Ludic Dreams IV - Fresh From the Forge

Conundrums of Old School Combat

Combat occupies a central if ambiguous place in old school games. In many old school games, combat is not incentivized in terms of experience points. Unlike more forgiving versions of the world's most famous roleplaying game, in old school games the risk of death for PCs is very real. This means that there is a strong reason to avoid combat, at least when the outcome is not clear in advance. The use of reaction rolls and morale checks ensure that combat to death is often not the default result of interaction, even with "monsters". Adventure design for this playstyle tends to replace a series of balanced combat encounters against fixed villains on predetermined battlemats with open-ended situations consisting of opposing ambiguous factions with wildly varying power scales. Which is all a great deal of fun. 

And yet, in many old school rule sets, especially those derived from B/X or OD&D, as well as some rules lite systems, combat itself, although risky, can end up feeling strangely boring to some--myself included. There are several reasons. 

One is that these rulesets often do not support very meaningful tactical choices in preparation for combat. Take weapon choice. In the alternate combat system of OD&D white box (i.e. prior to Supplement I), weapons, although costing different amounts, are otherwise undifferentiated, doing a flat 1d6 damage to foes. This abstractions renders meaningless weapon choice.  

This was "remedied" in Supplement I, which veered wildly in the other direction, introducing a system expanded in AD&D 1E, where each individual melee weapon receives its own unique treatment, with elaborate set of bonuses or penalties against each different armor classes, different damage dice (which also vary against different sized opponents!), and in AD&D 1E, also weapon speed, as well as a various other piecemeal special effects for different weapons. Along with restrictions on weapons by class, this introduced a space of tactical choice that operated at a minute level. This system is ungainly. 

I've come to think of B/X derived rulesets as an unhappy medium. Unlike OD&D white box, melee weapons are primarily differentiated by damage dice. When bundled with class restrictions on weapon type, this results in a situation where the main effect of the equipment list is to specify optimal weapon choice by class, in essence assigning a damage die to each class. It is true, there are some choices around the margin for certain classes. Will a fighter or a cleric use a two-handed weapon for a slight bump in damage, or opt to use a shield for a slight bump in AC? It's not nothing, but it's also not much. 

The same pattern holds with initiative. OD&D did not even bother to specify an initiative sequence, unless we count the miniature wargame rules in Chainmail. AD&D "remedied" this problem by introducing a baroque group initiative system broken down minutely into segments (10 per round), with casting times given in segments, and the use of weapon speed factors to break ties, which ensures complicated dynamic rounds in which characters do many overlapping things--at the cost of breathtaking complexity. 

B/X and many rules lite systems operate again in a middle space with group initiative like AD&D, but without segments and so with only one action per character per round. This can lead to a monotonous you-go/they-go turn sequence which consists mainly of moving around a circle rolling dice as each player attacks (or perhaps casts a spell), often missing against high AC opponents (or on an off night), or doing one or two points of damage here or there. When combat is protracted it becomes a kind of turgid round-robin.

Finally, within combat itself, there is sometimes a paucity of actions defined other than attacking. OD&D whitebox has none. AD&D 1E by contrast has many options, including elaborate mini-systems for surprise, charging, overbearing, grappling, and psionic combat among other things. To really play it, some kind of battlemap seems best to leverage the full suite of rules, at least for fights of any complexity. In this case B/X and many rules lite games are less a middle ground and hew closer to whitebox OD&D. There are rules for attack with melee and missile weapons, and casting spells, and maybe a couple of combat actions like defensive fighting, or charging. But nothing else. This means that the game does not especially support or leverage the kind of grid-based combat that require miniatures or VTT tokens to use. Who cares about any of that if all I need to know is which guy you're choosing to lock yourself into combat with? This is connected to the fact that B/X and rules lite games are often designed for theater of the mind style play. This is not a criticism, since I love theater of the mind play, but since there is not any rule support for different kinds of actions, this lends itself to a situation where fictional positioning doesn't matter much. 

In general, what we find is that OD&D whitebox is pleasingly simple, but perhaps too simple. AD&D is very complex, closer perhaps in terms of complexity if not feel to 3E combat. B/X and other rules lite games are in a medium where combat can end up being a slow slog without a great deal of tactical choice or individual character expression beyond the choice of class. For something that can occupy a large swath of time and is very high stakes, combat in B/X and rules lite games often lacks a je ne sais quoi. 

This all suggests that there is a design space for innovation that either hews to the white box or B/X side of things, maintaining simplicity or elegance, but opening up tactical or more dynamic combat possibilities. In other words, here's a design challenge that various rulesets have attempted to address to some degree: can we make old school combat interesting without going full bore AD&D? There are a variety of things we might explore here, many of which have been developed to some extent in different old school games or supplements. 

These include ways of making weapon selection meaningful without devolving into baroque individual weapon system, either with or without variable weapon damage; the selection of character abilities with interesting consequences for combat, without devolving into feat trees and the like; more dynamic initiative systems; or rules that detach tactical decisions from space and so are more suited to theater of the mind than battlemap play.

Up today is a product that steps into this breach by providing new systems that add more choice, variety, and tactics to old school combat.

Fresh From The Forge

Fresh from the Forge: A Rebalanced Weapon System for Old School Play by Lucille L. Blumire is a 38-page zine presenting two new mechanics for combat, a whole new system for differentiating different weapon types, and a system for creating magical weapons with a broadly B/X or OD&D implied ruleset, like Old School Essentials or Swords and Wizardry. It is available for purchase here for $6.99. 

The idea in this zine is to differentiate weapon types in meaningful ways for old school play by treating weapons as belonging to abstract categories, assigning special properties to weapons of each different type. This provides players with clear and simple choices between different balanced effects. (I once tried my hand at this approach, while eschewing variable weapon damage.) Interestingly, for melee weapons Blumire presents two different axes of abstract features. 

First, the weapon can be one of four types: axe, blade, bludgeon, or simple. And within that type, it can be one of four different sizes: light, one-handed, two-handed, or a polearm. This is a neat framework organizing all weapons by the intersection two sets of abstract properties. 

Weapon types have a base damage die and one or more special effects. For example, an axe type has a base damage die of d6 and has the special property of exploding damage on a max damage roll. Size provides further properties. For example, light weapons reduce the damage die by 1 step (for an axe that would be to 1d4) and can be dual-wielded; two-handed weapons increase the die size by one (for axes to 1d8), and so on. The size also has effects on "combat width", the number of party members who can stand in the front rank. (More on combat width below.) 

As elegant as I find this framework, it is clear that the system either doesn't work, or that Blumire is lured by the siren's song of specific D&D weapons that don't quote fit the molds she's crafted. So, for example, instead of making "throwable" a property of some type or class, she introduces a couple of extra types here and there, e.g. "throwable light blades". At other times she breaks the rules of his own types where it doesn't seem quite right to her. For example, axe types do exploding damage, unless they're light. It also turns out there are no light bludgeoning weapons, and no simple polearms. And so on. So I salute Blumire's effort, but I wish she had been more thoroughgoing and ruthless with his vision, and had figured out a way of making it all work in an exceptionless single system. The whole promise of defining weapon types with two neat categories is elegance!  

The zine also presents a neat system for handling a situation where a party is fighting as a unit in a larger battle. The idea is that the party faces off against waves of foes, with the option to retreat at any time. If they defeat one wave of foes, they can then opt to face a second wave, and so on. Each victory or defeat they have then affects the overall course of battle, by affecting a roll for how many forces are lost from each side in this phase of battle. This makes the PC combats a sort of microcosm of the larger war. Essentially the PCs are asked how far they're willing to push the possibility of losing some members of the party in order to heroically achieve gains for their side. I can see this provided a fun, tense, combat-focused session as a microcosm of a broader war. 

The rest of the zine is less good. The rules differentiating missile weapons are perfunctory. Blumire does not apply the same sort of template that she applies to melee weapons, which seems like a missed opportunity. The rules for enchanting weapons are workaday. "Enhance" them to +1 or more by spending gold. One enhanced they can acquire some potency against a certain foe by killing a lot of them. The weapons produced in this way will be of the most boring variety of magic. There are some rules for having weapons "contain" spells that are a touch more interesting, but in the end it's very bland.  

Perhaps the least well thought out aspect of the zine is a mechanism for handling lines of battle called combat width. The idea is to handle lines of combatants in confined spaces (i.e. dungeons) or in large military battle formations in abstract but meaningful ways. This is a great topic, since "holding the line" and formation seem like a hugely important aspect of combat that D&D ignores. It also presents what cold be in theory a happy medium between a full battlemap and pure theater of the mind, trying to operate in the happy medium space that seems to befit B/X style play. It requires at most a piece of graph paper to scrawl loosely on during combat. 

Combat width tracks how many people can fit in a front rack of a given size to attack and be attacked. If you are large, or have a weapon that requires a big swing than you need more space to operate and take up more real-estate in the rank, so less people can fit in a line and so less people can attack. On the other hand, if you have a long pointy weapon like a spear or polearm, or are smaller, then you take up less real-estate, i.e. more of you can fit. The base combat width is 5'. Here is an illustration from the book showing a party of adventurers squaring off against two orcs and a troll in a 20' corridor (a huge corridor!).   

Although the text doesn't specify, I think the idea is that combatants can attack anyone they overlap with. If your battleline is longer, or if someone on the opposing side dies, and you do not overlap with anyone, then you may attack anyone on either side of the gap with a +1 to hit and damage, or you may push through to the next rank, unless someone steps up to fill the spot or the entire rank reconsolidates to prevent this. 

There are no rules presented for reconsolidating a rank or stepping forward. Can you do it immediately when someone falls? This is a crucial question for this approach, but is never clarified. Furthermore smaller combat width would appear to be a disadvantage for flanking if one doesn't have enough combatants to fill out the entire space. Blumire fixes this by declaring that one is "never punished" for having a smaller combat width, and so someone with 3 or 4 combat width may "expand" to block up to 5 spaces. This is just too fiddly. It also makes less sense for someone with a small combat width owing small size. 

There are also rules about being able to shoot around a rank if it doesn't fill the corridor, but the rule doesn't specify how much space there must be. Another crucial question. In short, these rules are unclear and perhaps unfinished in their presentation. For rules that seem intended to abstract a feature of combat, they also don't seem to bring that much new to the table. It seems like a lot of fiddling around for less gains than we might have expected. 

In sum, Fresh From the Forge is a neat attempt to make combat and weapon choice in old school games more interesting, with some excellent ideas sprinkled throughout. There are seeds of a very interesting approach, but they never quite grow into their potential. 

Ludic Dreams III - My Body is a Cage

At long last, I turn my Ludic Dreams series to what I probably should have been doing all along: reviewing games and adventures about dreams, the dreamlands, and general phantasmagoria. It’s like coming home—if your home was Dylath-leen. I have a few more in the pipeline, so stay tuned!

This time I am reviewing My Body is a Cage, a game by John Battle, with editing by Jared Sinclair, and seven accompanying 2-page dungeons written for the system by Alex Damanceno, Ema Acosta, Jim Gies, Josh Domanski, Maria Mison, Nevyn Holmes, and Julie-Anne Muñoz (who also illustrated several of the other dungeons). You can buy it as a PDF here or here for $20. 

I play-tested My Body is a Cage over 3 short sessions (~2 hours each for a total of about 6 hours), running 3 players through “The Atkinson Hotel” by Ema Acosta, one of the 7 adventures included with the game. Two of my players, Nick Kuntz and Aleks Revzin, play in my long running dreamlands campaign. The third player was Bones’ own Anne, author of the Dungeon Dioramas series. Since this game is in some ways a crossover between indie and OSR sensibilities, it is worth saying that all three of my players had broadly OSR type expectations and preferred play styles. After the final session we spent a little while debriefing the game.

The Concept

John Battle says it best: 

"Awake: You’re broke or struggling. Life is hard. You go to school and work a job, just trying to make enough for rent. Maybe you wanna be a youtuber, or draw your web-comic. Perhaps you want to travel, or at least move out of your parents’ house. You gotta find a way to make money. In this game you play as a person, someone other than yourself, in a slice-of-life story. 

Dreaming: When you sleep you dream of a dungeon. It’s filled with treasure. If you steal it, you awaken richer. This is your chance to fight back against the struggle of life. But the dungeon holds dangers, and you are still just a person. So be careful. Good luck, don’t die."

Here at Ludic Dreams, I hope we can all agree: that's a great concept. 

Char Gen and Gameplay Loop

Character generation is genuinely interesting in this game. Players dice three times each on two d100 tables, one of positive sounding adjectives (e.g. lucky, cool, innocent), and one of negative sounding adjectives (e.g. overwhelmed, fraudulent, paranoid). The player then assigns these as their six stats, each with an ability modifier that ranges from +3 (the strongest stat) to -3 (the weakest stat). 

One neat thing about this use of stats is that it allows you to assign positive sounding adjectives to one of your penalty stats, and negative sounding adjectives to one of your bonus stats. For example, Anne played Stephanie, assigning the adjective “Cool” to the worst -3 stat position, deciding that Stephanie wanted so badly to look cool that it was a liability. Similarly, Nick assigned Fraudulent to the +3 stat for their PC Simone, on the rationale that Simone was a very compelling fraud.

The personality of the character takes shape from the assigning of stats and is further elaborated as you pick bonds that tie you to other PCs, select a flaw that your opponents can target, an ideal that you can voice once a game to your advantage, and two weirdly specific skills. You also roll once on a “genre” for your character, which can be a musical, cinematic, or literary genre that is somehow the theme of your character, which you can evoke one time per session to double your dice on some roll. Character generation caused us to laugh out loud several times. It created memorable PCs who were tied to one another in interesting ways. We all had a real sense of who the characters were before we started playing. I definitely recommend doing it together at your first session. I's fun to collectively watch the characters take shape and for people to play off one another.

The game employs a loop perhaps influenced by the Persona series of games. (So Nick tells me, I haven’t ever played the games.) There is a daytime period that is charted out over a calendar month, with a daytime action available whenever the character has a day off (at least I think this is how it works). This is randomly determined as you have a 1 in 8 chance each day in the month to have a day off (oof, life is tough for the PCs). While the daytime system is never spelled out, there is a sample map of a waking world city that shows how the GM might construct daytime activities for their players. 

These includes wilderness hiking to heal your character, researching topics in the library, apartment hunting with associated living expenses (and bonuses for living somewhere fancy!), selling your dream treasures at "the dream merchant", visiting the mall to have your fortune told, going to the movies to add dice to your dice pool for the next adventure, etc. The presupposition seems to be that the daytime portion will involve a mix of dice rolls and perhaps scene-based play, with some pressure coming from “big events” like rent being due or final exams or family events on set calendar dates.

After the daytime portion comes the nighttime portion set in the dream dungeon, which has an exploration turn based structure, familiar from old school games, and appropriate to a high peril environment. This phase is the more familiar “dungeon crawl”, although in a dreamy form. It is left open how these two phases relate. Perhaps the players decide how frequently they will enter the dream dungeons, allowing them to set their pace throughout the month under the pressure of making rent or tuition payments. Or perhaps the adventuring happens at set times, say every two weeks.

In our playtest, we used the waking world mainly to characterize the player’s relationships to one another and to an NPC who sent them into the dream dungeon. In other words, we focused mainly on the dream dungeon segment of play. This is too bad, because I think in an extended campaign the waking-dreaming loop would make for fun and dynamic play. The waking world portion would require probably the most investment from a GM, because Battle gives you a lot less to work with than in the dream dungeons. Battle does build some connections between the two phases by tying NPCs in the waking world to NPCs in the dream dungeon, with effects that can cross into the waking world in interesting ways. Were I running a campaign, I would probably develop more connections across the two cycles of play – including more ways to affect dreams by doing things in the waking world and vice versa. What would a rival adventuring party look like in a game like this?

The Atkinson Hotel and The Other Six Dungeons

The adventure we ran was "The Atkinson Hotel". It’s a very memorable location, a vaguely creepy turn of the (20th) century hotel, with an alarming staff and treasures from real world luminaries (e.g. Borges’ typerwriter, or a larger version of Duchamp’s painting The Bride) who used to frequent the hotel in their dreams, and may even have died there. I prepped for the dungeon for about 1 hour, mainly to flesh out the rooms and connections between a bit. Otherwise I was easily able to run the dungeon from the two-page spread. Two-page dungeons are hard to make work, but this dungeon is a masterclass in layout and design.

The three hotel staff NPCs are presented with brilliant lucidity: a tiny paragraph, three one line motivations or quirks, and a clever way to make a state block look interesting. They absolutely came alive in play with almost no effort. Check out the list of treasures at the bottom of the dungeon as well! I always love memorable treasures and the idea of using heirlooms from literary and artistic luminaries in the waking world is a gorgeous premise.

The dungeon itself is a pointcrawl between eight hotel rooms. The starting room is very dynamic with three different exits, one normal (hotel room door) and two surreal (at the back of the closet, under the bed). In our playthrough, the players reported the dreamlike quality of the dungeon came through strongly. There were some memorable moments that emerged in play, including the surreal experience of climbing out of a small and claustrophobic (indeed shrinking!) storage room into a huge storage room surrounding it. Another memorable moment involved Aleks’ character Alecs waking the perennially sleepy hag he carries on his back (random “equipment” he started with) with the tempting smell of soup, and setting her off into kitchen to taste all the soups to the hysterical consternation of the bustling chefs in the room. A final memorable moment came when Stephanie shot the infernal title to Borges’ typewriter out of the hands of the hotel manager with her bow, sticking it to the wall, right before the PCs made their getaway back to the waking world, Borges' typewriter in hand.

The players liked the dungeon on the whole, although they did feel limited by its linear pointcrawl nature. Although you can get on the crawl 3 different ways from the first room, each other room has one entrance and one exit, meaning that once you made your initial selection you are always on a linear path. Were I revising the dungeon I would Jaquays it by introducing maybe 4 extra rooms, looping paths, and multiple exits from most rooms. 

They had a deeper criticism which comes from what I think as the "dream aesthetic dilemma". In dreams, scenes are often disconnected, spatial logics break down, and "people" often function more as symbols than living beings with their own distinct agendas. Old school dungeons by contrast work on spatial logics. One explores the space, learns to navigate it, and works it to one's advantage. The people one encounters are not figments or parts of tableaus, but factions with their own agendas and desires, who occupy regions on the map or move through it in intelligible ways. This (fantastic) naturalism enables lateral thinking, problem solving, and open-ended negotiation. The dilemma is that the absurdist, disconnected, symbolist aesthetic of dreams pushes against this. (As you might imagine, I of all people have thoughts about ways to navigate this dilemma, but I'll save those for another time.)  

It's not surprising that my (OSR style) players remarked that there clearly was no map of an actual hotel, but only dream scenes snipped from a hotel and connected by pseudo spatial connectors. They had the sense that each was a static scene that would stay where it was when they closed the door. They noted that this limited their sense of agency, which depends on the logic of real world space, and made the dungeon less interactive than more “naturalistic” dungeons. For some of the NPCs, they also wondered how much "they were really people". 

Still, I think this is an excellent starting dungeon for this game. I would wholeheartedly recommend a less linear, properly Jaquaysed version of it as a near ideal introduction to My Body is a Cage.

Behold the Nyxosphere in all its glory!

The other dungeons included in the game are more variable in their quality. Two more of the seven are roughly of the caliber of “The Atkinson Hotel”. One is the gorgeous “Nyxosphere” by Alex Demanceno, a sort of open world demonic dreamscape with a more classical D&D in dream hell vibe. It especially leverages the mechanics of monsters in interesting ways. It also has a more naturalistic approach to (an absurd demonic) space, so it will probably run more like D&D than some of the other dungeons. The other is “Animalia” by Jim Gies, a text-heavy two-page adventure that pulls a trick on the players by having them appear in the dream dungeon in the form of animals. The dungeon is interesting and it would be a delightful second or third adventure to run. It certainly opens with a bang, with the players dicing to see what animals they are and replacing one of their stats with a suitable animal trait.

In a second tier we have two dungeons that have excellent material but need some work. The first is “The Desert”, a depth crawl by Josh Domanski. It’s evocative and interesting. It uses a nice mechanic of randomly generated locations + details + events, with modifiers for depth. But the different locations don’t give you quite enough information to make them interactive and playable, and there is no treasure even listed. The second is “Seasons Amiss” by Nevon Holmes, illustrated by Julie-Anne Muñoz. This “dungeon” has an amazing concept. It consists of a pointcrawl across a surreal map. At the starting place there is a lantern that can be turned to red or blue light, shifting the whole map into summer or winter phases. Certain things are revealed in each phase, given the map a wonderful interactivity and puzzle solving vibe. Excellently, the two lights also introduce countdown clocks to environmental hazards in the form of heat waves or blizzards that will punish the players and keep them moving. While I adore the concept of the dungeon, it contains no encounters, no monsters or NPCs, and no treasure. 

In the third tier, we have dungeons that work less well. "Stiff Bargains", another team-up by Nevyn Holmes and Julie-Anne Muñoz, consists of a punny series of fetch quests for absurd NPCs. The whole is alarming and absurd enough that it could be fun for a certain group. But the linked chain of fetch quests is not the best format for a dungeon crawl. The last adventure I hesitate even to speak about. It is called “The Seven Orifices of Omniscience”. It is not clear who wrote it or what it is. It reads like something from the Book of Revelations. It is in no way a dungeon. 

Core Mechanics

Let’s talk about the innovative mechanics of the game. The games core mechanic is that when your character does something, a GM or another player can ask you to roll. You choose one of your attributes to roll on and apply the modifier to a 2d6 roll. If the roll is unopposed you must roll a 10+ to succeed. If the roll is opposed then the GM or other player rolls 2d6 as well, perhaps adding a modifier. Whoever rolls higher gets to say how the thing turns to their advantage, and the loser can choose to up the stakes and try again if they want. Combat uses opposed rolls but works a little differently. I’ll talk about that below.

You can add extra dice to your rolls in a number of ways, including most importantly from a dice pool that functions as a kind of meta-currency. You are incentivized to employ negative attributes because whenever you roll an attribute with a penalty you add a die to the pool. You also add dice to your pool if you use all six attributes over the course of the adventure. Most importantly, you add dice to your pool by selecting a bingo card that corresponds to a class for each session (both daytime and dream dungeon). The bingo card incentivizes playing to the type of the relevant character class. You get a die each time you cross off something on the bingo card. You get a whopping 10 dice if you get bingo by completing a row, column, or diagonal. At the end of an adventure, unused dice in your pool can be converted to treasure or used to buy skills, bonds, or a chance to raise an attribute. This flexible use of the meta-currency is interesting.

The players in this game had mixed feelings about the meta-currency aspect of the game. On the one hand, they experienced the core mechanic as straightforward and intuitive. Since near certain failure (rolling to hit 10+ with an attribute penalty) is incentivized by the meta-currency, and since adding dice nearly always ensures success even on opposed roles, the players experienced themselves as often choosing between failure and success. They found this a little strange. But this is also a game where you play to win in high peril circumstances (dungeons). This meant that they were incentivized to choose strategically to fail in low stakes situations in the service of collecting rewards (dice saved as treasure or XP style rewards) or storing up meta-currency ammo to win in higher stakes circumstances. This “failing in order to win” dynamic felt unfamiliar to them and they didn't entirely love it.

There was also a lot to keep track of on the character sheet in terms of the meta-game currency, including attribute modifiers, dice pools, a few other ways of boosting dice (genre, bond, skill), and the massive bingo card. As OSR players used to assuming that “the answer is not on your character sheet”, they found the meta-currency worked against this expectation. Since the meta-game currency dominates the players strategic experience, the players reported feeling like the answer to pretty much everything really was on their character sheet. 

One of the players in particular wished that more of their attributes were relevant to the kinds of physical actions on performs in a dungeon, which is a very physical space. Sometimes that reported that it felt like a stretch to find an appropriate attribute, most of which refer to personality traits, to roll on for physical tasks.

None of this is to suggest that the meta-currency core mechanics don’t work. But the mechanics do perhaps push towards a different playstyle than old school play. If you are open to a fusion of indie and OSR styles, then I think you may like this. If you are more solidly OSR in your preferences, you may find some of the mechanics a stretch.

Combat

In combat, one uses opposed rolls with the winner scoring a hit against the loser. Damage is recorded by marking off inventory slots and sometime incurring conditions like burning or bleeding that also occupy inventory slots. The use of inventory slots as hit points is elegant. Having conditions occupy inventory slots--as Mausritter does--created an elegant unified mechanic. I especially enjoyed the robust role for conditions in the system, although we didn’t see this in our play test, which had little combat. For example, the condition of burning spreads to additional inventory slots until the fire is put out, and if you are stressed you lose 1 die from all your actions (!), but you can pass to other players, presumably by unloading it on them. 

The application of this system to monsters works elegantly too. Monster have inventory slots corresponding to their HD. These slots contain their various attacks or abilities, so you incapacitate your foe as you score hits against them. For example, if you can score enough hits against a giant lobster you might break its claw. 

My Body is a Cage also uses a lower-is-better initiative system that has you roll different sized dice depending on how time consuming or slow what you’re doing is. You can do up to 3 things in a single round, but you have to roll all 3 initiative dice if you do. So there's an economy between going first, or doing more things in each round. 

I found opposed rolls a strange fit with the otherwise innovative individual initiative system. Opposed rolls represent a struggle as a two-sided affair, combining the activity of both sides in a single dramatic face-off roll. But the individual initiative system seems more geared to representing attacks as one-directional affairs, where each participant gets their own separate actions that are resolved in sequence. If I’m understanding the system, then if someone is facing multiple foes, they get a very large number of attacks each round in the form of opposed rolls: each of their opponent’s attacks trigger an opposed roll (up to 3 attacks each), and on top of that, opposed rolls are also triggered by their own actions (again up to 3).

In play I stumbled over this system, only coming to the above understanding by the time I was done running it. I started out thinking that there was only 1 opposed roll per pair of combatants, but then realized that this didn’t work with the individualized initiative system and multiple actions a round. It was a little strange that I walked away from reading the brief rules about combat so unsure about how they were supposed to work. Maybe if Battle had said a little bit more, it would have been clearer to me from the start.

Graphic and Information Design

This brings us to questions of design. My Body is a Cage is laid out in landscape orientation. Each page or two-page spread is colorful and uniquely designed, focused on a single idea or rule. Sometimes there’s a paragraph of text, or a big table, and sometimes there’s just a few sentences.

If you love this kind of thing you’ll probably like this a lot, and if you hate it then you probably won’t like it here either. Personally I’m agnostic about this trend in graphic design. I did find that it worked in one specific way for me here. Many of the rules and ways of tracking things used in My Body is a Cage have a gimmicky toy-like feel. Each character has a bingo card that you print out and mark up in play. There is a word search you complete to get random starting equipment. You stack dice in a little circle on your character sheet to represent your dice pool. There’s a paper fortune teller that the GM cuts out and assembles to determine random treasure. The bright and splashy layout made it feel like the game was composed of activities drawn from a colorful children’s activity book—the kind you might have bought in a convenience store before getting on a long family trip or bus ride. While it won’t come across quite as clearly in online play as it would in person, with a little prep it and having players print out sheets in advance, I think you can capture a fair bit of this activity book vibe.



This is an ambitious design choice that was relatively well-realized. Some of these features could use a little fine-tuning. The character sheet presupposes you will record your dice pool by stacking dice, and the bingo card seems to presuppose you will use tokens, since there's no way to mark off a black square with a pen. We found this awkward for purposes of storage when an adventure was spread out over multiple session, as they often will be. (Skills are also missing from the character sheet, by the way.) But the basic thing I want to say is that it's impressive how well John Battle pulls off this tactile, festive, childlike feel in the design. The aesthetics of the graphic design have a real point that fuses with the rules for the game in interesting ways.

When it came to information presentation the design of the book does less well. The book wastes no words on explaining how the rules work in play or even fit together, often assuming you’ll sort of infer the logic of the game from the different terse but colorful rules spreads. I found this frustrating. I spent far more time trying to understand the game than I would have had there been more text to help me. Not all minimalism is sleek information design; sometimes less is actually less.

Exacerbating this problem, there are several things that seem to be implied by the rules but do not otherwise appear in the game. For example, the initiative system is geared around weapons of different size, but there are no mechanical effects for different sized weapons. Another thing is the selection of character class for each session. The only mechanic presented is the bingo sheet that incentivizes certain kinds of behavior for each class by adding to your dice pool when you check off the box. But the game includes a list of spells that you’re supposed to dice for. Do you get a spell if you took the magic bingo card? But do you also get something if you take the fighter or rogue bingo card? Maybe one of those weapons of different size? 

This raises an interesting design question. I’m all in favor of systems that enable hacking and presuppose that everyone who plays them will trick them out to play in their own special way. How do we distinguish that as a positive design goal from a game being unclear or half-baked? One test might be whether you have to spend energy just trying to figure out what the rules to the game are or how they work together. Although the rules for My Body is a Cage are neat, I found Battle’s strong preference for saying as little as humanly possible about his game left me guessing at times or having to piece it together. 

In Sum

My Body is a Cage is an interesting game that blends indie and old school playstyles to produce something new. It has a great premise. It suggests a promising gameloop structure, with a strong separation between slice of life downtime in the real world and adventuring in dream dungeons. Some of the mechanics might need revision (i.e. combat), but others are creative and well-suited to the game. The dungeons that it presents have a dreamy vibe at the cost of less open environments and lateral thinking. The aesthetics of the whole will contribute to your play, especially if the group can meet around a table and enjoys tactile activities. There’s an excellent game in there if you’re open to old school games that are played in an indie style. 

Ludic Dreams II - Filling in the Blanks

I will be reviewing two books written by Todd Leback, published by Third Kingdom Games, and written for the Old School Essentials system, but easily usable for any older edition of D&D or their retroclones. The first, which I'll talk about today, is Filling in the Blanks: A Guide to Populating Hexcrawls. In the next installment of Ludic Dreams I'll delve into Into the Wild: A High-Level Resource for OSR Games. The first presents a technique for randomly generating the keys for wilderness maps. The second presents rules for wilderness travel and exploration, a system of random weather generation, rules for establishing and ruling a domain, techniques for handling trade, and even a system for creating new B/X classes. Together they present a unified system for handling what happens outside a dungeon. Indeed, taken together they are impressive in scope, depth, and detail.

Filling in the Blanks is illustrated by Jen Drummond, who did the covers, and Adrian Barber, Chad Dickhaut, and Dan Smith who did the internal illustrations. The maps are made by Todd Leback and Aaron Schmidt using hexographer. Art and cartography is crucial in conveying a setting, giving flavor or visual details of adventure locales, and igniting the imagination so that a DM can inhabit the mental space of the adventure or world. It is much less important for a generic presentation of rules. The inoffensive B/X feeling art in Filling in the Blanks fits the generic character of the system, breaking up the page layout, without distracting from the rules presentation. 

Hex Theory

What is a hex? Historically speaking, hexes derive from hex and chit wargames, where troops represented on little cardboard squares (chits) moved across a board divided into hexagons representing a battlefield of different terrain types. In this sense, they represented abstract boardgame spaces that tracked troop movements in six directions (N, NW, SW, S SE, NE), while accounting for the effects of terrain on movement and battle.

Early ttrpg players, many of whom were wargamers, general employed graph paper maps for dungeon crawls and hex maps for wilderness travel and adventuring. Indeed, in Gygax’s Greyhawk campaign, when the players moved from the graph paper squares of the dungeon into the wilderness, Gygax employed a hexmap borrowed directly from the boardgame Outdoor Survival. He used it for a phase of the campaign that came to be called domain play, where the game swayed towards its wargaming roots, as players were expected to “clear” a wilderness area of monsters and claim it as a domain, building military outpost (castles, monasteries, etc), “civilizing” and ruling it, while perhaps engaging in warfare and diplomacy.


                 

In contemporary play, hexmaps are used in a variety of ways in classic or old school play. We might distinguish the following six functions of a hex—no doubt there are others we might think up.

1. Smallest Map Unit: In this function, the hex is the smallest unit of the map. There is no map inside a hex, rather the map is composed of hexes.
2. Measure of Movement: In this function, the hex is used as a measure of movement, which proceeds from one hex into another hex in one of the six directions of the hex facings. As pieces move across a certain number of spaces across a board, so too in hexes, PCs move a certain number of hexes in one of the six directions.
3. Terrain Bearer: In this function, the hex is coded with a certain terrain type. This type comes with both mechanical and narrative effects, including affecting movement rates and encounters. We operate here at the level of a uniform type “hills”, “swamp”, “forest”, “jungle”, and so on.
4. Keyed Unit: In this function, the hex is the unit of the map which is “keyed”. It thus plays the same role in wilderness maps that rooms play in dungeon maps. Hexes are “stocked” with notable features, including possibly adventure locales, natural formations, lairs, settlements and the like.
5. Encounter Space: In this function, hexes are the spaces in wilderness exploration where random encounters happen. Different encounter tables may be tied to different hexes, regions, or terrain types.
6. Political or Economic Unit: In this function, hexes bear a political status, showing them under the sway of certain factions with mechanical or narrative effects, or they function as an economic unit with the capacity to produce wealth or different goods.

As we’ll see, these functions can be separated from one another. One can use hexes without hexes playing all these roles. For example, this glorious illustrated hex by Tom Fitzgerald is not the smallest map unit (1), since it has a map drawn within it. It might otherwise function as a hex in the other senses.

As we'll see when we get to Into the Wild next time, Leback too leaves some roles behind. For example, he draws a distinction between exploration and travel by using the hex as a measure of movement (2) for the first but not the second. He also divides these roles between two different kinds of hexes.

Hexes and Subhexes

Leback’s system of hexmap stocking and wilderness exploration involves two levels of hex: the hex, and the subhex. The hex is a 6-mile area, which is composed of thirty-three 1.2-mile subhexes. Like so:

The subhex in Leback’s system play most of the six roles of a hex: it is the smallest unit of the map; it is the bearer of a terrain type; it is the unit which is keyed; and it is the location where encounters happen. Players move through subhexes by charting a course across the map in one of two modes (exploration or travel), they encounter the keyed elements in hexes, and all encounters occur in a determinate hex. They are where most adventure activity happens. 

Keep in mind that subhexes are tiny! Even a group with a heavily armored person on foot will move through a baseline of 10 subhexes a day (or fewer if moving through difficult terrain). So the basic building blocks are relatively small. 

The larger hex plays more abstract roles. They play a DM-facing prep role in organizing how keyed elements are distributed across subhexes (4), and each has its own encounter tables (5). They are also the basic political and economic unit (6) that is crucial for Leback’s domain play of “clearing” and “civilizing” the wilderness into a domain ruled by player characters, from which economic power can be extracted. But since that's in the other book, we'll have to save it for the next installment.

Keying Subhexes

In Filling in the Blanks, Leback uses hexes to help organize the keying of subhexes. For reach hex, he has us roll for 1d6 features. For each feature we roll to see what category it belongs to. The categories include geological features, structures, resources, hazards, bodies of water, dungeons, settlements, magical effects, and so on. Once we have the category, we then turn to subtables that give us more details to work with. 

The results in many of the tables are seemingly pedestrian, resulting in fertile dirt, or apple groves, or an abandoned house, or a distribution of boulders throughout a subhex. At the higher rolls they get weirder, and there is plenty of interesting material, but many of the results are mundane or barebones. When we have our feature fleshed out a bit by rolling on several subtables, we then place them in the subhexes. This gives us a sense of the expanded topography of the hex and can even alter its layouts by introducing bodies of water, changes of elevation, or systems of roads.

We next roll 1d6 to see how many lairs are placed in the hex. For each of the lairs, we use some set of wilderness encounter tables, drawn perhaps from whatever your favorite other monster books are, to decide what monster’s lair it is. (These encounter tables set the baseline of how closely the hexmap will hew to vernacular fantasy tropes. For less vanilla settings, use weirder encounter tables.)

This is where things get interesting. We then use the map of the hex and the features we've rolled to place the monster lairs in locales that are interesting, using the random combination of these three things (map, features, lairs) as a spur to our imagination. For example, if there is an abandoned monastery or sinkhole, perhaps we place monster lairs in it—and what we place in it will also give us ideas for fleshing out the locale. The weaving together of random features and lairs in a hex presents opportunities to imaginatively inhabit and elaborate the space of the hex by focusing on the interrelation of different, randomly generated elements.

Finally, the hex is also the unit of the unified encounter table for all the subhexes it contains. Each hex has its own separate encounter table. The table is constructed by including each monster with a lair in the hex, adding monsters from the surrounded hexes likely to roam. This has the effect of giving a unified, more ecological feel to a hex. If you encounter a monster, you can probably surmise that it will have a lair nearby, which you could find with some effort. This system emphasizes the significance of lairs to wilderness exploration. Lairs are crucial for Leback’s vision of domain play as “clearing” and “civilizing” hexes (more on this in a minute), but could be made central in other ways, provided players had good reasons to search out the lairs of some of the things they encounter along the way.

The Stocking System in Action

I decided to take this system for a test spin. So, I created a 19 hex map, which is a sizable chunk of a wilderness area for players to explore. I made it in Worldographer, the only hexmapping software I know that let's you do hexes and subhexes. It looked like this:

Hex 1

I started with hex 1. Let's zoom in on the image:

I rolled 3 features and 3 lairs, so the hex has an average number of things in it. For the lairs I used the encounter tables from OSE--so a pretty vanilla baseline. This is what I rolled.

Features

1. A 4-room dungeon of 3rd level
2. A keep, worth 100,000 GP (!). It was built 20 years ago. It is inhabited by its original builders. It is in immaculate shape. (All these results came from rolling on subtables.)
3. Resource: Parrots

Lairs

1. Goblins
2. Giant Rats
3. Crab Spider

The emergent possibilities here were fascinating. The burning question, looking at this set of results, is who the builders and current occupants are of this 100,000 GP keep. From this list, the only intelligent creature is the goblins. But with an immaculate keep worth 100,000 GP, this must be a wealthy and powerful faction in the jungle. This means these must be some remarkable goblins! I asked myself where all their wealth could come from. Since the hex also has the resource of parrots, I decided their wealth must come from the parrots. Brainstorming, I thought perhaps these goblins are merchants of trained parrots. Even better, I thought, perhaps they are traders of whispers and secrets, with parrot spies spread throughout the jungle! Now we’re cooking with gas!

Looking at the OSE entry on goblins, I see that Goblin Kings have 3 HD and their bodyguards have 2 HD. I liked the idea of a goblin king with a crown of gorgeous parrot feathers, surrounded by gilded bird cages in which his favorite birds are pampered after returning to him with news from far and wide. Stat-wise goblins seem awfully weak to hold a stronghold of that value, so I thought that they must be intelligence brokers among jungle factions, conveying crucial information to opposing groups, and perhaps blackmailing others. So there would likely some other higher HD beings on loan to the Goblin King from his customers. We'll have to wait to see how the rest of the map unfolds to decide who these borrowed guards might be. 

Looking at OSE, it also mentions that there is a chance goblins ride wolves. Wolves doesn’t quite fit in this jungle context, so I decide that they ride jaguars. As these goblins are taking shape in my head, I decide that perhaps they are not the greenskins of 5E, but more fey, like the goblins from fairytales or The Princess and the Goblins. Perhaps they have varied appearances, and some lesser goblin magic. I place the keep in 019.014 and decide that the parrots congregate in 018.014 fed and guarded by the goblins.

The crab spiders are also an interesting result. Perhaps they are the occupant of the 4 room, 3rd level dungeon. In OSE it says that crab spiders camouflage themselves and have deadly poison. I don't know if crab spiders are real, but they sound like aquatic or amphibious spiders--maybe half crab and half spider. So perhaps the dungeon is in the swampy cove in 022.015. 

Riffing on the idea of a spider-infested swamp dungeon, I decide it was the half-drowned sanctum of a Sybil who prophesied by inhaling hallucinogenic swamp gasses that bubble up through a sacred pool in the inner chamber. The gasses probably still provide valuable visions at a cost of a save vs. poison with ill results. But the place is infested with these deadly camouflaged water spiders and perhaps some ancient curses. Likely there's other treasure and lore in there as well. 

Finally we have the giant rat lair. Looking at the map, maybe they have networks under the savannah in 019.015. Perhaps they set ambushes with softened ground and set upon those who fall into the tunnels with bites that bring jungle rot.

Last we need to construct our encounter table for the hex from these materials. That’s easy enough to do. Here's a rough encounter table without stats:

Hex 1: Encounter table (1d6)

1. Parrot Spy: Befriends the party only to deliver info to the goblin king about their actions and movements. Subsequent ambush or offer to trade, depending on information conveyed.
2. Goblin Patrol on Jaguars
3.  Goblins going about business (1=gathering fruit, 2=trapping parrots, 3=harvesting timber, 4=hunting giant rats)
4. Giant rats
5. Crab Spiders
6. Encounter from surrounding hexes (trading partners? To be filled in later)

I actually carried the experiment further, and did a number of other hexes as well (2-4 from the bigger map above). Once I got multiple hexes going, patterns began to emerge across them that produced further imaginative synergies, as a chain of thousand year old buildings in different hexes made me think about a historical layer of the remains of an ancient culture in this region. Later, when I rolled a sprawling 1 mile high plateau in hex 4, caused by a natural but violent event, and a large human settlement in a hex, I decided that this settlement was an isolated surviving remnant of this ancient culture, perhaps living in a decaying domed city that time forgot.

Praise & Critique

In short, Filling in the Blanks works magic by introducing a typology of hex features with a robust set of random tables, which it juxtaposes with randomly rolled lairs, all against the backdrop of a hexmap to produce emergent possibilities that provide seeds for your imagination. Starting from nothing but a utilitarian hexmap and a vanilla encounter table from the OSE core books, this process produced a rich imaginative yield for me in short order. 

Why is this method of juxtaposing randomly rolled pieces so effective? Here I think we need to stress the way in which random generation, especially where many of the elements are generic (a pristine keep, a level 3 dungeon), forces you out of your rut. The dice function as an enigmatic oracle, a voice that speaks from beyond. By asking you to build imaginative connections between randomly rolled items, and in the process put flesh on their bones, it spurs you to creation through an assemblage of things you never would have put together. It also has a pleasing sense of throwing down a gauntlet. The voice of the oracle issues the following challenge: "riddle me the relation between these things: a bit of jungle map, a pristine keep 20 years old, parrots considered as a resource, a level 3 dungeon, goblins, crab spiders, and giant rats." Puzzle it over. Let your imagination build a web of connections. It gives you a foothold to imagine.

I have experienced the agony of staring at a huge hexmap I urgently need to stock with an idling imagination and building desperation. Filling in the Blanks provides a workable model for doing something hard. It will certainly shape how I do things moving forward. It’s frankly hard for me to imagine not riffing on these tables and system for “populating” the hexes in my next campaign. Bravo.

And yet. 

Producing the single hex detailed above took me 24 rolls, occupying 12 straight minutes of rolling and flipping back and forth through the book. It took at least another 15--admittedly fun--minutes to dream up some possibilities from the results and jot down barebone notes.  As I mentioned, I rolled other hexes too. Some went quickly and were pleasant, but I had to stop after one particularly dense hex with 6 features and 4 lairs that took no less than 45 rolls occupying 35 minutes of clattering dice and flipping pages to get a list of results. And that was before I ever got in a position to start interpreting their meanings! Admittedly it was shaping up to be a neat and meaty hex, but it probably would have take an hour to finish. 

I'm sure it would have gotten a bit faster as I got the hang of finding things in the book. But there's no two ways about it: it’s going to take a very long time to populate even a small hexmap like the one I made above using this book. My guess would be maybe 6-8 hours of prep? One frustrating thing is that it needn’t take so long. The text is its own worst enemy. Leback never bundles rolls, opting instead to send you to further subtables or even scurrying to a new section with its own host of tables, when it would be easy to combine them all into a single roll. Worse still, the paragraphs leading up to each subtable often have 3 or even 4 inconspicuous pre-rolls buried in the text. Meaning that you have to scan paragraphs to extract hidden rolls or crucial information before you even get to the tables. This is not great information design. 

Here Leback would do well to consider the following two simple information design options. The first is to increase the die size (perhaps to 1d100) and incorporate combinations from subtables on a single table. The second is to have muti-roll tables, with three columns (say) next to each other, so that one can roll by dropping dice simultaneously, just reading the results across. 

But it's not just organization of the tables. Some of the rolling seems almost obsessive, as when Leback instructs you to roll for how many boulders are in a hex, or how many feet wide or deep a small brook is, or what the square footage is on a hut. Imaginative seeds emerge from the conjunction of mundane and relatively generic elements (goblin + parrots + immaculate keep), but there are limits to how much the addition of minutia spurs the flow of imaginative juices. It's pretty clear that this book veers too far towards the minutia. 

What makes it too far? How do we know where to judge the line? I suppose there are two things at stake. One is the question what details fuel the imagination. On the one hand, knowing a bit about the keep was useful: valuable, pristine, still in use by its original builders. On the other hand, having to roll the number of boulders and their size, and what type of stone they are, does not do nearly as much for me. Something a bit more general would be more evocative and flexible. The other question, of course, is less about what spurs the imagination, and more about how long the process of prep takes. Labor intensive methods are fine if the yield is good and the DM signs up for it; but we should remember that the DM's time is a precious commodity and so we shouldn't needlessly increase the length of prep where it can be avoided without loss.

I wish that some ruthless editor could get their hands on this book, cutting superfluous rolls and combining the remaining ones into bigger single tables, perhaps working with one of the many geniuses of information design that seem to be everywhere in the OSR scene now, to give the DM easier access to the information they need at a flip.

But I want to be clear. Even with this problem, I recommend Filling in the Blanks very highly. It plays for the stocking of hexmaps something like the role that Matt Finch's glorious Tome of Adventure Design plays for the design of dungeons or adventure seeds. (In fact, you could combine them!) Filling in the Blanks is a wonderful if flawed product that you should get if you are a DM who plans on creating hexmaps for wilderness exploration in your games. At least, you should get it if you're willing to spend some real time prepping your campaign using a technique that spins gold from the juxtaposition of mundane (and occasionally fantastical) to take your imagination into a terrain where it otherwise would never go. 

Ludic Dreams I - A Small Collection of Flowers and Entanglements & A Tangled Web

This is a review of A Small Collection of Flowers and Entanglements by Luke Earl, and A Tangled Web by Benjamin McCown and Christian Stryffler. Both of the zines kickstarted on Zinequest 3. Both present novel systems for tracking NPCs, their relationships, and evolving schemes. I have read but not used the zines in play. 

My interest in these zines arose from a felt need for two things. The first is what I call "technologies of memory", i.e. systems of note taking for both adventure prep and record keeping over the long haul. How does one "write up" NPCs and their relationships in a way that is geared to adventure? The second is an interest in systems that model advancing schemes of NPCs and factions, but in a way that is sensitive to player action (and inaction). I find that without a mechanic to model a world of evolving threats and opportunities that react to player action, my default is just to prep the next adventure location. I lose the sense of a dynamic world that is in motion and responding in active ways to what the players do. 

So I’m in the market for these kinds of tools. Let’s see what’s on offer.

A Small Collection of Flowers and Entanglements

A Small Collection of Flowers and Entanglements is a 24 page PDF presenting two different systems, “Flowers” and “Entanglements”. “Flowers” is a system for randomizing evolving situations that are sensitive to player intervention. “Entanglements” are ways of representing networks of NPCs via their relationships and knowledge. The actual techniques are presented over 9 short pages. The PDF also presents attractive printable worksheets that allow you the DM to easily employ these techniques. The PDF is available on DTRPG here and itch.io here for $2.34 and £2 respectively. 

Before I get into the techniques, let me get a couple of criticisms out of the way. The PDF has some typos and is written in a cheeky style I found a tad distracting. It could use some better or more fully fleshed out examples to illustrate the techniques. It also presents the techniques over 9 brief pages, and is mostly taken up with printable worksheets. However, the techniques are interesting and the worksheets are beautiful.

Flowers

Flowers is a variant of the hexflower technique developed by Goblin’s Henchmen. To tell you about the variant, I need to explain the original. The best introduction to this fascinating, supple, and highly customizable tool is The Hexflower Cookbook available here. Goblin’s Henchmen’s hexflower leverages the bell curve of 2d6 rolls to represent evolving situations where, although subject to chance, there is a direction events are most likely to go, and where what happens next depends on what’s going on now. You can use it to model almost any evolving situation including the weather, terrain traversed in overland travel, a trial by jury, or morale in combat.

The technique involves assembling hexes representing evolving conditions. For example, in the illustration above, the hexes each represent the day’s weather for purposes of overland travel. You begin at the center. From there each day you roll 2d6 to see where you move to next, consulting the hex key to the right to see which of six directions you move. Since 6-7 and 8-9 are the most likely results, probability will tend to move you down (mainly) and to the left (a little), although anything might happen. If you move off the map, you renter the hexflower at the opposite side of the same row, coming into the hex through the edge opposite the one you went off on. 

Goblin’s Henchmen presents a couple techniques for making the procedure sensitive to player interventions. One technique involves giving the players action points they can use to turn the direction moved by one hex face per point spent. So, gaining a political ally in a revolution hexflower might give the revolutionary players 1 AP allowing the party to alter a roll by up to 1 face, from 8,9 say, to 10,11. Another technique, where the outcome towards which probability directs us (at the bottom) is something the players are trying to avoid, invovles flipping the key around when the players get a win, putting 6-7 at the top instead of the bottom of the hex key like this so that the probability trend is in the "good" direction, i.e. upward.

“Flowers” by Earl is a variant hexflower that uses a 1d6 hex key, with a single number from 1 to 6 assigned to each hexface like so: 

Suppose we use it to model the villain's schemes. At the very bottom is the villain’s scheme accomplished, surrounded by hexes that represent progress towards that goal. For example, perhaps the goal is “total domination of the city-state”. One result near to the bottom might be “villain infiltrates the government”. At the top is the ruination of the villain’s plan, surrounded by hexes representing setbacks, for example, “a key ally deserts the villain”.

The system uses the 5E advantage/disadvantage mechanic to model player intervention. If the players accomplish something that sets back the interest of the villain, then they roll with advantage, giving them a 75% of rolling a 4, 5, or 6 and moving in one of the good upwards directions. If the players ignore the scheme or suffer a defeat, then they roll 2d6 with disadvantage, giving a 75% of rolling 1, 2, or 3 and moving in downwards. Although Earl doesn’t do this, one could also imagine a further variant that includes a neutral condition for rolling without either advantage or disadvantage when neither side has the upper hand.

In sum, this is a neat mechanic for modeling evolving situations that are very sensitive to player action (and inaction). By eschewing alternate keys or meta-game action points it is cleaner than Goblin's Henchmen's original, although it loses some probabilistic nuances. And you can still get some of the same inertial energy produced in the original by the probability tilt of the bell curve by setting player inaction at rolling with “disadvantage”. Inaction flows towards defeat; if they snooze they (probably) lose.

Entanglements

Entanglements by contrast uses a tanglegraph to represent the relationship between a small number of NPCs, accompanied by a sheet with notes on what each NPC knows. It’s presented as a tool that is usable especially with small mysteries that have a fair number of tightly interrelated NPCs, where what each knows is crucial. The tanglegraphs are attractive visual representations of the relationships of NPCs. Indeed, as drawn by Earl they have the aesthetic of dynamic representation of the atom, suggesting relations between particles in motion bound together by forces. But there is also something occult, perhaps kabbalistic, about their trailing parabolas connecting circular nodes. 

Where there are four or fewer NPCs, each NPC has an arrow going to each other NPC. Thus the relation between any two NPCs is modeled by two arrows one coming from each of the NPCs to the other. Each arrow is labelled with one or two words representing how the source NPC relates to the NPC at the end of the arrow. For NPCs of five or greater number Earl uses only a single arrow for each representation. The arrow might say, for example, “estranged brothers”, or “blackmail”, or whatever. This makes the visual representation easier to take in, and also accommodates the fact that it’s hard for players to keep track of so much information—so it pushes the DM to think a little more holistically about the relationship. The tanglegraphs are accompanied by a key that names the NPCs at each node and provides space to write what the NPC knows.

In sum, this PDF, although little, packs a punch. If you’re in the market for this kind of tool, the aesthetically pleasing worksheets are worth looking at.

A Tangled Web

A Tangled Web, written and illustrated by Benjamin McCown and Christian Stryffler, with editing by Brooke McCown, presents a system for relating NPCs to one another to support small scale mystery scenarios. You can purchase it here on itch for $4. After a brief introduction, it gives six example scenarios, each presented over a pair of two-page spreads. The first spread presents a graphic map of the relationship of six NPCs and a key giving brief background on each NPC. The second presents a series of random tables providing scenario alternatives by modifying (say) the motive or details of the schemes of two or three of the NPCs mentioned. The six scenarios are followed up by a series of random tables to flesh out scenes with these characters and some sheets to take notes.

The relationship maps, like the one above, are essentially tanglegraphs. But instead of Earl’s occult atomic energy, these illustrated maps are presented in a folksy way. They cater to people who prefer visual representations, with a dual key, using a different icon for each NPC, as well as for each type of relationship. By breaking free from the rigid format of Earl’s numinous templates, they allow for more flexible and simpler representations. For example, rather than choosing whether to use a single arrow or two one-way arrows to represent a relationship, McCown and Stryffler use both. If the relationship is mutual they put an arrow at each end. If the relationship is one way (i.e. unrequited love) they put the arrow at just one end. So, you could have two npcs with no relationship at all, two with one-way relations, or two with one mutual relation, or even a mutual relation and a one-way relation. 

Personally, I find the dual key, although charming, a little unwieldy, since it requires multiple simultaneous decoding to read what is an otherwise quite simple relationship map. If I were making these for my home game, I would use names rather than icons to depict the NPCs.

The NPC key provides the name of the NPC, a 1-3 sentence capsule description, and one or two similarly terse pieces of information. Instead of focusing solely on knowledge as Earl does, these pieces of information are labelled Secrets, Flavor, Flaws, or Desires. This information is geared towards the very human mysteries that each of the six scenarios presents, where a combination of secrets, foibles, and desires create an unfolding mystery. Flavor presents welcomes notes on how to characterize or play a memorable NPC. The structure here is good and potentially relevant to different genres of play. You've got the relationship map, with a small key of different kinds of relations. You have a brief description of each NPC. Pick half a dozen tags that correspond to the features most relevant to the style of play for your game. Organize your notes that way.

The randomized tables that follow the relationship map allow one to roll to flesh out central elements of the small-scale mystery by providing further detail on motivations, schemes, or unfolding crises of two or three NPCs. I like the idea of further customizable options in a product presenting a series of small scenarios, but I have mixed feelings about the use of random tables to present them. I’m a fan of rolling on tables to represent unfolding events that are sensitive to chance (and player action as in Earl’s Flowers). I’m also a fan of rolling on tables in the moment to produce unexpected results during play, as with random encounters. During prep I’m a fan of rolling on tables for inspiration that get the imaginative juices flowing, as in Matt Finch’s glorious Tome of Adventure Design. But I’m less a fan of rolling to produce swappable customized elements of an otherwise fixed scenario during prep. Why would one do that? It doesn’t produce unexpected results in the moment, or get the creative juices flowing. So, what role does randomization play here? Would anything be lost if we presented them as a menu of options from which the DM may pick what seems most interesting? Of course, one can always treat a table as a menu of options if one likes, so the complaint is small. 

The mystery scenarios presented range from quirky and low-key to sinister and high stakes. They are systemless, but written with the dressings of fantasy play, i.e. vaguely medieval village mysteries with demi-human characters, suggesting use for games like D&D. At one end of the spectrum, scenarios like “Critter Bones” and “Blackmailing the Blacksmith” read like fantasy versions of an episode of Northern Exposure. Take the first of these. A pair of town busybodies suspect a loner dwarf of being up to no good. As it turns out, he is struggling to learn necromancy, but he likely has harmless motives (e.g. reviving his pet or starting a zombie circus). Meanwhile, two waifs (a child urchin and a pickpocket) are about to get themselves in trouble with low-stakes criminal activity! Personally, I have trouble imagining spinning fun sessions out of this kind of scenario at least using a ruleset like early editions of D&D. They read like scenarios for Dogs in the Vineyard, but with D&D tropes substituting for the fire and brimstone.

At the other end of the spectrum are scenarios that seem like quite strong material for adventure. For example, in “Fish Tales” a bossy fishmonger has found an artifact in the gullet of a fish that will bring doom to the village (and perhaps the whole region) if the players don’t crack the mystery and intervene. My favorite scenario is “The Little Druid” in which a young druid is being taught shapeshifting by a talking wolf, while the pack (unbeknownst to the druid) attacks villagers. Meanwhile and unrelatedly, an assassin who can barely control their magical powers has slain the wrong victim with tragic consequences. There’s a lot going on in this scenario, and it has an air of fairy-tale like mystery to it that I can imagine shining at the table for old school D&D, especially for 1st or 2nd level characters.

The random tables included after the six scenarios at the end of the zine are extremely terse. I puzzled over how they were to be used in play. For example, there are three separate tables to roll on that each give a one-word description of the voice of an NPC with results like, "Indian accent", "exasperated", "haughty". Another table of weather has "clear full moon" and "sunny" as possible entries. What is the weather situation, such that it's an open question whether it is daytime or nighttime? The zine also ends with what I assume, perhaps, to be a die drop random event table. It includes things like, "A dog shows up out of nowhere. What could it want?" and also "The next roll in your game is a critical failure." I struggled to see what productive function this table might play.

Setting aside this brief foray into random tables at its end, and focusing on its original contributions, what A Tangled Web shows us is that it is one thing to have a way to represent and store information, for example, a tanglegraph of the relationships of networks of NPCs. This is an abstract tool, like Goblin's Henchmen's hexflowers that can be put to any number of purposes. What is at least as important is seeing how this tool can be put to a definite use--in this case, prepping small-scale mystery scenarios. Once one has seen six deployments of the tool for this purpose, one is well-equipped to carry on with one's own mysteries. I recommended a tangled web on these grounds, especially if small-scale mysteries with a big heart is your jam. 

Where to Go Next

In my mind, the question is where to go next with devices of representation like this. In particular, how could one tailor them to questions of larger scale and greater complexity than homespun small town mysteries built from broken hearts, land speculation, and brassy fishmongers? What forms of representation would be required for adventures focusing on political intrigues among rival factions in an urban environment? How can we depict the jostling fractious politics of wizards in shifting consortiums, with relations to the strange entities of the Overworld or fey courts? Part of the key, surely, will be settle on a set of tags to organize their notable features different than either of these zines introduce for organizing the information about NPCs relevant for small-scale mysteries. For example, for the wizards we might ask what domain their occult researches are in. For general factions, we might represent what resources they possess. And so on. 

I think it would also be interesting to experiment with nested tanglegraphs, with say each major faction in a locale (a city, say) getting its own tanglegraph, and separate tanglegraph representing the relationship of factions to one another. It would be fun to somehow figure out how to keep a big whiteboard that had the nested tanglegraphs available electronically in a single representation. This would even allow you to draw lines connecting elements of one tanglegraph to elements of another, where one player in a faction had a secret alliance with a player in another faction, although this would quickly come to look like those giant boards in movies that disgraced police detectives erect in their bedrooms to track some hopelessly complicated case they were never able to crack.