Dungeon Exploration and Combat

 I recently stumbled on the YouTube channel of a gentleman named Galen Wood, a real OG of war gaming and tabletop RPGs going back to the 1960's. He has such a great conversational tone on his channel, it feels like I'm sitting down with a friend who's been in the hobby longer than I've been alive and listening to him talk about something that he is passionate about. I watched his video on Dungeon Combat Through Time and it really spoke to me. If you've been here for a while you know I talk about dungeon exploration from time to time and sometimes it bleeds into topics that aren't related. Sometimes the article is about exactly that.

    His video really got me thinking about how I run combat in the dungeons of the games I run. In recent years I've run entirely online. When I first started running games online I used to make maps in Gimp and upload them to a VTT like roll20. Over time I did less and less of this. Eventually I started to run entirely theater of the mind for fantasy, which I was already doing for Heroes Unlimited and other Palladium games. I found that it dramatically improved the games. I really used to love maps and visuals and all that jazz. I bought a 3D printer at some point to make my own minis and environment pieces, I got these papercraft map pieces, I started to get into 3d modeling... But honestly it didn't improve the experience. After Covid I barely played in person anymore and my Judge's Toolbox was collecting dust. It was all online play with zero visuals. I enjoyed it a lot more and people who had been playing with me for years told it that those were some of my best games. In some ways it felt like getting back to my roots. My first experiences with D&D were playing with my dad running a game for me and my friends. He didn't use maps, he didn't use minis, just occasionally asked for a marching order.

Combat as a more nebulous series of descriptions really made things fun. In a game with less rules like DCC it really shines. Heck it even says in the book itself that everything is written the the assumption that they will not be needed. It allows for more dynamic combat, telling the players how many feet away something is, letting the thief try to describe how he's going to slip around instead of looking at a map and counting squares and assessing if he has to pass foes, these things really make the combat feel more dynamic and enjoyable, it keeps the attention on each other and the Judge, not watching a map and having perfect battlefield clarity. The theater of the mind acts as it's own fog of war. Character should not have a perfect mental map of the battle in the dark places under the world that they have just set foot in, they have to focus on the ogre trying to kill them right now. 

 This is all to endorse how much I think theater of the mind improves the games. I want to thank Mr Wood for running his channel and I really think you should check him out, here is a link again. If you're someone who uses a lot of maps and visuals and has never tried theater of the mind, I strongly recommend you give it a shot, even if you don't end up liking it, I'm confident you'll have walked away learning something.

Thieves Symbols: A tool for exploration

 It is only natural that the thief, or it's equivalent, should be scouting ahead. In a perfect world the party will wait patiently for the scout to come back but that is not always exciting and what if the worst should happen to the scout while they are exploring and they don't come back before the candle burns down? They need to know about the things the scout encountered along the way but how could they do that without meta-gaming?

    In the past, I've played games where I played my favorite class, the thief/rogue and taken on the role of scouting. I would take chalk or charcoal with my into any exploration and leave marks at a specific designated height, that they could look for and would explain the nature of anything I encountered. I got really granular about this. I would buy the party daggers, each of them identical in height, and tell them "If it is my mark, it will be found at the height of the cross guard when you place the tip of the blade on the floor. If it's not there, then it's not mine." additionally I would give the players out of game a collection of my symbols and what they meant, printing out the page and handing them a physical copy of the list for reference. They were supposed to know that there was no distinction of chalk vs charcoal and a few other rules about deliberate changes to things to warn of a danger that was able to track the symbols.

    If you adopt this, I don't think anyone needs to get as granular as I did back in the day. Just having a system of symbols and telling your fellow players before hand that you do this, this is what they mean, here is the symbol key, is more than enough. when following your scouting, look for the symbols. I did all that stuff because I played with a lot of GMs growing up where had a very deep seated GM vs player mentality in how they ran. This made me a Paranoid little Toast. I would do things like leave candles with my group and say "when the candle burns down to this point and this nail falls out, if I haven't returned assume I'm dead and act accordingly." I was really big on dungeon exploration and keeping track of a lot of things. There might be future posts about that if there is interest.

The symbols I used when I played

    

    This whole symbol idea is not entirely my own. I saw this infographic on symbols that the homeless use to designate safe and dangerous places around a city. I cannot speak to the validity of this at all. I questioned who was out here studying the symbols and how they could be universal. It seemed a little dubious but it did give me a good idea for navigating a dungeon and make mapping just a little easier. 

    There was a long running game where this DM had us exploring a mega dungeon and realistically we would never see all 3500 rooms of this place. I decided that my character wasn't particularly interested in the treasure of the dungeon. He traveled in with this Paladin and his squire who he kept sending into death traps and a few other people. The guy playing the paladin straight up told the rest of the table it was his game and his story. He refused to elaborate on this and got very angry when we tried to help with anything plot related. So I mapped this dungeon as I explored, left my symbols behind, and eventually published an almanac of the first few floors with their dangers and my symbols marked on the map. This did not sit well with the guy who claimed this was his story as the dungeon was supposed to be a secret, which he never told us. It was a good time. I remember that game fondly. 

 This one got away from me a little and turned into a bit of a storytime! Thanks for coming out and reading! This might turn into a bit of a series about things I used to do to help with dungeon exploration. 

B-Team Adventures

     One of the things I like to do when I run a game is have the players play only a single character at a time with a few backup characters as the "B-team". In order to allow the B-team to sort of keep up with the party they gain an amount of experience based on the session number rounded down. This cannot exceed the experience gained by the main party that week. The question has often come up, "What was the b-team doing this week?" and I haven't really had a good answer. Until now. Now I have a table to roll on when asked what they were doing that lends itself to making up threads for the party to pull on if they want to or simple storytelling if they don't. Check it out!

 

B-Team Adventures! 

Judge's Toolbox

 I saw a video a while back of this person's GM's toolkit. It was a super lightweight kit they brought with them when running games to make their life easier. Most of my stuff is still in storage so I had to find pictures of them from a while back but I figured I could post the pictures of what I use, talk about it, share links to what I can, and hopefully give you some ideas for your own table.

    I wanna start this off by saying that my setup is super low budget. I don't like to use a lot of minis or map pieces. I find that, with the way I run, mostly improv and in the moment decisions, the use of a lot of map pieces and stuff doesn't really work for me. I come from an era of using rocks and pennies and whatever we could find as minis so keeping things low budget has always felt good and a little nostalgic. The idea behind this is that I could carry this with me easily and run a game almost anywhere with my backpack of books I used. 

With as many of these entries as possible I'm including links to show their price. I strongly encourage you to check your local equivalent of  a hobby or craft store before purchasing from amazon or any online retailer. If you go to a local craft store you're going to be able to hold it and look at it and really decide if this is what you want. They also sell them in much more manageable amounts, you don't need one pound of glass beads when a small bag is more than you'll ever need. 

 

Lets start off with the top of the toolbox, meeples. You can get these on amazon pretty cheap on amazon in a huge number. You can get them in wood, or plastic or even transparent plastics now it seems. I liked wood, just felt better in my fingers. coming in so many colors makes it easy to distinguish what they are supposed to be. It's easy to take a note card and place it on the table with meeples on it with "= orc" to make a key if players are having a hard time tracking it. This is such a low budget way to have a lot of minis out on the field for normal sized or smaller foes.

The first tray on the top. I went ahead a numbered this one to help with explaining everything. Tray 1 is easy, its just a few dice. I count at least 3 d20 in there which makes me think I probably put at least 3 sets of the standard dice in there in case anyone forgot theirs, or someone drops one off the table into the shadow realm

Tray 2: Glass beads that are flat on one side. They are really helpful for a lot of things. marking spots on a map, sometimes I use them to track enemies, sometimes they are just used to mark light sources or things that I'm encouraging the players to interact with that aren't monsters or NPCs. They are also super cheap. I think mine came from some random planter I walked past in the trash but they can be purchased in absurd amounts cheaply too.

Tray 3: Super simple, wooden disks from the craft store with a number on one side and a skull on the other. you could use them for death saving throws or something else but I used them as enemy tokens. It helps for people to be able to say "oh I'm gonna go to attack number 1" and track them, then flip them over when the players kill them to track the bodies. I remember looking online and finding they were much cheaper to purchase in a hobby store, almost half the price I found online. Here are some of them for you to look at online and get an idea of how much they are.

Tray 4a: A two parter because I couldn't comfortably keep the other part of them in that tray. These are just little card holders that have a cardboard piece that slots in. for a while there I used them for the PCs. the players could draw their character, write their name, doodle a little symbol for their character, anything really on the card part and then it was easy to tell who was who and who was were. I offered to print off art and glue them to the cards for players but that never really happened. 

Tray 5: A collection of pawns in different colors. sometimes they were used for PCs sometimes they were for hirelings or NPCs who came along with the party. These came before the cards in tray 4 and were mostly phased out aside from NPCs after a while. I originally got them for a board game I was making but ultimately never used them for that because I found out I could build my prototype in tabletop simulator.

Tray 6: Similar to tray 3. I had larger ones for larger foes. The neat part is these are usually measure in the half inch so they always lined up with the grid. I had some long ones for mounts along with the ones shown there.

Tray 7: The all important spare pens and pencils. I always assumed everyone would show up with none and expected them to go missing so for pens I raided a supply closet for these stylus pens from work and got mechanical pencils. Buried under there are long erasers in those plastic sleeves that you click out like a pen, I love them and it saved a lot of mechanical pencils from never being able to refill.

 

Tray 4B: Talked about above as the other half of the top tray.

Tray 8: There are more wooden disks that fill out the slot of "large" size monsters and enemies, along with some peel and stick glass tiles that have numbers on them. I never really used those for much. One time in 5e I used them to track exhaustion, another time I used them to track traps on the floor the players had found, once I used them as a stand in for monsters. I'm not sure I would seek these out when I rebuild this box.

Tray 9: A bunch of dry erase markers in different colors. I don't typically use minis or scenery pieces and I draw out my maps so having a bunch of colors was usually pretty helpful to get hazards and details across. not the same tray but next to 9 is wet erase that filled out the same function. It was usually an either/or situation but there was one single time that I pre-drew the tiles and had some of them in the wet erase so I could wipe away the dry erase parts and make the map "crumble" away. This tray also includes a sand timer of 1 minute which is often used to put the pressure on players in tense moments. When I take it out, it usually doesn't even mean anything, it's just there to cause panic.

Tray 10: Those wooden pieces I mentioned earlier that are used for mounts. they are a little long and take up just over two 1' squares. 

Tray 11: Even more little wooden disks with numbers on one side and "X" on the other to signal a body. these tiny ones are used for swarms, like my favorite little monsters, vegepygmy.

 

On the bottom of the box I really managed to cram a lot of stuff in there and this one has some things that are not pictured or are in later pictures. For example, not pictured is a standard deck of playing cards. I have never really had a use for them but I always imagined it could be useful some day or in the event most people don't show up at the last minute we could still play cards.

Number 1: This is a wooden salt cellar I found in a thrift store, I keep one complete set of DCC dice in it. It probably takes up too much space but I really like it.

Number 2: Note cards. Any table needs these. one side is blank, the other side had lines. Great for making quick notes for players to hang onto, place something down on a map. I'm confident no one reading this blog needs me to talk more about what I do with these, I'm not breaking any new ground.

Number 3: A dry eraser and yet more pens. Its been so long since I used these that I don't even remember what was special about these pens. the eraser was super helpful to have on hand because of how I did maps, which you'll see later.

Number 4: Sticky notes. Yet another staple at any table. as with note cards above, I'm not breaking any new ground here.

Number 5: These are stolen from Cranium. That is the player pawns and the die from cranium. not pictured, I 3d printed 3 more, one in silver, one in white, and one in black. These became my default PC pieces for a while. Someone drew little faces on them to show the direction they were facing. The die was just thrown in there, because why not? On occasion I would have a player who called bullshit on the dice that were rolled out in the open and be salty their character died. I would offer a chance to change their fate if they could call what color the die would land on before it was rolled. I encourage people to plunder old board games from thrift stores and the trash for pieces of their games. I'm still kicking myself for not taking the pieces of mysterium and throwing them in with this stuff.

Number 6: Have I mentioned that I used to run 5e? These decks are from a company called Nord Games. I got into 5e because friends wanted to get into the hobby and had discovered D&D, so I ran the system they had already read and asked about instead of DCC which I had been running for years at that point. The decks I owned were a happy middle ground between DCC and 5e for how criticals are handled. I wanted tables with fun options, The players wanted big numbers and were deeply opposed to critical tables because a certain famous GM didn't use them on his show. As for the treasure decks, I like treasure to be randomly generated unless you specifically are hunting down a named item and have gone on a quest for it. The last one there, the luck deck, if I still had this I would be using it in DCC. The luck deck was used to add something meaningful to rolling a 20 or a 1 outside of combat. On a 20 you would get a card you could play at any time that could alter your own die rolls or add some beneficial effect to the game. On a 1, I got a card that I could hang onto and hit you with later to penalize a roll or cause some doom. I will never forget a player evaluating how hard his save would be, realizing he had a slim margin of success and then shouting "you're going to the shadow realm!" when I slapped that card down in front of him. Bastard still made his save.

Not Pictured: Plastic poker chips. These got a lot of mileage as fleeting luck tokens, fellowship tokens, markers for resources players might forget to track, number of days traveling vs number of rations. Just a whole lot of use.

Not Pictured: Plastic bottle rings. When you drink a soda you get a ring of different colors depending on the brand and flavor. The colors could mean anything and I used them to indicate status, bleeding, on fire, stunned, paralyzed, poisoned, you name it. I kept them in so many colors, I had a little tray I kept in that bottom box.

Other things I liked to bring with me in my bag with my book and dice include the dry erase dungeon tiles and a binder that was my Judge's screen. Pictured below, on the left is the boxes of the dry erase tiles and on the right is the binder I used for my screen. I really liked that binder because it bent at that crease along it and could be used as it's own stand.

 

 The dungeon tiles were really nice because you could do chases, extend rooms as needed, spin them around while making rooms to mess with people's orientation as they tried to map. They were a lot more to carry than the classic roll up map, for sure, but I preferred these because it presented more chances to mess with players in a way that is less antagonistic and more funny. They can be found at Roll 4 Initiative where you can get them in hexes and even different patterns if you don't want white tiles.

The binder opened and folded in the back with a piece along the bottom to make it sit open. I had quick reference tables for both 5e and DCC in mine because I was switching off between running both of those at the time. It takes up more space than a normal judges screen but I could get so much more information this way, including full critical tables and fumble tables. Its hard to tell in this picture but it's standing on it's own there super nice to have on hand. 

 

 

 I hope this maybe gave you some ideas for stuff to use at your own table for low budget fun.
 

 If you're thinking of building your own Judge's toolbox like this I cannot stress enough that no single tray should ever cost you more than $5, these things can be done super cheap and still be super effective.

 If nothing else this is something I've wanted to talk about for a while now but was pretty sure I would never find these pictures again. If you made it this far, thanks for reading!

Old School Treasure Troves: 1st edition DMG

 

If you’re here you’re probably at least passively aware of the 1st edition AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide. It’s an old book that is kind of hard to get your hands on these days. There are some archived digital versions out there with the images and formatting removed to preserve them, and there was a reprint a while back. To me, this book has always been an important reference tool, even when playing other games. There is a lot here that can be useful. So I would like to talk less about this book as a whole, there are plenty of people who cover it in detail, and more just the parts that I find myself referencing often.

Plants

First up on this list is the herbs, spices and medicinal vegetables table. Found on page 220 we have a sizable list of plants and their uses or “powers”. This list is very hit or miss for accuracy, plenty of things listed here are correct and more than a few kill you if you consume them but are listed to have healing properties. Even with that, this is a good table to have on hand and reference in the moment. Yes, you could take a more comprehensive work and use that as a reference but why would you need to? At the table, in the moment of the game, not everything needs to be 100% accurate to real world equivalents and this table gives you something fast and easy to reference for this purpose. 

Gems

The next table I reference constantly, given the slightly magical nature of all gems in Hodas, Reputed Magical Properties of Gems. This one starts on page 26. It gives us a list of gemstones and minor magical properties affiliated with them. For example it claims agate grants restful and safe sleep, it claims a ruby brings good luck, and jade imparts skill with musical instruments. This table is a good leaping off point to decide the powers of a magical gem. In Hodas this table contributed heavily to a similar one that is used to reference the very real minor magical properties of the gems in the setting.

Potions

Another table I reference often is Potion Miscibility. This is a short section on page 119 that covers two scenarios: when two potions mingle, and when you drink a potion while under the effects of another potion. Especially for DCC this feels so right. A world where magic is chaotic and unpredictable and you just mingled two pieces of that unpredictable mess of magic? Be worried. This could result in an explosion that deals 6d10 damage, it could poison you, or it could make the effects of one of them permanent. There are some more robust versions of this table out there but this is the one I like, it’s short and it’s fast to move through.

NPCs

This next section is a whole lot of tables that start on page 237 and give you a whole lot of tables to generate an NPC. I typically use this one to make a character’s mentor or important NPC they might have picked up through the Tome of Levelup or declared they have from their time between levels 0 to 1. I have my own version of this on this very blog but I’m not entirely satisfied with it and have been working on a re-write. Until then, this section is a good reference point to give a whole lot of information about someone and it’s seen a lot of usage at my table over the years.

Alignment Tongue

Alignment Tongue is something that it’s possible for a character to roll as a language in the DCC rules. It would be a fair assumption to say that it is simply the secret language spoken by agents of that alignment and then move on. What is presented in this book is a pretty detailed description of what this actually is and at my table we go by this description. The short version of it is that it’s basically a sort of thieves cant for an alignment. And just like thieves cant, it is limited in it’s applications. You will not be having long, fully detailed conversations about anything and everything in your alignment tongue. You will be able to establish things like intent, ask about hunger, and health but not much more. Speaking this to someone who you are not sure of their alignment can be messy. 

Descriptions

Something that is common in this book are tables of descriptive words. Things you can read once or twice but every time you do read it you’ll come away with another word to help bring your games to life. I am not ashamed to admit these tables expanded my vocabulary. There are sections of descriptive words for, gemstones, potions, dragons, dungeon dressings, hirelings, castles, and many more. This isn’t found on any one page. Most of these are scattered through the book in somewhat random places and others are near similar information. 

Economics

This last one might sound boring but hear me out! On Page 90 there is a discussion about economics framed around the context of PCs. It touches down on the fact that PCs bringing an influx of gold will flood the economy. It speaks to things that don’t get talked about often, taxes and trade. Why wouldn’t the local lord demand a cut of the money you pull from the dungeon that is in his lands? Why wouldn’t the PCs be charged a toll to cross a bridge along the way? It talks about a silver and copper based economy. These are all things that can matter as much or as little as you want them to and if you do want them to, this gives you a good starting point.

I could go on about this book for a long time and talk about tons of sections, but I wanted to keep this post connected to the tables and parts I use the most. There are so many other helpful pieces in it that can really bring some new ideas, or old ones, into your games. It’s one of my most used reference tools over the years. Are there parts that I don’t bother with? Yes! Tons of them! Even so, this is a great piece of reference material for any table and I strongly recommend looking at one of those archive preservation versions of this book. 

Blog d100: Snacks at the table

          Another post this week inspired by d4 Caltrops: d100 subject list. This week we're talking about eating during the game.

 Rolled 73: What are the best snacks you've found that work during a game?

    This is one that when I saw it I hoped I would roll. The act of sharing a meal with friends is very important to me. I use the phrase breaking bread a lot when I talk about this subject, because to me that is what it is. We gather for a communal meal to sit and enjoy each other's company. The act of cooking for my friends and sharing a meal means something to me. So we're gonna get a little (lot) off topic and hijack this topic to answer the question and talk about what those snacks really meant. 

    Getting the now out of the way: I play online now because I moved to a country where my ability to speak the language is similar to that of a pre-schooler. My snacks now are usually just chips, a local candy brand that I've come to love, and popcorn. My wife got me into the habit of eating my snacks with chopsticks to avoid a mess and it makes me wonder why I wasn't always doing that. 

     Some of my fondest memories of the table come from this sharing a meal. I come from a group that used to block off an entire Saturday once or twice a month and play for the entire day. We would rally at someone's house before the sun had risen. We would quietly set things up at the table and share coffee while someone made sausage biscuits and gravy. One of us would throw some eggs in a muffin tin and toss it in the oven, someone else brought this unhinged device to microwave bacon and turned the microwave into a fire hazard but made the crispiest bacon I've ever had. This sounds messy, like a great way to get grease on your character sheets, and it is! some of us would keep our sheet in a plastic sleeve from a binder page, some of us wouldn't. Rich's sheets were always the greasiest things. But we shared breakfast and discussed the weeks or month prior while the DM did his last minute prep and reviewed things. The shared meal at breakfast was important to us for a lot of reasons.

    Around lunch time we wouldn't take a break, usually we would break out chips, pretzels, canned soda, and the fixings for sandwiches. Lunch was not one of the important meals and we might take a short one while the DM made a sandwich or take fifteen while the smokers took a break (often to buy us time to think about our next move). Occasionally we might order a couple of pizzas or pile into a car for a trip to Macca's or Arby's. A light lunch and snacking through the session got us to dinner. Snacks for me personally always included almonds, corn nuts, dry jerky, or something else small and crunchy that I could shovel into my mouth by the handful like I was feeding a furnace. I would always bring 4-5 of those tall cans of Arizona iced tea, drinking something like 6 times my daily value of sugar but always willing to share these.

    Dinner was also important. This one also meant that we took a break. In the summer some of the guys would go out and load up the grill with burgers, dogs, and chicken breasts. No vegetables by the way. I don't know why but other than french fries we didn't eat vegetables during this. I remember a visiting player asking about this and someone asking if he wanted to make them, then it was never brought up again. In the fall and winter we would throw a stew in the slow cooker or a instant pot. I loved making Tex-Mex stew over rice for these games. We often took a break for dinner and would sit and discuss things we had been watching or reading. Sometimes we would break out magic cards and play magic over dinner. We always made way more than we needed for dinner so people would be comfortable going back for seconds or thirds over the course of the rest of the night. We would pick back up after dinner and play late into the night, picking at the leftovers and cleaning out the snacks we brought. Sessions would end around 2-4 in the morning and after we would spend at least an hour just talking before everyone scattered and headed home. 

     I look back on these times so fondly. I deeply miss these extremely long game days. I miss sitting at a table with friends and sharing meals while catching up on everything we missed. This group is one I played with for a decade, we had people come in and out but that vibe never changed. We had younger players some high school guys, all the way up to a guy in his 70's who liked to tell me "my youngest grandchild is older than you" for some reason when I was in my mid 20's. In this age of digital games where everyone is playing online I really feel like something important about games is lost. I am not breaking bread with friends for an entire day, I'm hopping on Discord and playing for a paltry 4 hours and feel that I barely had enough time to run the game before it ended. There is a social element that is lost online. I live in a tiny studio apartment now and lack the space to host like I used to but I long to play with a group of people at the table, people I am friends with, people who's lives I want to hear about and share their burdens and joys with them before we all get into our game of pretend with math rocks. Games were once a full day, shared human experience, and food was how we made space for each other inside that time.

 

This post is the result of Buster over on 19 Sided Die laying out a challenge to me to cover the whole d100 list of topics. Since my last post he has had three, including one that covered this same topic! check out "Are Holy Symbols Required" "Where does lantern oil come from" and "Gaming Snacks". Additionally Bombgoblin has answered the question of "What drugs are in your setting?" with a... unique answer and I strongly suggest checking it out.

Monster, Lairs, and Battles

Lair Actions
    Something I really love that 5th edition D&D did was lair actions and legendary actions. For those of you unfamiliar with them lair actions are special actions the monsters can take within their own lair, such as making part of a cave collapse. Legendary actions are given to those monsters and foes who are a cut above, used to signify bosses of adventures, these are actions that allow them to act slightly out of initiative order to do a short list of things. I always thought these rules were fun and really lined up with the DCC philosophy of "monsters don't follow the rules", stated in the monster section of the rule book. Giving them these options contributes to making them mysterious and frightening. 

    In general my players have been smart and careful enough to avoid fights with monsters in their own lairs, luring them out, baiting them to another location, or simply destroying the lair before starting a fight. So I've never been able to really use lair actions in DCC until very recently. I gotta say it was a great time. The players fought an evil magician with his scarecrow minions. They went in supremely confident that they could trash this guy... and then he activated every scarecrow in the room for a free extra round of actions from them and the players immediately realized the danger they were in. It totally changed how the battle felt. It went from confident magician stomping to panic and filling the room with smoke and fire in a single round. Had they baited this magician out of his keep he wouldn't have been able to do this. 

    This really felt like it added something, everyone remarked that the fight was a lot of fun and despite things going sideways quickly they were having a good time. This is something that I really think fits into the philosophy of DCC and to make it lean further into DCC we could go as far as making it's lair action into something it rolls on a table to determine it's random lair action. Even a short d6 table could really make the  concept of a lair action lean into the identity of DCC more than it already does.

 

Legendary actions

    In truth, I've not had the chance to use this. If I'm being totally honest, I keep forgetting. The way I run is a lot of improv and off the cuff, so as a general rule, I don't have set stat blocks ready to go. I borrow from things I've read, I improvise in the moment, I copy something close enough. For something like these Legendary Actions, my style of running is really bad at having those. So I cant speak to this as anything resembling an authority. However, this feels like the philosophy of DCC. Giving a big powerful threat these special things that allow it to break the rules just a little lines up with that "monsters don't follow the rules" line. It also does something to make the monster or foe more dangerous while giving them complexity instead of just bumping up the numbers. In theory, if you were to lift it 1:1 from 5e you could make a whole lot of panic happen at your table when a character spell burns like crazy to do something devastating and the foe uses one of these legendary actions to resist it. I think there is a discussion to be had here over this one and I am open to that discussion.

 

 Windup Attacks

    A D&D youtuber who has been playing since the old days did a video about this, Telegraphed Attacks and that is where the idea came from for me. I've used it once or twice and always to great effect. The idea is simple, we've all played a game where the bad guy winds up for an easily avoided attack, you dodge and come back swinging. At the table this creates an environment of risk and weighing options. Maybe you know your friend already spent their round in the attack range and you need to decide if you're going to get yourself or them out of the way. Maybe you think you can bring down the foe before he brings down his huge sword? Failure to get out of the way of such a big and telegraphed attack should be punished. It should be crippling, an automatic critical, or some other effect applied to the characters who didn't escape the incoming attack. I've used this to have the battlefield suddenly altered, characters sent flying, and weapons and armor broken. It changes the flow of combat, no one wants to find out what happens when the ogre swinging a battering ram like a club connects that windup hit. It doesn't need a map either. If you're like me and handle your fights in a theater of the mind, its easy enough to explain that the foe is winding up an attack and you are in the range of people to be hit. 

 

I know this was a bit of a short one, I just really wanted to share this. This is one of those things that I found and liked while playing another system. Yes, DCC is my home system and the game I use to run almost everything these days. But experiencing playing other systems, even for a short time, is important. Even when I hate a system, there is still something somewhere in there, a small treasure to plunder and take back to my home system, something to enshrine on the shelf and make my home system just a little more personal. 

The Eternal Champion and The Games

 

This week I wanted to share a peek behind the screen of the games I run. I wanted to talk about the media that has been extremely influential in how I run games. This post will be about how I see the players as a multiversal constant. If you’re Familiar with Michael Moorcock’s work then you already know from the title what this is going to be about. If you aren’t then here’s the skinny. 

The Eternal Champion:

Elric of Melnibone, Dorian Hawkmoon, Corum Jhselen Irsei, Erekose. These are only some of the incarnations of the eternal champion. They are the same person, but they aren’t. Sometimes they are aware of this, sometimes they are not. They have met each other, they have fought at each other’s sides, and even crossed swords on occasion. The Author Michael Moorcock has created a massive multiverse of heroes spanning more than a few genres. The eternal champion fights for law or chaos always serving balance, even if they don’t know it. Each of these heroes, or anti-heroes, or villains, depending on how you look at it, are connected to each other through an unbroken chain of reincarnation across the multiverse. 

I am not at all doing this justice but I strongly recommend Moorcock’s books. My introduction to his writing was Corum and I think it’s a good place to jump in. His books are influential enough in DCC to have a spell named after the concept of the eternal champion.

What does this mean for games?

This starts with a question. What is something that every single character you have ever played has in common?

Most people will answer that question with some trait they give their characters or something along those lines. They may be right but it is highly unlikely, if you play long enough you’ll eventually play someone who doesn’t have that quality. And this question applies to more than just the games I run. What does your character from Exalted at another table have in common with your star wars clone trooper veteran? What about your Legend of 5 rings ninja? How about your pathfinder warrior? Now, I’ll admit that there are people out there that try to play literally the same character in every game they get into, no matter the system or genre. Ironically those people play into this even harder than those who don’t.

The real answer is that every single one of those characters has been played by you.

You are the thread that ties these characters from different worlds, times, places, and even games & tables together. Each of them is a piece of you. You might play a character who is nothing like you, but it’s still you playing that character, even if they aren’t like you. Every character you’ve played is secretly the same hero. 

How do I use that?

In the games I run, This means something. It’s not a literal one to one recreation of the eternal champion of Moorcock’s books, his books are telling a story with a planned ending, so we take some liberties for games. You are the eternal champion. Each of your characters is a piece of you, a shard that you cast into a setting. That shard fights for one side of the eternal conflict, bringing balance, even if you don’t realize it. 

It doesn’t come up often but when it does, its important. Players have gotten themselves into situations where they end up in the wrong universe, a character from a Heroes Unlimited game might end up in the world that runs on the rules of Pathfinder. Sometimes you see a glimpse of the multiverse you aren’t supposed to. This was how a lesser villain of a prior campaign summoned his monstrous reflections, through a shard of a mirror meant to glimpse the multiverse. That mirror, when it was whole, was a portal what was shattered by a character some 20 years ago in another game, scattering the pieces of the mirror to the multiverse and breaking his character into slivers of himself.

This is how it plays out, magic and technology get a little weird, things break, people end up in the wrong places. I don’t create a new setting for every game, so naturally shards of your eternal champion can exist in the same position and meet each other. To this day no one has ever asked about the-four-who-are-one or what happens if they gather enough shards in one place. Most of my players have never and will never pick up a Moorcock book. That is okay. They don’t need to in order to interact with that part of the games. 

This works in my games for three reasons: 

First, because I’ve connected all my settings. Games that run on different rules simply use their own rules when in a non-native setting. Conflicts defer to the visitor’s rules. It keeps things simple in what could get out of hand very quickly. 

Second, because I’ve run the same handful of settings consistently for decades. Things that happened in the superhero game 10 years ago are still being felt by players now. This long history means that they can recognize these patterns and threads across games. Their warrior from DCC lands in the streets of NY and looks around, they have no idea what is going on but the player sees a poster for the 457th jack dagger movie and hears the name “Ultimate Stealth” on a nearby TV and they instantly know, out of game, what happened. 

Third, I’ve spent decades using the same system for a dozen different Genres, palladium. Yes, I also ran non-palladium games. heck this is a DCC blog. What palladium offered was a system that could do a lot of things without being GURPS. No shade for GURPS but it is just not for me. With Palladium I could run superheroes, space opera, mecha, TMNT, a game based on kung fu movies, horror mystery, Spy games, basically anything. So with this multiverse using mostly the same system it kept things tidy. Given that Palladium was built on the back of a d20 system and also somehow a d100 system it blobbed up against other games with shocking smoothness. In recent years I’ve transitioned away from Palladium, I use DCC for everything now. My kung fu game uses Kung Fu Classics. My superhero game is Evolved: Justice Edition, you get the idea. So i’m cheating a little bit by having my games mostly use the same system it allows seamless blending with only a few hiccups… but there are still other systems that are connected, and I am always ready for those to interact.

As a small bonus to all this I like to change things that interact with the multiverse, like the Eternal Champion spell, it no longer just pulls a generic guy out to fight, it pulls one of your other characters from somewhere else in the games, potentially even a game I didn’t run, to fight for you. Sometimes I’ll have something show that it’s operating at a whole different level by directly addressing the player, in the same way that Vivec of elder scrolls addresses the player, not the character you play, using a phrase that basically means “you who is controlling this incarnation”. 

The Meta-nature of games

This brings me to possibly my favorite part of this idea. How games are all connected to each other, through the players. You and I might never play together, we might never even have players who play with each other, but through the games, slowly, branching out into other people’s games, our games are connected to each other. In the same way you know almost everyone through 6 degrees of separation or less, you’ve likely been connected through this web of eternal champions and shards longer than you realize. I think that's wonderful. My player Steve has played in in a game I’ve run. Steve has also played at another Judge’s table, putting his characters into that Judge’s games. Creating a connection. That Judge might have their own player who plays in the Third Judge’s games. That player, the eternal champion in my interpretation, has played with Steve and is now connecting those three tables. Adventure League for 5e was something that, to me, really leaned into this without realizing it.

Sometimes this takes on a more direct appearance. This post is getting a little long but I really want to share these two stories so I’ll keep them short.

I have a friend who I have never played games with, I’ve never run a game with him in it, I’ve never been in a game with him, nor has he run a game I played. We orbit the same spheres of players. This friend heard about something in my games, called “the house” which players had been using as a dumping ground for problems they didn’t want to fix the hard way for decades. When I ran this game, The House, I would allow my players to pick any character they wanted from any game I ran or use a character from any other game they had played, the only rule was that they had to have played the character at least once. This lead to all kinds of interesting things coming into this supernatural place, a pokemon trainer, some superheroes, a spartan from halo, at least one clone trooper, a bard from the witcher. So my friend learned that the house was a makeshift prison in the games, created by lazy and cowardly players. He approached me and asked me if I would let him take something out of his own games and put it into the house. I shrugged and said sure, why not let him write something for the games? But what he meant was “Toast, i have no way to contain this thing in my setting. Can I put it into yours for safe keeping?” This was the first and only time someone asked this and it was wonderful. It meant our games, though never really connected, now had a very real connection to each other.

The second story is also about The House, which is really where the multiversal fabric of the games gets thinnest. A player brought in a delta green character. His character died in the house. Now, within my setting i warn players, if you bring in one of your characters to the house and they die in there, they are erased from the multiverse. Obviously this only applies to games I run, I can’t kill a character in someone else’s game. But this player nodded when is character died and got back to me something like a month later. He told me that this character had been erased from that delta green game. He approached his GM for that game and asked if he could have his character erased because of what happened in the game I ran. I thought this was pretty cool, because it created a very real connection between the games I run and another GM’s games, even though neither of us knew each other.

This was a long one that turned more into a tangent but I just really love the concepts of a multiverse and interconnected continuities in games. I think it’s possibly my favorite part of games, to see the connection we all share and might not even realize. I love when things get meta, I love when your characters meet each other. I love when something that happened in an unrelated game influences even a small decision in another game. 

Thanks for reading. I hope you got something here to think about and maybe take home to your own game.