Game Viet Nam

A tale of tragedies in Cornwall today.

Somewhere just off the spiral stairs below the south tower the party was ambushed by one of those big metallic spiders.  The hopeless loser Robert proved the inadvertent hero of the moment.  His death and apparent tastiness bought the rest of the party sufficient time to escape.

The dwarf Harry Jasso attempted a parlay with a trio of Vile Man-Bats.  The reaction roll came up as the worst possible result, not even accounting for Harry's abysmal charisma, so I ruled they mistook him for one of the mad gnomes.  A sonic screech attack threw him back 30' into a wall, doing twice the damage necessary to kill him.  The rest of the party bravely hid in an adjacent room until the Vile Man-Bats departed.  To their credit, they did bring back the pulped remains of his body for proper burial at the abbey.

Samson Jones! got a little out of hand in his carousing and somehow ended up in some sort of brawl with what he thought was a transvestite hitting on him.  Turns out it was actually Lady Susan's somewhat mannish looking older sister, the widow Chezmerelda.  Now Samson Jones! is rotting in the dungeon of Castle Bouttreaux with a long list of charges against him (slapping a noblewoman, operating a lizard without a license, aggravated mopery, etc.).   The bribes and fines necessary to get him free total a whopping 6,000 gold pieces.  Who will take care of his sons, who are hideously deformed and hideously stupid respectively?  Don't let the cops know, but Uggs the Cleric is organizing a jailbreak.  Hit up +Reynaldo Madrinan on G+ if you want in on the action.

Vaults of Nagoh: Fiend Folio-only Wandering Monster tables

Playing D&D with Porn Stars: Redoing the Fiend Folio (series)

Blood of Prokopius: Fiend Folio series

my stuff: Proscriptive Campaign Creation, The Folian Mythos, Mightiest Monsters: FF, the flumph beat this? part 1, part 2, part 3

What Are You Doing: FF doodles part 1, part 2

Kevin Mayle: cover study

SomethingAwful: WTF, FF? part 1, part 2

Please enter any additional links in the comments.  Chris of Vaults of Nagoh mentions a Tales of the Rambling Bumblers post, but I can't find it at the moment.

What if the only gods in your campaign setting were the freaks at the top of the Fiend Folio food chain?

Lolth - Spider Queen of Demons
Cryonax - Prince of Freezing Blood and Shattering Ice
Imix - Prince of All-Consuming Flame
Ogr�moch -Prince of Crushing Stone
Olhydra - Princess of the Drowning Waters
Yan-C-Bin - Invisible Prince of Thunder and Lightning
Ssendam - Lord of Insanity
Ygorl - Lord of Entropy

I think that would be a pretty gruesome set-up.  No deity is particularly beneficent towards mankind, instead cultic practices would lean towards the warding off/begging for mercy school of worship.  Also, the high priest Kyuss (of the "Sons of ...") would probably be a revered figure in the temples of his master Ygorl.

And I might actually give a crap about that stooge Ogr�moch.

Remember the NPC classes introduced in 3e, the Warrior, Adept, Expert, Commoner and Aristocrat?  The pretty much sucked compared to the PC classes, with the Commoner being far inferior to any other class.  Except maybe the Sorcerer.  I hate those guys.  Anyway, the Warrior and Adept are particularly interesting to me, as they are basically recongizable as cut down versions of standard D&D classes.

So here's my idea, integrate something like the Warrior and the Adept as the backbone of the class system.  Then implement more robust classes as add-ons to the baseline.  Like this:


Imagine this as a two page spread in a rulebook.  The lines in black are the NPC class information, with the rectangle being the spot you'd insert some artwork of a typical Warrior or Hedge Wizard or whatever.  The red, purple and green columns are the buffer PC/important NPC variants, which all build off the stuff in the black columns.  So if the black text said "A Warrior is someone who fights, here's his XP chart, hit dice, etc..." then the red text would say "A Fighter is a Warrior with the following special powers" or something like that.  The illo box on the lefthand page would feature three characters, typical members of each of the three subclasses. (Note that in the actual rulebook the text wouldn't be different colors.  I'm just trying to ruin your eyes this afternoon.)

What do you think of this approach?

Most of the titles on older TSR products were pretty pedestrian designs.  Off the top of my head these are my two favorite product logos from back in the day.  Anybody else got any others they like?

The standard D&D implementation of Vancian magic has at least two great things going for it, encouraging spellcasters to think strategically and creating adventure situations via spell scarcity.  So my question today is about the effects of alternate spell systems.

Q: What situations do you want to see in play that Vancian magic does not encourage?

I'll offer two answers to get the ball rolling:

A1: I'd love to see PC wizards collapse from exhaustion because they pushed themselves past the limits of their powers.
A2: I don't want players to not know exactly how many spells they'll be able to get off before they run dry.