight monsters. In every episode of the X-files, there was some kind of investigation and confrontation with a monster, alien, or other creepy F/X type something or other. You need to do the same. But they should never be routine, and if you keep the game action packed with more mundane threats while building up tension and foreshadowing for your monsters at all times, that’s the grimdark mood and tone.

1492 Quadrata lim vs JSL Blackletter

Sorry for the lack of attention; but on the other hand, I've made a number of new setting related YouTube posts.

But I've also been playing around with fonts and banners again a bit. One of the things that I mentioned earlier was that while JSL Blackletter has become quite common in the indie and DIY RPG space because it was used for the logos of Labyrinth Lord and ShadowDark, I prefer the similar yet slightly different 1492 Quadrata lim, just because while it is pretty similar, it's not exactly the same.

Then, I found where I'd on a whim downloaded the ShadowDark creator's kit. This has the following banner (in both black and white, but I'll only show the one because it'll show up on this screen better, unless you're doing something funky with your display). It's in the JSL Blackletter font. I erased the font portion and retyped it in 1492 Quadrata lim, just so you can easily compare the two.

As is normally the case in two similar but noticeably different fonts, there are some letters that I like better in one and some in another. I wish I could somehow cherry-pick them, but that requires more effort to do than I think is worth it.