Vampire Orgy

I've made a card game! It's about having a threesome when one of you is secretly a vampire. You can help spread awareness of this serious issue by downloading the pdf here, printing it off, and playing it with two of your friends.

It's a stressful game. As a human, you have to open yourself up to one of the people across from you, knowing one of them will kill you. Your only information is their actions, body language, expressions. You think you have it figured out - then your guy does something weird, and you're flung into panic. Terrifying uncertainty.

After being human, playing the vampire is like putting your feet into a warm bath. You know who everybody else at the table is, and you know they're just warm meat waiting to be eaten. But if you show that for a second, it'll be obvious who you are. In playtesting we went through a string of games when the vampires lost every time, because the humans had gotten good enough to identify that visible relief when you first see the vampire card.

So, you have to act uncertain. Try to pretend you're as helpless and terrified as everybody else in the game. All the while you're desperately trying not to smirk.

It takes about ten minutes for a round, and you need exactly 3 or 6 players. If you ever play it, send me a comment, I'd love to hear how it went.

Neanderthal

Sorry for the radio silence, gang. I've hung up the DM spurs for a while, and I'm playing in a Caveman Campaign run by a friend of mine, Matt Groves. So, I thought I might take a break from telling you what's cool about my game to tell you what's cool about his.

A C-C-Caveman campaign, you say? What's so cool about that?

1. You rise from the dirt with nothing. No clothes, no weapons, no equipment. Anything you want, you have to make with your own two hands. Kill a boar, strip its hide for armor and tie a tusk to a stick to make an axe. Tie vines together for a rope, use a strip of fur as a sling. You want bows and arrows? You better find a master craftsman to invent that shit.

Whenever you get an item, roll a craft check: d6+int+a bonus for good materials. Write that number next to your item. Whenever it gets damaged badly - say, if an enemy gets a good hit against your armor, or they attack your weapon directly - roll d6 as a save. If it's over your craft number, it breaks. If it's under, it's safe - but subtract one for next time.

This strips D&D right back to the primitive basics. Brutal and primitive, your fists are your first and last defense  You have a very small amount of shit, and you care about all of it. This is the spike you tore off that giant cactus - this is the armor you made from the bones in the dinosaur graveyard. Everything is personalized and unique.

It works because no-one else has anything either: you can't buy anything, and most of the battles are fist VS fist. This puts the focus on using the environment - throwing sand in their eyes, pushing shit onto them. Punching does a d4, a crafted weapon does a d6, a great weapon does d8. You might want to downgrade the hit points by a bit.

2. Everything is based on something tactile. You need things like eyes or tongues for spell components. You get experience by eating the brains of your foes. The end of every battle is marked with a bloody frenzy as you start ripping into the bodies of the fallen.

(Pro anatomy tip: Human bodies comes with two "Club Bones" that make perfect weapons.)

Leveling up involves smoking rare herbs to enter the magical level-up plain and commune with the gods. Classes are basic: Wizard spells should be fiddled with to become more like subtle tricks than obvious magic.The ability to start a fire is a good level 1 wizard spell, for instance.

3. Everything was cracked out of the clay mold just the other day. The land is still molten; mountains move, gods walk. There are no cities, trade routes, or civilization - just straggling tribes surrounded by crazed wilderness. Anything could be over the hill. Forms are still fluid, the way they are in creation myths; many animals still talk.

4. Megafauna, megaflora, everything is enormous and archetypal. The trees reach forever, and the most dangerous enemies are the beasts; massive and untamed. Dinosaurs are still here, of course, scattered and dying but still terrifying - the dragons of the setting.

5. We've started creating a tribe (An all-woman amazon outfit called "The Furies", using wolves like motorcycles). Recruiting members, finding a place to live, figuring out how to build a lair and what to make it from; it's the primitive basics of the stronghold, stripped down to the cool shit. 

That's what makes it so good in general. Everything in D&D stripped down to the most basic form, and made as tactile as possible. It's simple and brilliant, and you should definitely try it sometime.

How to make a 3D dungeon map in ten seconds.

Step 1: Get Deus Ex. You can buy it for eight bucks here.


Step 2: Start a new game. When you start the level, press "T". It should pop up with this text:

Delete everything in there with backspace, then type: "set DeusEx.JCDentonMale bCheatsEnabled True", and press enter. That enables cheats. 

Step 3: Use the same method to type in the word Ghost. This lets you fly, and move through walls. 

Step 4: You now have a three-dimensional dungeon map. Put Deus Ex on a laptop, fly around and describe the level to your PC's as they fight through it. Make up stats for all the enemies, traps, and treasure they encounter.

You can get a full list of other cheats here, along with help on how to set it up if it's not working. You'll want to use:

Invincibility:

god

Invisibility:	invisible

Disable Ghost Mode:

walk

You can also use cheats to teleport to the start of any level in the game, just by typing Open _____ (with the name of the level in the space). There are about 70 maps you can use for dungeons in this game. The full list is at the same link as above. Here's some good ones:

02_NYC_Hotel: A new york street, with a crummy bar, hostage situation in a hotel, smuggler living in the sewers. I think I remember a secret Majestic 12 base under the street, too.

03_NYC_BatteryPark: A homeless encampment in the park conceals an entrance to the hidden enclave of the Mole People.

06_HongKong_WanChai_Market: Hong kong. The canals hold secret treasure, triad members war in the abandoned subways, there's a dungeon hidden behind secret levers in a femme fatale's hotel room.

06_HongKong_VersaLife: Area 51 style facility masquerading as a normal business.

10_Paris_Catacombs: Dystopian future Paris. Find your way down to the paris catacombs, which now serve as a battleground between freedom fighters and the police.

10_Paris_Chateau: Old french mansion with a hidden dungeon under the wine cellar. No enemies, just figuring out how to penetrate the environment - perfect if your PC's need something to rob.

You can use cheats like this in a lot of games. Two good ones:

Any game published by Bethesda (Skyrim, New Vegas, Morrowind) can be instantly turned into a 3D hex crawl map by pressing "`" ("Tilde", next to the 1 key) and typing TCL. More cheats here. 

The Legend of Grimrock is a great dungeoncrawler with a level editor. Just click and drag to map out a dungeon. The best thing about it is that it comes with torches that burn out over time. Beware that the map size is a little small, though.

There's a few reasons why Deus Ex is the best choice for this:

1. It's old and cheap. You can get it for 8 bucks, and it will run on your shitty laptop with no problems.

2. It comes pre-loaded with RPG information. 

Every door comes with a Lock strength and a Breaking strength - how easy it is to lockpick, and how easy it is to force. Just convert that information to a DC and you're good to go. The skill system also gives you info for hacking computers, keypads and security cameras, and disarming bombs. You don't need anything but the game open.

3. The dungeons are really fucking good.

They're massive, intricate, and they have as many routes through them as possible. The first level is famously a scale model of Liberty Island. Something as simple as a door can usually be blown up, lockpicked, hacked open from a nearby computer, or opened with a password.  All the traps can be turned on your enemies, as can their turrets, their robots, the mutants they've been experimenting on. There's plenty of secret passages, treasure, traps. It's got the shit you need.

4. There's a lot of good stuff in the setting, if you want to use it.

You're dystopian cops in the post-cyberpocalypse, wearing trenchcoats and sunglasses at night (it's always night), beating down "Terrorists". Every single conspiracy is true. The police are in bed with the Illuminati who are fighting Majestic 12 who mastermind the Men In Black who bred the crocodiles in the sewers which are hunting down the Mole Men. Every street corner conceals a secret facility. To be a good cyber-cop, you have to pretend you don't notice any of this.

In my first session, we got a lot of mileage out of playing this for laughs. The game itself manages to get away with playing it straight, though, because it does so much grounding work. It's core trick is that you always start in the scummy streets and abandoned warehouses of the world above, and slowly transition through into gonzo-land. Every dungeon is mapped out like a real place. You look through enough environments with stories like "Here's where they have their coffee breaks, here's the office, and here's where they ship out the steel" that by the time you've transitioned through to "Here's where they perform genetic experiments on the hobos", you've acclimatized. 

It's easy to reskin for D&D (just find-and-replace "Terrorist" with "Orc"), but it means you'll have to make a new story for the dungeon. You'll also miss the computer stuff: security cameras, hacking computers for pass codes to doors, hacking robots to turn them on their masters. For best results, use it with a something modern like Shadowrun, Nights Black Agents, or Cyberpunk.

How my Campaign works

1. The PC's enter a society. They have a goal.

2. It becomes clear that the society is inherently opposed to the PC's goal.

3. The PC's destroy the society.

I've never known why this happens. No-one ever plans any part of it. I make up a society, the PC's make up a goal, and the way our minds collide in play somehow naturally disintegrates into this pre-ordained pattern, to the constant surprise of everyone involved.

Here's an example: One of my players had their heart set on creating a democracy. After impersonating the ruler, he gathered all the nobles in town together and told them that they were all going to be demoted. He was actually bewildered and heartbroken when this didn't work. "My utopia!" he cried, as the party thief slaughtered noblemen.

Here's my attempt to explain it in detail.

1. I have a basic idea of how the session will run - a pre-made dungeon, encounter, something like that.

2. The PC's either ignore my pre-made stuff, or blow through it in record time and keep playing.

3. Forced into the delirious Improv Zone,  I make up a Society on the spot. Even if I've got one that's been made up before we started, the PC's will force me into spinning up the details of some part I hadn't thought about. ("What do they do with their dead?" and then "Could we ride the corpse pillar down the death-pit?")

Often the details will be spun from the PC's themselves - they'll make a joke or something, and I'll go "Sure, that's how it works".

4. The PC's case the joint. As I make up the society, they research it, develop a goal or a way to achieve that goal, and start putting plans in action.

5. The "Gravity" of my campaign pulls towards escalation. It is very hard to calm things down, and very easy to make things worse. Thus, even if the PC's are in a calm situation, they soon find themselves sliding towards destruction and anarchy. (This isn't a conscious decision on my part - just the natural effect of what I'm interested in, probably.) Naturally, they eventually end up fleeing the ruins of society.

6. Because of this society-destroying style of play, solving a problem naturally creates a dozen more. The PC's have a bizarre amount of agency on the world - far more than anyone could have in real life. Everything they go through is warped or devastated until the game world is entirely defined by PC-created problems, and I don't have to make any plot hooks on my own at all. The players have made their own world to play in.

It kind of emulates Jack Vance's Cugel's Saga. The society is a trap for the protagonist, and the last page is the protagonist fleeing as the society is destroyed behind him. It's a strange, wonderful thing, and I've loved running it. The last session has finished, though: The players have achieved a picaresque kind of closure, with everyone dead and the last city they tried to save still destroyed.

I'm exploring a more classic kind of dungeon crawling, now, trying to fill in my weaknesses: I never understood XP, Treasure, Dungeons. I had the players level up whenever they wanted. When they reached the treasure vault of the thief king and asked what was in it, I replied - "Uh ... what do you want?" I've never had a clear understanding of giving consistently upgrading challenges and abilities in an arena of deadly exploration and combat, and I'm going to give that a go.

Time Check

Yo, don't cross off those torch slots. Just stick that shit on the wandering monster dice.

No look, Kirin Robinson's Light cards are a perfectly elegant graphical interface and all, but you can buy 8 torches for three silver. You can just get twenty of those things, cheap as chips. Nobody's got time to count slots when you've got twenty of the things in your pack.

Roll a d6 every turn. If you roll a 1, a monster finds you. If you roll a 6, any torch you have lit goes out. Same thing for lantern oil, but it lasts three times as long: Give it a cross the first two times, and make it burn out on the third strike.

So the dice works as the threat of time passing. It unifies the monsters and light together into a single horrible Time Check. Every ten minutes you spend in this wretched place, you're rolling it to see if something shitty happens. Ghost Stories has a Curse Die like this, a massive black thing that falls to the table with a THUNK.

If my math is right, a lucky torch should go out roughly once every six turns (One hour), which will work out to about 20 rooms if you're using Greed n' Speed (Assuming lightweight treasure and that the party is stopping to search for stuff). Trying to predict dice is crazy, of course - I'll have to see if it's too harsh once I run it.

HEY TWO POSTS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE

Quick and dirty 1st level equipment

Everybody gets:

One dagger

Leather Armour

A torch, a rope, and one day's rations

They can then:

A. Upgrade to a weapon that does d6 damage

OR 

B. Upgrade to scale mail

OR

C. Get another two adventuring items from the equipment list.

Greed & Speed Treasure Tracker

Write every piece of treasure the PC's find on this sheet of paper. As the party fills up the slots through 1, 2, 3 and 4, they grow slower as a group.

This symbol shows how often the party has to roll a wandering monster check. The top is every five rooms (or 120 feet if you feel like counting squares). As they lug around more treasure they walk through rooms slower, which means they'll need to roll more often. This group speed has no effect on how far each individual character can move.*

For those unfamiliar with wandering monsters: There's a 1/6 chance of meeting a group of random monsters every ten minutes. The distance under this symbol is an abstract representation of how far the party can move in that time. You should also roll on top of that whenever the party does something that would take ten minutes (Like searching a room or fighting some dudes), or make a lot of noise (Like breaking open a door). 

This is the party's Flee check. If they need to escape a bad situation, the party and the monsters both roll a d20. The heroes adds the number next to this symbol. The monsters may add +2 if they're fast, or -2 if they're slow. Whoever rolls highest has outrun the other group. If the monsters win, they get a free attack. If they party wins, they escape - but the monsters will still be somewhere behind them.

Why Group encumbrance? Why only for treasure?

Ok: "The Adventurers" places you as a group of tomb-robbers fleeing from a rolling boulder. The more treasure you seize, the slower you can outrun the boulder. At the end, the character who escaped with the most treasure wins.

Encumbrance is meant to be the same kind of risk/reward mechanic. The more treasure you pick up, the slower you go, the more wandering monsters you roll. So in a very direct way, picking up more treasure makes you more likely to be killed. Escape with enough treasure, and you can level up.

I can reach it!

I love that idea, but two simulationist mechanics have obscured it with book keeping.

1. Encumbrance is tracked individually, but the party moves as a group. Unless you split up, the difference is meaningless.

2. Encumbrance is tracked for everything, not just treasure. You're not being penalized for being greedy, you're being penalized for being cautious (by bringing a lot of stuff into the dungeon).

Matt Rundle's Anti-hammerspace Item Tracker is still my only love, and the only way I'd think of tracking individual items. Greed and Speed is designed for a different purpose: condensing the risk/reward of old-school treasure hunting down to it's purest, abstract form. 

(As a side benefit, it should unify the players a little. It's a specific sheet in the middle of the table, bulging with the treasure they've earned together - there's some pride in that.)

This is part of my ongoing attempt to understand old-school dungeon crawling, and make all these old weird rules I always forget actually work for my players. I'm running Barrowmaze, and the Crawl still isn't perfect yet: player mapping and light sources are still strange round pegs I'm trying to slot into the square holes in my table. I'll keep turning it over, and let you know what I'm trying out.

*If you want, you could even leave one character behind with the treasure and have everybody else move as if they're unencumbered. 

This is a terrible idea.

Skeleton silhouette from Roles, rules and rolls.

Cowardice, Treachery, Ineptitude, Insanity

You're a busy GM. You don't have the spare time or brainpower to give every hireling a different personality. What you can do is give them a unique way to flip out under stress.

Roll up one of these for as many hirelings as you can keep remembering this stuff for. Whenever an appropriate situation comes along, roll a morale check. If they fail, they do whatever treacherous, cowardly or inept thing you've rolled for them.

1. Cowardice

1. Uncontrollable shakes: -4 to all rolls.
2. Paralyzed with fear.
3. Flees.
4. Blind panic: attacks everything at random, friend or foe
5. Won't stop screaming: roll for wandering monsters.
6. Falls prone and drops whatever they're holding.
7. Deserts if the party sleeps in the dungeon
8. Tries to surrender
9. Cracks under the pressure of slow exploration and runs wildly through the dungeon.
10. Holes up in a room and refuses to keep going

You can roll d6 on this table to get a Panic result any time the henchmen see something that would send them screaming.

2. Treachery

1. Steals from party. If they think they're about to be discovered, they frame another henchman.
2. Sells out the party to a dungeon faction for thirty silver pieces.
3. Convinces other henchmen to mutiny and stab the party in the back when they find a good haul.
4. Cheats other hirelings at cards when the party rests: fights break out.
5. Thinks they know better than the party. Contests their decisions, rousing dissent.
6. Bargains for better pay at the worst possible time.
7. Snitches on the party if they do anything illegal
8. Leaves in the night, stealing as much treasure as they can.
9. Paranoid: Believes the party has betrayed them.
10. Cuts and runs when the party needs them to get out of a jam.

3. Ineptitude

1. An important piece of equipment breaks mid-use due to their shoddy maintenance.
2. Loses the things entrusted to them.
3. Shaky hands: Drops what they're holding at a crucial moment.
4. Bad cold: Sneezes when the party's trying to sneak.
5. Cries all night. Can't sleep.
6. Snores all night. The rest of the party can't sleep.
7. Stress eater: Eats all of the party's rations at night.
8. Has a terrible disease. Failed morale check means they won't reveal it, and the party will catch it if they rest together. (If you can't think of anything better, -2 max HP every day until they reach 1 HP).
9. Highly superstitious: Abandons party if they see them perform magic.
10. Conceals open wound - they didn't want to seem weak. Attracts wandering monsters.
11. Too old for this shit: needs to rest every hour.

4. Insanity

1. Old soldier: has vivid flashbacks, believes they're in the middle of an old battle.
2. Bitter hatred for another hireling: tries to slit their throat at night
3. Madly in love with another hireling: They sneak off for the sick thrill of dungeon sex.
4. Addicted to purple lotus. Horrible withdrawal: hallucinates monsters, +5 to critical fail chance.
5. Refuses to back down from a fight, no matter how hopeless.
6. Suicidal.
7. Beserker rage: Attacks the nearest thing, friend or foe, until they or everyone else are dead.
8. Fatalistically accepts death.
9. Leave no man behind: Refuses to abandon a single fellow henchman
10. Finishes off fallen PC's - "There was no hope for them, I just eased their pain."

Roll a d4 and a d10 to get the list and entry for your terrible hireling. It'd be better if they fit into a single list that you could roll one dice on, of course - anybody out there want to finish this off?

I've been on this hireling tangent because I'm planning to try all the bits of old-school dungeon crawling that I've previously ignored. Starting with DCC has crippled some aspects of my D&D education: I never understood hirelings, charisma, wandering monsters, light sources, player mapping. The slow and dangerous exploration of a megadungeon has been totally absent from my campaign. Maybe I'm not even old school.