Renewal and Inspiration

The past few months have had me in an odd place re: gaming and publishing, and I've definitely been feeling burnt out. But stepping away from Twitter to get away from The (gaming) Discourse has been extremely refreshing, and last night's session in the Hill Cantons has helped a lot to rekindle my excitement about this hobby.

Along with slugging away on the Slumbering Ursine Dunes omnibus and the sequel to Lorn Song of the Bachelor, I'm also starting to get some wind back in my sails for my own projects.

I've started working on the Gygax 75 challenge, a framework for putting together one's own campaign setting. It's a way for me to channel the big inchoate Feelings about Legacy of the Bieth and put them into a gameable format that other people can actually use to run their own games. Unfortunately, I got stuck on the hexmap side of things. I've had trouble with creating hex setups on my own that felt well-designed and realistic, but part of me balked at using in-depth creation of the sort that Rob Conley has presented. (No slight against Rob intended by any means! It's a great series, but my heart quails at the full process.) 

I thought about using something like Chgowiz's Three Hexes but that framework also doesn't quite fit with part of how I've already conceptualized Legacy of the Bieth. Much to my surprise, I've found that an AD&D 2e product, the World Builder's Guidebook, is hitting the sweet spot for my design needs. It's still pretty top-down design, but presents enough of a scaffolding that I think I can abstract the highest level components, drill down to regional setup, and still get something that will make it easier for future development and design. 

I'm immensely proud of my existing editorial work on Hydra Coop products, but it's a separate field of excitement to move forward on my own creations. Relatedly, my first adventure for publication, "Home is the Hangman," will be coming out with the release of the upcoming Haunted West RPG by Darker Hue Studios. Chris is doing an amazing job on HW and I'm really glad to have contributed to the project. I will also be appearing in a Haunted West livestream starting later this month.

Finally, I spoke with Paco over at GMS Magazine about the OSR a few weeks ago - take a look!

So a question for all y'all - what are you working on? What's been tricky for you, and what's been flowing well?

Rush In and Die, Dogs! -- 4e Minions in B/X

 Inspired by a query from ZharethZhen on Reddit.

4e D+D introduced the minion - a variant of a monster defined by having just a single hit point. This has utility in classic D+D frameworks for modelling hard-hitting groups of creatures that can nevertheless be defeated easily -- even more easily than a the baseline monster with minimum values on its hit dice. (An ogre, at 4+1 HD, will have a minimum of 5 HP, but an ogre minion only 1.)

Adjusting a classic D+D statblock to reflect a single hit point is trivial. But how would one value a minion for purposes of XP assessment? It doesn't seem to make sense to rate them as either a 1/2 or 1 HD creature if they're hitting more strongly and have special abilities (flight, save-or-die, etc.). 

So here's how I might address the issue for B/X-alikes.

• Monsters use d8 for HD in B/X, which averages out to 4.5 HP per HD.
• B/X monster XP is based on both the base HD and any special abilities.
• To calculate XP for a minion, divide minion HD by 4 to determine base HD, but add special ability XP based on the original HD. The dangerous nature of abilities from the higher-tier monster is reflected, but the HD-based XP is reduced to reflect the vastly reduced hit point capacity.

Have you used minions in your classic D+D? What do you see as guidelines for how to implement them effectively, or if at all?

 

War at the Table

I just finished up a GenCon Online panel, War at the Table, with Basheer Ghouse. You should all go check out Basheer's work here. This was a heck of a lot of fun, and I really loved talking with Basheer and the folks chiming in with questions. 

Take a look, see what you think:

(And if this is of interest, I'm still working on my "Wargaming Ain't A Dirty Word" post!)

Special thanks to Richard Ruane for helping us majorly with backend streaming stuff, and @LilRedAlchemist for an amazing organizing effort for PoC presenters at cons. This would seriously not have happened without her. 

The presentation that we were using (and our sources list) is available here.