Game Viet Nam

All y'all should go to this page at Snorri's joint A Wizard in a Bottle and check out the pdf Searchers of the Unknown.  It's a one-page D&D house rules thing-a-ma-bob and I think it's pretty great.  Searchers isn't exactly new, but over on G+ the other day Chris McDowell of SoogaGames reminded me of it's existence, with his comment "Anyone that runs or plays D&D should be required to play Searchers of the Unknown for at least one session. It should come packaged on one sheet with every version of the game."

Please, seriously, if you haven't read it take the few minutes necessary to do so, then come back and answer these questions.

1) Is it still D&D if your character doesn't have Str, Int, Dex, Wis, Con and Cha scores?  Are the presence or absence of those stats dealbreakers for you?  This is one of the big humps I would have to get over to run this great little game.  Those six rolls of 3d6 matter a lot to me, even in editions where they don't do that much mechanically.

2) Having a character class seems like a pretty core part of the D&D experience to me as well.  On the other hand, everybody starting out as some jerk with a spear and no particular skills seems like a pretty good match for my usual "down-and-dirty" approach to starting a D&D campaign.  What if the only character classes available were Prestige Classes?  You want to play a wizard?  You absolutely must seek one out in play and apprentice up.  That's a bit similar to the WFRP approach, except you wouldn't necessarily hop from class to class.

Fred the Dwarf, the elvish trio (Lankii, Senoma and Vithujin) and the cleric Aethelred the Unsteady have returned from an expedition to the dungeons below Dundagel.  Most folks in the area assumed they were dead, because they were last seen heading to the ruins several weeks ago.  But today they return and buys many rounds of drinks for the folks staying in the Abbey guesthouse.  Though tight-lipped at first, eventually a few details of their expedition begin to slip out.

• These guys have built some sort of permanent outpost in Goblin Land, which can be accessed via a portal somewhere in the dungeons.
• Their ally the fighting man Will Die Too is now chieftain of the Tricloptic Vikings, having defeated the previous chief in single combat.  He's sorta gone native and doesn't seem to show much interest in coming back.  That may have something to do with his two new beautiful triclops wives.
• The party may or may not have started a war with these total jerkward four-armed humanoids that ride pterodactyls.  These guys have some serious mad science mojo going on in this grand canyon-esque hell-rift.
• Aethelred has declared himself Bishop to the Goblin Lands.
• A coldalisk works just like a basilisk, except you freeze solid.
• One of the party members traded away an interesting item to Dremelza the Witch: a little four-armed fetus-mutant in a jar.  Not like pickled or anything, a live specimen that bangs on the glass and seems to really want to be let out!
• You know how Blixa the Thief likes to travel with a magic doggy?  He has apparently set a trend of sorts.  Lankii has a pet bat-winged cobra and Bishop Aethelred is often seen talking to his cat.  Of course, Aethelred may just be off his rocker.  Dude thinks he's the Bishop of Goblins, after all.

So my back end site stats tell me this is the 3,000th post published here at the blogspot version of the Gameblog.  (I did 300 posts on the first version of the blog, begun in February 2004 and hosted by Tripod.)  Other stats stuff I find vaguely interesting:

Current Followers: 612
Hits/Day: Between 1,000 and 2,000 typically
Published comments: 19,586
Total hits since I started keeping track: 1,954,265

When Nestor and Machaon had reached the tents of the son of Neleus, they dismounted, and an esquire, Eurymedon, took the horses from the chariot. The pair then stood in the breeze by the seaside to dry the sweat from their shirts, and when they had so done they came inside and took their seats. Fair Hecamede, whom Nestor had had awarded to him from Tenedos when Achilles took it, mixed them a mess; she was daughter of wise Arsinous, and the Achaeans had given her to Nestor because he excelled all of them in counsel. First she set for them a fair and well-made table that had feet of cyanus; on it there was a vessel of bronze and an onion to give relish to the drink, with honey and cakes of barley-meal. There was also a cup of rare workmanship which the old man had brought with him from home, studded with bosses of gold; it had four handles, on each of which there were two golden doves feeding, and it had two feet to stand on. Any one else would hardly have been able to lift it from the table when it was full, but Nestor could do so quite easily. In this the woman, as fair as a goddess, mixed them a mess with Pramnian wine; she grated goat's milk cheese into it with a bronze grater, threw in a handful of white barley-meal, and having thus prepared the mess she bade them drink it.

-from The Iliad, Book XI, prose translation by Samuel Butler (the novelist, not the poet Samuel Butler, nor the classicist Samuel Butler)

Bronze Age carousing was weird, man.  Cheese and barley in the wine?  I've spent a bit of time trying to figure out if anything resembling "Pramnian wine" is still available for purchase today.  ?ethymneos wine, from the island of Lesbos, might be a good match.  The Hungarian wine Tokaji Eszencia, which is Baron Munchausen's favorite vintage, if I recall correctly, might also work.   I've heard that Tokaji Eszencia is one of the priciest wines in the world, so I'm not sure anyone would actually put feta and barley flour in it.

This is offered as a slightly more complicated, slightly less lethal alternative to "save or die" poison:

If you save the poison is not in you.  If you fail your save, the poison has entered your blood. 

On the first round after failure, you take 1d6 damage.  You are -1 on all actions.  There is a 1 in 6 chance you fall prone, either unconscious or writhing around in agony (50/50 chance). 

On the 2nd round after failure you take 2d6 damage, you're -2 to act and have a 2 in 6 chance of incapacitation. 

On the 3rd round you take 3d6, -3 to act, 3 in 6 KO. 

Etc., etc., up until 10 rounds have passed, when you take 3d6, -10 to act, 10 in 6 chance of incapacitation.

The idea here is that being poisoned will kill almost any character in a few rounds, BUT you have some time to try to pull some shenanigans, like sucking the poison out or overcoming the hit point damage with cure spells and potions.  And you get an opportunity to maybe kill the sumbitch who poisoned you, only to fall over dead a round or two later.  How awesome is that?

What happened this morning in +Jeff Rients' Wessex campaign?

Roll 1d20
1 - Ool the Dandy, loyal henchman to +Taurus Hell's Heart, was imprisoned.
2 - No one is quite sure, but +Philip the Bloody has a new hydrocephalitic goblin mounted outside his cabin.
3 - +Sir Hugo le B�tard now bears a hideous scar on his back from one of +Philip the Bloody's infamous phaser blasts.
4 - The party returned with a huge pirate-style chest filled with treasure. Some of it even had the mark of King Arthur.
5 - There are now two less vampires in the dungeon (both were pro-wrestlers).
6 - Several of the party members have horrible acid scars covering their face. They don't want to talk about it.
7 - +Philip the Bloody's new tattoo reads "True Stanist" under a picture of a golden orb spider.
8 - The party encountered strange, mummy-like creatures encased in glass.
9 - The party did battle with a mighty dung-golem. There were no survivors.
10 - Ooluu tested the power of Dagon over the undead. The results were inconclusive.
11 - The dragon has returned, and he is angry.
12 - Rakshasas were actually encountered on the Rakshasa level.
13 - +Philip the Bloody's trusty phaser ran out of batteries.
14 - The goblin henchmen of +Sir Hugo le B�tard now possess strange, steel gloves mounted with dental equipment.
15 - They party actually entered the caves deep below the castle. There they encountered hideous crabmen.
16 - The party killed a gargoyle using a clever trick.
17 - The things without a face are highly susceptible to fire.
18 - A magic item was discovered (1-3 Excalibur itself 4-5 Merlin's wand 6 something far more stange)
19 - Add moving rocks to St. Serpentor's list of posthumous miracles.
20 - Roll twice, disbelieving both results.

Evan Elkins wrote this in lieu of a standard session report.  Some of it is even true!