Appendix II

This post is a draft for an Appendix II. I'm redoing my rulebook slightly; less to update the text, and more to update the look, feel and layout. Although I did make a minor change or two; I noticed that somehow I'd let Teleport in as a 5th level spell. My first thought was to delete it entirely, but then I decided to move it to the Ritual Only spells instead, where it makes more sense, as well as greatly reduce the range to which you can teleport. Rather than 100 miles/level, it's 10 miles/level, so a top level character can still only teleport up to 100 miles. That's a nice distance, but considerably less than 1,000 miles. I also fixed a few minor typos and an even fewer amount of poorly worded sections. It's an extremely minor revision; like I said, it's more for the layout, look and feel than for anything else. And I'm doing it primarily as a pdf, although it's possible that I'll send it to Lulu and get a POD of it just because. 

Rather, what I'm going to mostly do new as part of the text is add a new Appendix, or maybe even two new Appendices, to add to the existing Appendix, which has some discussion on how to play as well as some optional rules, including the travel system, a few "exotic" races like the woodwoses, seraphs, dhampyrs, etc. Appendix II, this appendix that I'm using this post as a draft for, would be a discussion of playstyle and how the rules differ from other games that gamers might be more familiar with, and how that impacts the game at the table. Appendix III, if I write it, would be a brief summary of the Old Night setting, or the Three Realms+ as I tend to frequently call it, since I've gradually added a few other regions to the original Three Realms that I'll end up getting campaigns and therefore becoming "core" to the setting; the Corsair Coast (including Porhomok in the interior), Nizrekh, and "the North" including Lower Kurushat and a bit of Hyperborea. That makes for an awkward count; should I call it the Six Realms? The Eight? Anyway, that's for later. For now; how to play for 5e and for OSR players, respectively.

Also, I generated some more images for my new layout, mostly with Gemini, because Nano Banana 2 doesn't seem to run out of generations nearly as quickly, so I can keep going long after Grok and ChatGPT have shut me down. I don't always like the Nano Banana 2 images as much, but this crop is actually quite good, so I'll add some to this draft for visual interest. The actual text in the actual document will have new images, because these are already in other sections of the document. Mostly in the monster section.

Players who are new to the hobby might not have any expectations on how this all works, and may not need this appendix, but I seriously doubt that anyone new to the hobby will ever read or play this game, so I'm addressing this appendix to people who come from already inside the hobby who have experience with some other game. In particular, I believe that people will look at the rules and think that this looks quite a bit like Dungeons & Dragons; either "modern" D&D like Fifth Edition, or retro D&D like the various OSR games (Old School Essentials, OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord, Basic Fantasy, Sword & Wizardry and numerous others, all quite similar and broadly compatible with each other.) However, the game isn't really like either of those, in many ways, nor is it meant to be played like either of them, because I don't really enjoy the default play style inherent in either of them enough to try and mimic it; I made this game specifically because neither of them really did exactly what I wanted it to.

All roleplaying games have to, ultimately, answer the most fundamental question for their players; what is it that the characters actually do? And how does that differ in this game than from other games that you might be more used to playing, and how does that change how the game actually happens at the table?

Fifth Edition D&D (5e) is a game that's fundamentally about being big-time heroes. It's a game about telling epic stories about saving the world, involving characters who are heavily inspired by super-hero stories and which offer power fantasies to their players, who can expect to have characters who have mechanics to allow them to do cool, dramatic things, that if put to screen, would be CGI fests of crazy action and super-powered nonsense. Even at relatively low level, characters are extremely capable, heroic, and have access to all kinds of magical power fantasy f/x. 

The published campaigns for 5e all follow a similar, albeit admittedly not identical pattern; the player characters meet extremely colorful and exotic characters who need help against equally colorful and exotic villains, and as they knock down one wave of villains they discover that there is more going on than they initially thought and they now have to investigate and shut down further waves of more powerful villains, to stop a conspiracy to lay waste to the world through some evil god or equally bad and powerful mega-super-villain. Halaster Blackcloak, the "Mad Mage" himself under Waterdeep, and Count Strahd, the iconic vampire-wizard supervillain are among the least colorful and more grounded of this assemblage of arch-villains, which also includes half a dozen iconic demon lords in one campaign, Tiamat, Goddess-Queen of Evil Dragons Who Lives In Literal Hell in another campaign, Tharizdun, the powerful Chained God of Madness and his four godlike elemental lords, one for each element, who he has manipulated into serving him unknowingly is another. The famous archlich Acererak has cursed death itself, causing people to be unable to become resurrected by routine D&D magic in another. It goes on and on. Even the anthology "campaigns" tend to offer similar story arcs, although less epic, because they are shorter and meant to be lower level. 

5e is fundamentally a game about extremely colorful, unusual, highly fantastic super-heroes saving the world from cosmic threats that are capable of literally threatening the entire world all at once, and being the Big Time superheroes who are the only ones, for some reason, who can do so. When I'm feeling less charitable, I call this mode of play The Avengers meets the Muppets. 5e has also started to develop an alternate mode of play, although it is less represented in the actual campaigns, it has been heavily represented in some of the art and other "ancillary" material for the game lately, which embraces the trend of cozy fantasy. In this version, "heroes" are just characters, and they don't save the world, or really do much of anything unusual; in fact, that's kind of the whole idea. It's Fantasy SIMS, and you just run these bizarre and highly fantastic characters in a bizarre and highly fantastic world, but you just run a business, or do other little low stakes and often whimsical and colorful things. I don't know; this adds an element of My Little Pony to the otherwise Avengers meets the Muppets vibe. 

This mode of play is well established and supported by not just the structure of the adventures, but also by the rules and mechanics. Characters are very durable, difficult to kill, can immediately do all kinds of "cool things", and only add to their ability to do "cool things" as they level up, quite quickly, I might add. Almost every character is overtly magical and highly fantastic, and although "traditional" races exist in the game, of course, even the "boring" human option (actually the most commonly played, I'm told) but every addition to the game makes it more colorful, more fantastic and more whimsical. I don't begrudge this style of play, but since 5e does it very well, there really isn't any real reason for me to try and do the same thing; if that's what I wanted, why not just play more 5e instead? Keep in mind that although the game looks superficially similar in some ways to 5e, you are not expected to play Shadow of Old Night in this manner, and it will no doubt frustrate and disappoint you if you try. That's not what I mean for it to do.

The OSR, or Old School Revival (or Renaissance, depending on who you ask, or sometimes even Revolution) is perhaps a little fuzzier on what exactly it is, but ultimately I think I can make some handwavy generalizations. Because the Shadow of Old Night also resembles an OSR game superficially, it's important, I think, to compare it to that as well. What do OSR characters do? Well, first off, OSR characters are usually not nearly as colorful a 5e characters. They're often quite grounded, low fantasy, even occasionally leaning almost into grimdark territory, where the idea of an exotic race is something like a goblin, and they otherwise focus on very traditional, old-school types of characters with low access to magic, low access to "cool things", and the OSR makes a big deal of contrasting its sword & sorcery roots to 5e's high fantasy; although that's not exactly true either (Conan or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were all three over-the-top heroic characters that are more similar to super-heroes than OSR gamers are often willing to admit.)

There really isn't any such thing as the "iconic campaign" for an OSR game the same way that there is for 5e. What "campaigns" do exist are not written at all like 5e campaigns. There isn't really any story at all, there's just locations full of interesting challenges. You certainly don't save the world from super-villains. You may not even save a handful of villagers. In general, the gist of the game is to go explore "dungeons" for no other reason than the joy of discovery, the fun of the challenge, and the material rewards for your characters that they expect to get out of it. The "dungeon" itself becomes the super-villain, a bizarre environment that is unremittingly hostile in nonsensical and ridiculous ways, which serve no other purpose than to create challenges for the players to overcome with their characters. Ultimately, that is what the most important activity of the characters is; to overcome challenges for the sake of it, not because it creates an interesting narrative, or tells an interesting story, or meaningfully develops even the characters, who ultimately might end up being kind of disposable. Because overcoming challenges through player cleverness rather than through character coolness is the objective OSR players often brag about riding the struggle bus. Their characters are the opposite in some ways from 5e characters. Not necessarily colorful, or even interesting, they are often more like playing pieces, and they are quite fragile in comparison. OSR games aren't imaginatively living a power fantasy, it's bragging about how clever you were as a player to solve ludicrous and random challenges. And sometimes, the challenges take their toll, and that's part of the whole experience; you have to replace characters sometimes because you lose them due to not quite being clever enough, not quite being prepared enough, or perhaps most often, just not quite being lucky enough and having bad rolls come your way. If you don't set the proper watch and have the proper preparation, your character can die randomly due to a literal random encounter with a random wild animal, and that's the way it's supposed to be. You shrug and roll up a new character and jump right back in and try again. If you're successful, your characters gain treasure (gold pieces, or gp) and experience (XP) both of which mean that you become better at going in and doing it again, except now with even more difficult challenges, presumably, or at least you can address challenges that you had to avoid before. Rinse and repeat. 

So, although Shadow of Old Night resembles D&D in both of these iterations in many ways, it isn't really meant to be played like either of them. There is both a game and a famous (albeit old now) TV show that best emulate what I expect a Shadow of Old Night game to be like. The game is Call of Cthulhu (CoC) and characters there are not power fantasies at all; they are rather pointedly normal people in over their heads, and the purpose of the game is not that they acquire anything really. They're not overcoming challenges for its own sake, or to raise their status through treasure and experience (gp and XP). Ironically, they do sometimes attempt to save the world from horrific world-ending threats, although not being super-heroes like 5e characters, the vibe is tremendously different. Sometimes you do not, though, often the threats are much more subtle or localized. Maybe the whole world isn't under immediate threat, although it could be under a longer term threat as ancient and alien creatures who have little interest in humanity other than to consider them a pest or a speed bump to their own agendas. Investigation and mystery is what the PCs are spending the majority of their time doing, often followed by hectic and desperate action that may leave you several characters short when all is said and done, because Call of Cthulhu is meant to be a game of desperate supernatural horror. 

The X-files is the TV show, and it differs in some respects from CoC. The characters can be more capable. Rather than being in-over-their heads normal Joes caught up in things that they're not supposed to know, they can be well trained and well educated federal agents, to so speak; trained and authorized to investigate and stop these supernatural threats, and capable of doing so, after a fashion, but they need to be lucky, careful, and usually have a better plan that just going in guns blazing. You do expect more continuity of characters; you don't get near the lethality of say an OSR game or a CoC game. Monsters are still overwhelming and characters are still in over their heads, but through careful research, investigation, and finding the monsters' weaknesses, they can at least be stopped or thwarted, if not destroyed, and the world can go on for a time, without having most of the characters either die or go insane, like they do in CoC. It's not unlike CoC in most respects, other than that the characters are a bit more capable and are expected to (mostly) survive the experience, although often at cost to themselves.

This is the model that Shadow of Old Night is meant to emulate. You need to be careful with your characters, but not in the OSR sense where you're attempting to tactically solve challenges like traps and stuff like that, but rather in the sense that you need to investigate first before going in fighting, because if you Leeroy Jenkins your way into it, it will go badly for you most likely. But by being more cautious, you can be expected to survive and maybe even prevail. Again, not long term, perhaps, but you can hold off the long defeat for another day. What you spend your time doing is investigating shady conspiracies, secret supernatural threats, and investigating in a fantasy world that maybe doesn't necessarily believe that the threats are real. It's supernatural federal agents and black ops in a grounded, low fantasy world, and you do it because it has to be done. You're not the Big Time Heroes, you're the secret heroes that few if any truly recognize for what you do for them. If anything, they may fear you more than like you (how much do you want a federal agent knocking on your door talking about aliens, Bigfoot or ghosts?) You don't get rich doing this. You don't get powerful. You do get more capable, but only modestly, as time goes on. The point isn't to have characters that advance for its own sake, that's just an emulation of more organic and "realistic" character growth over time as you survive more investigations. 

Although the mechanics superficially resemble D&D mechanics, they don't really play like them, and you're not even meant to play the high lethality OSR type game with them; you're meant to play a game that is more like a fantasy horror game, a fantasy Call of Cthulhu or fantasy X-files if you will. I like the idea of the characters being capable, swashbuckling equivalents to Fox Mulder who persist (mostly) from season to season, if you will, rather than like fainting old professors who are likely to die before the adventure ends, but you should never feel like your characters have any real plot or mechanical immunity to having bad things happen to them. If you try and play Shadow of Old Night like 5e, you'll find that your characters are frustratingly fragile and maybe even kind of bland compared to the flashing lights and super-powers that you're used to. If you try and play Shadow of Old Night like an OSR game... actually, it would probably work reasonably well, but then again, it's not meant to be played that way, and I don't envision ever running Old Night like that. It's just a coincidence, if you will, that an OSR ruleset is closer to what I want mechanically to do something very different from a playstyle experience. Old Night is its own game; meant to have D&D-like mechanics (old-fashioned D&D mechanics, anyway) but meant to be played as if it were Call of Cthulhu and not any version of D&D really at all.