My Boxed Set

Now that I think the rules are fairly finalized, I am putting together little booklets of rules for the tabletop. I am laying them out for practical play and not including the OGL declarations or S&W trademark information since I am just printing out copies for myself... anything I put on the web will be a little different to make sure I follow the right procedures for these kinds of things.

My own Personal Boxed Set (which does have its own box!) consists of six booklets:

1. Character Creation
2. The Basic Rules
3. Magic Rules and Spells
4. World Information
5. Monsters and Treasure
6. Compiled Tables

My goal here is easy tabletop reference to the rules, keeping books 5 and 6 to myself, and allowing books 1-4 to be used by players as needed. We'll see how it plays out in real life.

I have put my rules in digest-size PDFs, and use booklet printing to crank out copies, using my long-reach stapler to put them together all old-school.

While I was at it, I printed out my PDF of the Esoteric Creature Generator to throw in the box, as well as a copy of Matt Finch's Eldritch Weirdness and his City Encounters PDFs, also in booklet form. Add some dice, some pencils and a small notebook, and I have box of portable game ready to play.

Playing to Strengths

It seems to me that playing a game in a weirder setting (and I think Athanor does qualify as a bit weirder than average) should focus on keeping it weird. That is, the settings and situations of a weird fantasy should emphasize what distinguishes it over what is similar to other games. That weirdness can help emphasize a sense of immersion for players and build something unique about the setting.

So, when looking at Athanor, I think I need to consider what makes the setting unique. Here's my list of Things to Emphasize:

• Arid, dying land.
• Ochre, lichen-covered seabeds.
• Dinosaurs.
• Post-apocalytpic ruins filled with high-tech artifacts.
• Fungus forests.
• Airships.
• Non-standard races.
• Two moons.
• Vog-Mur the Necromancer.
• The Overlord of Zamora and his "children."
• A semi-ruined domed city with lawless ruins at the borders.
• Firearms.
• Rare but present sci-fi artifacts.

My goal is to keep these things in mind when playing the game and designing adventures. Maybe I need to put the list in the front of my campaign binder.

Of two minds

I have been thinking about airships again and realizing that I did nothing to think about airship battles or chases. Part of me wants to define such things because, that part of my mind says, it'll be important and cool and thus needs to be defined so everyone knows just how important such battles are.

The other part of my mind says that of course this stuff doesn't need to be defined because ship-to-ship battles played out on the board are totally disruptive to immersion and really step out of the game play, often give players little to do, and really bog a RPG down in a miniatures battle only a few people will like.

Both of which seem to have some grains of truth.

What do do? Do any of y'all actually know of some siple rules to steal inspire me if I do go that route?

Some More Capsule Reviews

I'm not in the review business, and haven't been since the days when I wrote several reviews and the single most boring and academic article in the brief history of Cryptych magazine. I know I got a "Hook, Line and Sinker" and I think a single review published in Shadis around issue 10, too. That's my entire career in the gaming industry, right there. It's stunning, really.

But I throwing out some quick impressions I have of Lamentation of the Flame Princess products because I think James Raggi is onto something. I'm not going to claim Raggi is the Second Coming or some crap like that. But he's putting out products that I think are really making me think hard about how to organize, present, and run my games.

I just got myself PDF copies of his No Dignity in Death: Three Brides and People of Pembrooktonshire and I have to say, I'm impressed. Like his recent Death Frost Doom, the adventures in NDIN are grim, interesting, and filled with really robust roleplaying opportunities. And his scenarios engage issues of class, race, misplaced faith in tradition, horror, and social isolation. All in a pretty small number of pages. Even if I never run his adventures, I'm pretty floored at what he has done in pretty system-neutral terms and with uncompromising clarity.

As far as PoP goes, it takes Pembrooktonshire and gives the town a litle more depth and a lot of quick characters with personal quirks and motivations that go a long way to making Pembrooktonshire the possible setting for an extended mini-campaign. Characters are described in a handful of sentences, and by creating a quick sketch that includes a quirk and a motivation, each of these characters can be a quick springboard for adventure. The people of Pembrooktonshire aren't interesting because of game mechanics (this is a pretty much systemless book), but due to the web of interweaving character motivations and potential springboards for activity in the town. In a lot of ways, this book lays the foundation for understanding how to set up a poltical or role-playing heavy sandbox setting more than anything I have read.

So even if you don't plan on running old-school RPGs, these two adventures (and hell, I still stand behind telling you to by Death Frost Doom) are worth getting your hands on. If you're a cheap bastard who hates waiting, get them off RPGnow in PDF like I did. Because these books might, if nothing else, be pretty stimulating in thinking how to set up a game that give characters meaningful, difficult choices in a dynamic setting where their actions and not a prescribed set of moments build into a personal plot that is driven by the players and not the GM. Which is pretty tough to do.

The Familiar and the Strange

I realize that among the the items in Athanor that seem most out-of-place on Athanor are dinosaurs and the use of Earth-analog languages and cultures in Athanor. Part of this is an experiment. Back in college, I had tried to have more complex cultures as part of my FRP, but I remember the reasonable and convincing words of my friend Dean who essentially told me that nobody wanted to have to study to play D&D.

As you can tell, I have fun doing world-building. I like the weird, the fantastic, and event the nonsensical in my games. And while I have friends who like to read up on a fully-realized game world, my experience is that games should feel like fun, not work. I think this is part of the problem with worlds like Tekumel and Glorantha and even, to some extent, the Forgotten Realms. Too much crap to read. Tekumel confounds this further by having odd languages, weird names, and strange customs. Most of the players I have known don't want to play amateur anthropologist.

So how to do alien and pulp and weird and fantastic? I chose to use elements of the familiar. Dinosaurs because 1) they're cool, 2) they're a bit gonzo, and 3) they are a signal that this isn't a typical D&D campaign. The language and culture thing... well, that's an experiment.

When I was first thinking of Athanor, I had complete generic fantasy cultures in mind. That's where the historical names of the Aquilan Empire and the Witch Kings of Ylum come from. Those are names that have been tumbling around the old RPG setting mind for a while, and I have even used them before in other campaigns. But along the way, I grew dissatisfied. Fake names have little resonance, but if the cold, emotionless, rigid blue guys with a sense of racial superiority have Germanic names, maybe that creates some sort of easy mental shorthand by taking advantage of people's existing stereotypes. We'll see. Maybe this won't work. Beats me.