OrcCon 2010

Last weekend was OrcCon - one of the three major gaming conventions in the Los Angeles area. The four-day convention was quite large and focused mostly on boardgaming, but there were also a lot of miniature games, card games, and RPGs as well.

The RPG offerings were completely dominated by 4th Edition "Dungeons and Dragons" - there was an entire ballroom devoted entirely to 4e RPGA. I engaged one 4e DM in conversation and asked if he had an pre-gens so I could join in. He said no, but I might be able to find someone in the room with a computer who could help me build a character. I wandered off to play in the Zooloretto tournament.

The demand for RPGs was high and most of the games filled up early and had waiting lists. I played in a session of All Flesh Must Be Eaten GM'd by Mike Lowrey, which was very enjoyable thanks to the kooky players. I also played in a hilarious World of Darkness game run by Steve Ramirez of the L.A. Dead Gamers Society. Steve's scenario was called "Aliens Invade the Drive-in" and we all played teenagers in a small town being visited by invisible aliens. The interactions between the jock, geek, and rebel characters were highly entertaining.

Besides a few sessions of Call of Cthulhu OrcCon lacked much old school RPG activity. Robert Lionheart ran a last-minute late-night old school D&D megadungeon on Feb 14, but I couldn't join in because, for me, after 8pm on Valentine's Day usually does not involve rolling polyhedral dice.

World Oranj Background

In response to requests from players, I will do my best to post background notes and session reports for our D&D games. There's a bit a catching up to do. First off, here is the background for the World Oranj WhiteBox D&D game in Los Angeles. Also included are some illustrations I made to help clarify some specific points...

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE WORLD

Our Game begins on the World Oranj - a large rainy planet circling a large ocherous sun. This planet has an amber-hued gaseous atmosphere that has the odor of freshly sliced agaric mushrooms. For tens of thousands of years this planet was dominated by a progression of far-reaching human civilizations. Remnants and ruins of these cultures are found everywhere among the forests, swamps, mountains, and seabeds of the world. Over the years, as the various surviving civilizations became more isolated and inwardly focused, the sprawl of humankind declined as wildness retook the world. Currently, the larger portion of remaining humanity is concentrated in a handful of large and isolated city-states that are surrounded by sparsely populated wilderness. Within the city-states the greater bolus of humans maintains an obliviousness to the outer world, focusing instead on complex and decadent artistic, cultural, and pharmaceutical endeavors. Most people spend their entire lives within their city-state, however each progressively shrinking generation produces its own small share of scholars, adventurers, and psychopaths who venture beyond the city walls into the black-leaved forests stalked by translucent beasts.

CHARACTER CLASSES

Clerics: In the sky there is a blue and silver moon called Zymos. This moon appears very large due to its close proximity to Oranj. On Zymos there resides Six Demons living in six ancient temple complexes, respectively. Clerics are able to call on these Demons to gain supernatural favors. While a cleric may call on any of The Six, each cleric has a special association with one of the Demons, usually originating from a dream or vision early in life. Each cleric carries a book of collected meditations and supernatural scripture he or she uses to record and study incantations necessary to invoke favors and spells from the Demons. Clerics are often motivated by a desire to discover lost meditations and artifacts related to the Demons, and, of course, to travel to Zymos to meet the Demons face-to-face.

Fighters: These individuals have spent their lives focused on disciplined physical pursuits - usually violent, athletic, and/or erotic in nature. Fighters are often motivated by a passion for contests and conquests – a disposition often considered to be a sort of mental illness by the good people of the city-states.

Magic Users: Scholars of the ultraphysical sphere, specialists in paramathematics, hypergeometry, and pharmaceutics, magicians practice using their mental abilities to alter the elements around them. They rigorously train regions of their brains to act as storage reserves for physical formulae encoding certain atomic manipulations. Magic users are a strange and rare breed who jealously guard their personal books of spell formulations while seeking out additional knowledge and materials to add to their collections.

David Jien - Top Wizards

Perfect images of Top Wizards by David Jien.

House rules for our White Box games...

For our White Box D&D sessions we are employing a few basic house rules beyond what is in the 3 little brown books. Here is a brief list of the major house rules. These are pretty much inspired by Gary Gygax's latter-day White Box house rules:

Character Generation:

• Abilities: 4d6, and remove the lowest die. Assign the six totals to abilities of choice.
• Level 1 characters start with maximum hit points.
• Players may not name the characters after themselves, because character death may result in death of the player.
• Each character starts with 3d6 x 10 pieces of gold.
  

Ability Bonuses:

• Strength: Fighters with STR of 14 or higher do +1 damage.

Combat Round:

1. Players declare actions (move, missile, melee, spell).
2. Player and DM roll for initiative.
3. Actions resolved for high initiative group.
4. Actions resolved for low initiative group.

Combat:

• Natural 1: Weapon dropped or misfired.
• Natural 20: Roll double dice.
• Bind Wounds: Immediately after combat (within one 10min turn) players may bind wounds for +1d4 HP. This will restore consciousness.

Weapon Damage:

• Unless otherwise noted, all normal weapons do 1d6 damage. Exceptions:
• Dagger: 1d6-1
• Two-handed Sword or Hammer: 1d6+1

Unconsciousness and Death:

• A character is unconscious at 0HP.
• A character is dead when it reaches a negative number of hit points equal to its level.

Harvey Benschoter animation

Fleshetables from Harvey Benschoter on Vimeo.

Recent links in the popular press...

A nice article on Neil Gaiman in the New Yorker.
Kid Goth - Neil Gaiman's Fantasies

An article in the LA Times mentioning Original D&D:
Astral Weeks: In D&D We Trust

LA Times has some really cool black and white D&D stock photos from he 70s that they always use for related articles... I recall they whipped these out for the Arneson obit as well.

Cleric spell books in OD&D

This weekend I re-read the Original Dungeons and Dragons (OD&D) rules from 1974 - you know, the white box with 3 little brown books by Gygax and Arneson - and I noticed that it says explicitly that clerics use spell books just like magic users.

This was an amazing revelation to me! One of my favorite aspects of D&D is the spell book mechanic derived from the 50s-era fantastic fiction of Jack Vance. Having magic users quest for scrolls, books, and mentors in order to expand their magical repertoire is always a major, if not central, character motivation in the games I run.

I relish the thought of applying this mechanism to clerics as well. Searching the planet for lost prayers, meditations, inscriptions, and holy books in hopes of gaining the ability to invoke favors from ancient, and possibly forgotten, supernatural beings would add a lot of fun and mystery to a campaign. I also think it makes things much less technical and gamey than every cleric simply picking the same old spells from the same old list before every game session. Certain orders or cults would of course have their favorite holy books with selected canonical spells and prayers. What good cleric wouldn't want to bring back new invocations for their order to add to their canon?

As far as I can tell, the clerical spell book first was discarded in the "Blue Box" Basic Set by J. Eric Holmes. I am disappointed that none of the editions of OD&D retroclone "Swords & Wizardry" use traditional OD&D clerical spell books.

I hereby declare that, starting today, all clerics traveling through my games must learn their prayers and invocations from mystical scripture.