tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-41394984009089522202024-03-13T05:02:33.829-07:00Baker's FieldRichard Baker's News and PonderingsRichard Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329182427795648081noreply@blogger.comBlogger97125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139498400908952220.post-55399383442125080492017-10-26T14:47:00.001-07:002017-10-26T14:47:26.605-07:00New Blog Location!Hi, everybody --<br />
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I'm relocating this blog on over to my shiny new website. If you're looking for Atomic Dragon Battleship or Baker's Field posts, well, I'll leave them here for the indefinite future. But all my new posts and newsy updates are going to appear here:<br />
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<a href="https://richardbakerauthor.com/blog-posts/">https://richardbakerauthor.com/blog-posts/</a><br />
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Thanks for stopping by -- and please come visit my new site!<br />
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RichRichard Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329182427795648081noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139498400908952220.post-78417432621666181582017-08-23T17:47:00.000-07:002017-08-23T17:47:42.696-07:00GenCon 50, Monuments<div class="MsoNormal">
Hi, there! Thanks for stopping by. I haven’t posted in quite
a while, so I thought I’d share a few quick updates about what I was up to. I
just returned from GenCon, where I spent four days running Alternity games,
participating in the “GenCon 50” special presentation track, and meeting
interesting people. Here are my ten takeaways from GenCon, in no particular
order:</div>
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10. It was great to sit down side-by-side with Peter
Adkison, Monte Cook, Skip Williams, and Jonathan Tweet to reminisce about the
job of designing D&D 3<sup>rd</sup> Edition. I haven’t been in the same
room with all four of those guys in almost twenty years. I know that the whole
seminar was recorded; if you’re interested in D&D history and 3e in
particular, I think it would be worth your time to track it down.</div>
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9. Pearl Street Pizzeria is one of Indianapolis’s hidden
gems. I picked up pizzas there to bring to a game session we ran for a special
backer, and I gotta say, that’s a damned good pie. I find myself doubting
whether I should tell you about it, because I don’t want to see it buried under
a Ram-like avalanche of hungry con-goers. Anyway, twenty beers on tap and the
best pizza in Indy. You heard it here first.</div>
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8. No, Sasquatch Game Studio didn’t have a booth in the
Exhibitor Hall this year. We didn’t have any new products to debut at the show,
and without something new, we weren’t sure we’d see the sort of sales it would
take to justify the expense of the booth. Instead, we focused on running
Alternity with Baldman Games and the Herald’s Guild event management, and spent
most of our time actually playing games for once. But there’s a good chance
that we’ll try to booth-up again next year.</div>
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7. Wow, companies left money on the table this year. Paizo
sold through their Starfinder stock on Thursday. Ditto Fantasy Flight Games
with some of their new releases. I guess I’d rather sell out early than overprint
for the show, but Thursday’s a little too soon to run out, isn’t it?</div>
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6. Flying in late on Wednesday is rough. I didn’t get to bed
until 2 am on Wednesday night, and I had to get up a little after 6. Even
without a booth to set up, it might be better to fly in on Tuesday.</div>
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5. There’s a great little game store called Good Games just
a couple of blocks from the convention center. They ran a 40% off sale on
Warmachine and Hordes during the show. I took the opportunity to break into a
second faction: I now have a lot of Skorne to assemble and paint after I get
through some more of my Menoth painting.</div>
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4. I happened to run into Mark Tassin of the Writer’s
Symposium while looking for somebody else, and we had a great chat. I’ll be
adding some Symposium panels to my schedule next year, somehow; I’ll also be
trying to run games and maybe staff a booth!</div>
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3. The Baldman Games team at GenCon is first-rate. They’ve
got a great set-up and they’re providing hundreds of tables of great gaming
throughout the show. They really took care of us, even though our Alternity presence
was small potatoes compared to D&D. If you’re looking for games to play at
GenCon, you really should check out the Baldman Games events over in the JW
Marriott.</div>
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2. I played Alternity with a lot of awesome gamers over the
weekend. Every single player I had the pleasure of hosting at my table was
smart, engaged, and happy to be there; when you’ve got a good table of players,
running a fun game is a breeze. Thanks to any of you who might be reading this!
You guys really made my show.</div>
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1. Wow, I think we’ve got something with Alternity. People
picked it up fast, they had a lot of fun playing, and I heard the things every
publisher wants to hear (“where can I get this?” and “when does it come out?”) Kudos
to my fellow Sasquatch Steve Schubert for creating a great adventure; it was a
little bit of a tight fit for a con slot, but the players seemed to enjoy it
quite a lot and there were a lot of ways for those of us GMing to try out different
endings.</div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Current Events</b></span></div>
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I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Confederate statues and what to do with them. As
it happens, I just finished reading Michael Shaara’s <i>Killer Angels</i> (a fascinating study of military leadership, as well
as a great historical novel). As a history buff, my default position is <i>don’t remove monuments.</i> To me it seems
like an effort to erase history, and I put a lot of stock in the Santayana
quote about what happens to people who don’t remember history. But . . . then I
thought about what it would be like to be a person of color who has to walk by
a Confederate statue every day. And I also recalled that quite a few of those
monuments were built by people in the early 20<sup>th</sup> century who were
trying to rewrite history for their own purposes. Leaving the statues in place
endorses the narrative of the Lost Cause, and that narrative’s done a lot of
harm to a lot of people.</div>
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I do think that some Confederates deserve remembering. Robert E. Lee performed an enormous service to our country by
convincing his fellow Confederates to lay down their arms; without his
courageous choice to surrender at Appomattox the war could have tapered off
into years of unrest, local uprisings, and guerilla fighting. James Longstreet endured
vicious opprobrium for his support of recently freed slaves after the war; it
seems to me he tried to atone for the part he played. Perhaps because of my
recent reading of <i>Killer Angels</i>, I
feel some compassion toward men who felt that they couldn’t participate in a
war against their home states. People of the time saw their states like we see
our country; Lee loved Virginia the way you love America. Could you imagine
helping the United Nations to subjugate America, even if you thought America
might be in the wrong? I wouldn’t want to make that choice.</div>
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Anyway, I guess I come down on the side of removing statues
to places where they no longer symbolize state power. They don’t belong in
courthouses or capitol buildings or maybe even city parks. Leave them in museums, battlefields, and
cemeteries—and make sure the true story of those men, both good and bad, is
told. And I wouldn’t destroy works of significant artistic merit. Stone
Mountain is wrongheaded, but destroying that relief would be a terrible thing
to do. Tell its story instead, including how and why it came to be built and
why we would never build it today. </div>
Richard Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329182427795648081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139498400908952220.post-81111071513048474542017-05-02T11:16:00.000-07:002017-05-02T11:16:16.615-07:00Relay For LifeI devote a lot of this blog toward talking about fun things like games, science fiction, beer, and baseball. Today I’m changing it up a little bit to take on a not-so-fun topic: cancer. I’m participating in my church’s Relay For Life team this year, and I’d like your support. Here’s the link to our team page:<br />
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<a href="http://main.acsevents.org/site/TR?fr_id=80595&pg=team&team_id=2120842">http://main.acsevents.org/site/TR?fr_id=80595&pg=team&team_id=2120842</a><br />
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You can donate directly to the team by selecting the Donate button in the middle of the page, or you can credit me by selecting my name down on the team list and hitting the Donate button there. Either way is fine with me. I’m not keeping score—I sent my own donation right to the team.<br />
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<h3>
About the Relay</h3>
The Relay For Life is a fundraising event sponsored by the American Cancer Society. Team members take turns continuously walking a track or path for the duration of the event to signify that cancer doesn’t take a break—and neither should we. The Relay fundraising effort spans thousands of events in many different countries, but you’ll find me at the May 13th event at Auburn Memorial Field in Auburn, Washington. I’m participating as part of the Auburn First United Methodist Church team.<br />
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<h3>
Why I’m Participating</h3>
Everybody has a cancer story—someone you know, maybe someone you care about deeply, has battled cancer. I want to tell you about three people today.<br />
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<b>Paul Randles</b> was a co-worker of mine at Wizards of the Coast, and a friend. We played together on the company softball team and shared plenty of after-game beers back in the day. He was one of the most positive people I’ve ever worked with—a great game designer and a man with a big, big heart. Paul was just 37 when he died from pancreatic cancer back in 2003, but his favorite saying has stuck with me in all the years since: <i>Every day is Christmas!</i> If you knew Paul, then you know he meant it every time he said it.<br />
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My <b>Aunt Cathy</b> was my mom’s older sister, and just about a second mom to me at times. She and my mom were inseparable, even if she did have that special older-sister talent for getting under my mom’s skin at times. There’s a great family story about fried oysters: When my mom and my Aunt Cathy were growing up, my grandmother sometimes served fried oysters for dinner, a meal that my mom just hated. Since my grandmother belonged to the “I’ll keep serving it until you finish it” school of thought, it always developed into a colossal row. Many years later, my Aunt Cathy admitted to my mom that she didn’t eat the oysters either. “How did you get away with it?” my mom demanded. “Easy,” said Aunt Cathy. “You always made such a fuss about the oysters that I quietly slipped them into my napkin and threw them away while everyone was paying attention to you.” Aunt Cathy was a lifelong smoker, and it finally caught up to her: lung cancer, Stage IV when it was diagnosed. She got a better hand than Paul did--almost a full lifetime before cancer took her--but I miss her.<br />
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And lastly there’s <b>Kim</b>, my wife. Her outcome is going to be a lot better than Paul’s or Aunt Cathy’s, thank God. But she’s fighting cancer right now. Back in November she was diagnosed with Stage I breast cancer—the second time she’s had it. The first time (ten years ago) required a little bit of surgery, a few weeks of radiation, and years of taking Tamoxifen. This time around, Kim came down with a more aggressive type of cancer, so the oncologist recommended chemotherapy. In fact, I’m taking her to the hospital tomorrow for her sixth and final treatment of the “rough stuff”—the broad therapies that clobber all fast-growing cells and make someone feel sick and run-down. So, the good news is that we’re just a week or two away from Kim starting to really get her energy and health back. And she couldn’t have a better prognosis—the cancer was detected early and there are targeted therapies that’ll work on it, so we’re pretty much 100% confident that this will be a good outcome. But the reason she gets to win this fight is that smart people have directed money and resources toward R&D for early detection and effective therapies. And that’s where you come in.<br />
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<h3>
Final Word</h3>
I find myself in the position of asking folks for money a lot. I’m the Finance Committee chairman at my church, and my partners and I at Sasquatch Game Studio run Kickstarter campaigns to crowdfund our game publishing. You might think that approaching people about opening up their wallets would be tough, and it is. But I put out the word anyway, because I believe I’m not just hitting up people for money: I’m making them aware of an opportunity that I think they’d want to know about. In the case of a game I’m publishing through Sasquatch, that opportunity is pretty tangible: you get a game. In the case of the Relay For Life, it’s the opportunity to be a part of the fight against cancer. So even if it’s just a few bucks, please—help us beat cancer once and for all!<br />
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Richard Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329182427795648081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139498400908952220.post-5255328904609578882017-03-10T17:16:00.001-08:002017-03-10T17:16:16.646-08:00Lethality in the Alternity GameA little change of pace this time: I'm going to talk about some of the mechanics I'm working on for our new Alternity Science Fiction Roleplaying Game. We released a beta version of our Quickstart Guide, and we've been thinking hard about just how deadly deadly ought to be. (By the way, you can download the Quickstart Guide for free here: <a href="http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/206864/Alternity-Science-Fiction-RPG-Beta-Test-Edition">http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/206864/Alternity-Science-Fiction-RPG-Beta-Test-Edition</a>.<br />
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<h3>
Lethality in Alternity</h3>
Since releasing the Beta test rules for the Quickstart Guide, we've seen some good discussion in a few different forums about the rules we’d created. We’re still looking for feedback on our game and we hope to incorporate some “lessons learned” into the Core Rules as we develop them, so we think it’s a *good* thing to see some of our assumptions challenged. One of those assumptions is, naturally, just how deadly guns ought to be to player characters.<br />
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If you haven’t looked at the Alternity Quickstart Guide, most of this probably won’t make much sense: This is for folks who are wondering what we did and why.<br />
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<b>First Assumption: </b>Let me start with one key assumption you might not agree with: <i>Heroes are special.</i> We’re not trying to model real-world gun lethality for the PCs. We’re trying to model action-movie, cinematic lethality. Heroes in action movies rarely drop from one shot… but mooks and civilians usually do. The typical hero’s durability track might have 6 to 10 boxes, but a mook or noncombatant might have only 2 boxes. And those boxes might have lower values than the hero’s wound boxes. For example, Dr. Ayers in the <i>Magellan </i>adventure has two boxes: 1-9, and 10+. That’s much more vulnerable than we want heroes to be, but that’s okay—she’s not the star of the show.<br />
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<b>Second Assumption: </b>Average hits produce injuries; it takes Excellent or Stellar hits to generate wounds that might be instantly life-threatening. So damage ranges for Average hits shouldn’t reach values that might punch out a hero.<br />
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So, with those two basic assumptions out of the way, let’s look at the real interaction people are curious about: one hero shoots another hero, or a NPC who’s supposed to be just as tough as a hero. (That isn’t a typical foe in our Alternity action movie, BTW—most mooks should be a lot more brittle.) So what are the odds of one-shotting the near-peer foe?<br />
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<h4>
Lucky 13</h4>
The key number here is 13. If a weapon hit gets into the 13+ damage range, you’re in the wound band right before the punch-out at 16+. An unarmored character with one wound box at 13-15 is at risk of instant punch-out from any weapon that can deal 13 damage, because a Stellar hit automatically deals 2 boxes of damage. The first box of damage marks off the 13-15 wound box, the second ticks off the 16+, the bad guy drops. Assuming you get a Stellar success in the first place, that means:<br />
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Plasma Pistol (2d8) = 15% chance for one-shot<br />
Heavy Pistol (1d8+6) = 25% chance for one-shot<br />
Battle Rifle (1d8+8) = 50% chance for one-shot<br />
Sniper Rifle (1d8+10) = 75% chance for one-shot<br />
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Remember, those are the same chances that Badguy Miniboss punches *your* ticket if he gets a Stellar success on your character. Good thing you’ve got a hero point or two just in case, right?<br />
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The conspicuous absences from that short table above are the weapons that max out at 12 or less damage: the light pistol (1d6+5), the laser pistol (1d6+6), the combat knife (1d4+5), etc. They can’t one-shot an “Evil PC,” but I’ll note again that they can certainly one-shot Dr. Ayers or the typical mook—because two boxes of damage kills a mook, and Stellar hits produce two boxes of damage. Whether those light weapons should be able to one-shot your PC is a fair question; maybe we should nudge them toward that magic 13 as a maximum damage roll, although it might make the heavier weapons too deadly for our taste.<br />
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Some weapons—shotguns and blast cannons, for example—routinely produce 2 wound boxes under the right circumstances. For a Stellar hit, that increases to 3 wound boxes… which means that suddenly the magic number of 13 is actually a magic number of 10 for characters with one wound box at the 10-12 band. A Stellar hit from a shotgun at close range has a 50% chance to one-shot because of that. And *any* close-range hit from a shotgun punches out a mook or noncombatant.<br />
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<h4>
In Summary</h4>
Overall, how close did we get on the lethality? Well, you can be the judge of that. I’m reasonably happy with the chances we’ve described above: Some hero in the party receives a Stellar hit from the bad guys in just about every gunfight, and we don’t want a good roll from the GM to be an automatic death warrant. And hits against non-heroes tend to punch ‘em out on any Excellent success with a halfway decent damage roll, which also seems good to me.<br />
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Closing Thoughts</h4>
There are two lessons I learned from writing all this down. First, we probably ought to look a little closer at heroes with 2 boxes in the 13-15 wound band. That’s pretty good, and maybe we were a little generous with that. Second, the laser pistol and light pistol might want a wee bit of a boost to threaten a 13 on a max damage roll. But those are pretty straightforward adjustments as we continue to develop the Alternity game.<br />
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<i>(Hmm, weirdly enough the right way to boost the light pistol might be to use a damage range of something like 1d10+3. That d10 looks wrong as a damage expression for a small weapon, but what we’d really be saying is that your .25 cal pistol only has a 10% chance of one-shotting as compared to the 25% chance for a heavy pistol. Have to think more on that!)</i><br />
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Thanks for helping us to dig in on our new rules set—and thanks for caring enough to share what you think about Alternity!<br />
<br />Richard Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329182427795648081noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139498400908952220.post-12623770847184487382017-02-23T22:12:00.002-08:002017-02-23T22:12:40.039-08:00Kipling and CasablancaWelcome back! I see that I’ve let a couple of weeks slide by since the last post. Time is a serious constraint for me these days: I’m finishing up a contract gig with En Masse that keeps me out of the house from 8 am to 6 pm every day, I’m doing design work and Kickstarter preparation for my upcoming <b>Alternity </b>sci-fi game, I’m shepherding my <b>Plan Number B</b> expansion for <b>Ultimate Scheme </b>through art and layout, and I’m working on the second draft of my novel <b><i>Restless Lightnings. </i></b><br />
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With all that going on, blog posts tend to fall to the bottom of the stack. I guess the “good” news is that my contract at EME is winding up, so I’ll be able to devote 50 more hours a week to my writing and my own game design. I can use a few weeks to catch up on my various projects before the next contract rolls around, although I have to admit that I’ll miss that regular paycheck. That’s the life of a writer, I guess.<br />
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<h3>
I Don’t Know, I’ve Never Kippled</h3>
I’ve been spending a few hours here and there over the last couple of months reading through Rudyard Kipling’s poetry because I’ve been looking for catchy turns of phrase I might use as titles in my Sikander North series. The first title, <b><i>Valiant Dust</i></b>, is drawn from the Kipling poem “Recessional.” The second title, <b><i>Restless Lightnings</i></b>, comes from the poem “The Islanders.” Then I discovered that I’d inadvertently established a “personality trait-inanimate object” naming system in my first two titles, and I needed to find a third turn of phrase that followed the established system. Naturally, finding just one more that suited me proved much harder than I’d expected! I’ve read dozens of Kipling poems in search of the right bit of verse.<br />
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Kipling is a writer not remembered kindly in many quarters these days. Yes, it’s tough to get around the jingoism of “South Africa” or the racism of “The White Man’s Burden.” But Kipling loved India enough to write <i>Kim </i>and <i>The Jungle Book</i>. And the man who wrote “Buddha at Kamakura” was no Christian supremacist. That last one is worth a read if you’ve never run across it. I’ve been thinking about it for days. I'm beginning to think that Kipling was a much more complex guy than we give him credit for nowadays.<br />
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I did finally find a title phrase I like, but I’m going to keep it to myself for a little bit longer. Book 3 is still a long ways away! If you’re curious, though, you might try reading “The Destroyers.”<br />
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Oh, and in case you’re wondering about the heading… it’s an old, old punchline. The joke begins: “Do you like Kipling?”<br />
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<h3>
The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of</h3>
I watched <i>The Maltese Falcon</i> for the first time on Saturday evening. It’s been on my list of movies to watch for years now—I’m something of a Humphrey Bogart fan and I just hadn’t checked “the Black Bird” off my list yet. I’m afraid the movie just didn’t do much for my wife or my mother-in-law, but I liked it well enough, especially the great dialogue between Sydney Greenstreet’s “Fat Man” and Bogart’s Sam Spade. <i>Casablanca, Key Largo, The African Queen, </i>and <i>The Caine Mutiny</i> still retain their top billing at the top of my Bogart list, but I liked seeing Bogart play a quick-thinking, resourceful troublemaker. Sam Spade’s not as cynical or world-weary as other iconic Bogart characters, although I suppose that <i>The Maltese Falcon </i>was early in Bogart’s career.<br />
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(Note to self: Track down <i>The Big Sleep </i>sometime. Still need to check that off, too.)<br />
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I don’t know if this is official writer advice or not, but I’ll recommend it anyway: Read and watch some of the classics.<i> Casablanca</i>’s dialogue is pure genius; it’s well worth a couple of hours of your time if you haven’t ever seen it, because you’ll learn something about snappy and unforgettable dialogue if you pay attention. Heck, <i>The Caine Mutiny</i>’s court martial scene did “You can’t handle the truth” to perfection forty years before <i>A Few Good Men</i>.<br />
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So, there you go: Read old poems. Watch old movies. You might learn something!<br />
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Richard Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329182427795648081noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139498400908952220.post-25293147595521157302017-02-06T21:22:00.000-08:002017-02-06T21:22:54.074-08:00Rich's Teenage Ten Albums<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">There was an interesting question circulating around Facebook a couple of weeks ago: What 10 albums most affected your teenage years? I’ve been thinking about this one off and on for days, trying to remember what was really important to me when I first started listening to “my own” music and developing my tastes. Naturally, I decided to answer the question here rather than answer it on Facebook—why waste a good blog topic on a single post?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Let me establish a couple of things right up front. First, I became a teenager on October 1, 1979 (yeah, I’m getting old). I turned 20 on October 1, 1986. But some albums on this list predates that 7-year window because I tended to pick up records that had songs I liked, regardless of whether they were current—I was starting my collection with stuff that was in some cases ten years old already. Second, being a big sci-fi and fantasy nerd, I naturally zeroed in on any album that had a science fiction or fantasy theme to it. Teenage rebellion wasn’t really my thing, sorry.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Anyway, here’s my list. Enjoy!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>10. The Wall (Pink Floyd). </b>If you were a schoolkid in 1979, “Another Brick in the Wall” was your anthem. I listened to this album a lot in college, but I long ago decided that I like <i>Wish You Were Here, Dark Side of the Moon, </i>and <i>Meddle </i>way, way more than <i>The Wall.</i> It’s just too damned dark for me to really enjoy listening to it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>9. The Game (Queen).</b> In 7th grade I fell in with three good friends, and the four of us played D&D together throughout high school. I didn’t like “Another One Bites the Dust” (and still don’t, Queen was so much better than that), but we killed a lot of monsters to that song. And there was an off-track on the album called “Dragon Attack,” which as you might imagine was pretty popular at the table too.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>8. Rumors (Fleetwood Mac). </b>My discovery of <i>Rumors </i>just squeaks into my teenage years. In my college days I spent entire semesters drinking beer and throwing darts at a dart bar called Ton-80. They played <i>Rumors </i>just about every night in that place. Everyone knows the mega-hits on the first side, but I always liked the second side better; “Gold Dust Woman” and “The Chain” are serious, powerful songs.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>7. Heavy Metal (various).</b> The movie <i>Heavy Metal</i> came out in 1981. Thanks to the wonderful magic of HBO, I eagerly watched a rated-R sci-fi cartoon with a great rock and roll soundtrack. I guess I’ve outgrown a lot of the songs from the collection (and the drug jokes and animated sex scenes), but to this day I love Donald Fagen’s “True Companion.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>6. Synchronicity (The Police). </b>The Police owned the charts for a couple of years when I was in high school. I wasn’t a huge Police fan, but when they came to Atlantic City, I saw an opportunity to impress a girl I wanted to impress, so I went. I had to take my sister and her friend too, but that was okay—I saw the Police <i>Synchronicity </i>tour. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>5. Ziggy Stardust (David Bowie). </b><i>Let’s Dance</i> was Bowie’s giant hit album during my teenage years, but I was always drawn to his earlier stuff. God,<i> Ziggy Stardust</i> is a great album. I can listen to “Starman” or “Moonage Daydream” all day long and not get tired of ‘em.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>4. Decade (Steely Dan).</b> I often started my exploration of different bands by picking up a “Best of” album. Steely Dan’s <i>Decade </i>compilation was the one that converted me into a lifelong Steely Dan fan. I bought all their studio albums on vinyl, then bought ‘em again on CD. I think Steely Dan is the only band I can say that about. If I had to pick a favorite Steely Dan album, I’d say <i>Aja</i>—it’s simply perfect. But they’re all good. I’ve also had the good fortune to catch Steely Dan in concert a couple of times.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>3. Fire of Unknown Origin (Blue Oyster Cult).</b> Remember that sci-fi thing? Well, a heavy metal band with science-fiction themed albums was pretty much sure to win over teenaged Rich. <i>Fire of Unknown Origin</i> was BOC’s big commercial success, and put them on the map at exactly the right time for me to notice. From there, I picked up <i>Cultosaurus Erectus</i> and <i>Agents of Fortune</i> and loved those albums too, although these days I think <i>Spectres </i>is their best. I’ve seen BOC play a couple of times—they still tour, believe it or not! </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>2. Led Zeppelin IV (um, Led Zeppelin). </b>I bet I don’t have to tell you about Led Zeppelin IV. Let’s just say that “Misty Mountain Hop” and “Battle of Evermore” hit my not-so-hidden Tolkien geek right between the eyes (although “Misty Mountain Hop” really doesn’t have anything to do with The Hobbit). Anyway, this was another soundtrack to those D&D games of my teenage years.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>1. The Yes Album (Yes).</b> When I turned 14, I got my very first album: <i>The Yes Album.</i> It was a gift from my Uncle Jeff. Jeff was a music guy and he knew I was into science fiction, so he figured a little progressive rock would be up my alley. Turns out he was right. I didn’t know a thing about Yes before I got the cassette, but I listened to The Yes Album until I wore out the tape. When I wrote <i>The Last Mythal</i> trilogy, a book about elves in the Forgotten Realms, I pretty much listened to <i>Close to the Edge</i> and <i>The Yes Album</i> continuously to put me in an elf-y frame of mind. Yes actually came through Seattle a couple of years ago with a show in which they promised to play <i>The Yes Album</i> in its entirety, and I couldn’t talk anyone into going with me. I should’ve gone by my darned self.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">These ten albums aren’t necessarily my top ten right now. My tastes have broadened over time, and believe it or not I don’t just listen to prog-rock all day. Anyway, I had fun thinking up this list, and maybe I reminded you of some albums you used to love when you were a teenager. </span><br />
<br />Richard Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329182427795648081noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139498400908952220.post-50892932644083094102017-01-30T22:09:00.000-08:002017-01-30T22:09:02.615-08:00Studio Ghibli, Steampunk<div class="MsoNormal">
On Saturday, I did something that I hardly ever do anymore:
I sat down and watched a DVD. These days, it’s so much easier to just wander
over to whatever’s playing on the movie channels or to check out On Demand or
Netflix. Somewhere along the line I became too lazy to actually get up, root
through the DVD collection, pick out a disk, turn on the Blu Ray player, and
then remember which input mode on the TV brings up the player. Fortunately my daughter
Alex was home, and she wanted to watch some anime and spend quality time with
her sister Hannah before going back up to school. She decided to watch <i>Princess Mononoke</i>. </div>
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I watched <i>Princess
Mononoke</i> once before, sometime back in the late ‘90s. I didn’t remember it
all that well and what I did recall was that it was confusing (hey, it’s been
like twenty years), so I tried to watch it a lot more carefully this time. It’s
a really strange story, with lots of morally gray characters. In some ways,
there isn’t really a villain—even the lady who runs Iron Town and seems to be
doing the most villainous things in the story is a protector of lepers and mistreated
women. We’re really used to Westernized story arcs and roles in our
entertainment, and it’s a bit of culture shock to be immersed in a story told in
a different way.</div>
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<br /></div>
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It was especially fun
to watch Hannah (an 18-year old anime fan) become engrossed in the story. She’d
never watched <i>Princess Mononoke</i>
before. Early on, I could tell she was really struggling to digest the
conflicting messages about the characters and their motives. But she was
completely hooked halfway through, and by the end she was literally sitting on
the edge of her seat (and observed at one point, “Okay, now this is <i>terrifying.</i>”)</div>
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<br /></div>
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I’ve only seen a half-dozen or so of the Studio Ghibli
movies: <i>My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s
Delivery Service, Castle in the Sky, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Princess
Mononoke,</i> and <i>Ponyo</i>. Of those, I’d
say my favorite is <i>Castle in the Sky</i>
(possibly the best steampunk story anyone’s put on film so far). It’s also the
most conventional (well, Western conventional) story arc of those half-dozen
movies. It makes me wonder if I like it best because it’s delivering a story in
the format I’m most used to, or if I like it best because I like the steampunk
world in which it takes place. </div>
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Speaking of steampunk: Being a gamer, I also find myself wondering
what’s the most definitive steampunk/anime RPG experience out there. <i>Big Eyes, Small Mouth</i> comes to mind, but
it’s not really focused on steampunk. <i>Castle
Falkenstein</i> and <i>Space:1889</i> are
good steampunk settings, but they’re also old. Where’s the 21<sup>st</sup>-century
RPG that provides the definitive steampunk adventure? It seems like a real
oversight on the part of tabletop RPG publishers everywhere. Maybe I’ll do
something about that as soon as I get a suitable window in my schedule.</div>
Richard Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329182427795648081noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139498400908952220.post-49049800556009874512017-01-11T23:26:00.001-08:002017-01-11T23:26:08.869-08:00Cover Reveal, Civ VI, Plan Number B<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Welcome
back! Three thoughts for today: <i>Valiant Dust</i> cover, Civ 6, and <i>Plan Number
B</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<h3 style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Valiant Dust
Cover Reveal</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Okay, so I
know I mentioned <i>Valiant Dust</i> just last week, but this is pretty cool: Tor
revealed the cover for my book today! I am super-happy with the artwork and the
snazzy cover design work (and Mike Stackpole’s generous testimonial is
double-super cool). Here’s a link if you’d like to go have a look for yourself.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.tor.com/2017/01/11/horatio-hornblower-in-space-revealing-the-cover-for-richard-bakers-valiant-dust/">http://www.tor.com/2017/01/11/horatio-hornblower-in-space-revealing-the-cover-for-richard-bakers-valiant-dust/</a></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">I love the cover. Hope you like it too!</span></o:p></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span></o:p></div>
<h3 style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Civilization
VI</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">I’ve been a
big fan of the <i>Civilization </i>franchise for something like twenty years now. I
pretty much run out and buy each new edition as soon as I can find the right
moment to pick up a twenty-hour-a-week habit for a couple of months. So I’ve
been happily exploring <i>Civilization VI</i> for the last month or two (at
substantially less than twenty hours a week, since I am insanely busy these
days). I’m still forming my impressions of how the newest offering stands in
comparison to previous versions, but I generally like it so far. I like laying
out districts for my cities, I like the civics and government, I like the lower
number of units on the board, and I like the mix of strategic and luxury
resources. It’s a fresh new take on the series, which is probably good—it would
have been very hard to “out-Civ 5” the Civ 5 game.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">One thing I
wish the diplomacy interface let you do: I wish there was more of a “same to
you!” function available. When a NPC leader Denounces me, I want a button right
there on that screen to Denounce the guy right back. And when a NPC leader asks
to build an embassy in my capital, I want an option that says, “Sure, if I can
build one in yours.” In the mid- to late game NPC leaders *never* let me build
embassies. It’s hard not to take that personally.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">I’ll touch
on Civ VI a little more as I play through a couple more games, but so far I’ll
give it a thumbs-up. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<h3 style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Plan Number
B</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">You <i>Ultimate
Scheme</i> fans out there will be happy to know that I’ve got a rough design
hammered out for <i>Plan Number B</i>, the expansion deck for <i>Ultimate Scheme</i>. We’re
lining up artist Claudio Pozas to do our card illustrations again, and we’re
playtesting right now. <i>Plan Number B</i> introduces 5 new factions, 3 new ultimate
schemes, and a couple of new X-factors. The biggest new elements of the
expansion are a brand-new scheme deck (Power schemes) and the introduction of
the Interpol Agent (that mysterious pawn from the original box), plus plenty of
Action cards to support the new stuff.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">I generally
feel that game expansions ought to offer something besides just “more,” so you’ll
find that the Interpol Agent provides you with a new complication to scheme
around (and a new weapon to use against your rivals). The Power schemes are
built around a theme of controlling the Interpol Agent and accomplishing
special “mission” schemes that offer valuable new abilities as rewards. With a
little luck we’ll have <i>Plan Number B</i> finished up in about 4-6 weeks. We’ll
print and ship it very quickly after that, since we’ll be using a
print-on-demand vendor for this (it’s a pretty small print run).</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">That’s all
for now! </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
Richard Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329182427795648081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139498400908952220.post-43954677592307342832017-01-02T13:54:00.000-08:002017-01-02T13:55:10.462-08:00New Year, New Look!<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Hi, everybody! Welcome to my newly updated blog for 2017. As you can see, I made a few changes to the template, updated my profile, and came up with a new name. <i>Atomic Dragon Battleship </i>was fun, but it wasn't particularly clever or any kind of play on my name, so I decided to up my game a bit. I've never actually been to Bakersfield, but it rolled off the tongue better than Baker City (it's in Oregon, and I have been there). I would have called it Baker Street after Sherlock Holmes' famous address, but Jeff Grubb kind of beat me to it with his Grubb Street blog. So Baker's Field seems okay for now.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I'll try to keep my posts shorter and more frequent than in the past. So, without further ado, here are three things I'd like to share to start the year.</span><br />
<br />
<h3>
Valiant Dust in November</h3>
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I'm busy working on a new series of military-themed science fiction novels for Tor Books. The first one is entitled "Valiant Dust" (it's a reference to a Kipling poem), and it'll be out early in November (2017). I've actually been done with the book for more than a year, but publishers have schedules to keep, and I had to wait for a slot to open up. Valiant Dust (and its sequels) tell the story of Sikander North, an officer from the colony system of Kashmir serving in the star navy of the Commonwealth of Aquila. I'm pretty proud of it and I think it's a good read! I'm now working on book 2 of the series, working title of "Restless Lightnings" (another Kipling reference).</span><br />
<br />
<h3>
Hired Gun at En Masse</h3>
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Back in September, my friend and former WotC colleague Daneen called me up because her employer En Masse Entertainment (publishers of the popular TERA MMORPG) had just landed a big new localization project. Daneen needed writers, stat! So for the last few months of 2016 (and the first couple of months of 2017) I've been working in a contract gig with EME to help bring a Korean game to the US market. I don't speak a word of Korean, but fortunately we're working off files that have already been translated. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">One of the interesting parts of the experience is that I'm working in downtown Seattle for the first time since moving out to the Northwest in 1997. I catch the train in Auburn at 8:01, I debark at King Street Station around 8:35, and I walk a short mile to the En Masse office (3rd and University), arriving a few minutes before 9:00. It's strange to be a non-driving commuter! I only wish the train ride were a little longer so that I could do some serious writing in transit.</span><br />
<br />
<h3>
Warmachine</h3>
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">At GenCon this year, fellow Sasquatch Dave Noonan persuaded me to buy into Privateer Press's excellent Warmachine Miniatures game. I'm still learning how to play, but I'm having a ton of fun assembling and painting minis again--it's been a good 15 years since I did any painting at all. My faction is the Protectorate of Menoth. Here's a look at my Vanquisher (I use an alternative paint scheme featuring off-white and Prussian blue, just to be creative).</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYFfoBVarGMoVVYqEuYTR0dDrnob2LanMY5nbB3R81-gLsWtGLcZuZpRSmfhCyGPsKzPJH1kln_xwFP107Qi-TWsB8YgqNaVEMUQvXLaMWqNOSlO0xqiJ_ghU_MZWh1LOrXniYoTYPmYW1/s1600/20170102_134906.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYFfoBVarGMoVVYqEuYTR0dDrnob2LanMY5nbB3R81-gLsWtGLcZuZpRSmfhCyGPsKzPJH1kln_xwFP107Qi-TWsB8YgqNaVEMUQvXLaMWqNOSlO0xqiJ_ghU_MZWh1LOrXniYoTYPmYW1/s320/20170102_134906.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">That's all for now!</span><br />
<br />Richard Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329182427795648081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139498400908952220.post-77829829375359989882016-06-13T10:06:00.001-07:002016-06-13T10:06:23.443-07:00GenCon, Summer Beer<div class="MsoNormal">
Hello! For a change of pace, I’ll talk about a bit of the
game biz that starts to loom large in my mind every year around this: GenCon.
If you’re a gamer, you know about GenCon. If you’re not, let me just say that
GenCon is the biggest pure gaming show in the US, the flagship convention
experience if you’re a D&D fan or a boardgame aficionado. There are bigger
gaming-focused shows (PAX, for example) but they lean toward digital games
these days—if you’re a tabletop enthusiast, GenCon is a must-do at some point
in your gaming career.</div>
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Now, here’s the strange thing: I have never really attended
GenCon as a fan. During my 20-year career with TSR and WotC I served as part of
the company contingent presenting seminars, running demos and games, and
generally making ourselves available to the fans. Since parting ways with WotC,
I’ve attended 3 GenCons as Rich Baker of <b>Sasquatch Game Studio.</b> So I’m going to
talk about what it takes to go to GenCon if you’re a tiny company.</div>
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<br /></div>
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First, GenCon is expensive. A small booth (10 by 10) costs
$1800. If you want a premium corner location, that shoots up to more like $2700.
You can get in quite a bit cheaper by choosing the “entrepreneur’s avenue” for
$1000, but you’re going to be in a pretty remote part of the exhibit hall. Is
the corner space or end space worth it? I think it is. There are *so many,
many, many* exhibitors at GenCon these days that most attendees only ever see a
fraction of the dealer’s hall. Your booth is one tiny little shining star in a
big night sky full of stars just like yours. Seriously, you cannot imagine how
lost in the crowd you’ll feel with your 10 by 10 booth. So anything you can do
to get a good location is probably worth doing, and paying for the end space or
a bigger booth is one of the few things that’s in your power (see below).</div>
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<br /></div>
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You can save money by sharing a booth with someone else.
GenCon adds a stiff booth-sharing fee ($350) so you don’t get it at exactly
half cost, but it will save you many hundreds of dollars if you can tolerate
being in the same space with a friendly competitor for 4 days. We shared space
with Wolf Baur of Kobold Press the first year we got a booth. You also get a
nice price break if you can commit to next year’s GenCon on Sunday of this
year’s GenCon and pay 50% up front.</div>
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<br /></div>
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You don’t get much control over where in the hall your booth
will be. Don’t count on landing a spot right by the busiest door so that
everybody walking in and out will see your booth. The primo spots go to
companies buying gigantic booth acreage, followed by companies that have been
coming to GenCon forever—there is a “priority point” system that means the
smaller booths in good territory go to folks who have been coming to the show
for many years. As a first-time exhibitor your booth is going to be in the
“nosebleed” section. You can still do okay there if you have a name, a great
product, or eye-catching booth décor, of course. But it might take you a
couple-three years of steady exhibiting (or paying extra for an end spot) to
climb the priority ladder and secure better booth locales.</div>
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The booth cost includes two exhibitor badges, a table, and a
couple of chairs. You can get extra badges if you want them. It also puts you
on the list for exhibitor housing, so you have a better shot at securing
close-in accommodations for the show. But downtown hotels in Indianapolis get
really expensive around GenCon, so with two plane tickets and a
double-occupancy room and your booth rental you’re talking about $3500 to $4500
to get to the show and have a place to sell your product. If you can drive to
Indy or if you have a place to stay in town, that helps quite a bit. We’re
fortunate: Dave Noonan’s brother lives in an Indianapolis suburb, so we stay in
the Sasquatch Game Studio Indianapolis Regional Headquarters each year.
(Thanks, Doug!)</div>
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The convention hall in Indianapolis is run by an outfit
called George Fern Exhibitor Services. George Fern makes available to you a
number of booth upgrades like carpeting, extra tables, better network access,
and so on. If you’re a small outfit with a 10 by 10 booth, you don’t need that
stuff. I think it’s quite overpriced compared to what you can bring in
yourself. (You are absolutely allowed to schlep in any reasonable furnishings
you care to bring.) We fly in on Tuesday night so that we can use part of Wednesday
for some CostCo trips or other booth-decorating expeditions, and we find that
we can handle things pretty well ourselves.</div>
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A note about friends and visitors. This is hard to say, but
I’ll say it anyway: If I’m in my booth and the Exhibit Hall is open, I’m there
to interact with my customers and make sales. I love seeing folks I haven’t
seen in a long time and I will happily make plans to go grab a bite of lunch when
I take a break or spend the evening visiting. What I really can’t do is allow knots
of friends to “form ranks” between me and my customers and then stay there all
afternoon. So if you’re buying booth space at GenCon, remember that you’re
paying $100 an hour or more to be there and be available to customers. It’s
reasonable to take a few minutes to say hi or make plans to meet up after the
hall closes if things are quiet, but then you can in good conscience shoo your
visitors along.</div>
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Overall, my personal goal at GenCon is simple: See and be
seen. I want to be at the show so that I can see what’s going on in the game
business—what’s hot, what’s not, who are the interesting new publishers, what
the industry leaders are up to. I also want to be at the show because it’s a
powerful bit of marketing and brand-building for our little company, and an
opportunity for fans to come and meet us if they want to. I’m not looking to make
GenCon a profit center for Sasquatch (although I certainly want to do my best).
I just want sales at the show to subsidize the cost of being there to see and
be seen.</div>
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<b>Summer Beer:</b> Now
that the weather’s warm, I find that my beer tastes change a bit. For most of
the year I’m a big fan of smooth darker beers with nice roasty malt flavors.
But in summer, nice refreshing crisp lagers and pilsners just can’t be beat.
This year, I’ve stumbled across a couple that are very much worth your while.
The first is Sierra Nevada’s <b>Summerfest</b>—reminiscent
of a macrobeer but just better all around, which makes it very drinkable by my
standards. The second is <b>Hellas Bellas</b>,
by Ninkasi. Ninkasi is known for their
IPAs, but this excellent helles lager is just about my favorite beer on the planet
right now. It’s smooth, crisp, refreshing, and complex, just what I’m looking
for in an upscale lager.</div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
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When I can’t find the Ninkasi or the Sierra Nevada, or if
I’m looking to save a couple of bucks on a six-pack, I sometimes turn to Red
Stripe Jamaican Lager. Many years ago I drank quite a few Red Stripes at the
Officer’s Club in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Definitely a step up from a canned
macrobeer and usually quite affordable. Or sometimes I’ll pick up a six-pack of
Peroni. You don’t think of Italy as a place to get a decent lager, but Peroni
is very crisp and carbonated and goes down nice in hot weather.</div>
Richard Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329182427795648081noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139498400908952220.post-9192419959942316602016-04-29T10:49:00.001-07:002016-04-29T10:49:13.638-07:00Rebuilding Ultimate Scheme, Portland Beer<div class="MsoNormal">
I’m back! I set my blog aside for a couple of months after
finishing my tour of adventures I’ve written for various RPG systems, but now I’m
ready to resume. I’m just going to wander around a few different topics for
now, and we’ll see where this thing goes. I’m assuming that many of you read
this because you’re interested in what I do as an author and game designer, but
I intend to mix in a few thoughts about current events, pop culture, or
politics as they strike my fancy. (God knows there is no shortage of things to
say about politics this election season!)</div>
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<br /></div>
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Anyway, this time: Rebooting Ultimate Scheme, and brew pubs
in Portland.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Ultimate Scheme</b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We’ve re-launched my Ultimate Scheme boardgame on
Kickstarter! (When I say ‘we,’ I refer to Sasquatch Game Studio, the small game
publisher I founded with Dave Noonan and Steve Schubert.) Here’s a link—please, feel free to share it
around and help me spread the word!</div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="http://kck.st/1pBFzda">http://kck.st/1pBFzda</a></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I designed the game back in 2014, and we’ve shown off
different iterations to many people over the last two years. We took a shot at
launching the game on Kickstarter back in January, and to our surprise, we just
didn’t get that “critical mass” of backers. So, we took the game back to the
workshop to see if we could bring it in at a lower funding goal, offer a
better value to our backers, and change the emphasis on our pitch to make it
about the fun theme of the game and less about the details of the mechanics.
The mechanics are nice and clean, but the thing that people love when they see
Ultimate Scheme is the idea that they’re playing an Evil Genius and they have a
bunch of wacky plots to pull off.</div>
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<br /></div>
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We did some legwork to research potential manufacturers, and
we eventually found an outfit that could produce an affordable print run of
1,000 units for us. While the business plan sure looks better if we assume we’re
running off 2,000+ copies, we had to adapt to the idea that we might be looking
at a $20k Kickstarter instead of a $50k Kickstarter—people know us for our RPG
work, and we are still trying to get noticed in the boardgame market. The
manufacturers we originally targeted weren’t interested in print runs below
2,000-ish copies, so we found an outfit that would work better for us.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We also took a hard look at the game components to see if we
were making a game too expensive for its market. In my original design (and my
prototypes) I used wooden cubes for the resource markers, mostly because I love
<i>Lords of Waterdeep</i> and I thought that
was the gold standard for what components we ought to shoot for. The result was classy, but it meant more
expensive manufacturing, leading to a MSRP of $50 or more. So we reworked the
components to go to nice, heavy cardstock, linen-finish punchboard tokens
instead. That let us bring the MSRP down under $40. And the tokens let us make
better use of Lee Moyer’s handsome icon designs. You’ll have an easier time
telling the Finance tokens from the Science tokens when one is clearly a dollar
sign and the other is clearly a gear-and-atom than distinguishing green and
blue wooden cubes.</div>
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<br /></div>
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The last big component shift was changing the box size. We
originally planned a “square” box like <i>Ticket
to Ride.</i> It turns out square boxes can be more expensive to ship, and
shipping adds up fast. Saving $2 to $4 on each unit you ship can make a big
difference to your bottom line if you’re mailing out hundreds of reward
packages to your backers. So, we adjusted the box size to more of a “book”-type
package, which involved reworking the cover and making some adjustments to the
board design.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Finally, we also redesigned the cover. We thought our
original cover was pretty good, but folks just gave it a “meh.” You hate to buy
things twice, but when your audience tries to tell you something, you’re stupid
if you don’t listen. So we went back to Claudio Pozas, our illustrator, and
commissioned a new cover image from him. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So, the upshot of all these component adjustments and
finding new printers and new outreach and marketing (I didn’t talk much about
those, but we did some of that too) is that we were able to slash our
Kickstarter funding goal from $30,000 in the original to $15,000 in our current
Kickstarter, and we knocked $15 off the “baseline” pledge level that gets you a
copy of the game. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s a weird truth of Kickstarter that you are a lot more
likely to get $30,000 by asking for $15,000 and funding fast than you are by
asking for $30,000 and hoping you just squeak over the finish line. People want
to see that projects have a good chance to succeed, and the sooner you can put
the audience’s minds to rest on the question, the better off you are.</div>
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<br /></div>
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And, if you haven’t done it already: Go ahead and share the
link to our Kickstarter! We can use all the awareness we can get.</div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
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<b>Brew Pubs in
Portland:</b> Last week I went on one of my semi-annual beer pilgrimages to
Portland. I join a group of Boeing engineers who take the day off to take the
train from Tacoma down to Portland, buy a transit pass, and try out new craft
beer places. This time around we hit Pints, Zoiglhaus, the Horse Brass Pub, 10
Barrel Brewing, and Backpedal Brewing. All were excellent, but I really loved
Zoiglhaus and Backpedal. Zoiglhaus had a great menu of German food (try the
brat!). Backpedal was extremely basic—no warm food, just beer and tables, they’re
the base of operation for the pedaling bar you see in town—but they were
super-friendly and the beer was amazingly good. On a day when I drank a lot of good
beer, the Red Druid at Backpedal really stood out.</div>
Richard Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329182427795648081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139498400908952220.post-20608269439681818512016-02-17T09:03:00.000-08:002016-02-17T09:03:00.376-08:00Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 28: The Moon-Door<div class="MsoNormal">
Well, I’m finally there! After almost a year, I’ve finished
with my look-at-each-adventure retrospective. During the course of writing
these 29 blog posts, I discovered that I did *not* have 28 adventures, as my
first count indicated. Instead my final count comes to 33, since I managed to
forget or overlook a few in my initial list, and I also wrote a couple of new
ones during the course of the series.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My real total might be 34, because I skipped over my work on
the 2<sup>nd</sup> Edition <i>First Quest</i>
boxed set. I know I worked on an adventure for it, but I just cannot bring any
details to mind and I can’t swear as to which of the adventures in that set are
mine! I guess that’s a drawback to a long career—sooner or later you forget
some things you worked on.</div>
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<br /></div>
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One more thing before I move to the adventure: If you
haven’t checked it out yet, take a look at my Ultimate Scheme Kickstarter!
We’re really coming down to the wire on this one, and we can use all the
support we can get. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://kck.st/1ny7Ely">http://kck.st/1ny7Ely</a></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Even if it’s not for you, please—share the link and help
spread the word!</div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>#33: Secret of the Moon-Door</b></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
After finishing our work as the design studio for WotC’s
Elemental Evil, my fellow Sasquatches and I realized that we had a good deal of
5e knowledge and an audience with a serious demand for more 5e content. After
some brief deliberation, we decided to move forward with plans to present a new
version of our <i>Primeval Thule Campaign
Setting</i> compatible with the newest edition of D&D. Not knowing if or when a 5e Open Game License
would be made available, we looked closely at the 3e-era OGL, and we realized
that it would work just fine for a 5e-compatible setting.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So, in the summer of 2015, we launched our second
Kickstarter. This time we wanted to produce just one version of our Thule
setting, not three in one book. For stretch goals, we at first planned to
create more PDF adventure content for the 5e Thule game . . . but on thinking
it over, we decided to provide a mix of bonus material, including a
player-oriented book (the <i>Player’s
Companion</i>) and a GM-oriented book with monsters and rules variants (the <i>Gamemaster’s Companion</i>). For the third
book in the set we decided to collect the first two stretch goals—the
adventures by Steve Winter and Rob Schwalb—into an <i>Adventure Anthology</i>. Better yet, we figured out how to make the
booklets available as print-on-demand softcovers as well as PDFs.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That all seemed good to us, but I was dissatisfied
with the Adventure Anthology because I felt it was pretty thin at just two
adventures. I wanted to make sure we were providing good value for the dollar.
So I talked with my partners, and we decided that we’d add a “bonus” adventure
to the Adventure Anthology to make it a threesome instead of a duo. That became
<i>Secret of the Moon-Door.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Primeval Thule </i>had
its origins in my love for Clark Ashton Smith’s Hyperborea stories—one small
corner of the Cthulhu Mythos stories that happened to match up very well with
my favorite game, D&D. <i>Secret of the
Moon-Door </i>is my homage to Smith’s stories. In fact, the plot is based on a
mash-up of Smith’s story <i>The Door to
Saturn </i>and some parts of Lovecraft’s <i>Dream-Quest
of Unknown Kadath. <o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
(If you’re a fan of Lovecraft and D&D and you haven’t
read Clark Ashton Smith, I’d really encourage you to do so. Smith’s Hyperborea
stories feel like something halfway between Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar and
Lovecraft’s Dreamlands. They are the most D&D-ish Cthulhu stories around.
Some of the best are “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros,” “The Testament of
Athammaus,” and “The Ice-Demon.” Smith’s Atlantis stories are pretty good, too.
Check ‘em out!) </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I set out to provide a party of Thulean heroes with plenty
of Smith-like touchstones such as a wizard trafficking with Things from Outside,
subhuman savages, and an expedition to an alien sphere to bring justice to an
evildoer who thinks himself far outside the reach of any human power. More than
that I really can’t say without dropping major spoilers (I probably spoiled a
bit already). But I think there’s a nice mix of mystery-solving, a simple
puzzle, and a truly far-out setting for the adventure’s climactic scenes. I
hope you enjoy it!</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Next Time:</b> Beats
me! Having just finished a long stroll down memory lane, I’m inclined to
spotlight a few of my favorite games from my collection and talk about why I
like them. But if you have something you’d like me to blog about, let me know!
The topic spinner is spinning.</div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
Richard Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329182427795648081noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139498400908952220.post-85719897528930756742016-02-02T19:57:00.001-08:002016-02-02T19:57:36.142-08:00Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 27: The Giant’s Tribute<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
I’m slowly
getting close to finishing up my adventure retrospective. It’s been a busy few
months; during the summer and fall I was working like crazy on <i>Primeval Thule 5e</i> and my new sci-fi
novel <i>Valiant Dust</i> (coming in 2017
from Tor Books). These days I’m pushing hard on <i>ULTIMATE SCHEME, </i>my new boardgame. We’re planning on sending files
to the printer at the end of February, and there’s a zillion things to do!</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Let me take
a moment to engage in some naked self-promotion: <i>ULTIMATE SCHEME</i> is awesome, and you should back it now at
Kickstarter. It’s a lighthearted game that mixes some resource management and
worker placement mechanics with a fun theme of global mayhem through villainous
plots. If you’re into good Euro-style mechanics, nerd culture references, and
lots of replayability, I think you’ll like it. And tell your friends, too! We’re
fighting to get the word out and we can use all the help we can get.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Here’s the
link: <a href="http://kck.st/1ny7Ely">http://kck.st/1ny7Ely</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Don't make me melt the icecaps to get your attention!</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>#32: The
Giant’s Tribute</b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
As you have
no doubt noticed by now, the overwhelming majority of my adventures have been
published by TSR, Wizards of the Coast, or my own little outfit, Sasquatch Game
Studio. But last year my friend and occasional collaborator Robert Schwalb
asked me if I’d be willing to pitch in on his <i>Shadows of the Demon Lord </i>project by serving as a stretch goal
adventure author. Since Rob had just committed to doing the same thing for me
by helping out on <i>Primeval Thule 5e</i>, I
was pretty much obligated to say yes. But I was also real curious to see what
happened when Rob managed to slip the leash and run off to do anything he
wanted.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
As it turns
out, Rob asked *everybody* to do short SotDL (that’s <i>Shadows of the Demon Lord</i>) adventures, and he was clever enough to
stagger out the schedule of adventures so that no one got buried early on with
the landslide of adventures he arranged. My turn didn’t come up until about
five months ago. By that time, Rob was looking for SotDL adventures suitable
for high-level characters. Since I didn’t know all that much about the setting,
I asked Rob if there was anything he felt was under-served by the previous
adventures. Rob thought about it for a moment, then said, “No one’s done
much with giants yet.”</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
So, giants
it was!</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
I read
through Rob’s excellent setting and the interesting rules set for his game, and
thought hard about what a “Demon Lord” giant adventure ought to be. The classic
D&D giant adventure is, of course, the G1-G2-G3 series (<i>Steading of the Hill Giant Chief,</i> and so
on). But the giants you fight in those adventures are not really all that
unnatural or horrifying. Sure, they’re big and they have lots of hit points,
but they really act like big 10<sup>th</sup>-level orcs. You cut them down four
or five at a time, and you feel pretty mighty about it.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
I asked
myself what would make a giant horrifying, and I thought about the classic
giants of myth: Wicked, sinful brutes that gleefully devoured children or
ground your bones to make their bread. SotDL giants are pretty stupid, but
something that is big and filled with evil cunning and an instinct for petty
malice . . . that’s a little more interesting. It reminded me of the
Raver-possessed giants from Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant books, and I
found my hook: (SPOILER ALERT) What if the PCs found out the hard way they
weren’t dealing with a dull-witted brute, but a demon that had possessed the
biggest, strongest thing around?</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The nice
thing about the format for the <i>Shadows of
the Demon Lord</i> adventures is that they’re pretty short. A short adventure
is just the right format to challenge the PCs by presenting a situation they
think they understand (a giant is demanding tribute from a village), put a
nasty twist into it (the giant has a demon’s magic and wickedness), and deliver
on an exciting finale. If you have a chance to play it, let me know if the
adventure delivers!</div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>Next Time:</b> <i>Secret of the Moon-Door,</i> the last in my series!</div>
Richard Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329182427795648081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139498400908952220.post-90671923562380304782016-01-13T11:42:00.000-08:002016-01-13T11:42:15.397-08:00Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 26: Elemental Evil<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
As you might
guess, I took a nice holiday break and let the blog slumber for a few weeks. I
meant to start things up again last week, but I’ve had a hundred things going
on with finishing up the stretch goal projects for <i>Primeval Thule</i>, prepping our <b><i>Ultimate Scheme</i></b> Kickstarter, and
beginning the rewrite on my novel <i>Valiant
Dust.</i> The blog seems to be the item that always slides to the bottom of the
list.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Speaking of
the blog, I’m finally getting close to finishing up my tour of old adventures I’ve
worked on. It’s time to pick a new theme. An obvious one would be novels or
game sourcebooks, but I’m a little tired of talking about myself, so I’m
considering a more or less random tour through Games that Rich Likes. Got any suggestions for things you’d like me
to write about? Let me know!</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
One current
event of note: The world is a less interesting place now that David Bowie has
checked out. I discovered “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders
from Mars” when I was in college and played the hell out of that record. I had
a few other Bowie albums and liked them pretty well, but Ziggy Stardust is
genius, pure and simple. Everyone knows the title track, but I always liked a
couple of the deep cuts like “Starman” and “Moonage Daydream” (both picked up
recently for movie soundtracks, incidentally—I guess other folks like them
too). Anyway, it really caught me off guard. Bowie was great, there was nobody
like him.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>#31: Princes
of the Apocalypse</b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Shortly
after I knocked out my work on the <i>D&D
Starter Set,</i> Chris Perkins of Wizards of the Coast approached me to sound
out Sasquatch Game Studio about WotC’s new “studio” model for producing big
D&D adventures. Taking on a huge Forgotten Realms project wasn’t exactly on
our radar—our plans post-Thule were centering in on my <i>Ultimate Scheme</i> boardgame—but we were intrigued by the idea, and we
recognized that it would put Sasquatch “on the map” for the general gaming audience
with a much bigger and more prominent product than we could pull together on
our own. So, we decided that we were in. Focusing on the Elemental Evil
campaign meant pushing <i>Ultimate Scheme</i>
back, since El Evil (as I came to call it) would require 100 percent of our
manpower and resources for six to nine months. In fact, that’s why we’re just
now getting to an <i>Ultimate Scheme</i>
Kickstarter; if we hadn’t done Elemental Evil, we would have launched the
boardgame last year.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Dave, Steve,
and I met with the D&D team at WotC (primarly Greg Bilsland and Chris
Perkins) to dig into what they had in mind for <i>Princes of the Apocalypse.</i> The first thing that surprised us was
that WotC wanted the Elemental Evil adventure to be set in the Forgotten
Realms. “Really?” I asked. “I mean, really really? Because that’s always been
Greyhawk, and people are going to holler about getting the chocolate in the
peanut butter, aren’t they?” (Possibly a bad metaphor on my part, since
chocolate and peanut butter are awesome together. It’s a reference to an old
Reese’s ad campaign.) But Wizards was very sure about it: They wanted Elemental
Evil in the Realms, and they even had a good idea of where they wanted set: The
North.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Our first
reaction was a bit of skepticism—after all, I know the Realms quite well, and I
can tell you that there is more set down in print about the history of the
North and every flyspeck village along the Long Road than just about any other
corner of Faerûn. But as I looked at the area that Chris and Greg had identified,
I realized that there was indeed an opportunity here where we could develop
something really new and interesting for the Realms, while anchoring it
carefully in the existing continuity. Wizards had also worked out the broad
storyline of the adventure. What we had to do was to translate that story
document into “actionable” plans. For example, Wizards asked us to make sure
each of the four cults had a “surface outpost,” but we used that guidance to
create sites such as Feathergale Spire and the Sacred Stone Monastery.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
I wore a lot
of different hats for <i>Princes of the
Apocalypse</i>. First off, I wrote large sections of the adventure, including
Rivergard Keep, Sacred Stone Monastery, the earth and water temples, and the
temple of the Elder Elemental Eye. I was the art director for Sasquatch, which
meant that I created the art orders for the book, contracted illustrators, and
provided feedback to help develop sketches into finals. (Kate Irwin at Wizards
was tremendously helpful in that task.) And finally I was the overall project
manager for Sasquatch, which meant I was trying to ride herd on all the
designers and editors, keep up with WotC’s deadlines, field WotC’s extensive,
extensive, feedback, review everything that was being written, and pull together
the book’s design turnover. I was originally going to write the earth and water
nodes too, but I had to hand them off to talented freelancers Jeff Ludwig and
Steve Townshend—I was just buried by the amount of things I was trying to do.
Let’s just say it was a crazy nine months or so, and I learned some hard
lessons.</div>
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<br /></div>
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While the
process was brutal at times, I’m very pleased by the way the adventure turned
out. As I’ve mentioned more than once in this blog series, I’m a big fan of
sandbox-style play. <i>Princes of the
Apocalypse</i> is the biggest and most ambitious sandbox adventure I’ve ever
pulled together, and there are enough storyline events and investigations
between the adventure sites to allow the players to feel like the adventure is naturally
developing from the choices they make. I have a few regrets about things—for
example, we needed to do a better job at helping the DM identify where NPCs and
clues and story elements appear or recur. As it stands, the DM needs to study
the adventure pretty carefully to get the most out of it. But <i>Princes of Apocalypse</i> rewards that
effort with a great campaign.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<b>Next Time: </b>My <i>Shadows of the Demon-Lord</i> adventure, <i>The Giant’s Tribute</i>.</div>
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<br /></div>
Richard Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329182427795648081noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139498400908952220.post-72586247492705297142015-12-17T10:48:00.002-08:002015-12-17T10:48:18.717-08:00Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 25: Primeval Thule<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Time is
flying by these days! I’m pushing to finish up all the Thule 5e stretch goal
projects and make sure our Thule 5e books all get to where they’re supposed to
go. I’m also up to my eyeballs in prepping our next Kickstarter project,
<b><i>Ultimate Scheme.</i></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i>Ultimate
Scheme</i> is a Euro-style boardgame I designed a year ago that is now well on its
way into production. Here’s the basic pitch: You’re a sinister genius or secret
organization out to take over the world. You’ve got an ultimate scheme such as
<i>Become a God, Destroy Rock ‘n’ Roll, </i>or <i>Global Chaos.</i> You’ll need to execute
a number of stepping-stone schemes such as nuclear extortion, making a deal
with the devil, or creating a dance craze to pull off your master plan. For you
boardgame nerds out there, it’s basically a “worker walkment” game that’s easy
to learn and hard to master, built around a not-too-terribly-serious theme.
You’ll be hearing more from me about this soon!</div>
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<br /></div>
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Speaking of
fun things from Sasquatch Game Studio, that brings me to this installment of my
adventure collection: the adventure I wrote for the <i>Primeval Thule Campaign
Setting.</i></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>#30: Cavern
of Golden Tears</b></span></div>
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A couple of
years ago, I had what I thought was a good idea. “Hey Rich,” I asked myself
while driving back and forth to Redmond. “If you could write any game you
wanted, what would that be?” And the answer I came up with was a RPG setting
that brought Clark Ashton Smith’s Hyperborea stories to life for today’s
D&D and Pathfinder fans. So I invited my good friends (and former WotC
colleagues) Dave Noonan and Steve Schubert to join my little cabal, and
Sasquatch Game Studio was born.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Along the
way, the initial concept of Primeval Thule—basically, the subgenre of fantasy
that I like to think of as “fantastic horror”—broadened a bit to absorb
influences such as Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Pellucidar, and pulpy
sword and sorcery stories in general. Much as the old Dark Sun setting captured
“desert” sword-and-sandals adventure, we decided to build the 21<sup>st</sup>-century
d20 setting that could capture lost worlds, barbarians, thieves, and a little
dash of Lovecraftian horror. In my opinion, a game or setting should meet the
“you know it when you see it” test, and I think Primeval Thule holds its savage
head high in that regard. </div>
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<br /></div>
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We also decided
to try out the experiment of seeing what happened when you created one IP
(intellectual property) and supported it with multiple game systems. We
initially built Thule for Pathfinder, the new 13<sup>th</sup> Age game, and the
4<sup>th</sup> Edition Dungeons & Dragons system license – and just this
month, we’re bringing out a 5e version of the setting. So if this sort of thing interests you, check out DriveThruRPG for the pdf version, or ask your FLGS to see about ordering it for you!</div>
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Okay, on to
the adventure part of this whole thing. We wanted to make sure Primeval Thule
was playable “out of the box” so we made room in the outline for several short
adventures. Mine was <i>Cavern of Golden
Tears,</i> my best take on a pulpy sword-and-sorcery tale complete with hostile
natives, a lost city, and a sinister priest of Set who’s out to beat you to the
prize. It’s all about capturing a memorable hook—a hidden ruin where a dead
king weeps tears of gold—and presenting it as if you were playing through a
Conan story. </div>
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<br /></div>
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As it turned
out, I used my design draft of <i>Cavern </i>several times as a playtest/demo of
Primeval Thule—I ran it at PaizoCon, GenCon, and once or twice in private
settings. At the time I felt it was a good taste of what the setting was about,
and I’m lazy enough to fall back on “What have I already written?” when I’m
looking around for a scenario to run. I also put together a fun group of pregen
PCs for the convention games, including the ranger Zargon the Deadly, Marresh
the thief of Quodeth, and Isko Yhoun, the Atlantean wizard. (In one game
session I killed Zargon dead in a single round of combat when he failed to note
the approach of a saber-tooth tiger. Heh.)</div>
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Is <i>Cavern of
Golden Tears</i> any good? I’d have to leave that to the readers. As I’m getting
close to the end of this retrospective series, I’m naturally drawing closer to
things I worked on quite recently, so it’s harder to get a sense of what other
people think about something as compared to what I think about something.
<i>Cavern of Golden Tears </i>really isn’t that old yet, and hasn’t been played by all
that many people. But I think it’s a fun little one- or two-session expedition
into the jungles of Thule, and I hope that the folks who have seen it enjoyed
the trip!</div>
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<br /></div>
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<b>Next Time:
</b>Princes of the Apocalypse.</div>
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<br /></div>
Richard Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329182427795648081noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139498400908952220.post-30415599247712089602015-11-28T11:12:00.002-08:002015-11-28T11:12:58.038-08:00Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 24: D&D Starter Set<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Turns out
this is a busy time of year, and keeping up on a regular blog post is a little
challenging. My apologies—I really had planned to finish up this little
retrospective series before the end of the year. Juggling the Primeval Thule
print job, our PDF accessories, and shifting Sasquatch to a new distribution
partner wound up absorbing a ton of my time and attention over the last few weeks.
Plus, there was an exciting new development this month: My agent sold the first
three books of my <i>Sikander North</i> military
sci-fi series to Tor Books!</div>
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<br /></div>
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So what
exactly is Sikander North? About a year ago, I found myself with a good writing
window and asked myself a simple question: If I could write anything I wanted,
what would I write? I decided that since I enjoy sci-fi with plenty of military
action, “geopolitics,” and thriller trappings, that’s what I ought to focus on.
So I came up with a take on the future that’s inspired by the Great Power
rivalries of the late 19<sup>th</sup> century and the dreadnought era, and a
character that I could write some fun stories about (the aforementioned
Sikander North). <i>Valiant Dust,</i> the
first book in the series, should debut in 2017—it’s almost done now, but I need
to do one last set of revisions for Tor. </div>
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<br /></div>
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As much as I’ve
enjoyed the opportunity to write Forgotten Realms novels, it’s always been my
goal to break out of the shared-world reservation and write my own stuff. So,
as you might imagine, this is a very exciting bit of news for me. I’ll keep you
posted on the progress!</div>
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<br /></div>
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Okay, on to
the meat and potatoes of the blog post today: My ongoing look back at
adventures I’ve worked on over the years.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>#29: Lost
Mine of Phandelver</b></span></div>
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About two
years ago, I decided to part ways with Goblinworks and focus on Primeval Thule,
my own writing, and freelancing work as the opportunity presented itself. (I
liked Goblinworks just fine, but the 75-minute commute each way was stealing
too much of my day.) Anyway, I sent a note to Chris Perkins at Wizards of the
Coast to let him know I had some bandwidth to take on any work he might have,
and it turns out Chris had just the right project: the adventure that would be
included in the new <i>D&D Starter Set</i>
for 5e. I’d worked on 5e for a few months right at the end of my time on-staff
at WotC, so I was happy to dive in and pick it up again.</div>
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<br /></div>
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The
opportunity to work on an adventure that appears early in an edition’s life
cycle is both fun and challenging. It’s fun because you know that a lot of
people are going to see it, and some of your work is going to wind up becoming a
touchstone of shared experience across many thousands of D&D players. I
wound up writing the second adventure in both 3e and 4e (those being <i>Forge of Fury</i> and <i>Thunderspire Labyrinth</i>), plus <i>Reavers
of Harkenwold</i> in 4e Essentials <i>Dungeon
Master’s Kit. </i>It’s cool to create starting towns and introduce monsters and
villains that players might be seeing for the first time ever. The challenging
part is that writing early in an edition—potentially before the core rulebooks
are published—means that some things just haven’t been figured out yet. The
encounter-building rules and treasure rules that would appear in the 5e <i>Dungeon Master’s Guide</i> weren’t even
close to finished when I worked on the 5e <i>Starter
Set.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<br /></div>
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The other
challenging part was that Wizards of the Coast provided me a list of “make sure
you include X” about as long as my arm. There were dozens of locales in that
corner of the Sword Coast that WotC wanted to touch on, a bucket of old Realms
lore, different types of dungeons, a mix of combat, exploration, and
roleplaying . . . I kind of started to think of the mission statement as “write
the kitchen sink adventure.” That daunted me a bit at first, but then I
realized that it actually dovetailed nicely with the idea of a wide-open
sandbox, which is probably the strongest and best example to give a new DM on
how adventures should be put together. Plus, these days, new D&D players
are almost certainly coming to the tabletop game after years of experience in
World of Warcraft or console games featuring ideas like “quest hubs.” Creating
a D&D adventure for beginners that used those expectations effectively made
a lot of sense.</div>
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So, with
that in mind, I looked through all the material WotC had dropped on my desk,
and winnowed down the list of locales and elements to something I could fit in
the space I had to work with. Borrowing a bit of Realmslore, I decided to “hide”
the final dungeon (the mines of Phandelver proper) and make the finding of that
dungeon the major story thread tying together the earlier pieces. As it turns
out, the story of the Phandelver Pact, Phandalin, and that little era of the
history of the North is actually quite confusing and contradictory in places,
so I had to work pretty hard to present something that was not too deep in
Realmslore for a casual FR fan to understand. In a perfect world I actually would have omitted a lot of that material, but fitting the new adventure into
existing Realmslore was important to WotC (and me, too, to be honest). I was also handcuffed a bit by things like the
requirement to feature the banshee Agatha but not let her fight the PCs and
making sure all the player factions got into the mix—nothing that was really
onerous, just a bit more complicated and nitpicky than I would have liked. </div>
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When I was
close to wrapping up the adventure, Chris Perkins asked me for a title
suggestion. I just drew a blank. This was a kitchen-sink adventure, after all,
and it was hard to figure out what it was *about.* The
best I could come up with was something like “The Lost Mine,” but that felt
super-generic. Since I couldn’t come up with a title hinting at the sort of
activities or plots the heroes were facing or a clever twist on a well-known
turn of phrase that would apply, I settled for adding a proper noun that would
at least make the title distinctive. I thought the suggestion was weak and I
figured WotC would brainstorm up a better one, but it stuck. So, there you have
it: <i>Lost Mine of Phandelver.</i> Sorry if you don’t like the name.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Next Time:
Primeval Thule!</div>
Richard Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329182427795648081noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139498400908952220.post-38204929418968570192015-11-03T09:47:00.002-08:002015-11-03T09:47:29.748-08:00Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 23: Loch Finnere<div class="MsoNormal">
Greetings again! I’m afraid I got caught up in a collision
of <i>Primeval Thule 5e</i> deadlines and
fell behind on my write-something-each-week resolution. The good news is that I
seem to be mostly climbing on top of the pile again—I’ve got the 5e <i>Primeval Thule Gamemaster’s Companion</i>
pretty much in hand, I’ve got Steve Winter’s <i>Red Chains</i> adventure for 5e <i>Primeval
Thule</i> edited, and I’m digging in on my assignment for the Primeval Thule
Player’s Companion. Plus, I think I’ve got two printers, one bindery, three
freelance illustrators, and a freelance cartographer all pulling in the same
direction, so things are slowly coming together. Finally, I tried out a change
in the <i>Ultimate Scheme</i> play sequence
last week that worked like a charm. It might be the change that takes <i>Ultimate Scheme</i> from being a <i>good</i> game to being a <i>great</i> game. We’ll be Kickstarting it
after the holidays, aiming for a midsummer release in 2016. So get ready to get
your sinister genius on!</div>
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<br /></div>
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For those of you living in the Cincinnati area, I’ll be out
your way next week. I’m going to be a guest at AcadeCon, November 13<sup>th</sup>
to 15<sup>th</sup> at Hueston Lodge. I’m going to run a couple of Thule games,
run a couple of <i>Ultimate Scheme</i> games, and maybe even play a game or two if I
can. I hope to see you there!</div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>#28: Banshee of Loch Finnere</b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Next on my list is a little PDF adventure I wrote for the <i>Accursed</i> game from Melior Via: <i>Banshee of Loch Finnere. </i>This was
something new for me on a couple of counts. First of all, it was the first
thing I’d ever published outside of the TSR/WotC/Paizo family. Secondly, it was
the first thing I’d written specifically for publication as a PDF. A number of
things I worked on over the years were made available as PDFs after they were
printed and distributed as physical products, but Banshee was intended for
digital publication from the get-go. Finally, it was the first time I’d written
for the <i>Savage Worlds</i> game system,
one of the more successful and broadly published non-D&D RPGs out there.</div>
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<br /></div>
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My contribution to the <i>Accursed</i>
setting came about because Melior Via happened to be Kickstarting their new
game around the same time that me and my fellow Sasquatches were Kickstarting <i>Primeval Thule </i>(the first one, for
Pathfinder, 4e, and 13<sup>th</sup> Age). I’ve known Ross Watson of Melior Via
for many years, and when he reached out to ask about some cross-promotion for <i>Thule</i> and <i>Accursed</i>, I was happy to oblige. The <i>Accursed</i> guys offered to serve as a stretch goal for our <i>Primeval Thule</i> Kickstarter, and we
offered to return the favor by supporting the <i>Accursed</i> game. As it turned out, John Dunn of Melior Via wound up
writing our <i>Night of the Yellow Moon</i>
adventure for Thule. I, in turn, wrote <i>Banshee
of Loch Finnere </i>for John and Ross.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In case you haven’t heard about <i>Accursed</i> before, it’s a dark fantasy setting in which evil has essentially
won. The world is in the hands of a small number of powerful and terrifying
witches, each of whom rules her own dark domain carved out of the defeated
nations of the old world. The “heroes” of the setting are actually monsters who
have turned against their mistresses—vampires, zombies, golems (Frankenstein
monsters), and so on. It’s a nicely done world, a little reminiscent of the old
Ravenloft setting from TSR. I started my work by reading through the <i>Accursed</i> files, and trying to wrap my
head around the idea of what would make a good adventure in the setting.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Reading through the book, the part of the setting that
really caught my eye was Caer Kainen. It’s got a great Gaelic/Black Cauldron
feel to it, and I found myself thinking of Scottish ghost stories. I hadn’t
worked on a horror-based ghost-story adventure in quite a while (the closest
would be <i>Night of the Vampire</i>, Part 6 of my blog series). The first thing you need to figure out about a ghost story is, of course, who’s the ghost? Why is he or she haunting the living? And why is
it important to stop him or her?</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A number of years ago, I read a good book on writing by
Orson Scott Card, and I remembered a bit of advice from that book: In any given
setting, who’s in the most pain? Who needs things to change the most? That’s a
great choice for a villain, or a protagonist. I realized that the story of Caer
Kainen’s fall began with a terrible betrayal. The heroic king was seduced by
the witch known as the Morrigan, and abandoned his wife and children. Later on,
when the witch drew him completely into his doom, he slaughtered his family
with his own hands. As bad as it was for the kingdom that the heroic king was
lured into evil, the most tragic part in this play belonged to the betrayed
wife and mother of murdered children. That would be someone with a reason to be angry and miserable in death, but she came to blame the wrong people for her tragic fate.
After all, a ghost that hated the right people for the right reasons wouldn’t
need stopping, would she? For this to be a tale of horror and betrayal, Queen Aideen’s
vengeance had to be focused on the wrong victims—in this case, her own family,
Clan Finnoul.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
More than that I won’t say, because if you do wind up
playing through this adventure, you’ll want to be surprised by the twists and
turns. As far as I can tell, <i>Banshee of
Loch Finnere</i> was well received. Even if you don’t play Savage Worlds, I
think it would be easy enough to pick it up and use it in your game system of
choice.</div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Next Time:</b>
Something that quite a lot of people have played through in the last year or
so: <i>Lost Mine of Phandelver!</i></div>
Richard Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329182427795648081noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139498400908952220.post-85080136353632394112015-10-06T12:04:00.001-07:002015-10-06T12:04:10.227-07:00Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 22: Diamond Staff<div class="MsoNormal">
Apologies for the delay! My schedule since GenCon has been
pretty crazy, and finding the time to continue my once-a-week retrospective on
adventures is harder than I thought. Over the last few weeks I’ve been
scrambling to finish the update of the <i>Primeval
Thule Campaign Setting</i> to 5e, and start work on various supporting
adventures and companion books Sasquatch Game Studio promised in the
Kickstarter campaign. It’s good to be busy, but sometimes it seems like there
just isn’t enough time in the day.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The good news is that we have the PTCS 5e off to the
printer, we’ve made the PDF available to our backers, and we’ve got design
drafts in hand for two of the adventures we promised: Steve Winter’s <i>Red Chains, </i>and Robert Schwalb’s <i>Watchers of Meng. </i>Primeval Thule is
turning into a small product line—within another 5 or 6 weeks we should have 5
PDF adventures available, along with the <i>Gamemaster’s
Companion, </i>the <i>Player’s Companion,</i>
and maybe a secret bonus or two. We’ll see how it goes!</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If you follow me on Facebook, you might have noticed that I’ve
been doing some hiking lately. I’m fortunate to live in one of the most
beautiful parts of the country—Washington state is a hiker’s paradise. Two
weeks ago I got out to Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park and hiked
Hurricane Hill. Last week I went up to Chinook Pass (just outside Mount Rainier
National Park) and hiked the Naches Peak loop, one of my favorites. Fall hiking
is the best. We have too many pine trees to get much in the way of really spectacular
fall colors, but I love the cool air, the lack of bugs, and the absence of big
crowds. Check out my pictures on Facebook if you haven’t seen them yet, they’re
great!</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Speaking of hikes, I guess it’s time to dive into the next
in my blog series: <i>Search for the Diamond
Staff,</i> which of course presents the heroes with the opportunity to hike all
over the Dalelands.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>#27: Search for the Diamond Staff</b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As you may or may not know, in December of 2011 Wizards of
the Coast decided they could no longer afford to retain my services. Thanks to
Washington state law about laying off folks and then hiring them back as
contractors, I couldn’t do any work for WotC for almost a year (not that I’m
sure I would have wanted to right after our parting of the ways). But in the
fall of 2012, my “blackout” period ended, and WotC reached out to ask if I’d be
interested in doing some freelance work for them. I decided that I had the time
available, and it couldn’t hurt to foster good relations with my former
employer just in case opportunity led me back in that direction. The game biz
is just too small to make burning bridges a good idea.</div>
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Anyway, the job WotC had in mind was a new Encounters Season
adventure. I’d already knocked out one of these a couple of years previously
(my <i>Dark Legacy of Evard</i> adventure),
so I was reasonably familiar with the expectations and the challenges of the
format. As before, Wizards knew a lot about what they wanted the adventure to
be before I even started an outline: It needed to be set in the Dalelands, and
they wanted it to tie in to a previous Game Day one-shot adventure in which the
PCs raid a dracolich lair and steal the mystical artifact known as the Diamond
Staff.</div>
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I put on my thinking cap, and came up with several ideas for
how different power groups in and around the Dalelands might be up to no good,
and how the PCs might interact with those plots. That brainstorming led to the
idea of an action-adventure chase across the Dalelands involving several
factions all out for the same thing (the Diamond Staff, of course). WotC also
asked me to make sure that each session of the Encounter Season included not
just a fight, but also opportunities for roleplaying and some small amount of
exploration. That last bit was a little tricky, because the map budget was
effectively zero; everything I came up with needed to be something that could
easily be pieced together with Dungeon Tiles or with repurposed poster maps
from previous products.</div>
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I’m not sure how well I pulled off creating small areas
worth exploring, but I’m pretty happy with the roleplaying and interaction
opportunities I worked into the adventure. The adventure opens with a job
interview: The sage Imani wants to hire reliable adventurers to escort him into
a dangerous ruin, so he posts a flyer reading, “WANTED: Experienced and
reliable adventurers to participate in a potentially hazardous expedition. Must
be skilled with blade or spell, stout of heart, steady in danger, loyal,
trustworthy, and of generally agreeable disposition.” I also worked in a fun
three-way fight at the end of the adventure in which the PCs get to decide
which group of bad guys they temporarily cooperate with; I expect that
opportunity engendered some great group discussions when players stumbled into
it in the last session!</div>
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<i>Search for the Diamond
Staff</i> was also used as something of a playtest or demo of 5e rules,
although that work was done after I wrote the adventure with 4e mechanics.
Checking around on session reports online, it seems that most people played it
with 5e, not 4e. If the 5e elements were good, bad, or indifferent, I can’t say
I had much to do with them.</div>
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One final thought: The title was a real chore. Chris Perkins
and Greg Bilsland at WotC kept asking me for title suggestions, and I just didn’t
have anything good. So finally I threw out <i>Search
for the Diamond Staff</i> as a lowest-common-denominator “call it what it is”
suggestion. Some days the inspiration is there, and some days it isn’t. </div>
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<b>Next Week:</b> My
only Savage Worlds adventure, <i>The Banshee
of Loch Finnere.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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Richard Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329182427795648081noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139498400908952220.post-41058860144867403462015-09-14T10:00:00.000-07:002015-09-14T10:00:03.546-07:00Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 21: Emerald Spire<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Sometimes
irony is, well, ironic. The day after I posted my blog about <i>Thornkeep</i>, it was announced that
Goblinworks laid off all but three of its people, and the company was looking
for a buyer for the <i>Pathfinder Online</i>
game. I feel terrible for the guys I know who sank a couple of years of hard
work into putting the game together. Unfortunately, that is the digital game
biz—companies fall short and collapse all the time, some of them quite a bit
bigger and better-funded than Goblinworks. I’ll be pulling for the Goblins to
land on their feet, wherever they wind up.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I still
think there is a good market for a small, clever, shoestring MMO publisher to
create an <i>EVE</i>-like fantasy game—it’s
not for everybody, but there is a really interesting niche there. You can do
quite a lot with a small number of highly invested fans who make your game
their own and introduce their own social structures and player-kingdoms. If
there is any postmortem I might offer at this point, I suppose it would be
this: That game I just described isn’t what Pathfinder fans necessarily wanted.
The initial enthusiasm for <i>Pathfinder
Online</i> was driven by an unrealistic expectation on the part of the
Pathfinder audience that somehow Goblinworks would create a $100 million dollar
WOW clone that let them explore Golarion like it was Azeroth. That was never in
the cards. I think Ryan and the Paizo leadership were pretty upfront about what
they were trying to deliver, but people really had their hearts set on hundreds
and hundreds of hours of PvE content showcasing huge parts of their favorite
fantasy world, and that is an extraordinarily expensive proposition.</div>
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<i>Pathfinder Online</i> also faced another
significant obstacle in the fact that the OGL on which Pathfinder itself is
based explicitly does *not* extend to electronic games. So, <i>Pathfinder Online</i> couldn’t use the
mechanics familiar to Pathfinder players. This was not necessarily a fatal
flaw—there are some very good reasons to go with <i>EVE</i>-style time-based skill advancement instead of grinding for XP,
for example—but, taken with the fact that the game couldn’t be built to
spotlight the world of Golarion, it was heading toward a place where PO wasn’t
the Pathfinder game and it wasn’t the Pathfinder world (at least in the eyes of
Pathfinder fans). Great gameplay attracting deep-end MMO players is what <i>Pathfinder Online</i> had to go on, and I
guess that just wasn’t enough to pull in the second-stage funding/investment
they needed to build out the game. </div>
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During my
work in and around <i>Pathfinder Online</i>,
I did get to create an interesting little town called Thornkeep, which got
published as a sourcebook and small collection of dungeon levels. And I also
got to build another town called Fort Inevitable, and a much bigger collection
of wacky dungeon levels: The Emerald Spire.</div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>#26: Emerald
Spire</b></span></div>
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<i>Pathfinder Online</i> actually ran two
Kickstarters. The first was for the “tech demo,” an initial exploration of the
game concept and basic engine. <i>Thornkeep</i>
came into existence as a physical Kickstarter reward associated with that first
Kickstarter. The second Kickstarter (with a cool $1 million ask) was to begin
the funding of the game proper. The signature physical reward for that second
campaign was the <i>Emerald Spire
Superdungeon.</i></div>
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The Emerald
Spire itself was a “nearby feature of interest” I came up with when I worked on
Thornkeep. The Inner Sea World Guide suggested mysterious Azlanti ruins in that
corner of the River Kingdoms, so I made sure to create a handful of likely
sites. To my surprise, the Paizo folks seized on the notion and ran with it,
choosing to make it the focus of a multi-level superdungeon with each level
created by a notable game industry luminary. Celebrity contributors included
Keith Baker, Wolf Baur, Ed Greenwood, Frank Mentzer, Chris Pramas, Mike
Stackpole, Lisa Stevens, and myself. To that list. Paizo added a number of
staff aces including Jason Bulmahn, James Jacobs, Erik Mona, Sean Reynolds, Wes
Schneider, and James Sutter, along with freelancers Tim Hitchcock and Nick
Logue. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the herculean work of Logan Bonner
as the developer who put the final polish on the whole thing.</div>
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I took point
on wrangling the sixteen authors up front, soliciting dungeon pitches from each
of them, suggesting refinements, and then organizing the dungeons so that the
high-level dangerous ones were deeper down than the low-level ones. In a couple
of cases, I contributed a lot of help on Pathfinder mechanics—a couple of our
contributors hadn’t written for a 3e-era product before. But overall I tried
very hard to keep each authors’ original vision intact, and allow levels to be
whimsical or serious as the author preferred. </div>
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The
trickiest design constraint was once again the maps. The Paizo folks wanted to
make sure that each level could be represented on a flip-map (basically, a
tactical-scale map of a level, shown in 5-foot squares). So, the maximum horizontal
spread of each level could only be 22 by 30 squares, or only 110 feet by 150
feet. On the bright side, there was no reason we couldn’t stack up a lot of
small dungeon levels one on top of each other, so we figured out that the
Emerald Spire needed to be a “dungeon shish-kebob” of many levels joined by a
common story or theme. I met with James Jacobs, Erik Mona, and Wes Schneider,
and we came up with the idea that the Spire itself was a physical object—a
needle of green crystal 2 miles deep—that passed through or adjoined each of
the levels we were creating, linking the surface to the deepest stratum of the
Darklands.</div>
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My level was
Level 6, the Clockwork Maze. Since the brief writeup on the Emerald Spire in <i>Thornkeep</i> had mentioned a Numerian
wizard playing around with weird constructs, I figured at least one of us
authors ought to make that guy the star of a Spire level, and I volunteered
myself for the job. The fun part of the level is that giant clockwork revolving
turntables change the alignment of key passages and intersections—to fight your
way through the level and continue your descent, you’ll need to figure out how
to align the control levers found throughout the level. I also had fun using the
metal-clad template to create a steam-borg wizard who looks a little like
Tharok, the Legion of Super-Heroes villain.</div>
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My other big
contribution to the project was the first 20 pages—the town of Fort Inevitable,
and big-picture overview of the Spire, how it works, and why it’s there. I seem
to be in the business of making up starting towns, for some reason—besides
Thornkeep and Fort Inevitable, I also wrote up Phandalin for the recent <i>Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set,</i> Duponde,
Harkenwold, Fallcrest, Pommeville, and more. Fort Inevitable is interesting because it’s a
lawful-evil starting spot ruled over by an iron-fisted tyrant; your characters
have a Sherriff of Nottingham they can play Robin Hood to.</div>
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Next Time: The Search for the Diamond Staff.</div>
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Richard Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329182427795648081noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139498400908952220.post-86480367056615829042015-09-02T11:42:00.001-07:002015-09-02T11:42:54.699-07:00Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 20: ThornkeepWelcome back! My apologies for the interruption in my regular blog postings over the last few months. Between July and August, I took a vacation, ran a Kickstarter, went to GenCon, rewrote a novel, and chased down a hundred small details pertinent to our upcoming edition of Primeval Thule 5e. For most of the summer, I’ve been frankly swamped, and I had to focus on some other things. But today I think I can spare an hour to continue my retrospective on adventures I’ve created, so I’m back—this week, at least.<br />
<br />
Before I get to <i>Thornkeep</i>, let me tell you our Glacier story. This year for the family road trip, we decided to go to Glacier National Park, someplace we’d never been. I carefully plotted out our route, picked out a week when the wife and kids could get away from their summer activities, and made a reservation to stay at a condo in downtown Whitefish, Montana. We started out on Monday, July 20th. On the first day we drove to Palouse Falls (fascinating terrain, it’s in the heart of the Washington scablands) and then stayed in Colfax. On Tuesday the 21st, we drove from Colfax to Whitefish—quite a haul, but the scenery in Idaho and Montana is really just breathtaking.<br />
<br />
After driving all day, when we were just 15 miles from Whitefish, Glacier National Park burst into flames. A huge wildfire broke out in the eastern half of the park, closing most of the Going to the Sun Road—which, as I had previously determined from my research and prep on GNP, is THE THING YOU DO when you go to Glacier. The park burned for like two weeks; we were in Whitefish for three days. As it turned out, we did get to see the western half of the Going to the Sun Road, but we missed Logan Pass, and a bunch of neat stuff around St. Mary’s Lake. Instead, we took a very long drive around the southern border of the park and saw the Two Medicine area. That was quite spectacular too . . . but I have unfinished business with Glacier National Park now, damn it.<br />
<br />
Okay, on to <i>Thornkeep </i>and the Accursed Halls.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>#25: The Accursed Halls</b></span><br />
In December of 2011 my long association with TSR/Wizards of the Coast came to an end, and for the first time in a very long time I found myself a free agent. At WotC we had a draconian non-compete policy which meant that I couldn’t even consider writing for any other companies on the side, but that of course came to an end when they decided they could no longer afford to retain my services. A couple of months later, in the winter of 2012, I received a call from Ryan Dancey, a former colleague of mine at WotC who is perhaps best known as the D&D brand manager who led the effort to create the Open Game License back in 2000. Ryan was laying the groundwork for Pathfinder Online, and he needed a writer/designer to help deliver on the initial tech demo Kickstarter—specifically, a sourcebook on the town of Thornkeep in Golarion’s River Kingdoms. I was only passing familiar with Golarion, but Pathfinder I certainly knew pretty well, and I had some free time, so I was in.<br />
<br />
I joined Ryan and some other Goblinworks principals at Lisa Stevens’ house on a snowy day in early spring to learn everything I could about Thornkeep and Pathfinder Online. My mission was pretty straightforward: Create a well-rounded town that could serve as “a hive of scum and villainy” and perhaps grow into a “starter zone” for the MMO that would be moving ahead. That sort of source material is second nature for me, so no problem there. I also was asked to create a short dungeon representing an old set of ruined chambers hidden below the town, and thus the Accursed Halls came into being.<br />
<br />
The most unusual design challenge of the Accursed Halls was that we had some ambition of matching the tabletop map and adventure to the dungeon map you’d actually experience if you visited Thornkeep in the MMO and went exploring. That was a tough order, because in the spring of 2012 the MMO only existed as a set of design documents and possibilities. One of those was a game engine and sample dungeon that looked like a potential fit for Pathfinder Online, so I actually had a map to work from. The problem: a reasonable tabletop map and a reasonable MMO dungeon experience are two very different things. The map of the Accursed Halls therefore represents my best interpretation of an asset that, at the time, looked like it might very well be incorporated into the MMO.<br />
<br />
Naturally, the creation of a MMO involves many, many false starts and design explorations that end up leading nowhere. The initial opportunity on which I based my map of the Accursed Halls didn’t pan out (although it made for a perfectly fine dungeon map for the Thornkeep sourcebook, and a fun little adventure). As it turns out, I wound up signing on with Ryan and Goblinworks at the end of 2012, and stayed there until October of 2013 working on Pathfinder Online (and <i>Emerald Spire, </i>which I’ll get to in another post or two). Perhaps the most interesting part of the project is the fact that some of the source material I created for Thornkeep—the town map, the key personalities and factions, and nearby features—is, of course, featured in the MMO. Over the next few years, a lot of players will brush up against some names and places I made up, and that’s kind of cool.<br />
<br />
<b>Next Time: </b>My second D&D Encounters adventure, <i>The Search for the Diamond Staff</i>!<br />
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Richard Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329182427795648081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139498400908952220.post-8206916552138341982015-08-05T11:35:00.001-07:002015-08-05T11:35:09.605-07:00Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 19: Dark Legacy of Evard<div class="MsoNormal">
Welcome back! My apologies for the interrupted blog posts;
the last three weeks have been very busy for me. First my partners and I at
Sasquatch Game Studio launched our Primeval Thule 5e Kickstarter, then I headed
out for a family vacation at Glacier National Park, then I came home just in
time to head out to GenCon. Time for blogging has been in short supply lately!</div>
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I’ll talk a bit about Glacier and GenCon in future posts,
but this week I wanted to revisit our 5e Thule Kickstarter campaign and provide
a bit of an update. We are over 200 percent funded, topping $30k with just
about two weeks to go! Naturally, we’re using that support to make Primeval
Thule 5e the biggest and best product we can. Right now someone who pledges in
at a level that includes digital rewards will receive not only the <i>Primeval
Thule Campaign Setting </i>book, but also PDF adventures by Rob Schwalb and Steve
Winter, along with a Thule 5e Gamemaster’s Companion that will include new
Thulean monsters and additional adventure sites and hooks. And, if the campaign
continues to go well, we’ll soon be adding a Player’s Companion to provide
additional spells, narratives, and other character-creation info for Thulean
PCs. If you’re looking for great new 5e content, this is a good place to start.
Here’s the link:</div>
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<a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/809579963/primeval-thule-5e?ref=nav_search">https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/809579963/primeval-thule-5e?ref=nav_search</a></div>
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OK, on to my next adventure retrospective!</div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>#24: Dark Legacy of Evard</b></span></div>
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In late 2010 I was assigned to work on D&D Encounters
Season 5. The Encounters program was a sort of “outreach” content plan designed
to provide D&D players with a weekly D&D game at their friendly local
gaming store. Basically, you show up and play for an hour or two one night a
week, and over the course of three or four months, you’ll play through the
adventure currently being shared by all other people participating in the
current Encounters season. It was a very successful program for Wizards of the
Coast and brought many thousands of gamers out every week. My job as the
designer assigned to the next Encounters season was to create a fun, episodic
adventure that would keep ‘em coming back for another 13 sessions.</div>
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While I came up with the storyline, some of the big elements
had already been settled on before I began work on the adventure. So, I was
given the marching orders to create an Encounters season that was more of a
ghost story than a dungeon crawl, something that revolved on the story of
Evard. Evard, like Mordenkainen or Otto or Bigby, was a name that had been
around in D&D since 1st Edition. However, while those other mages had
actually been characters played by real people participating in the earliest
D&D campaigns, Evard was mostly just a name associated with a spooky spell
or two. Toward the end of 3rd Edition, the character had emerged a bit more in
the lore that was developed around the school of shadow magic, and Evard
finally showed up as something more than just a name—the creator of the school
of shadow magic, a dark, sardonic personality who dabbled with sinister magic
and mocked those who disapproved of his studies.</div>
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Thinking about the idea of spooky magic, a dark wizard, and
an adventure intended to showcase overtones of horror in D&D, I hit upon a
simple question: <i>Who’s buried in Evard’s
Tomb?</i> (Yeah, it’s a version of the old New York joke about Grant’s Tomb.)
And when I realized the answer was not the obvious one, the story of Evard’s
old rival Vontarin, the town of Duponde, the reckless young mage Nathaire, and
Evard’s terrible curse all fell into place. I borrowed a bit here and there
from Clark Ashton Smith’s excellent fantasy horror stories about the haunted
province of Averoigne to polish up the “feel” of the setting and story. (In
fact, the name Nathaire is from one of the characters in “The Colossus of
Ylourgne.”)</div>
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The Encounters format was very tough to work in, because you
couldn’t assume that the DM running your adventure would have the same players
at his table every week. Likewise, you couldn’t allow for the adventure to be
tackled out of order—people would be talking about their experiences in Week X,
so if some table played out X+3 on that week, they could spoil the story for
other tables. That was tough for me, since my design taste runs a lot more
toward sandbox-style adventures where people can engage whatever story thread
they find and follow it as long as they want. For <i>Dark Legacy of Evard,</i> I had to embrace a much more rigid storyline—I
couldn’t let the players make a decision in Week 3 that would make the Week
5-6-7 content irrelevant. So, I decided to make it the most flavorful and
suspenseful linear narrative I could manage. If you can’t give players the
chance to make a lot of big choices, you can make sure you deliver a riveting
story instead.</div>
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Going by what I saw of people writing up their Encounters
season responses, my approach seemed to work well enough. <i>Dark Legacy of Evard</i> was well received, and people seemed to really
groove on the spooky setting and the old story of Evard and Vontarin. Based on
the number of people participating in the Encounters program, <i>Dark Legacy</i> was probably the most
widely-played of my adventures since <i>Forge
of Fury.</i> You can still find it on DriveThruRPG.com if you’re curious (it’s
for 4th Edition D&D).</div>
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<b>Next Week:</b>
Thornkeep, my first non-WotC adventure!</div>
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Richard Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329182427795648081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139498400908952220.post-41447070774080912902015-07-16T13:36:00.000-07:002015-07-16T13:36:21.907-07:00Change of Topic: 5e Thule!Hi, folks –<br />
With your permission, I’m going to take a short break from my adventure retrospectives. I’m heading into the busiest three weeks of my summer, and I just don’t have the bandwidth to give ‘em the attention they deserve. I’ll try to pick things up again after GenCon.<br />
<br />
In the meantime, let me engage in a little shameless self-promotion. Today, my partners and I at Sasquatch Game Studio launched a new Kickstarter for a 5e version of our <i><b>Primeval Thule Campaign Setting. </b></i>If you’re a fan of 5e, or you know someone who is, I encourage you to visit the link and check it out.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/809579963/primeval-thule-5e?ref=nav_search">https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/809579963/primeval-thule-5e?ref=nav_search</a><br />
<br />
Feel free to spread the word to all your gamer friends! Just getting the word out is quite a challenge, and we can use all the attention we can get.<br />
<br />
Something interesting we’re doing with this Kickstarter: We’re running it across GenCon. Kickstarter campaigns often have a quiet period in the middle weeks (the “doldrums”), so we figured we might as well set up the timing so that GenCon fell in the middle of the campaign. Plus, it’ll give us something to talk about at the show. (We’ll be in Booth 674, and we’d love it if you stopped by and said hi!) We started the campaign a little early to make sure people had a good chance to see it before heading off to Indy, and we’re continuing well into August so that folks have time to recover after the show and notice it again before we’re up against the finish line.<br />
<br />
We think that 5e is a great fit for Primeval Thule. Thule’s narratives are basically backgrounds on steroids, we already had new Cosmic and Serpent domains for our Pathfinder version, and of course monster stats are pretty straightforward adaptations. There are a few things we can bring to 5e that folks are perhaps a little hungry for, such as monsters with slightly more flavorful powers, a few more cleric spells, and backgrounds with cool, distinctive abilities. Plus, Thule will be the first complete campaign setting available for the new system!<br />
<br />
Finally, we’re also taking advantage of this opportunity to reorganize the book and bring the narrative mechanics from the previous versions’ Appendix up into Chapter 2, right next to the narrative descriptions. This lets us optimize the space a bit, providing us with the ability to add a few pages of all-new content to the 5e version. You might have noticed mysterious references to Thulean Great Old Ones that didn’t appear in the previous book, such as Yga-Ygo and Lorthnu’un. We’ve got Lorthnu’un all statted up, illustrated, and ready to go in the new version of the book. It’s cool stuff!<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Richard Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329182427795648081noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139498400908952220.post-25774033814633161492015-07-07T10:41:00.001-07:002015-07-07T10:41:23.097-07:00Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 18: Gamma World<div class="MsoNormal">
Hello! I can’t believe that July is already upon us. That
means GenCon is less than a month away! I will be at the show, spending most of
my day around the Sasquatch Game Studio booth. We’ll have copies of Primeval
Thule available in all three game systems currently published, plus a few
special offerings you can’t find in your FLGS: Posters of the Thule cover art
signed by artist Todd Lockwood, Thule GM Screen packs, and a few premium
leatherbound copies while supplies last (signed by the Sasquatches, naturally).
We will also be offering demos of our upcoming <i>Ultimate Scheme</i> boardgame. Oh, and we’re thinking of hosting a
Friday evening Sasquatch meet-up for anyone who wants to socialize a bit, more
details to follow.</div>
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Drop by and check out our booth if you’re at GenCon—we’d love
to meet you and talk games!</div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>#23: Gamma World, Legion of Gold</b></span></div>
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One fine day in 2009, Bruce Cordell and I were called into
Bill Slavicsek’s office. I wondered if I’d done anything that might merit a
chewing-out. To my surprise, Bill informed the two of us that, as of
immediately, we were now working on a special project: A new edition of the <i>Gamma World</i> game. Bill went on to
describe some of his initial thoughts about the project and some of the unusual
requirements—for example, designing the game to include a collectible card
component, and making sure it was a true stand-alone game, no other purchase
needed. Bill also emphasized that he wanted to see a game that lived up to its
zany, kitschy roots. He was looking for something more like <i>Paranoia</i> or <i>Ghostbusters</i>, and wanted to make sure that Bruce and I were up to
the task of writing for humor. We both agreed, and away we went.</div>
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I was pretty stoked about the idea of working on <i>Gamma World</i>. I got the first edition box
way back in 1978, and played it alongside old 1e D&D collection. But as
Bruce and I sat down to begin brainstorming, I told him I had a confession. “I
know it’s supposed to be zany,” I said, “but when I was a kid, I took <i>Gamma World</i> seriously. I played it
straight, not for gags.”</div>
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“Me too!” Bruce admitted. So, here we were, with marching
orders to go build a humor RPG based on a world we took (probably way too)
seriously when we were kids.</div>
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A brief digression: Writing humor is tougher than you might
think. I figured out years ago that there was really no way to judge which gag,
wisecrack, or wry observation of mine was funny, and which wasn’t. About 25% of
any humor I write is honestly funny and appeals to anybody who reads it. About
50% is situational, and funny to some folks but not others. And 25% is funny
*only to me.* Unfortunately, I can’t easily tell which category a gag I write
falls into.</div>
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Anyway, off we went to create the 5<sup>th</sup>, 6<sup>th</sup>,
or 7<sup>th</sup> Edition of <i>Gamma World</i>,
depending on how you count ‘em. Bruce and I decided that we needed a new take
on how Terra Gamma came to be, preferably one that could easily accommodate
your mutant riding around in a ’57 Chevy armed with a fusion rifle. So, like
the <i>Alternity</i> version of the game, we
assumed that the “base” timeframe of the setting was pretty much our own modern
day. Bruce is a big science geek, so he suggested we might use some of the
worst-case fears about particle accelerator experiments as a mechanism for
destroying the world. That seemed pretty awesome to me, and thus our idea for
the Big Mistake was born. And I got to nuke Peshtigo, for no particular reason.</div>
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In terms of the <i>Gamma
World</i> system, I’m actually really proud of the way the Origins work.
Basically, your character powers and stats are determined by two random rolls:
For example, you might be half-Yeti, half-Radioactive. In an early playtest, I rolled
up a character that was Hawkoid/Seismic, and I spent the whole session trying
to work it out in my head as to how my character could be a flying rock. An
hour in, it hit me: My dude was a gargoyle! That was when I realized we had
something really fun with the Origins. It occurred to me you could do a fun,
light version of D&D using the same mechanism that mixed up classes, races,
or even signature magic items. We also went on to explore the notion a bit for
a potential superhero RPG, but that didn’t go anywhere (too bad). </div>
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The Alpha mutations and Omega tech cards weren’t necessarily
something that Bruce or I were enthusiastic about including, but our business
team really wanted to explore the territory of mixing in a collectible card
component with a RPG. We had several competing objectives for the cards: They
needed to be integrated into core game play, but we couldn’t assume players
would use them. They needed to be good enough that players would want to buy
them, but not so good that players could break the game just by spending money.
(I suppose it’s better to experiment with different business models in a
sideshow product like Gamma World than to try them out with the flagship line.)
In retrospect, I wish we’d pushed harder to build a true card-based char gen
system. Given the randomness of the dual-origin character creation, there’s no
reason that couldn’t have been covered by drawing from a deck.</div>
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So far, I’ve been talking about system and components here,
not adventures. I actually didn’t have anything to do with the adventure that
came in the 2010 box: All my writing was in the rules and overview portion of
the boxed set, while Bruce wrote “Steading of the Iron King.” I wasn’t involved
in <i>Famine at Far-Go,</i> the follow-up
box by Bruce and Rob Schwalb. Instead, I finally got to write a Gamma World
adventure in the <i>Legion of Gold</i> box,
the third in the release arc. <i>Legion of
Gold</i> was my favorite old Gamma World module from back in the day, and I was
really looking forward to revisiting it with our new engine. Bruce was again my
co-writer for the box, but this time I took the adventure content, while he took on the
crunchy stuff.</div>
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The really tricky part about the adventure design was that I
had to make sure that battle maps existed for each encounter, but I could only
ask for two new posters in Legion of Gold. So, I had to create sites and
encounters that relied heavily on maps from the <i>Gamma World</i> box and <i>Famine at
Far-Go</i> (we figured that most GMs would pick up all three sets). I also
wanted to create an adventure that was strongly influenced by the original from
thirty years back, but did something new. So, I hit upon the wacky idea of
taking the adventure to Gamma Terra’s moon. Bruce was amenable to the
suggestion, and that’s how Moon Zone 9 and space eels and all the rest came to
be a part of the adventure. It’s like a 1950s SF version of what the moon might
be like before people figured out that it was an airless rock.</div>
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I’m pretty happy with how <i>Legion of Gold</i> (heck, the whole <i>Gamma
World</i> product arc) turned out. The format was a little tough, since tying
ourselves down to “all fights on a poster map” and the standard tactical encounter
format made it tough to stay away from railroad-ish narratives or cover lots of
different approaches to a situation. But you really shouldn’t be playing <i>Gamma World</i> for deep narratives or
challenging decision points. You should be playing to blow things up.</div>
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<b>Next Week:</b> <i>Dark Legacy of Evard!</i></div>
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<br /></div>
Richard Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329182427795648081noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139498400908952220.post-79091103432037075272015-06-30T10:13:00.000-07:002015-06-30T10:13:32.213-07:00Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 17: Reavers of Harkenwold<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Welcome! I
hope you’re enjoying the summer. We’ve finalized our vacation plans for July,
settling on Glacier National Park as our main destination. We’ve been to
Yellowstone a couple of times, but Glacier will be new for us. I hear great
things about it—if you have any “can’t-miss” suggestions about enjoying the
park or the area nearby, please let me know! I think we’ll work in a half-day
at Palouse Falls along the way out, and maybe look for another good stop on the
way back. My wife and I are big fans of the wine country around Yakima!</div>
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On to my next stop in looking back at adventures:
<i>Reavers of Harkenwold!</i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>#22: D&D
Essentials <i>Dungeon Master’s Kit</i></b></span></div>
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After my
work on P1 (<i>King of the Trollhaunt
Warrens</i>), I was assigned to work on the first adventure in a new H-P-E
adventure series. Our working identifier for the new adventure was simply HH1.
Because we were a good long ways ahead of the game, I wasn’t tied down by an
existing title or concept—I had carte blanche to think up the beginning of the
next D&D adventure series and do whatever I wanted with it.</div>
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As I have
noted once or twice in this series, my first impulse when I get the marching
order to do what I want is to ask myself what I haven’t seen published for the
game in a while. The answer I came up with this time was basically, “When was
the last time we saw a good Robin Hood adventure for D&D?” I’d worked on a
couple of adventures that were close to that concept: <i>Red Hand of Doom</i> and <i>Shadowdale:
The Weave Unwinding.</i> But <i>Red Hand of
Doom</i> was really more of a “cast of thousands” battle against an invading
horde, while <i>Shadowdale</i> was a
high-level scenario tied into the current Realms storyline. Nothing was out
there for a group of low-level characters to fight the Sherriff of Nottingham
or stage a Scouring of the Shire, so that’s what I settled on.</div>
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While I had
a lot of room to come up with the adventure I wanted to write, I did have one
important requirement: It needed to fit into the Nentir Vale, the default
setting in the 4e DMG. (Nentir Vale, by the way, was a very late addition to
the 4e DMG. We had that book pretty much done, and at the last minute the brand
team and the R&D management team decided that we ought to provide something
for novice DMs to use as a starting point. So, I was called in to create a
county-sized “sample” world to serve as a chapter in the DMG. Nentir Vale is
what I came up with.) I studied the Nentir Vale pretty carefully, and decided
that Harkenwold was the best place for the kind of adventure I wanted to write.
Thus the title <i>Reavers of Harkenwold</i>
was born.</div>
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Around the
same time, we were also developing the idea that we might spin out the new
H-P-E series into a tighter story arc than the first group of adventures. I
participated in a small committee with the other designers to cook up a
suitable story arc, which led to an idea for a strong devil theme across the
new series. That gave me a great hook for the bad guys who would serve as the
unwelcome oppressors in bucolic Harkenwold: The Iron Circle. Awesome! I spent
the next few weeks in March of 2009 knocking out the adventure, using the same
two-booklet and slipcase format we’d been using for the previous 4e adventures.</div>
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Then we
decided not to do a new adventure series. No HH1, no <i>Reavers of Harkenwold</i>.</div>
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Well, I was
a little saddened by that, since I felt I had a decent adventure on the table.
Unfortunately, part of being a pro game designer is watching things you worked
on get canceled. It’s kind of the way you get to join the club. Fortunately, my
disappointment did not last long. As we reconsidered our plans for 2010
products, the D&D Essentials concept came into being. Chris Perkins, head
of the design team at that time, immediately recognized that <i>Reavers of Harkenwold</i> could be
re-purposed to serve as the adventure for the <i>D&D Essentials Dungeon Master’s Kit.</i> He took the adventure I’d
written for the 96-page 4e adventure format, and boiled it down to its new size
and purpose so deftly that I hardly noticed a difference. So, my adventure
survived, and wound up being a well-received introductory adventure for our “4.5
Edition.”</div>
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<br /></div>
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I’m rather
proud of the tar devils (new monsters introduced in the adventure). Classic
D&D devils ought to have strong observable characteristics that create an
identity for the monster: for example, spined devils, barbed devils, beard
devils, bone devils, etc. The idea of a tar devil feels infernal, and has that
same sort of visual identity or theming that existing devils possess; it’s a
good fit for the flavor. Mechanically, the tar devil guards have an excellent
“stay near me” aura to lock down PCs, and the harriers have a nice signature
attack with their hot tar balls. Monster roles and monster powers in 4e work
really well, and the more I worked on 4e-era monsters, the more I came to
appreciate how poorly monsters often worked in other editions. Unfortunately, I
doubt tar devils will ever be seen again in the game. It’s surprisingly hard to
introduce new demons or devils into the D&D game, since players are so heavily
invested in the existing hierarchy of fiends. (I also whiffed on storm devils
from the 4e <i>Manual of the Planes</i>; oh,
well.)</div>
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The castle
map is good—DMs collecting poster maps from 3e and 4e products rarely got
usable depictions of castles, and that would seem to be one of the things you
can never have enough of in a D&D game. I wish I could have mapped the
whole thing, but there’s only so much you can do with one poster map and a
sandboxy adventure that might or might not use different pieces of it. I’m also
really happy with the way the “infiltrate the castle” challenges worked out.
D&D adventures in the 3e or 4e era very rarely made use of any kind of
“sneak past the monsters” material, since the combination of better-balanced
encounters and awards-by-encounter made it difficult to get players to buy into
the idea that some battles shouldn’t be fought. But we’ve all seen a hundred
action movies where the brave rebels come up with a plan to get into the
villain’s stronghold, so I did my best to provide the DM with ways to
adjudicate the player’s use of clever ploys or audacious imagination—and make
sure the adventure rewarded the PCs for thinking like heroes.</div>
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I wonder if <i>Reavers</i> is perhaps a little too hard for
a true novice DM to handle, which might make its inclusion in the <i>Dungeon Master’s Kit</i> a little
problematic. But in my defense I’ll point out that I didn’t design it for
newbies, that’s just where it ended up. Most people seemed to like it well enough,
as far as I can tell.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<b>Next Week:</b> Gamma World!</div>
Richard Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329182427795648081noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139498400908952220.post-72675314241733905982015-06-23T12:08:00.000-07:002015-06-23T12:08:37.879-07:00Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 16: King of the Trollhaunt<div class="MsoNormal">
Hello! A strangely quiet week here at the Baker
household—both of my daughters are off on a mission trip, so it’s just Kim and
I holding down the fort (with our big baby of a Lab). Last night we snuck out
to catch a Mariners game. I found a nice ticket-resale site and came across a pair
of really good tickets that someone had to dump at the last minute, so we sat 8
rows from the field and only paid $15 apiece for the seats. Of course, the beer
still costs $10 at Safeco, but you’re allowed to bring food into the park, so
Kim and I enjoyed Jimmy John subs while watching the Mariners get thrashed by
the Royals. At least we didn’t pay $50 a seat for the privilege.</div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>#21: P1, King of the Trollhaunt Warrens</b></span></div>
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Ah, <i>King of the
Trollhaunt Warrens.</i> My contribution to the adventure was the Trollhaunt and
the Great Warren, including Skalmad and his magic eye. I also came up with the
backstory of the sad fate of Prince Etheran. My co-writer, Logan Bonner, covered
the town of Moonstair, the troll attack, and the Feywild material that forms
the conclusion of the adventure. As in <i>Thunderspire
Labyrinth</i>, I didn’t have any input in the adventure title or the “catalog
copy”—it was my job (and Logan’s) to write an adventure that matched the title
we had in hand.</div>
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Trollhaunt was my second adventure for D&D 4e, and the
first adventure Wizards published for paragon-tier play. I worked on it
immediately after <i>Thunderspire Labyrinth</i>,
and had a better handle on skill challenges at that point. The “find your way
to the dungeon” challenge at the beginning of the adventure is actually pretty
interesting. I also came up with a challenge for negotiating with a dragon,
and Logan included a couple in his section of the adventure. </div>
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For some reason,
when I thought about the idea of “the Trollhaunt” and what sort of environment
might be overrun with trolls, I kept thinking about the old Star Trek episode <i>The Galileo Seven</i>. So, when you read or
play through the Trollhaunt trek, just imagine thick mists hiding big giant
dudes who occasionally throw fifteen-foot spears at you.</div>
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One little goal I gave myself in the design of Trollhaunt: I
wanted the players to get to know Skalmad, the troll king, and face him several
times in the course of the adventure. All too often adventures that feature an
interesting bad guy have exactly ONE meeting of heroes and villain—the
climactic battle scene. I wanted to see if we could think up a way for the PCs
to fight Skalmad multiple times. That notion led to the Eye of Moran and the
Stone Cauldron. If you play through Trollhaunt, you will come to <i>hate</i> Skalmad, and that’s good.</div>
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The map of the Great Warren was challenging, because we had
hard rules in place about making sure that any area map we created for an
adventure had to be re-usable as the insert maps in the tactical encounter
spreads. So, I had to map out this sprawling maze in 5-foot squares. I took two
full pages to make the biggest spread possible. One interesting feature: If you
don’t mind getting wet, the stream tunnels provide a whole different path to
explore the complex, and make this a very non-linear map. However, it has
always been my experience that PCs <i>hate</i>
getting wet (they’re like cats), and I wonder how many groups out there
realized how valuable this alternate pathway could be.</div>
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Funny story about the art order: Check out the spot illo on
page 4 of Adventure Book One. I had a hell of a time getting that through our
art approval process. Chris Perkins thought I was absolutely nuts to ask for an
ominous-looking sack, but I just knew it had to be there. When the trolls of
the Trollhaunt inform the people of Moonstair that the noble Prince Etheran is
not welcome in their realm, they do so by throwing his head over the wall in a
bloody sack. The PCs later recover a letter from the town mayor to the lord, in
which the mayor diplomatically says that, “a troll warrior delivered a token
proving your son is dead,” which I thought was a masterful bit of
understatement. Anyway, it turns out that making a sack look threatening is
tough, and I had to fight for that little bit of gallows humor in the
adventure. Sorry, but the bloody sack is just funny to me for some reason.</div>
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One other thing I’m proud of in Trollhaunt is the will-o’-wisp.
Working early in 4e, we only had one <i>Monster
Manual</i> to pull from, and I was bummed that the will-o’-wisp hadn’t made the
cut for the first monster book. So, I got to design the first 4e appearance of
this iconic D&D monster. It turns out that a monster like the will-o’-wisp
works so much better with 4e’s idiosyncratic monster powers and templating of
actions than it does in earlier editions of the game. In 1e, you’d see lights
in a swamp, and there was nothing to <i>make</i>
the characters actually follow them into danger. Plus, the idea of lurker
monsters that join other fights is perfect for the making the will-o’-wisp an
interesting encounter. IMO the 4e wisp finally delivers on what the monster was
trying to do since 1978. I think 5e could benefit from incorporating a little
more of 4e’s monster design tech.</div>
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So, overall, I like P1, and I’ve used it (or pieces of it) a
number of times in my own games. It seems to have been well received, with a
good mix of story, colorful demi-Celtic trappings, and memorable fight scenes. I
ought to update it for 5e sometime.</div>
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<br />
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<b>Next Week:</b> <i>Reavers of Harkenwold,</i> the adventure
from the D&D Essentials <i>Dungeon
Master’s Kit.</i></div>
Richard Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329182427795648081noreply@blogger.com2