Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 23: Loch Finnere

Greetings again! I’m afraid I got caught up in a collision of Primeval Thule 5e 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 Primeval Thule Gamemaster’s Companion pretty much in hand, I’ve got Steve Winter’s Red Chains adventure for 5e Primeval Thule 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 Ultimate Scheme play sequence last week that worked like a charm. It might be the change that takes Ultimate Scheme from being a good game to being a great 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!

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^th to 15^th at Hueston Lodge. I’m going to run a couple of Thule games, run a couple of Ultimate Scheme games, and maybe even play a game or two if I can. I hope to see you there!

#28: Banshee of Loch Finnere

Next on my list is a little PDF adventure I wrote for the Accursed game from Melior Via: Banshee of Loch Finnere. 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 Savage Worlds game system, one of the more successful and broadly published non-D&D RPGs out there.

My contribution to the Accursed 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 Primeval Thule (the first one, for Pathfinder, 4e, and 13^th Age). I’ve known Ross Watson of Melior Via for many years, and when he reached out to ask about some cross-promotion for Thule and Accursed, I was happy to oblige. The Accursed guys offered to serve as a stretch goal for our Primeval Thule Kickstarter, and we offered to return the favor by supporting the Accursed game. As it turned out, John Dunn of Melior Via wound up writing our Night of the Yellow Moon adventure for Thule. I, in turn, wrote Banshee of Loch Finnere for John and Ross.

In case you haven’t heard about Accursed 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 Accursed files, and trying to wrap my head around the idea of what would make a good adventure in the setting.

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 Night of the Vampire, 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?

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.

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, Banshee of Loch Finnere 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.

Next Time: Something that quite a lot of people have played through in the last year or so: Lost Mine of Phandelver!

Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 22: Diamond Staff

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 Primeval Thule Campaign Setting 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.

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 Red Chains, and Robert Schwalb’s Watchers of Meng. 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 Gamemaster’s Companion, the Player’s Companion, and maybe a secret bonus or two. We’ll see how it goes!

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!

Speaking of hikes, I guess it’s time to dive into the next in my blog series: Search for the Diamond Staff, which of course presents the heroes with the opportunity to hike all over the Dalelands.

#27: Search for the Diamond Staff

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.

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 Dark Legacy of Evard 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.

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.

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!

Search for the Diamond Staff 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.

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 Search for the Diamond Staff as a lowest-common-denominator “call it what it is” suggestion. Some days the inspiration is there, and some days it isn’t.

Next Week: My only Savage Worlds adventure, The Banshee of Loch Finnere.

Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 21: Emerald Spire

Sometimes irony is, well, ironic. The day after I posted my blog about Thornkeep, it was announced that Goblinworks laid off all but three of its people, and the company was looking for a buyer for the Pathfinder Online 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.

I still think there is a good market for a small, clever, shoestring MMO publisher to create an EVE-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 Pathfinder Online 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.

Pathfinder Online 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, Pathfinder Online 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 EVE-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 Pathfinder Online 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.

During my work in and around Pathfinder Online, 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.

#26: Emerald Spire

Pathfinder Online actually ran two Kickstarters. The first was for the “tech demo,” an initial exploration of the game concept and basic engine. Thornkeep 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 Emerald Spire Superdungeon.

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.

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.

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.

My level was Level 6, the Clockwork Maze. Since the brief writeup on the Emerald Spire in Thornkeep 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.

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 Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set, 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.

Next Time: The Search for the Diamond Staff.

Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 20: Thornkeep

Welcome 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.

Before I get to Thornkeep, 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.

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.

Okay, on to Thornkeep and the Accursed Halls.

#25: The Accursed Halls
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.

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.

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.

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 Emerald Spire, 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.

Next Time: My second D&D Encounters adventure, The Search for the Diamond Staff!
   

Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 19: Dark Legacy of Evard

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!

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 Primeval Thule Campaign Setting 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:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/809579963/primeval-thule-5e?ref=nav_search

OK, on to my next adventure retrospective!

#24: Dark Legacy of Evard

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.

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.

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: Who’s buried in Evard’s Tomb? (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.”)

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 Dark Legacy of Evard, 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.

Going by what I saw of people writing up their Encounters season responses, my approach seemed to work well enough. Dark Legacy of Evard 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, Dark Legacy was probably the most widely-played of my adventures since Forge of Fury. You can still find it on DriveThruRPG.com if you’re curious (it’s for 4th Edition D&D).

Next Week: Thornkeep, my first non-WotC adventure!

Change of Topic: 5e Thule!

Hi, folks –
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.

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 Primeval Thule Campaign Setting. If you’re a fan of 5e, or you know someone who is, I encourage you to visit the link and check it out.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/809579963/primeval-thule-5e?ref=nav_search

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.

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.

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!

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!

Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 18: Gamma World

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 Ultimate Scheme 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.

Drop by and check out our booth if you’re at GenCon—we’d love to meet you and talk games!

#23: Gamma World, Legion of Gold

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 Gamma World 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 Paranoia or Ghostbusters, 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.

I was pretty stoked about the idea of working on Gamma World. 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 Gamma World seriously. I played it straight, not for gags.”

“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.

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.

Anyway, off we went to create the 5^th, 6^th, or 7^th Edition of Gamma World, 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 Alternity 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.

In terms of the Gamma World 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).

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.

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 Famine at Far-Go, the follow-up box by Bruce and Rob Schwalb. Instead, I finally got to write a Gamma World adventure in the Legion of Gold box, the third in the release arc. Legion of Gold 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.

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 Gamma World box and Famine at Far-Go (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.

I’m pretty happy with how Legion of Gold (heck, the whole Gamma World 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 Gamma World for deep narratives or challenging decision points. You should be playing to blow things up.

Next Week: Dark Legacy of Evard!